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Accepted Paper:
Imagining the future in women's personal narratives about unintended pregnancy
Lina Metsämäki
(Åbo Akademi University)
The paper addresses how the future is imagined by women being interviewed about their personal experiences regarding unintended pregnancy in Finland, and what these imagined futures could tell us about contemporary society
Paper long abstract:
In my doctoral thesis, I analyze interviews where women tell me about their experience(s) of unintended pregnancy(ies) in Finland in the 2010s. My aim is to study how women can make sense of their experiences of an unintended pregnancy through discourses and materiality like the body, the pill or new technology, with a special focus on power relations like gender, class and age. In many of the interviews, the women talk about a choice being made, and this choice is often influenced by imagined futures for themselves, with children or without, or imagined futures for other people involved such as previous children or a partner. In this paper, I want to explore these imagined futures further.
What can the imagined futures tell us about contemporary society? In what way are the women oriented towards different imagined futures and what aspects are imagined as possible versus impossible? What role does the future have in these individual narratives of unintended pregnancy? How does the imagined futures unfold in the interviews and from what point are these alternate futures being imagined, and who’s future is it that is imagined? How are positions like gender, class and age performed in relation to the future?