Bodies That Tell: Embodying Teen Pregnancy through Digital Storytelling

Abstract

Most visual culture related to early childbearing represents pregnant and parenting teen bodies as sites of fear and disgust. The embodied experiences of pregnant and parenting young women are almost completely ignored, which serves to marginalize voices, knowledges, and bodies. In this project, we use a participatory visual research approach, digital storytelling, as a strategy to surface embodied knowledges related to young pregnancy and parenting. As part of a larger research project, a multipartner research team conducted a series of digital storytelling workshops with thirty-one pregnant and parenting young women who attend a general-equivalency-degree preparation program in a low-income, predominately Latinx northeastern US city. Digital stories were analyzed using a narrative multimodal procedure that focuses on textual, oral, affective, and visual elements. We identified three main themes from the set of digital stories: (re)presenting the self, knowing bodies, and embodied trauma. For each of these themes we highlight an exemplar story that illustrates its breadth and depth. The themes represent not only elements common to the stories but also a theoretical basis from which to conceptualize the body as a process of sensual subjectivity, a strategy for theorizing bodies that accounts for discursive and material conditions. Although participants are made to confront a discursive context that often pathologizes their bodies and experiences, their embodied stories are one strategy to talk back and shift the conversation on teen pregnancy and parenting to affect policy and practice.