Abstract/Summary

Moving between questions of grievability (Butler 2009), intimacy, vulnerability and autobiography (Moss 2017), this chapter deploys a feminist approach to inhabiting research. The chapter argues that bereavement can induce a disabling sense of impotence, reflecting an inability to articulate, act or to change such a monumental loss. However, such personal emotional-affective vulnerability and inaction can also catalyse, and even compel, new forms of agency. Centering on an autobiographical account of stillbirth and related bereavement-inspired volunteer work, the relationality of grief and oscillations between the passivity of inaction and the mobilities of being in-action are explored. The chapter explores ways in which volunteering can be understood as an everyday embodied politics of gifting, collectivity, advocacy and activism, whereby volunteering-in-grief might generate new/renewed forms of politics in-action, and volunteering as a practice be seen as part of the democratic micropolitics of ‘quiet’ implicit/ explicit activism.