Emerging reproductive narratives/subjectivities in a turbulent time and small-island context, the Faroe Islands

The empirical point of departure, for this talk, is abortion-seekers and queers in quest of fertility care in the context of the restrictive access in the Faroe Islands.<br/>Methodologically, I seek to be attentive to the ambivalence in people’s reproductive narratives, imaginaries and struggles. In my PhD thesis, I write, “instead of understanding and treating these ambivalent emotions and ambiguities as contradictions (Merton 1976), I treat them as ‘complementary poles of intersubjectivity’ (Jackson 1998)” (Hermannsdóttir 2023, 89). Importantly, narratives as well as life-courses are not to be understood as linear processes nor with always an orientation (Johnson-Hanks 2002). They may be abrupt, inconsistent and at times, seemingly, contradictory. To methodologically stay in the ambivalent space, means being attentive of the voiced, the mumbling, the silences and the embodied.<br/>Theoretically, I aim to analyse upon social change through notions of ambivalence, uncertainty and not-knowing. In Moral laboratories Cheryl Mattingly (2014) theorises on subjectivity processes, from the space of family’s suffering and struggles. Mattingly argues that these struggles and sufferings are also transformed into “spaces of possibilities” (ibid, p. 15), by the families/individuals. I approach these reproductive narratives as emerging, because many are silent and even silenced but also because they uttered (to me) in a time of turbulence in the Faroe Islands. To approach emerging reproductive narratives (Hermannsdóttir 2023 p. 86-88; forthcoming), as a temporal point of research but also contextual, I argue that we can analyse upon contingent moments of social change.