ABSTRACT

Birth and death are usually considered in stand-alone academic literatures (birth or death studies) and connected by their positions in the life-course (as a beginning or an ending). By thinking about birth and death together we explore the connections between birth and death, and this chapter outlines the relational and intergenerational approach of the book. We develop the political and feminist importance of writing as two situated ‘I’s as well as a ‘we’ and we explore how this approach draws upon sociological and feminist ideas of how the personal is always social. This paves the way for the core focus in the book on the relationships between birth and death as this maps onto other relationships: the personal and social, public and private, virtual and actual and beginnings and endings. The theoretical approaches are introduced as they allow for this relational approach to birth and death: psychosocial approaches, theories of embodiment and feminist phenomenology, and theories of the virtual and actual.