Grounded in the authors’ theoretical and ethnographic work on pregnancy and
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involved in processes of identification. With a focus on the embodied nature of
social identity, the article nonetheless problematizes a model of the life course
that begins at the moments of birth and ends at death. Instead, it offers a more
extended temporal perspective and examines other ways in which identity may be
claimed, for example, via material objects and practices which evoke the body as
imagined or remembered. By documenting pre-birth and post-mortem identity-making of
this kind, it demonstrates how the unborn and the dead may come into social
existence. In addition, a cultural privileging of both the body and visuality is
shown to shore up the capacity of material objects and practices to shape social
identities in a highly selective fashion. The article therefore proposes
that models of the life course need to accommodate the meanings of pre-birth and
post-mortem materialities and so incorporate a conceptualization of social identity
as contested, relational and inevitably incomplete.
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