Expanding feminist resilience theorizing: conceptualizing embodied resilience as a material-discursive process during infertility

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Communication Theory of Resilience illustrates the material-discursive and adaptive-transformative processes that underline resilience, yet research has frequently underemphasized the physical enactment and embodied movements that assist in sustaining, recovering, and growing after a setback or loss. Drawing on communication theorizing and chronic illness literature, this study conceptualizes embodied resilience through three subprocesses: sustaining, foregrounding unproductive behaviors, and entanglement with biomedical actants. Through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 20 U.S.-based women undergoing infertility treatment, I investigate the ways in which these women remained resilient through embodied losses (i.e. miscarriages, failed treatment) and embodied pain (i.e. bruises). This study advances ontological, material, and neoliberal subjugations of resilience theorizing through the identification of intrapersonal and relational factors that delimit and enhance resilience during infertility. Family, friends, and healthcare professionals looking to enrich the resilience of an infertility patient can benefit from these findings and learn new methods to promote resilience within infertility patients.