This book focuses on the example of surrogate motherhood to explore the interplay between new reproductive technologies and new ethnographic writing technologies. It seeks to interrogate the potential of fictional multimodality in ethnography and to illuminate the generative possibilities of digital artefacts in anthropological research. It also makes a case for the tailor-made character of ethnographic writing in the digital era, arguing that research quests and representational modalities can be paired together to develop unique narrative forms, corresponding to each particular topic’s traits and analytical affordances.
Focusing on the intersections of assisted reproduction technologies and digitally mediated writing, this study casts light upon the value of the affective, the fictional and the ‘real’ in the anthropological research and writing of relatedness. Analyzing the situated knowledge of ethnographers and research interlocutors, it experiments with multimodal storytelling and revisits the century-long debate on the affinity between an object of study and the possibilities for its representation. As the first attempt to bring together digital anthropology, fiction writing and the ethnography of surrogacy, this book fuses the genealogy of feminist critique on the orthodox, phallocentric, and heteronormative aspects of academic discourse with the input of digital humanities vis-à-vis troubling the conventional formal properties of scholarly writing.
Author(s): Anna Apostolidou
Series: Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 213
City: Cham
Preface
Acknowledgments
Contents
About the Author
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Surrogate Bodies and Digital Critique
Introducing The Birth of a Topic
Why Surrogacy? Why Now?
Methodology in a Nutshell
Crafting a Digital Artifact
Surrogacy as a Liminal Practice
Reality and Its Discontents
Why a Digital Artifact About Surrogacy?
The Body and Its Inscriptions
Loss and Absence
Temporality and Anticipation
Complexity and Obscurity
A Gift or Not a Gift
Joint Work
Sensitive Information and the Non-tellable in Surrogacy
References
Chapter 2: The Literary and the Ethnographic: Fictionalizing Surrogacy
Fictions and Anthropologies
Affective Entanglements, Mediation, and Joint Work
An Hour Every Afternoon
Rachmaninov (Translated from Greek)
Graphic in the Ethnographic
Imagining Relatedness and Achieving Personhood
She Would Never Hold It (Translated from Greek)
Medicalization
Red Tape
Autoethnography, Duoethnography, Reflexivity
References
Chapter 3: Assisted Reproduction as Poetry and Metaphor
Metaphors of Persons and Meaning: Forging a Parallel Between Reproduction and Poetry
Metaphor, Poetry, and Truth
Cesarean
OneM
Waiting Room
Reproduction and as a Media/ted Practice
Relatedness and Storytelling: Remix and Creativity
The Body as Anthropological and as Feminist Writing Trope
Researching Gestation
References
Chapter 4: When Fictional Ethnography Goes Digital
Digital Anthropology’s Coming of Age
Hyper-texts and Writing Surfaces
Sensory Engagement and Gender in Digital Narration
Performativity, Intersectionality, and Transmedia Storytelling
Collaborative Trajectories and the Design of Anthropological Futures
References
Chapter 5: Epilogue: Un-Disciplining Anthropology
Index
