Bonding work: Spacing relations through pregnancy apps

Abstract

Smartphone pregnancy apps, which enable their users to track a pregnancy week by week and offer advice to coincide with each stage, have transformed the spaces and times in which pregnancy information can be accessed. In this paper we draw on recent geographical work on the family, relatedness, and digitally mediated forms of intimacy, to explore how these apps figure in the embodied, emotional, and relational geographies of pregnancy. We present an analysis of visual material from pregnancy apps and interviews with women in the UK who have used them, to examine how these apps are marketed as a means to facilitate the “bonding work” of forming a close relationship with the future baby through visual images of foetal development, and related to this, how they mobilise ideas of biologically naturalised and socially normative maternal bonding. For users, however, existing and future relationships with prospective fathers and grandparents, as well as the expected baby, are practised in the spaces of everyday life through the strategic and selective sharing of pregnancy information. Our attention to the spatialities and practices of making intergenerational and parental relationships shows how users of apps respond to ideas of physical closeness in pregnancy and how this intersects with ideas of relational closeness and connection as both natural and achieved through bonding work. Women's engagements with pregnancy apps can therefore provide important insights both into the contemporary making of intimate relationships through digital technologies and geographies of parenting and pregnancy.