Doubly disenfranchised: the experience of paternal grief following medical termination in Jérémie Szpirglas’ <italic>Pater dolorosa</italic>.

The term ‘disenfranchised grief’ is increasingly being used to designate grief experiences that are overlooked by wider society. In the French context, this term has overwhelmingly been applied to perinatal loss. Focusing on medical termination (IMG), a somewhat liminal category of perinatal loss, this article considers the <italic>doubly</italic> disenfranchised experience of <italic>paternal</italic> grief in such circumstances. While IMG-related grief is, in itself, disenfranchised, not least because it lacks societal recognition, paternal grief following IMG is doubly so, since the male voice is seldom heard. Taking as its focus <italic>Pater dolorosa</italic> (2019), author and journalist Jérémie Szpirglas’ narrative of medical termination, this article will consider the value of the term ‘disenfranchised grief’ in naming the experience of grief to which Szpirglas’ text attests; the capacity of the text to give voice to that experience and to offer a textual transposition of it; and the role of male grief writing following medical termination in beginning to carve out an alternative space for the sharing of a grief experience that defies established social norms. The article will therefore suggest, in line with Rita Felski’s argument, that ‘a literary text could know as much, or more, than a theory’, particularly when it comes to individual experiences of grief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]