Coming to Life: Philosophies of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Mothering 9780823291212

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Coming to Life

Series Board James Bernauer Drucilla Cornell Thomas R. Flynn Kevin Hart Richard Kearney Jean-Luc Marion Adriaan Peperzak Thomas Sheehan Hent de Vries Merold Westphal Michael Zimmerman

John D. Caputo, series editor

Edited by S A R A H L AC H A N C E A D A M S and C A R O L I N E R . L U N D Q U I S T

Coming to Life Philosophies of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Mothering

F ORDHAM U NIVERSITY P RESS New York

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2013

Copyright © 2013 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means— electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other— except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Coming to life : philosophies of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering / edited by Sarah LaChance Adams and Caroline R. Lundquist. — 1st ed. p. cm. — (Perspectives in Continental philosophy) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-8232-4460-7 (alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8232-4461-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Pregnancy. 2. Childbirth. 3. Motherhood. 4. Feminism. I. LaChance Adams, Sarah. II. Lundquist, Caroline R. RG551.C66 2013 618.2—dc23 2012028200 Printed in the United States of America 15 14 13 First edition

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This volume is dedicated to the University of Oregon Philosophy Department for its ongoing support of feminist scholarship, and to Bonnie Mann for helping two young scholars come to life.

Contents

Foreword Eva Kittay

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction: The Philosophical Significance of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Mothering Sarah LaChance Adams and Caroline R. Lundquist

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P A RT I : T H E P H I LO S O P H I C A L C A N O N 1

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Plato, Maternity, and Power: Can We Get a Different Midwife? Cynthia D. Coe

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Of Courage Born: Reflections on Childbirth and Manly Courage Kayley Varnallis

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Original Habitation: Pregnant Flesh as Absolute Hospitality Frances Gray

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The

Birth of Sexual Difference: A Feminist Response to Merleau-Ponty Lisa Guenther

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P A RT I I : E T H I C S 5

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Birthing Responsibility: A Phenomenological Perspective on the Moral Significance of Birth Gail Weiss

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Birthmothers and Maternal Identity: The Terms of Relinquishment Dorothy Rogers

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What’s an Adoptive Mother to Do? When Your Child’s Desires Are a Problem Melissa Burchard

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P A RT I I I : P O L I T I C S 8

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The Pro-Choice Pro-Lifer: Battling the False Dichotomy Bertha Alvarez Manninen

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The Political “Nature” of Pregnancy and Childbirth Candace Johnson

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Disempowered Women? The Midwifery Model and Medical Intervention Sonya Charles

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P A R T I V: P O P U L A R C U LT U R E 11

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Knock Me Up, Knock Me Down: Images of Pregnancy in Hollywood Film and Popular Culture Kelly Oliver

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Exposing the Breast: The Animal and the Abject in American Attitudes Toward Breastfeeding Rebecca Tuvel

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P A R T V: F E M I N I S T P H E N O M E N O L O G Y 13

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The Order of Life: How Phenomenologies of Pregnancy Revise and Reject Theories of the Subject Talia Welsh

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The Vision of the Artist/Mother: The Strange Creativity of Painting and Pregnancy Florentien Verhage

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Notes

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Bibliography

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List of Contributors

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Index

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Contents

Foreword E VA K IT TAY

What a joy to see a collection such as this. In it, Sarah LaChance Adams and Caroline Lundquist realize one of the hopes of the earlier generation of feminist philosophers of which I am a part: that philosophy takes seriously the experience and lives of women. Every woman, whether she has embarked on the path of motherhood and whether she has gotten there via pregnancy and childbirth, is faced with the default social expectation that maternity is her destiny and her principle source of accomplishment and joy. A concomitant ideology, found not only in Western society but also more globally, is that not only the social but even the ontological status of woman is tied to her capacity to bear children, give birth to them, and rear them. Therefore, every woman is touched by the topics covered here, whether they are part of her actual experience or the imaginary through which women’s subjectivity is constructed. Hence, these concerns are central to any philosophical project that takes the lives of women seriously. The essays here place the nurturance, physicality, and situatedness of mothering in dialogue with the abstraction and putative universality of philosophy’s canonical works. They explore the profound shaping of a woman’s identity and subjectivity through the process of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering both when there is and when—through miscarriage, abortion, or adoption—there is no child to nurture and raise. The essays are explored through the works of traditional male philosophers such a Plato, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Derrida, as well as the groundbreaking works of feminist philosophers such as Sara Ruddick, Iris xi

Young, Virginia Held, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray, among many others. In some chapters, we are invited to see features of the pregnant and maternal body through the lens of contemporary culture. In many, the philosophy proceeds by means of the writers’ experiences. The personal voice in the essays is not incidental to the philosophical project. It reveals vividly how the disembodied impersonal voice of philosophy is, as a matter of fact, already deeply gendered, reflecting the perspective of a dominant voice that has the luxury and privilege of taking itself as definitive of human experience. If men got pregnant, and were expected to get pregnant, bear children, and feed them from their own bodies, would a philosophical discourse created by men fail to feature the generative capacity of their bodies? Would they blithely ignore the doubling of bodies in pregnancy, the indeterminacy of the pregnant person as one or two? Would they so easily relegate the body functions by which humans reproduce to our animal and abjected nature—regarding them to be of little importance to the distinctiveness of humans? Today we have women engaging in philosophy— and doing so as women, that is, as people who come equipped to the task with the distinctive capacities of the female body, the socially constructed subjectivity of a gendered self, and a set of life experiences that vie with those pictures of the human that our male philosophers have handed us. For these women philosophers, the sense of wonder does not stop at the doorstep the sexually differentiated body. At that threshold a new wonder takes hold. While the labor of mothering has received a good airing by both proponents and critics of an “ethic of care,” many aspects of mothering beg for a continued exploration. In this collection a number of different aspects of mothering come into focus. When a birth mother who chooses (if that is an appropriate term given the social stigma that can attach to pregnancy of an unwed woman) to give up her child for adoption, how is she to understand her motherhood, and does she take up a maternal identity? When a mother adopts a child whose history of sexual abuse skews the sexual desire of the abused child, how does one take up the project of mothering? The essays that address these questions show us a side of motherhood that has not yet found its way into ethical discussions of care and mothering. They also make us see that the specificity and complexity of maternal identity is far greater than what we have thus far attempted to comprehend. Most of the essays, however, are phenomenological and ethical investigations of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering. The visceral, bodily aspects of maternity are at play. This is what makes this collection unique and pushes the dialogue forward. It challenges many settled views. As humans, we are foremost of woman born. What is the moral significance of being xii

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born and giving birth? How and when is it appropriate to speak of childbirth as an act of courage? Do we really want to give over to abortion foes the moniker “pro-life”? Can we not claim to be pro-life and still honor a woman’s right to decide? Should we not take the intrinsic interdependence of human life as firstly expressed in the relationship between a pregnant woman and the additional life she fosters? Shouldn’t we take the fact that pregnancy does not always result in a child, but sometimes ends in an abortion or miscarriage, as fundamental to our understanding of pregnancy? Is pregnancy a passive experience in contrast to the creative process of the artist or is the receptiveness of the artist to the world she inhabits analogous to the “waiting” of the pregnant woman? How do we confront the affront that the exposed breast of the breastfeeding woman gives to the conceit of humans as separate from and above nature and the animal? This is a collection that shows both how far feminist philosophy has come and how it is a spur to moving us onward. The collection has a strong phenomenological cast, one that is very appropriate, since the phenomenological tradition has explicitly addressed our embodied nature. However, it should motivate feminist philosophers from other traditions to raise similar questions and utilize the resources of differing traditions to search for satisfactory answers. My last remarks bring me to my concluding point, namely, that the essays here illustrate what feminist philosophy has been so successful in doing: to ask new questions that at once both plumb and challenge the rich reservoir of method and wisdom philosophy offers in the hope of finding richer, truer, and most useful understandings of our lives.

