Paper short abstract:

How do we capture and understand the ephemeral, transformational and often painful experience of becoming a mother for the first time? 'Bearing' (2020), a visual autoethnography of motherhood, explores the 'emotional' in both ethnographic film practice and maternal experience.

Paper long abstract:

How do we capture and understand the ephemeral, transformational and often painful experience of becoming a mother for the first time? Sharing excerpts from 'Bearing' (2020), my autoethnographic film, photography and fieldnotes, I will examine the process of filmmaking in order to build a case for the concept of an emotional thick description. This presentation will draw on debates discussing film's capacity for thin or thick description (Hastrup, 1992; MacDougall, 1996; Favero, 2018) by detailing my process of using feminist autoethnography to explore the sensory experience of early motherhood.

I will discuss the challenges of finding a form and approach to authentically express and further understand the embodied and unwieldy experience of motherhood. Strategies included deconstructing the component parts of the film, the use of vignettes and repetitive motifs. The research and filming process at times generated burn out and were sometimes emotionally overwhelming. I discuss how the process of making the film and related media brought me to address emotion work and emotional knowledge making. More specifically, I used emotion within both the process and content of my research to grow the filmmaking into its final iteration, and to reveal important knowledge around the 'emotional' in both ethnographic film practices and maternal experience. This in turn allowed for new understandings, such as furthering knowledge on sensory experience of loneliness and its interrelationship with maternal identity and maternal experience of place.