In the first year of the The Sad Love Stories of Mothers Who Sent
Their Babies Away for Adoption site, an estimated 100 birthmothers
signed up as members and actively participated on the message boards.
More than ten messages were posted daily, and the conversation developed
into a variety of on- and off-line activities, such as regular chats and
community meetings. The membership incrementally increased over time,
reaching 570 by November 2005.[4]
This Web site consists of
various sections: Introduction; Counseling; Let's Talk; Unsent Letters;
Stories at Your Heart; Your Thoughts About Adoption; Adoption Is a
Pleasure; and A Picture Display Room. For the purposes of this analysis,
I focus primarily on posts found in the following areas: Counseling,
which provides an opportunity for women to discuss issues related to
their pregnancy and their reasons for deciding upon adoption; Stories at
Your Heart, a place to tell untold stories; Unsent Letters, where women
can write to their babies; and Let's Talk, which allows members to
communicate with one another.
The Web site's appeal to these women is not surprising. Sharing their
experience helps to release the sense of loneliness, abandonment, and
social ostracization that many of the birthmothers feel. The following
post captures a birthmother's response after she discovered and joined
in this listserv.
ID: 슬픈맘으로 (With Sad Heart)
Date: 2004.06.26 22:24
Subject: I feel like I have a secret friend here
It has taken me a while to introduce myself . . . I got pregnant,
went through pregnancy, gave birth and put my baby up for adoption all
alone. All the way through I did not have anyone to turn to and get
counseling. Since I started to write here, I have felt much better . . .
I feel like I have found a friendship.
Ann Anagnost argues that the "InterNet listserv embodies new forms of
sociality and community as technologies of the intimate public sphere,"
an observation that applies well to "The Sad Love Stories" Web
site.[5]
Grappling with losses that often cannot (or are not
allowed to) be articulated, the young women not only find a venue to
express their feelings and their wishes for their babies, but also build
a sense of belonging within the same social framework that made them
feel excluded.
It is here that a sense of "virtual mothering" emerges, a performance
by the birthmothers of adopted children that invites us to consider how
traumatized bodies interact with Internet technology, thereby creating a
new notion of body and subjectivity. For these women, the bodily
experience of motherhood is often a distressing one. First, most
contributors to "Sad Love Stories" suffer emotional and/or physical pain
around their conception and pregnancy: The majority are young, unmarried
women whose relationship with the father of their children has ended
before (and many times because of) the child's imminent arrival. Even
more traumatic, a few women suggested that their pregnancy was a result
of sexual assaults by boyfriends, male friends, or strangers.[6]
Second, mothering is an embodied practice, both physically and
emotionally, from the spiked hormonal activity of pregnancy, to the
bodily trauma of labor, to the complex corporeal
interactions—breastfeeding, caressing, diaper changing, playing—by which
a mother and child bond. As a result, mothering creates a physical and
social relationship with a child.[7]
The "Sad Love Stories" community, however, is a site where organic
maternal bodies do not respond to their children, but instead interface
with machines, configuring birthmothers who are, in Gilles Deleuze's
terminology, part of "machinic assemblages." Johnston explains that "the
assemblage is not opposed to either mechanical machines or organic
bodies but encompasses both. Where bodies and machines enter into
machinic relationships, that is, become parts of an assemblage."[8]
In machinic assemblages, perceptions are freed from human bodies and
distributed across "a heterogeneous assembly of brains, bodies,
artifacts, and other external structures."[9]
The birthmother,
then, un/consciously performs her mothering through an interface with
Internet technology.
In order to conceive bodies on the Internet, bodies that transcend
the human-centered notion of the body, I draw upon Brian Massumi's
formulation of bodily affect. According to Massumi, the two important
aspects of the body are that it moves and feels. Affect is incipient,
never fully realized, and therefore always potentially "embodied in
purely automatic reactions most directly manifested in the skin—at the
surface of the body, at its interface with things."[10] His
notion of affect treats the body not in terms of a predetermined
subjectivity, but rather as an emergent, future-oriented quality of
incipience. Massumi's affect and body help to explain movements with no
end and the circulation of performing bodies on the Internet. Drawing
upon John Johnston and Massumi, I contend that the ways in which a "Sad
Love Stories" woman becomes a "mother"—as opposed to merely a
birthmother—is a collective process of bodies and machines, a machinic
assemblage that has affective qualities.[11]
Affects, of course,
include emotions and trauma and its bodily residues, but also
unrealized, unactivated, incipient energy emerging from the porous skin
and distributed into discrete bodies, matters, and artifacts across
different times and places. As Argyle and Shields eloquently put it,
"memory traces, called up by the body, parts of the body themselves,
allow us to experience with our physical selves . . . [in the meantime,
we] deposit our physical bits along the pathways of the BBS."[12]
The memory and mourning of birthmothers, their virtual mothering, is
always staged in the "here and now" of Internet temporality, where we
"bear witness in a live process so that a listener become(s) 'a
participant and a co-owner of the traumatic event.'"[13] The
Internet community, the site of that "shared and participatory act of
telling and listening," therefore functions as a venue for "the
transmission of traumatic memory."[14]