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Acknowledgments

Some four years ago, in the process of planning an international conference on pregnancy, childbirth and mothering, we awakened to the tremendous need for quality scholarship on these themes. It was then that we determined to begin assembling the present volume. We were well aware of the many obstacles with which we would have to contend—including and especially the very personal challenge of balancing our responsibilities to our children with the demands of editing a manuscript of this length. From the beginning, our work was a labor of love. Our steady conviction regarding the value of this project coupled with our increasing awareness of its uniqueness, drove us to continue. But personal conviction could only have taken us so far; without the help and support of our colleagues, contributors, family and friends— and even a bit of luck— this volume would never have come to life. We therefore ask our readers to join us in acknowledging the many people who have helped us along the way. Amrita Banerjee and Elena Cuffari joined us in orga nizing the conference which inspired this volume. The conference itself and the project of assembling an edited volume on the conference theme were fully supported by the University of Oregon Philosophy Department, and especially by its former Department Head, John Lysaker, and Bonnie Mann. Others who helped to make the conference a success include: Kara Barnette, Paul Burcher, Carolyn Culbertson, Jazmine Gabriel, David Goodman, Lisa Guenther, Aurora Hudson, Emma Jones, T.K. Landázuri, Jennifer Lang, Johanna Luttrell, Nikki McClure, José Mendoza, Andrea O’Reilly, Kimberly xv

Parzuchowski, Heidi Pohl, Elizabeth Reis, Christy Reynolds, Aaron Rodriguez, Katina Saint Marie, Ellen Scott, Eva Simms, Jessica Sims, Beata Stawarska, Kate Sullivan, Becky Sukovaty, Roberta Thompson, Amelia Wirts, Naomi Zack, and the Üntergang. The conference was supported financially by University of Oregon Graduate School, Center for the Study of Women in Society, Oregon Humanities Center, University of Oregon Department of Philosophy, and the Graduate Student Philosophy Club at the University of Oregon. As junior scholars the advice and assistance of our more experienced colleagues at various stages the publication process was invaluable. We would especially like to thank Lisa Guenther, Bonnie Mann, Kelly Oliver, and Gail Weiss. Throughout the process of editing this volume, the tireless efforts of our contributors have made our work easier. We cannot thank them enough, and share their joy in seeing their excellent work published here at last. We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers at Fordham University Press whose comments indubitably improved this volume, Erin Blood and Aurora Laybourn-Candlish, whose work on the most tedious parts of the final manuscript were completed with characteristic efficiency. Last but not least, we would also like to acknowledge the incredible family members who supported us in innumerable ways throughout the editing process: Joan Adams, Robert Adams, Nancy Bird LaChance, Linda Petersen and David Whalley. A very special thanks to our children—to Bella and Atticus Whalley, for reminding their mother that balance is the key to a philosophical life worth living, and to Geneva LaChance Adams, for demonstrating to her mother what it really means to be a philosopher: to have an ongoing sense of wonder about that which we usually take for granted. We can never fully express our gratitude to all.

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Coming to Life

Introduction: The Philosophical Significance of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Mothering S A R A H L AC H A N C E A DA M S A ND CAROLINE LUNDQUIST

Philosophy has often been described as preparation for death. Cicero wrote that to philosophize is to learn how to die, and Heidegger claims that being-toward-death constitutes the authentic attitude toward life. These ideas are not intended to be morbid. Rather, they propose that we should not be enslaved by death, not be driven by our evasions of it through forgetfulness or the striving toward immortality. In doing so, we would miss much of what is worth living for. To run away from death is to run away from life. Thus, in The Book of Dead Philosophers, Simon Critchley writes, “The denial of death is self-hatred.” While many philosophers have embraced life by way of death, they have typically evaded another fundamental truth of our existence, the bookend at the other end of life—birth. It is sometimes said that you cannot be there at your own origin. Nevertheless, it is true that one can be present at the origin of another human being—conception, pregnancy, childbirth, the child’s first word, the first steps, and so on. These are the experiences that women are usually more involved in than men. Yet, since women have largely been excluded from the practice of academic philosophy, their experiences have rarely found just representation in the canon. As a result, philosophy has a long history of ignoring, misunderstanding, reappropriating, and denigrating pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering. This volume is part of a growing movement to correct these problems. Although this anthology is not a proceedings volume, it was inspired by conversations that took place at a conference entitled Philosophical Inquiry 1

into Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Mothering at the University of Oregon in May 2009, which we organized with Amrita Banerjee and Elena Cuffari. The year before, we had discovered that the four of us were simultaneously working on research projects on the topics of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering. We had each found ourselves primarily working from resources outside of philosophy. Indeed, there is a wealth of creative nonfiction on motherhood and anthologies about motherhood and politics, lesbian mothering, mothering and race, mothering in poverty, teenage mothers, breastfeeding, and many other topics. There are thought-provoking memoirs that discuss adoption, postpartum depression, caring for a child with disabilities, and more. There are sociological, anthropological, and psychological studies. There is also the Motherhood Institute for Research and Community Involvement (formerly the Association for Research on Mothering), which houses the Journal of the Motherhood Institute (formerly the Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering). As compared to scholars in other disciplines, philosophers seem either willfully or unwittingly ignorant of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood. Nevertheless, the tremendous interest in the 2009 conference made it clear that in spite of this lacuna in the literature, there is widespread (international as well as interdisciplinary) interest in philosophical approaches to these topics. As Aristotle famously said, all philosophy begins in wonder. To be sure, the contributors to this anthology have found that a renewed sense of wonder before such “ordinary” (yet extraordinarily irreducible) experiences as pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering opens up dynamic avenues for philosophical inquiry and discourse. For more than three decades, feminist theorists have pointed to the exclusion of women and women’s experience from the history of philosophy and from the philosophical canon. Feminist critiques have emphasized the devastating consequences of this exclusion for women, as well as its negative impact on philosophy. As can be seen in the works of such groundbreaking figures as Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva, the inclusion of women and of women’s experience renews and enriches philosophy beyond measure. The authors in this anthology further demonstrate that considerations of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering provide an invaluable perspective from which to explore philosophical texts, themes, and questions. We offer this volume to scholars and advanced students from varied disciplines. Since some readers may be unfamiliar with the history of feminist philosophy and extant philosophical considerations of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering, the present introduction provides an overview of some of the foundational work in this area. Although we cannot presume to summarize the history of feminist philosophy, or all philosophical 2

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treatments of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering, we hope that a brief overview will provide readers a sufficient ground for understanding and assessing the pieces that follow. We begin by indicating that in spite of the overwhelming value of women’s experiences, phi losophers have often treated them dismissively or used them opportunistically as metaphors for metaphysical concepts. Reflecting on the historical relationship between philosophy and feminist theory, we call for a reexamination of some deep philosophical prejudices that so often bar conventional philosophers from taking feminist philosophy, or women’s experiences, seriously. We address these prejudices in the section concerning our approach. First, we consider the view that the personal is opposed to the philosophical. Next we address the perennial problem of essentialism in the light of Iris Young’s notion of gender as seriality; we offer Young’s approach as a way to navigate the personal and the theoretical while avoiding the sweeping claims that characterize essentialist philosophical theory. We maintain that contemporary feminist phenomenology is one successful illustration of Young’s methodology at work and serves as an example of the significance of philosophical inquiries into pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering. Nevertheless, the authors in this anthology utilize several valuable philosophical approaches. We go on to consider the broader philosophical significance of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering through explorations of gendered metaphysics, ethical theory, and social/political philosophy. Individual chapter summaries appear at the end of this introduction. Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Mothering in Philosophy To say that philosophy has historically been unkind to women would be an understatement. Not only have women been largely excluded from the practice of academic philosophy, but their experiences have also rarely found just representation in the canon. The philosophical canon is characterized in no small way as one that ignores, minimizes, and misappropriates the experiences of women. Philosophers who do consider the mother-child relationship often foreclose the question of its significance by considering pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering as mere obstacles to women’s participation in public life and to their financial independence. In constructing a vision of a more egalitarian society, the problem becomes how to care for children if women are not primarily engaged with this task. In these utopian visions, women’s individual responsibility for children and childrearing is reduced in favor of a more communal approach. Plato’s Republic is a classical example of a philosophical text in which maternity is viewed primarily as an obstruction to the good life. Socrates Introduction

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argues that women of the guardian class (in spite of their relative weakness as compared to men) should be educated as men, participate in the same pursuits, and not be “incapacitated by the bearing and breeding of whelps.” Similarly, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Frederick Engels argues for the elimination of women’s isolation in independent households. In his critique of capitalism, he claims that the emergence of patriarchy is integral with that of capitalism, and that the injustices inherent to the two systems are parallel. Engels’s critique of patriarchy was important and clearly progressive, but his consideration of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering is limited in that he considers it only as symptomatic of the problem of patriarchy. This negative perspective on pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering persisted into the twentieth century. Bertrand Russell, like Engels, critiques the subjection of women, especially their economic dependence. Like Plato, he advocates that children be raised in common nurseries, “the logical consequence of which would be the elimination of mother as well as father from all importance in child psychology.”  Another solution he offers is that motherhood become a professional occupation such that the “production of children” would become a “moneymaking career,” but a profession in which most women would not need to participate. Some contemporary feminist philosophers have also considered women’s responsibility for children as primarily a problem to be solved. Claudia Card and bell hooks advocate for “revolutionary parenting”—communitybased childcare in which mothers are not the sole primary caregivers. This suggestion may apply more specifically to white families, as Patricia Hill Collins claims that a system of “othermothering”— shared childrearing between mothers in a community— already exists in African American communities. Card and hooks’s solution accompanies a critique of the nuclear family model in which they contend that motherhood has been compulsory and oppressive for women. While Plato, Engels, and Russell believe that the emotional bonds of family life are basically old-fashioned, Card claims they are detrimental to children as well as mothers. The extreme of this view can be found in “Motherhood: The Annihilation of Women” by Jeffner Allen. She argues that “motherhood is dangerous to women” and should be “rendered null and void;” she develops a “philosophy of evacuation” from motherhood. Critiques of the patriarchal constraints on mothering are obviously essential, but they may be taken as prematurely foreclosing the question of its philosophical relevance. Some philosophers dismiss pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood in a more backhanded manner. That is, they make metaphorical use of these phenomena while denigrating or disregarding women’s experiences of 4

