[Presented at the 2023 annual Political Theology Network Conference.]
Quill Kukla opens their book, Mass Hysteria: Medicine, Culture, and Mothers’ Bodies, by noting that “pregnant and newly maternal bodies leak, drip, squirt, expand, contract, crave, divide, sag, dilate, and expel.” They suggest that this porosity challenges a Western obsession with the (fictitious) unified and bounded masculine body. The permeable boundaries of the pregnant body thus “have been a source of various species of intellectual and visceral anxiety.”
In other words, the pregnant body destabilizes Western conceptions of the boundaries of the self. In response, new boundaries are imposed and policed, and boundary-crossing is penalized. Childbearers’ eating and drinking habits are publicly scrutinized. Their births are overmedicalized in the United States, with disastrous consequences. Then, after birth, childbearers are expected to nurse and pump only in approved, private spaces.
And, of course, in the United States today, boundaries are increasingly being drawn that preclude pregnant persons’ access to lifesaving forms of medical care.
The proposed paper examines the ways that social and political powers seek to constrain and discipline the leaky, boundary-defying pregnant body. It attends in particular to recent developments in the United States since the overturning of Roe in June of 2022.
But it also flips this task on its head, noting that protecting access to abortion requires particular forms of boundary-drawing: the kind that affirms that a fetus does not belong to the same legal category as other born persons.
What does the pregnant body reveal about what boundary-crossing might be acceptable, and what boundary-drawing might be necessary? I draw from multiple autoethnographic accounts of pregnancy to uncover answers to these questions. I conclude that we need to both open ourselves up to the interdependent, interconnected, porous aspects of human life and that respect for the integrity and discreteness of persons’ bodies is a requirement of justice.