Women’s narratives of pregnancy loss: Discursive and multimodal manifestations of the involvement of the self, the interviewer, medical personnel, and YouTube viewers in the interactive organization of loss experience and its recollection

Approximately one in four pregnancies are lost; yet, most women are not aware of this high incidence rate until they face a miscarriage or a stillbirth. This research studies 43 narratives collected from interviews and 40 video blogs compiled from YouTube, focusing on the discursive and multimodal manifestations of the involvement of four different actors that play a significant role in shaping the pregnancy loss experience and its recollection. I first explore the role of the self in the loss experience and analyze how, as a means to understand the loss, women attribute blame and responsibility to themselves by discursively detaching their selves from their bodies. Furthermore, I examine how they reconstruct their identities as women and mothers as part of their sense-making process. The second actor that plays a significant role in the women’s recollection of their experiences is the interviewer, as a peer who also endured pregnancy losses. This peer-relationship formed during the interviews often leads to the co-narration of the loss, facilitated through the interaction of non-verbal semiotic resources and the embodiment of the most traumatic moments in the stories. Medical personnel are the third actors analyzed, as they bring the news of the demise to the women and significantly impact their experience and emotional recovery. Studying the direct and indirect reported speech of these interactions elucidates how these two forms are used in combination with other semiotic resources to embed layers of emotional and epistemic stances onto the discourse and to display dissatisfaction with medical personnel. Finally, a pregnancy (loss) community has emerged in the last few years on YouTube, fostering vloggers’ and viewers’ interactions as members of a community of experience. By exploring the content and the semiotic resources present in the vlogs, I unveil how vloggers establish and maintain a connection with the viewers and how this online community is created and expanded. With this research, I seek to open up a dialogue centered on pregnancy loss as an undesirable but natural part of life. My aim, ultimately, is to change how our society receives the news of an unborn’s demise, how medical personnel communicate with the grieving parents, and how mothers grief and overcome the pain of such loss