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them. Once again, Plato is the first philosopher to diminish women in this respect. In the Platonic dialogues, Socrates famously employs metaphors of pregnancy and childbirth to explain the process of coming to an understanding, knowledge or wisdom. In Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, Emmanuel Levinas employs maternity as a metaphor to describe subjectivity: The evocation of maternity in this metaphor suggests to us the proper sense of oneself. The oneself cannot form itself; it is already formed with absolute passivity. In this sense it is the victim of a persecution that paralyzes any assumption that could awaken it, so that it would posit itself for itself. Although for Levinas, pregnancy and motherhood are the image of all ethical relations, feminist critics note the tiresome stereotype of the selfsacrificing mother in Levinas’s work. Here, as with Plato, the metaphorical use of mothering appears to denigrate real women. The contentious relationship that sometimes exists between conventional philosophy and feminist philosophy may have to do with a vague suspicion that feminist scholars implicitly or explicitly demand the denunciation of the philosophical canon, or at least several of its constituent texts. Th is suspicion is understandable; after all, feminist philosophers are known for their critiques of key historical figures. But the belief that feminists would like nothing more than to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater stems from a misunderstanding of what feminist critiques of the canon aim to accomplish, coupled with a denial of the philosophical significance of that project. Feminist philosophers contend that a significant portion of human experience has not been properly attended to in most historical philosophy, and, as stated earlier, that canonical philosophical theory may therefore not be as rich or accurate as it ought to be. While some feminists have focused on drawing attention to overtly misogynistic statements in the work of such thinkers as Aristotle, Kant, and Nietzsche, the more philosophical facet of feminist critique emphasizes the role of gendered notions in canonical philosophical theory. As Cynthia Freeland argues in Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle, the pressing question for feminist theory is not, did Aristotle have mistaken views of women, but instead did such views find their way into his philosophical theories? If his theoretical frameworks contain “gendered notions,” or notions that are in some way equated with beliefs about a specific gender, then a second question arises, namely, can Aristotelian theory, when stripped of its gendered notions, maintain its theoretical integrity? Thus at the heart of feminist critique is a quintessentially Introduction

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philosophical concern about the integrity of canonical theory. If this concern remains a purely or merely feminist concern, then this is unfortunate indeed, since it rightly highlights the need for a serious reinterpretation and reassessment of canonical theory. Confronted with feminist attempts to expand the canon so as to better reflect women’s experiences, where conventional scholars capitulate, they nonetheless appear inclined to leave “feminine issues” to the feminists. They draw a tidy distinction between canonical philosophy and feminist philosophy and “feminine” topics, where the latter is vaguely understood as insufficiently rigorous and overly critical of the canon. Even as feminist thinkers work to legitimize the philosophical worth of their projects, conventional philosophers continue to ignore or misconstrue those projects. Feminist philosophy is thus ghettoized in departments across the United States and beyond, its practitioners grudgingly accepted as a necessary accommodation to changing social attitudes, though rarely welcomed as contributors to a broad yet cohesive unfolding philosophical canon. As Nye writes in Philosophy and Feminism: At the Border, Although philosophers might tolerate diversity and plurality in institutional practice and might even support institutional enclaves for women who want to do feminist work (such as the Society for Women in Philosophy or women’s studies departments), philosophy closed to feminist viewpoints might seem intact: a professional discipline, driven by “interior” concerns [and] unmoved by suspect “political” demands. This attitude is decidedly unsophisticated; ignoring the philosophical import of women’s experiences entails nothing less than the abandonment of the philosophical. The burden of proof in relation to the legitimacy of feminist topics and methodologies has been placed squarely on the shoulders of feminist thinkers. Whether the requirement is a fair one, it is incumbent upon feminist philosophers not only to explain and justify their philosophical methodologies, but also to illustrate the rich philosophical significance of their projects. Approach With few canonical resources from which to draw, philosophers seeking to explore such gendered experiences as pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering have often drawn from personal experiences, historical autobiographies, and/or literary examples. It is perhaps for this reason that philosophical

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inquiry into women’s experiences has often been construed by mainstream philosophers as too “subjective,” or personal rather than philosophical. On this and similar grounds, conventional philosophers may be inclined to reify the aforementioned distinction between “feminist philosophy” and “philosophy” proper, dismissing the former as the exclusive province of a splinter group of (female) academics. As Andrea Nye writes, “In the minds and teaching of many philosophers, it is clear, feminism is a distraction from the main business of philosophy.” Embedded in this dismissive attitude is a rather dubious assumption, that there is a hard and fast distinction between the personal and the philosophical. Another important apprehension comes from feminists themselves; they worry that consideration of women’s experience will result in essentialist conclusions. After explaining our own approach to these concerns, we will present the example of feminist phenomenology as one model for their successful navigation (though by no means is it the only useful model as this volume itself demonstrates), and as an opportunity to present some feminist phenomenologists’ discoveries regarding pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering. The Personal and the Philosophical Where does a sense of philosophical wonder begin, and how can it be inculcated within a broad philosophical audience? Women have long wondered at their own experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, and/or mothering, though they may not conventionally have had the resources to pursue their deep philosophical import. Women’s reproductive experiences are inherently fascinating due to the simple fact that pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering are, at least prima facie, irreducible to other phenomena. Thus one way to renew a sense of wonder before these experiences would be to simply publicize women’s pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering narratives. But feminist theorists have joined more conventional philosophers in debating the theoretical value and significance of individual narratives. We ask, then, what place should the personal narrative have in a philosophical inquiry into such phenomena as pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering? Attention to experience can illuminate its historical, material, political, social, linguistic, ideological, cultural, and embodied context. As we come to understand the experience of one person, it is not an autonomous and fi xed individual that we come to know, not just her personal emotions, embodiment, character, and choices. We can also begin to see how her situation has enabled, constrained, and motivated her; how she has taken it up in both active and passive styles; and how she has understood it

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psychologically and intellectually. Therefore, as light is shed on a “subjective” phenomenon, it also begins to illuminate the network of relationships in which it is embedded. It is because experience is entrenched in the actual world that consideration of it is so informative. Because of its situated character and because of its meaningfulness to people, experience can never be “pure,” “objective,” or completely free from discourse and institutions of meaning; as Linda Alcoff asserts, it is not an “unproblematized authoritative foundation for knowledge.” It is influenced by all of the things that can confine and persuade a person. As Joan Scott warns in her influential essay “Experience,” if we take experience to be transparent, then we may simply reproduce detrimental ideological systems. Indeed, ideology creates a propitious environment for certain beliefs and points of view. This perspective then informs the way we understand events both intellectually and emotionally. Consider this example: A nursing mother returns to work. She is allowed to take only one break per day to express milk. As a result, her milk supply diminishes. If she has been influenced by the ideology that mothers should always stay home with their children, then she might see her reduced milk production as evidence that she is failing in her natural maternal duties. A mother who is educated in feminism might see her problem as evidence for something else, namely, a society that values childrearing only insofar as it does not impede worker productivity. The first mother might feel guilt and a sense of failure, while the second might feel anger and frustration. The women’s interpretations of the event will already be a part of the immediate meaning of the experience for them; it does not just come after the fact. What is critical to understanding Scott’s concern is that whether a woman subscribes to ideologies of patriarchy or feminism, each woman can consider the same experience to be “evidence” for her preexisting beliefs. Although experience is subject to the influence of expectations, ideology, language, and theory, this does not mean these things determine our reception of an event. They cannot completely construct the individual or her experience; their relationship is motivational, not causal. This is why experiences can surprise us and offer something new to think about. Even the mother who is submersed in the ideology of patriarchy may realize that something is amiss with her workplace (not herself) when her milk dries up. Some experiences defy our theories and expectations, bringing cognitive dissonance and inarticulacy. We can see this in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Friedan when she addresses the “the problem that has no name” —the surprising prevalence with which American housewives in the 1950s showed symptoms of depression, including accompanying psychosomatic symptoms: 8

