ABSTRACT

Thinking about crossing boundaries takes the debate about the relationship between birth and death – in relation to the personal and the social in particular – further by raising challenges to existing categories and classifications as well as subverting some common sense assumptions, for example about the real and actual being more real than virtual worlds. Transgressing the boundaries of binary sex challenges assumptions about family relationships, such as trans parenthood at birth, or in the discovery at death that a family member was not corporeally the sex they had lived. Crossing boundaries between species challenges human norms and claims to superiority, and looking at birth and death among the nonhuman questions the management of birth and death. The boundaries between human and machine are also increasingly transgressed in the medicalisation of birth and death, which suggests new ways of understanding experience and new ethical frameworks to inform decision making and everyday life.