Showing Sonograms Around. Visuality, Affect and Prenatal Sociality

According to Arjun Appadurai (2003) the meaning of an artifact is inscribed in its use and its trajectory and not in the artifact itself. Pregnant women in Germany as well as in other countries where ultrasound screenings are common show prenatal sonograms around, glue them in prenatal baby-diaries or circulate them via Facebook. Even if these visual artifacts stem from medical screenings they count as pictures of a baby-to-be. Showing them around is commonly supposed to create pleasure. In my talk I argue that the sonogram does not evoke pleasure naturally but facilitates highly gendered norms of prenatal parental behavior and is part of practices that constitute prenatal communities. My talk is based on ethnographic observation of ultrasound screenings in medical maternity care and interviews with pregnant women gathered in the ethnographic study “Enacting Pregnancy. The Role of the Sonogram in Prenatal Diagnosis”, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Drawing on praxeographic perspectives I want to highlight how in the practices of showing and circulating sonograms forms of prenatal sociality are constituted through the display of emotion and affect. I will show in which way the “visual persuasiveness” (Burri 2012) of the sonogram as a visual artifact is performed within these practices and which affect norms regulate the kind of emotions that count as legitimate for pregnant mothers and fathers-to-be and for their significant others in Germany.