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Sometimes a woman would say “I feel empty somehow . . . incomplete.” Or she would say, “I feel as if I don’t exist” . . . Sometimes, she went to a doctor with symptoms she could hardly describe: “A tired feeling . . . I get so angry with the children it scares me . . . I feel like crying without any reason.” (A Cleveland doctor called it “the housewife’s syndrome.”) A number of women told me about great bleeding blisters that break out on their hands and arms. “I call it the housewife’s blight,” said a family doctor in Pennsylvania. “I see it so often lately in these young women with four, five and six children who bury themselves in their dishpans. But it isn’t caused by detergent and it isn’t cured by cortisone.’ ” This terrible tiredness took so many women to doctors in the 1950’s that one decided to investigate. He found, surprisingly, that his patients suffering from “housewife’s fatigue” slept more than an adult needed to sleep— as much as ten hours a day— and that the actual energy they expended on housework did not tax their capacity. Immersed in the imagery of the happy housewife, women had difficulty making sense of their dissatisfaction, but this did not change the urgency of its impact. Through attention to their experiences, women (and apparently some of their physicians) recognized that something was wrong, but failed to find solutions within the dominant paradigm. This was a sign that the available theories about women were inadequate. Freidan’s work demonstrates the role of wonder in generating new philosophical insights; it is precisely when we do not initially understand an experience that it can point to an unrecognized truth. A sense of wonder before an unthematized experience calls us to reflect philosophically upon how and why extant theories or theoretical categories fail to capture that experience. Experience is like hot, amorphous lava. Through interpretation, it cools, takes shape, and can be handled more easily. However when there are cracks in an explanation of experience, these fissures spread, creating open spaces that invite more adequate theorizing. In this way, experience can reveal the weakness of a theory, what it has yet to explain, what remains unformulated. A better theory will be able to explain more diverse manifestations of a phenomenon and be able to take into account more of its conditions. This does not give complete epistemic authority to experience, but instead places it in dialogue with theory. Scott argues that “the project of making experience visible precludes critical examinations of the workings of the ideological system itself . . . its premises about what these categories mean and how they operate, its notions Introduction

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of subjects, origin, and cause . . . analysis of the workings of this system and of its historicity.” However, examples abound in which considerations of experience lead to politically and philosophically relevant revisions of current ideological systems, including ideas about the structures of subjectivity. In “Disability and the Self,” S. Kay Toombs contends that the experience of disability defies clinical medicine’s (and philosophy’s) beliefs regarding the nature of the self. She contradicts the mechanistic view of the body that understands disability as primarily physical, and ignores the relationship between one’s embodiment and one’s subjectivity. This more holistic idea of the body reveals the need for changes in clinical, personal, and social responses to disability. Notably, she thinks that health and medical training programs should teach students to attend to patients’ clinical narratives—what the illness means to that person in the context of their situation. In direct contradiction to Scott, she believes that changes in medical personnel’s views of subjectivity will arise from attention to patients’ lived experiences. In “Are Mothers Persons? Reproductive Rights and the Politics of Subjectivity,” Susan Bordo makes a parallel discovery. Through examining our legal history, Bordo discovers that poor pregnant women, (especially nonwhite women) have been treated as “mere bodies” by the law. They have been forced to undergo court-ordered obstetrical procedures (primarily cesarean sections and forced sterilization) that are in denial of the women’s own values and desires. For example, Bordo describes a case in which a terminally ill woman, Angela Carder, was forced to have a cesarean section before the child was viable. Both mother and baby died shortly after the operation. The District of Columbia Court of Appeals, in affirming the order against a requested stay, ruled that the woman’s right to bodily intrusion could justifiably be put aside, as she had “at best two days left of sedated life.” Here, clearly, a still living human subject had become, for all legal purposes, dead matter, a mere fetal container. A woman whom no court in the country would force to undergo a blood transfusion for a dying relative had come to be legally regarded, when pregnant, as a mere life-support system for a fetus. In cases like this, the courts “divest pregnancy of all emotional, spiritual, religious significance, of all evocation of hardship or burden, of all connection with the experience of the pregnant woman.” Bordo argues that part of the solution is to recognize the existential importance of pregnancy, so that

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“invoking the authority of marginalized subjects may ultimately result in a reconstruction of subjectivity itself.” As Toombs and Bordo show, ignorance of a certain group of people’s experiences, whether willful or accidental, has very real social and philosophical ramifications. Contrary to Scott, they demonstrate that one can challenge the ideological systems in question, its notions of the subject, and the historicity of the system precisely through attention to experience. The recognition of new voices can change our worldview and values, and ultimately have a tremendous personal, political, social, and philosophical impact. The Problem of Essentialism Bringing marginalized experiences into view is an important political act, but if done carelessly its results can be harmful. In particular, one should be cautious when drawing conclusions about a group of people based on the experience of particular individuals. Generalizing can perpetuate inaccurate universalist and/or essentialist ideas. To speak of the “nature” of lesbians, Asian Americans, or women, for example, is inherently dismissive. It forecloses the question of identity; implies that an individual or group’s “essence” is something one can have in hand; assumes commonality where there are certainly vast differences; identifies the individual with a group with which she may not feel any solidarity; denies the uniqueness of the individual as well as her agency, choices, and intentions; and implies that people are conclusively constructed by outside forces. Thus even the presumably straightforward categories “woman” or “mother” become potentially problematic. This is the core of what feminists have termed the problem of essentialism: theoretical categories intended to render marginalized groups more visible may in the process do violence to the (presumed) members of those groups. The more general the category, the more likely it is to fail to capture the true richness, complexity, and variety of its constituent parts. In “Gender as Seriality: Thinking About Women as a Social Collective,” Iris Marion Young provides some resources for talking about commonalities in experience without creating universalizing categories. She argues that instead of thinking of people as members of groups, we should think in terms of series—“a social collective whose members are unified passively by the objects around which their actions are oriented or by the objectified results of the material effects of the actions of others.” Membership in a series means that one faces similar material, historical and social facticity

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as the others. It is a practical category, not metaphysical. People in a series do not necessarily feel a sense of unity or identity with each other; they are thrust together by society and circumstances. Young conceives of women through this notion of series, writing, “Thus, as a series woman is the name of a structural relation to material objects as they have been produced and organized by prior history. . . . Women are the individuals who are positioned as feminine by the activities surrounding those structures and objects.” These “structures and objects” do not determine one’s experience as a woman, but they do enable and constrain our actions. There is no natural, ontological, or metaphysical category women; rather, members of the series women are united by the material, historical, and institutional facts that they face. In contemporary, Western society some examples of these facts include: child care; birth control; family leave; abortion; baby care books; laws regarding birth, adoption and custody; breast pumps; maternity clothes; medical technology; and media depictions of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering. To the extent that women are subject to these and similar cultural realities they can be included in the series of “mothers.” Thus, this series may include biological and adoptive mothers, noncustodial mothers, stay-at-home mothers, working mothers, young and old mothers, those who find their maternity to be accidental or contingent, and those who do not want to be identified as such. Young’s way of thinking allows us to create practical categories, such as “women,” “pregnancy,” and “mothering,” while leaving them open-ended. No matter how comprehensive and nuanced a description may be, the meaning of the phenomenon need not be foreclosed. Thus we simply assert that there is a common situation in a particular context that, “mothers,” for example, face, and that this often yields a common experience. This enables similar experiences to be connected under a single, practical designation (such as “mothering”), while remaining open to the exceptionality of individual experience. The meaning can be left open to future clarification and elaboration while still remaining descriptive of a broad category and useful in highlighting the phenomenon. Young’s approach has tremendous potential for any number of feminist philosophical inquiries, characterized as they often are by both a grounding in the personal and an attentiveness to the problem of essentialism. The construction of meaningful yet open-ended series has already played a significant role in the emergence of a uniquely feminist phenomenology that captures the richness and complexity of women’s lived experience while offering substantial, often subversive theoretical claims. Using methods including serial categorization, some feminist phenomenologists have taken up and elaborated upon the project begun more than half a century ago by Simone de Beauvoir. 12

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We offer the following introduction to feminist phenomenology in order to illustrate how one set of feminist methods yields important insights when applied to women’s experience. Feminist Phenomenology While there is more than one phenomenological method, feminist phenomenology emphasizes the importance of the experience of the situated, embodied subject. Feminist phenomenologists are especially concerned with the historically ignored, gendered aspects of experience. Beginning with the revolutionary work of Simone de Beauvoir, feminist phenomenology has successfully navigated the realms of theory and praxis, the personal and philosophical. In the process, feminist phenomenology has illustrated the inadequacies of universal, generalized and genderless accounts of human experience. In 1949, Simone de Beauvoir published the groundbreaking treatise The Second Sex. In this book, Beauvoir takes a critical view of the biological, historical, cultural, and material limitations on women and considers how women have responded to these circumstances psychologically and practically. With regards to motherhood, Beauvoir highlights its paradoxical nature: The mother both possesses her child and is possessed by that child. The child puts her in touch with the future, but can make her feel finite and insignificant in comparison. The pregnant mother feels weighed down by her ailments, while she seems to have exceeded the limits of individual life. The forces of nature and biology overtake her body in pregnancy, and yet to gestate and raise a child is also creative. While Beauvoir believes that pregnancy can be an enrichment, she presents a detailed account of how it is harmful. She describes the fetus as a foreign growth, a parasite, a stranger, an intruder, and a mutilation. Beauvoir believes that the nausea, dizziness, diarrhea, constipation, and other common problems associated with pregnancy are largely psychosomatic— expressing the conflict between the woman serving herself and the fetus. The heart of Beauvoir’s problem with pregnancy is that it consumes the woman’s energy, forcing her to give up her independent projects in the face of the species’ need to reproduce itself. Between the 1970s and early 1990s, critics focused on this account of pregnancy, accusing Beauvoir of having a patriarchal horror of the female body. However, in a 1989 interview with Margaret Simons, Beauvoir denied that she was against motherhood itself. No, I didn’t say that exactly. I said that there could be a human relation, even a completely interesting and privileged relation between Introduction

