Petra has now completed her PhD and is working the Morgan centre at the University of Manchester. She can be contacted at:
Petra.Nordqvist@
manchester.ac.uk
Read all about Petra's PhD experience at CWS.
Petra Nordqvist
I am pursuing a PhD at the Centre for Women's Studies (2006-2009) in which I study lesbian couples' narratives of conceiving together using donor insemination and/or IVF. My supervisor for the PhD is Professor of Health Sciences Hilary Graham. I have a background in Gender Studies and Sociology (BA and MA equivalent) at the University of Lund, Sweden, and an MA in Women's Studies (Social Research) (2005-2006) at the Centre for Women's Studies, University of York.
My study takes a specific interest in the ambiguous social, political and cultural position of lesbian couples who conceive together using donor insemination and/or IVF. Reproductive technologies can be understood as foundational to lesbian couples' conceptions, and categories of motherhood and fatherhood are in many cases optional and multiple. I aim to explore the way in which discourses of parenthood, relatedness, conception and normality figure as interpretive cultural resources within women's narratives, and to explore the way in which the experience of conception is narrated.
The aim of this doctoral study is twofold. It partly aims to investigate the absence of lesbian reproduction as evidential in a review of the literature and partly it aims to address this gap by undertaking an exploratory empirical study. For both parts of the study, a qualitative narrative methodology is deployed. In the empirical investigation, I carry out semi-structured narrative interviews with lesbian couples in England and Wales, who are in one or more stages of the process of conception, or who have already become parents.
This research is supported by an ESCR doctoral award (ESRC Award Number PTA-031-2006-00503) and has been generously supported by the British Sociological Association Support Fund.