‘The only thing missing now is her being on the outside’: bodily borders/boundaries within father-foetal bonding interactions for UK expectant fathers

Abstract

Pregnancy and becoming a parent are heavily gendered experiences, experiences which feminist geographers have convincingly situated as significantly spatial. This paper makes an important contribution by addressing the general absence of expectant fathers’ voices/experiences within geographical work on pregnancy/parenting. Drawing upon periodic in-depth interviews conducted during pregnancy and after the birth, it interrogates the manifold ways geographical notions of bodily borders, boundaries, and interior spaces mediate expectant fathers’ encounters with their unborn baby. It firstly examines how, whilst expectant motherhood is characterised by notions of interiority and (inter)connection with the growing foetus, expectant fathers’ experiences are heavily demarcated by the relentless dichotomy of ‘inside’/‘outside’. Fathers drew on this heavily spatial (though literal) metaphor when describing their interactions with the foetus ‘inside’ the womb and their excitement/anticipation of when (following the birth) their child will finally be on the ‘outside’. Secondly, the paper explores the array of multi-sensory inter-embodied interactions fathers had with their unborn child—literally through the body of another person—exploring how these constitute anticipatory acts of love/intimacy. Thus, it forges an agenda for greater consideration of the everyday ‘pre-parenting’ geographies of expectant fathering, calling for feminist geographers to more critically consider fathers’ care-ful emotional, embodied experiences during pregnancy/expectancy.