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mother and child but that, in many cases, it was on the order of narcissism or tyranny or something like that. But I didn’t say that motherhood in itself was always something to be condemned, no, I didn’t say that. No, something that has dangers, but obviously, any human adventure has its dangers, such as love or anything. I didn’t say that motherhood was something negative. Ultimately, Beauvoir believes that women can mother authentically, but that their situation makes this difficult. Women have been taught to expect that motherhood will be the pinnacle of their lives, and yet there are many unfulfilled, dissatisfied mothers whose lives feel meaningless. Beauvoir notes that since women have typically been denied the opportunity to realize themselves through meaningful work, many mothers have sought to keep their children dependent on them in order to validate their empty lives. Not only is this a futile attempt since a child cannot be a substitute for one’s personal aspirations, but it is also gravely unethical. She argues that mothers and children are better off when women have opportunities to flourish through work and in society; these mothers will have more to give and demand less. She applauds maternal love when its aim is to give the child a concrete sense of his or her freedom, making herself, as caretaker, obsolete. “And that is exactly what makes for the touching character of maternal love, properly understood.”  Inspired by Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of embodied consciousness, some contemporary feminist phenomenologists have focused on the first-person, embodied experiences of being a mother, especially pregnancy and nursing. Like Beauvoir, they emphasize that a woman’s bodily experience of motherhood is affected by historical, cultural, and individual situations, and also by the choices women make. One example of such work is Carol Bigwood’s “Renaturalizing the Body (with the help of Merleau-Ponty).”  Bigwood argues that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of chiasm or intertwining provides a helpful alternative to the subject-object dichotomy in making sense of the mother’s relation to her fetus. She states, “It becomes especially clear in the case of pregnancy that, as MerleauPonty argues, the metaphysical dichotomous categories of subject and object, and self and other, fail to describe the incarnate situation, for the ‘subject’ is blurred and diff used in pregnancy. A woman is inhabited by a growing sentience that is not truly ‘other’ to herself.” Iris Young comes to similar conclusions in “Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation” when she describes the pregnant body as a dialectic: “The pregnant subject . . . is decentered, split or doubled in several ways. [The pregnant woman] experiences her body as herself and not herself.” “The integrity of my body 14

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is undermined in pregnancy not only by this externality of the inside, but also by the fact that the boundaries of my body are themselves in flux. In pregnancy I literally do not have a firm sense of where my body ends and the world begins.” Finally, in “Milk and Flesh: A Phenomenological Reflection on Infancy and Coexistence,” Eva Simms also employs MerleauPonty to help explain how the intertwining of mother and infant in pregnancy is continued after childbirth: A great paradox rules pregnancy: are there two bodies or one? Two beings or one? After birth it seems clear: two bodies, breathing separately, one tiny and vulnerable, the other still large and vulnerable, too. But this separateness is an illusion. Infants are born with involuntary, responsive capacities (“reflexes”) that already constitute the maternal form. Feminist phenomenology illustrates how attention to women’s experience challenges and even undermines conventional phenomenological assertions, calling into question, for example, the supposed unity of the subject. But the philosophical significance of women’s experience extends well beyond the realm of phenomenology. In what follows, we explore the import of philosophical inquiries into pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering to gendered metaphysical theories, theories of ethics, and social-political thought. Gendered Metaphysics, Ethical Theory, and Social/Political Philosophy Although philosophers have long relied upon experience as a source for theoretical insight, in failing to seriously consider those experiences associated with the feminine, they have also failed to acknowledge the substantial ways in which they might challenge their theoretical conclusions. The consequence of this intractable exclusion is that canonical philosophical theory is not as rich, as insightful, or even as accurate as it could and ought to be. Simply stated, such “feminine” experiences as pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering have the power to radically challenge and in many cases undermine conventional, often fundamental beliefs about the nature of human subjectivity and intersubjectivity, humanity’s relationship to the natural world, and the nature and purpose of ethics, to name just a few. Two contemporary French philosophers and psychoanalysts, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, have looked to pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering in challenging Western metaphysics and ethics. They contend that the maternal body is a site of intersection for nature and culture, self and Introduction

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other, and the prelinguistic and language. Both Kristeva and Irigaray take a complex view of the identity and difference between mother and fetus/ child. In Je, Tu Nous: Toward a Culture of Diff erence, Irigaray notes that, contrary to the common idea (in both psychoanalysis and the broader culture) that mother and fetus are fused, the placenta is a vital mediating space that already preserves differentiation within the relationship. There is neither fusion nor conflict, but a negotiation between mother and fetus. The placenta regulates exchanges between the two, ensuring that the fetus is not treated as a foreign or alien other. Irigaray refers to this as a placental economy. Kristeva describes the gestation of the fetus as a catalyst for a “catastrophe of identity.” In “Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini” she describes this in visceral and poetic detail: Cells fuse, split, proliferate; volumes grow, tissues stretch, and body fluids change rhythm, speeding up or slowing down. Within the body, growing as a graft, indomitable, there is an other. And no one is present, within that simultaneously dual and alien space, to signify what is going on. ‘It happens, but I’m not there,’ I cannot realize it, but it goes on,’ Motherhood’s impossible syllogism. According to Kristeva, the doubling, stretching, splitting, and severance that occur within the pregnant body are a literal alienation of the woman from her own flesh. As her bodily integrity is undermined by the fetus, this challenges the mother’s personal sense of unity. She is no longer alone in her body; her life is no longer individual. She cannot be simply identified with her own body, since there is another present within it. In the pregnant body— self and other (mother and fetus) coexist, sharing a split self. Both mother and fetus are in a process of becoming, they are what Kristeva calls a “subject-in-process.” For Kristeva, we are all subjects-in-process, but this can be seen more clearly in pregnancy. Kristeva believes that the mother/child separation is not restricted to pregnancy; as the child matures and acquires language, he or she moves away from the intimacy with the maternal body toward signification and the social. Kristeva says that there is an “abyss” between mother and child as what was once the mother’s own self becomes more and more distant from her: There is him, however, his own flesh, which was mine yesterday. First there is the separation, previous to pregnancy, but which pregnancy brings to light and imposes without remedy . . . Then there is this other abyss that opens up between the body and what 16

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had been its inside: there is the abyss between the mother and child. What connection is there between myself, or even more unassumingly between my body and this internal graft and fold, which, once the umbilical cord has been severed, is an inaccessible other? My body . . . and him. No connection. Nothing to do with it. Additionally, Kristeva thinks that the child abjects (radically rejects) the mother in order to achieve his or her own identity. Parallel to Freud’s idea of the Oedipus complex, in which the son symbolically and psychically commits patricide, Kristeva believes that the child similarly commits matricide to achieve an independent identity. Individuation requires this abjection because the maternal body threatens the individual borders of the subject. Both Irigaray and Kristeva claim that Western philosophy/metaphysics ignores the maternal as an origin and thus also ignores materiality as a basis of life. Denying the mother’s role in reproduction and creativity is matricide at the cultural level. For example, in origin myths the mother is often not the origin of life, rather males frequently give birth to themselves. There are also a lack of representations of the placenta and womb in our culture. Irigaray claims that patriarchy suppresses the importance of the womb, replacing it with language. For instance, she contends that the family name is a replacement for the connection to the umbilical cord, the original connection to the mother. Irigaray calls the navel, “the most elementary identity tag.” Our desire to return to the womb, our original home is also denied. Because these subjects are taboo, we forget our debt to the mother and our dependency on her. Kristeva believes that the discourses of science and Christianity oppose the mother to the social order, and especially to language. In the opposition of nature and culture, mothers are placed on the side of nature. They are associated with animals and the prelinguistic, passive body. However, Kristeva demonstrates that mothers actually have a complex relationship to language in Stabat Mater. This piece is composed in two columns. One column presents a reasoned argument against the conceptions of motherhood in science and Christianity. The other describes the experience of being a mother poetically/semiotically. The semantic account is often interrupted midsentence by the semiotic, not to be taken up again until a few pages later. In this way, she represents the intertwining and contradictory nature of these types of discourse. For Kristeva, language develops through the disruption of the symbolic (grammar and structure, the more formal aspects of language/signification) by the semiotic (rhythms and tones that discharge bodily drives, channeling the unconscious, providing catharsis). Introduction

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In spite of the cultural and personal abjection of maternity, Kristeva believes that the maternal reappears in art, literature, and religion. This return of the repressed has both dangers and advantages. The maternal is a font of creative potential, since with it comes marginalized, unconscious, and prelinguistic experience. However, it can be threatening, especially for women. Since women are already disregarded, they further risk having their work dismissed if it celebrates the semiotic and maternal. Women are also susceptible to depression if they internalize the mother; in these cases abjection and matricide can be turned toward oneself. Irigaray believes that our connection to our mothers, especially for women, is the origin of our identity and subjectivity. As women, she believes we are already mothers. It is our creativity that makes us mothers, not just of children but also of ideas, art, religion, society, and so on. While Kristeva thinks that the womb needs to be abjected personally and psychically to make way for autonomy and culture, both Kristeva and Irigaray claim that the maternal ought to be reevaluated so that it is not seen as a threat to culture. Human beings do not spring forth from a “state of nature,” but from a relation to their mothers that is both natural and cultural. Some recent scholarship has taken up the task of reevaluating maternity, and its social and ethical implications. For example, in Womanizing Nietzsche: Philosophy’s Relation to the Feminine, Kelly Oliver offers an understanding of the maternal that is not in conflict with the social. She argues that we need to think of the mother not as a passive, desireless, mute body; we must explore the subjectivity of mothers. “We need to reconceive the child’s relation to its mother as a social relation rather than a relation to nature.” “This new model of maternity can provide the ontological foundations for a new conception of the ethical relationship.”  In Subjectivity Without Subjects: From Abject Fathers to Desiring Mothers, Oliver argues with Kristeva that the mother is a desiring subject who cannot be reduced to the maternal body, and that maternity can be an image for ethics in which the subject/object dichotomy is overcome. Lisa Guenther also considers what broader philosophical insights can be found in the mother-child relationship in The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction. Guenther argues that one’s birth is a double gift: it is the gift of one’s life received from his or her mother, and the child is a gift to the family who cares for him or her. The birth of a child brings forth an existence that is already beholden to another, but it is a debt that cannot be repaid in reciprocal fashion (one cannot give birth to one’s mother). Instead this obligation calls forth a responsibility to others who also may not be able to reciprocate, “a generosity without expectation of

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return.” Above all, this is a duty to respond ethically to the stranger, since one is cared for by a family in which one was initially a stranger. In Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities, Cynthia Willett looks to the experiences of marginalized subjects to reconceive the self-other dialectic. Like Oliver, she argues against the maternal as merely a naturalbiological function, instead describing the relationship to the infant in terms of the social: “The infant is neither identified with the Other in an anonymous or collective existence nor alienated from the Other in the abstract constructions of a private subjectivity but is always oriented toward the Other through the kinesthetics (touches, scents, sounds) of an originary social bond.”  This book, along with Willett’s The Soul of Justice: Social Bonds and Racial Hubris, considers the phenomenological-psychoanalytic and care-ethics traditions in light of African American thought. Similarly to philosophers in the continental tradition, Virginia Held discusses human birth and wants to claim it as a “human,” not merely natural event. In Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society and Politics, Held writes: I try to think anew about human birth, about the creation of human life, and about the experience of those who create human life. I argue that giving birth to human beings should not be thought to be any more “essentially natural,” however that is conceptualized, than is human death. I suggest that human birth, like human death, should be understood to be central to whatever is thought to be distinctively human and that the tradition of describing birth as a natural event has served the normative purpose of discounting the value of women’s experiences and activities. Held belongs to the school of feminist ethics known as care ethics. Although care ethics is by no means a univocal movement, it is generally characterized by an emphasis on human interdependence. Care ethicists contend that philosophy’s historical neglect of women’s experience coupled with an excessive emphasis on rational autonomy has lead ethicists to incorrectly conceive of the moral agent as a detached, self-sufficient entity. In reality, care ethicists argue, moral agency is constituted by relationships with others. One key instantiation of moral agency is located in the relationship between dependents and caretakers. Although the caretaker/ dependent relation is not always understood in terms of gender, some care ethicists have argued that since women’s historical position has left them responsible for dependent care, women are more aware of the nature and significance of dependency relations.

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Some care ethicists, Held among them, consider the mother-child relation as the fundamental paradigm for all ethical and even political relationships. Held employs the mother-child relationship as a thought experiment to demonstrate how the competitive dominance-driven notion of the human fails to cover all moral relations. She believes that this exercise enables rethinking the goals and motives of our society: “I will try to imagine what society would look like for both descriptive and prescriptive purposes, if we replaced the paradigm of economic man with the paradigm of mother and child.” Held thinks that there are some helpful differences between this model and the contractual model: the mother-child relation, once it occurs, is not contractual or voluntary; it does not presuppose reciprocal (economic-like) relations; it is an irreplaceable relationship and neither person is a replaceable commodity; the individuals involved are not strictly separate entities; harmony, love, and cooperation are valued; and a policy of noninterference is obviously morally insufficient. In Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency, Eva Feder Kittay encourages us to rethink personal and social accountability on the basis of an ethics of care. Kittay thinks that the true profundity and prevalence of human dependence remains unrecognized, and the mothering relation can serve as an analogy “for social relations in which vulnerability is central.” To that end, she argues that every human is worthy of care and respect based on the universal human fact that we are all “some mother’s child”: “The notion speaks to the relationship, forged through the care of a vulnerable dependent, and to the value that this relationship imparts both to the one cared for and to the caregiver. This relationship is ubiquitous in human society and is as fundamental to our humanity as any property philosophers have invoked as distinctly human.”  Kittay emphasizes that the need for care also extends to mothers and other care workers themselves. The best-known example of maternal ethics might be Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. Mothers, she claims, are those who meet a child’s demands for preservation, growth, and social acceptability. These demands lead to the mother’s activities of preservative love, nurturance, and training. She argues that since reason arises in the contexts of these particular practices, these activities affect the thinking of mothers and those who identify with them. Moreover, she thinks that the demands of mothering undermine the division of emotion from reason found in traditional ethics. This is because passion and love work in conjunction with knowledge, in maternal practice. Although Ruddick believes that attention to maternal practice can provide an important corrective to traditional ethics, she is cautious not to romanticize mothering and argues that conflicts in maternal interests are inevitable. 20

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The story of feminist philosophy is one of progress in many senses. The continued participation of women in academic life serves as a reminder of a historical exclusion not only of women but also of women’s experience from the philosophical canon. Feminist methodologies have done a remarkable job of navigating the personal and the theoretical, thus capturing the wide experiential range of phenomena such as pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering while producing useful, often subversive theoretical insights. Philosophers such as Beauvoir, Irigaray, Kristeva, and Young have set a precedent for feminist philosophers who seek to understand the true richness and complexity of human experience. We therefore offer this volume not as the first to challenge convention, but rather as the latest chapter in a tale of ongoing progress. A Cautionary Note: Pregnancy Is not Childbirth Is not Mothering We believe that philosophical reflection on pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering can illuminate some of the most pervasive structures of human existence, lending new ethical, social, political, and metaphysical insights. But in our attentiveness to the phenomena, we must not overlook one key consideration: although common sense might lead us to perceive pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering as moments on an experiential continuum, they do not always or necessarily exist in such an arrangement. Whether or not women’s pregnancy terminations are voluntary, childbirth does not follow inevitably from the fact of pregnancy. Not all mothers are birth mothers; adoptive parents are parents properly speaking, thus parenting cannot be understood exclusively as the consequence of a previous biological process. Some birth mothers find themselves transformed by the experience of having carried a pregnancy to term and/or given birth to a child, even though they chose to relinquish parental rights. Each of these insights undermines a facile understanding of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering as moments on a temporal and/or biological continuum; each calls for a more reflective conception of the phenomena taken individually and of their interrelation. The Essays Part I: The Philosophical Canon In “Plato, Maternity, and Power: Can we Get a Different Midwife?” Cynthia Coe argues that dominant narratives surrounding pregnancy and motherhood remain beholden to a Platonic devaluation of becoming that Introduction

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draws a binary dichotomy between mothers and philosophers and constructs both pregnant women and young children as fundamentally fragile creatures. Coe further argues that the maternal anxiety born of these narratives normalizes fundamentally neurotic ways of relating to ourselves and to the world around us. In order to undermine the deeply entrenched dichotomies of vulnerability/virility and embodiment/intellect that operate within our understanding of reproduction, we must pursue a much larger conceptual shift in our ways of thematizing pregnancy and mothering; only then may we begin to work free of our Platonic melancholy. Kayley Vernallis argues that contemporary Americans tend to identify courage with a willingness to risk serious injury or death for the sake of some larger social good, coupled with a mental resolve that “conjures up images of successful bodily self-control and self-command;” she dubs this virtue physical pro-social (PPS) courage. Although PPS courage appears prima facie to be a gender-neutral virtue, Vernallis argues that its features are usually identified with what we call manly courage, the paradigmatic expression of which occurs in battle. In “Courage and Childbirth,” Vernallis points to sexist conceptual frameworks that have historically barred us from thinking about childbirth as an arena for the expression of PPS courage, including Christianity’s interpretation of birthing pain as a punishment for sexual sin and a gendered public/private division of courage which can be traced in part to Aristotle’s characterization of andréa. Vernallis ends by arguing that childbirth is a legitimate venue for the expression of courage despite the fact that key features of childbirth lack the volitional/agential attributes of manly courage. In “Original Habitation: Pregnant Flesh as Absolute Hospitality,” Frances Gray interrogates Jacques Derrida’s notion of hospitality as a relation between host and guest. She argues that the fundamental intrinsic relatedness of all human life expressed in the relationship between the pregnant woman and her “second subject,” the fetus, is the precondition for the plurality of subjects that necessarily constitutes all human subjectivity. According to Gray, pregnant flesh anticipates the possibility of mutual intersubjective understanding as an elemental communion evolves between two subjects cohabiting in one flesh. Using the metaphor of pregnant flesh as hospitality, she claims that pregnant flesh is ethically primitive. However, she claims that pregnancy is more like letting sparrows nest in one’s rafters than it is like offering hospitality in the anticipatory, welcoming sentiment of Derrida’s account. Lastly, she examines the implications of her argument for the questions of abortion and unwanted pregnancy. As Lisa Guenther notes, Maurice Merleau-Ponty often compares intersubjectivity to pregnancy and birth; either the other is reproduced from me 22

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like a child, or self and other are born together through a process of mutual divergence from a common flesh. In either case, Merleau-Ponty invokes birth as a metaphor without acknowledging the role of sexual difference. When he examines birth as a concrete process, it is from the perspective of the embryo rather than the perspective of the pregnant woman. In “The Birth of Sexual Difference: A Feminist Response to Merleau-Ponty,” Guenther addresses the blind spot of sexual difference in Merleau-Ponty’s work by developing suggestions in his own texts in dialogue with the feminist pregnancy philosophies of Luce Irigaray, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Adrienne Rich, and Iris Marion Young. Guenther argues that when read in the light of feminist accounts of birth, Merleau-Ponty’s account raises interesting possibilities for both the temporality of expectation and the restrictive duality of “girl” or “boy” that it entails. Part II: Ethics During pregnancy, Gail Weiss argues, a mother’s responsibility to the fetus is inextricably linked to her responsibilities to herself or her body; she fulfills her responsibility to her fetus through taking care of her own body (eating and sleeping well, avoiding drugs, and so forth). During pregnancy, maternal responsibility to the fetus is therefore mediated. In “Birthing Responsibility,” Weiss explores how responsibility to the fetus is altered by childbirth as the fetus makes the transition from intrauterine existence to infancy outside the mother’s body. Weiss contends that the birth mother’s body gives birth not only to a child but also to a responsibility to another, even if it is not the case that she alone can or should bear this responsibility. We must, she maintains, find a way to acknowledge the responsibility that emerges from the birth experience while avoiding the trap of privileging the responsibilities of birth mothers over those of adoptive mothers, fathers, and/or partners. What does it mean to be a mother? Intuitively, mothering seems to involve some sort of daily praxis, including but not limited to the care and nurturing of a child. Because we do not tend to think of women who relinquish their maternal role to adoptive parents as engaging in “mothering” praxis, we might be reluctant to identify them as mothers. But as Dorothy Rogers illustrates in “Maternity, Identity, and Absence,” maternal identity can persist in profound ways in the lives of mothers who have given their children up for adoption. By drawing from her experiences of relinquishment as well as other firsthand accounts, Rogers explores the formation, development, and persistence of maternal identity in the lives of birth mothers who are not raising their biological children. She ends by Introduction

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examining the connection between the sense of stigma and loss that birth mothers invariably report feeling and feminist critiques of adoption law and policies. Melissa Burchard explores the specific challenges of mothering adopted children who have been sexually abused in “What’s an Adoptive Mother to Do? When Your Child’s Desires are a Problem.” This analysis involves an investigation of the multiple meanings of queer desires and practices. She finds that children who have been sexually abused are likely to develop queer (nonnormative) desires, and parents of such children will need queer (transgressive) parenting practices to help children recover from or come to terms with their abuse. She offers questions and reflections on the desires and parenting needs of children, like hers, for whom sex and awareness of sex was imposed on them violently and abusively. Part III: Politics The popular dichotomy of so-called “pro-life” and “pro-choice” abortion ideologies is inherently problematic in that it stonewalls those who support the legal availability of abortion as “anti-life,” and those who do not as “anti-choice.” But it does so in such an obvious way that one might dismiss this distinction as simply fallacious and thus irrelevant in a serious debate over the legality of abortion. However, as Bertha Alvarez Manninen argues, dichotomous thinking has infected abortion-rights discourse to such an extent that many people equate the injunction to make and/or keep abortions legal with a moral acceptance of abortion and an absolute devaluation of fetal life. In “The Pro- Choice Pro-Lifer: Battling the False Dichotomy,” Manninen takes up Julia Hanigsberg’s call for the pro-choice feminist community to articulate a “vision of the value of intrauterine life” which might serve to undermine the false dichotomy of pro-life vs. prochoice. Manninen argues that pro-choice feminists can recognize the value of fetal life in two ways: first, by acknowledging that abortion is often experienced as a significant loss which merits mourning, and second, by calling for pro-choice advocates to help to curb the need for abortions by supporting effective sex-education programs as well as social programs that aid women who are faced with unwanted pregnancies. Ultimately, Manninen argues, the pro-life pro-choice philosophy should emphasize keeping abortions safe, legal, and rare. In “The Political ‘Nature’ of Pregnancy and Childbirth,” Candace Johnson examines theoretical debates concerning “medicalization” in relation to the empirical trend toward increased demand for “natural” childbirth options. Critics of the medical model have argued that medical interven24

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tion in pregnancy and childbirth is both unwarranted and disempowering; some have emphasized that these consequences are especially harmful to minority and/or economically disadvantaged women. Johnson notes, however, that the strongest criticisms of medicalization tend to come from privileged women, and are uniformly accompanied by demands for more “natural,” “traditional,” or “normal” approaches and practices. She argues that reverence for the natural is a political claim that asserts social position, identity, and resistance while betraying a physical and psychic duality that is exacerbated by the stark public-private divide in women’s lives. Like many feminist phi losophers, Sonya Charles believes that the midwifery model of pregnancy and childbirth is preferable to the medical model. However, in “Disempowered Women? The Midwifery Model and Medical Intervention,” Charles argues that some aspects of the former— such as the uniformity of birth stories, the explanation of the mind/body connection, and the attitude toward medical interventions— disempower women by encouraging feelings of shame, guilt, and isolation when medical technology is necessary. In addition to analyzing each of these aspects of the midwifery model, Charles offers some suggestions on how they can be reformed in order to make the midwifery model more commensurable with the broader goal of female empowerment that serves as its basis. Part IV: Popular Culture As Kelly Oliver notes, from the nineteenth until the late twentieth century, pregnancy was considered a medical condition and/or something to hide from public view. Understandably, then, until recently Hollywood has generally shied away from depicting the pregnant body. But in the past few decades, a number of films have taken up the theme of pregnancy, showing bare pregnant bellies, water breaking, vaginal birth, and discussing the experience of pregnancy, as previously unseen in popular film. In “Images of Pregnancy in Hollywood Film and Popular Culture,” Oliver traces images of the pregnant body from the 1930s through the present in relation to both their changing historical contexts and developments in feminist theory and the women’s movement. Although she identifies a handful of laudable trends in contemporary depictions of the pregnant body, Oliver argues that popular culture imagery ultimately betrays a deep cultural ambivalence toward pregnancy that highlights the need for continued feminist analysis. In “Exposing the Breast: The Animal and the Abject in American Attitudes Towards Breastfeeding,” Rebecca Tuvel explores a curiosity in American attitudes towards breastfeeding through various cultural moments. Introduction

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Despite the medical community’s recommendation for mothers to breastfeed, a significant number of women opt for bottle-feeding or choose to breastfeed only in private. Her analysis traces a shame associated with the mother’s breast in our cultural unconscious, and suggests that sociocultural accounts that attempt to explain this shame by reference to the sexual objectification of the breast in our culture do not tell the full story. Rather, an understanding of our desire to reject all that threatens our “humanity,” including both maternal and animal bodies, is needed to explain the displeasure and disgust many Americans experience upon witnessing the act of breastfeeding. She turns to Kristeva’s theory of abjection to help explain this phenomenon, but ultimately critiques Kristeva’s omission of the role of the animal qua animal (as opposed to just a stand-in for the maternal body). Ultimately, she emphasizes the importance of a nonhumanist ethics for rethinking our conceptions of humanity (and the concomitant oppression of women/animals). Part V: Feminist Phenomenology Talia Welsh explores the philosophical value of phenomenologies of pregnancy in “The Order of Life: How Phenomenologies of Pregnancy Revise and Reject Theories of the Subject.” It is clear, Welsh argues, that MerleauPontian inspired phenomenologies of pregnancy validate pregnancy as a significant subject matter for philosophy while calling into question the legitimacy of theories that characterize human experience as autonomous, rational, genderless, unified, and discrete. What is less clear, as Welsh suggests, is what a critical approach to phenomenologies of pregnancy call us to do. Are we, she asks, merely to revise conventional descriptions of the subject, or must we instead reject the centrality of the subject altogether? In addressing this question, Welsh explores pregnancy as a kind of Foucauldian limit-experience that rejects the centrality of the subject while maintaining the value of working from lived experience. In “The Vision of the Artist/Mother: The Strange Creativity of Painting and Pregnancy,” Florentien Verhage confronts the common view that pregnancy is a period of passing time in which the pregnant woman lets her body do ever more work while she relinquishes control. She challenges this assumption in the context of Merleau-Ponty’s comments on pregnancy, birth, and artistic creation and so tackles the overly simple dichotomy between artistic creation and pregnant passivity. She argues that the pregnant woman’s body is a lived body of an engaged and creative subject. Like the artist, the pregnant subject is engaged in a “passive-active” creativity that is, as Beauvoir has it, truly a “strange kind of creation.” 26

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Conclusion: New Directions The essays in this volume take a decidedly fresh approach to the questions at hand. For instance, while recent literature on reproductive rights is dominated by arguments either for or against abortion, Manninen’s essay goes beyond typical ways of thinking about the status of the fetus, and in the process offers an alternative to the pro-life/pro-choice dichotomy. Contemporary scholarly literature on childbirth tends to focus on the problem of medicalization; but Johnson’s piece contextualizes the midwifery model within a global and class-conscious perspective revealing that it may be equally problematic. Many publications on mothering assume that mothers are heterosexual, biological parents; yet Burchard’s essay concerns adoptive and same-sex parenting. These essays question conventional conceptions of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering, including the traditional assumption that the three are to be understood as moments on the same experiential continuum. In the essays that follow, the central commitments of their respective philosophical frameworks are presented in an authentic way, but it is not assumed that the reader will be familiar with the authors’ philosophical terminology or commitments (phenomenology or Aristotelianism, for example). In addressing an interdisciplinary audience, the authors herein have moved beyond narrow discipline-oriented approaches to their themes and questions. Consider for example, Tuvel’s essay on breastfeeding. This work is not solely of interest to Kristeva scholars, providing yet another exploration of Kristeva’s notion of abjection. Tuvel addresses a predominant feminist concern regarding the association of women with animals. Going beyond Kristeva, Tuvel argues convincingly that we should not simply upset the equation of women and nature, but that it presents an opportunity to reevaluate our view of nonhuman animals. Interestingly, her consideration of breastfeeding leads to a nonhumanist ethics. Likewise, the commitments of the other authors in this volume extend beyond loyalties to any particular philosopher or school of thought. This anthology will also concern philosophers who previously have not been interested in pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering; they will find that women’s experiences lend new insight to persistent philosophical concerns. For example, Welsh’s essay considers whether phenomenologies of pregnancy call upon us to reject the subject altogether as central or revise our traditional descriptions of the subject. Meanwhile, Guenther reveals a blind spot in Merleau-Ponty’s theories of flesh and institution resulting from his metaphorical use of childbirth and his inattention to the perspectives of pregnant and birthing women. Vernallis broadens Aristotle’s conception Introduction

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of courage, offering childbirth as an alternative paradigm to his exemplar of the soldier. One implication of Vernallis’s argument is that an Aristotelian ethic of virtue does not foreclose the possibility that women too may have courage, or virtue more generally. This book has been tailored so as to maintain philosophical rigor while remaining accessible to a wide variety of scholars, professionals and students; the theoretical claims are often complex, but they are described in consistently accessible language. Philosophical reflection on pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering has the power to challenge conventional philosophical assumptions and reinvigorate central philosophical questions. By illustrating that the significance of these phenomena can be revealed from a variety of philosophical (and extraphilosophical) perspectives, we hope to inspire continued work on these topics by scholars who might never have imagined that their specialization was amenable to them.

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PA RT

The Philosophical Canon

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Plato, Maternity, and Power Can We Get a Diff erent Midwife? CYNTHIA D. COE

The dominant construction of maternity in contemporary American culture has deeply Platonic roots, in three primary dimensions. First, the figure of the (literally) pregnant philosopher is a conceptual paradox—the analogy between Socrates and the pregnant woman works in our dualistic tradition on an exclusively metaphorical level. Second, maternity is constructed as a form of fragility, a state fraught with multiple and constant dangers. Through intense medical control and surveillance, pregnant women are made to experience their own bodies as delicate and alien objects. This construction reinforces the Platonic idea that maternity—far from being a life-giving power—creates merely mortal beings, and is thus connected to imperfection and death, in ways that intellectual reproduction is not. Third, children are perceived as beings who are profoundly vulnerable to a great variety of physical, psychological, and social threats. In this essay, I argue that the anxieties cultivated around pregnancy and motherhood perpetuate disempowering visions of the self in its relation to others and the world around it. Given how powerful the dichotomies of vulnerability and virility, embodiment and intellect remain, particularly in relation to maternity, we must pursue a much larger conceptual shift in order to work free of our Platonic melancholy. The Pregnant Philosopher As many scholars have noted, Socratic dialogues make remarkable use of reproductive metaphors in describing the transformation that philosophy 31

is supposed to bring about. In the Symposium, Socrates is likened to a Silenus figure, a statue containing many small statues within it. Alcibiades is speaking about catching a glimpse of the ideas within Socrates’s mind, but Silenus is also the mythic companion and tutor of Dionysus— often depicted as a drunken prophet, although Alcibiades also describes Socrates as unaffected by alcohol. Socrates is described as able to “give birth . . . to true virtue” through the activity of philosophical dialogue. This is in keeping with the teaching of Diotima the priestess, who says that pregnancy signifies the possibility of immortality, but immediately distinguishes between two forms of immortality: Now, some people are pregnant in body, and for this reason turn more to women and pursue love in that way, providing themselves through childbirth with immortality and remembrance and happiness, as they think, for all time to come; while others are pregnant in soul— because there surely are those who are even more pregnant in their souls than in their bodies, and these are pregnant with what is fitting for a soul to bear and bring to birth [that is, wisdom]. In this account, the two attempts to defy death are proposed at least superficially as if they had the same value, but Diotima soon clarifies matters, according to the usual judgments of soul and body, as she describes the process of intellectual education and the relationship between the erastes and the eronimos: When he makes contact with someone beautiful and keeps company with him, he conceives and gives birth to what he has been carrying inside him for ages. And whether they are together or apart, he remembers that beauty. And in common with him he nurtures the newborn; such people, therefore, have much more to share than do the parents of human children, and have a firmer bond of friendship, because the children in whom they have a share are more beautiful and more immortal. Everyone would rather have such children than human ones. Diotima is thus borrowing the transformative significance of the physical process of pregnancy to reveal the value of intellectual reproduction. But in doing so, she depends on a conceptual denial and devaluation of physical reproduction. Two things happen simultaneously in the interpretation of physical reproduction offered here: at an explicit level, physical reproduction is only the lowest form of aspiring to immortality, but at a figurative level, conception, pregnancy, and birth are used as a way to convey the power of philo32

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sophical practice, which is itself intermingled with male homosexuality. The devaluation of maternal power is premised on the displacement of this power to a process uncontaminated by mortality, and mortality as a condition becomes identified with and blamed upon women. Luce Irigaray identifies this linked devaluation and displacement as the central repression of Western thought: “Every utterance, every statement, will thus be developed and affirmed by covering over the fact that being’s unseverable relation to mother-matter has been buried.”  The child’s relation to the mother is unseverable but subject to a double concealment—buried, and the fact of burial itself covered over. As (mere) matter, the given out of which bodies arise, women are positioned as a degenerate origin. In a theological version of this idea, John Donne’s final sermon represents birth as already implying death: “without [God] might Eve say, my body had been but the house of death. . . . We have a windingsheet in our mother’s womb, which grows with us from our conception, and we come into the world, wound up in that windingsheet, for we come to seek a grave.” Women thus become associated with the pollution of becoming, understood as the falling away from being. The true origin of being, or life, resides in the masculine domain of immortal ideas, or the Logos, with the philosopher— as Diotima tells us, generated as she is by the character of Socrates and the authorship of Plato. Socrates is not only figuratively pregnant in the Symposium but is a midwife as well, in the Theaetetus, by allowing men’s thoughts to come to fruition through gentle encouragement. Due to his experience in reproducing ideas, he is now able to help others transform themselves into philosophers, to pass on that sort of immortality. He is the “pregnant, birth-giving male . . . [who] stands as the emblematic figure of true philosophy.” But this ability is premised on his separation from the “great nonsense of mortality”—his detachment from his own bodily desires and needs, and (even more intensely) his hostility to the body. In Nietzsche’s diagnosis of Plato as a life-denying philosopher, he claims that the “ascetic treats life as a wrong road on which one must finally walk back to the point where it begins,” an attitude crystallized in Socrates’s dying words: “O Crito, I owe Asclepius a rooster.” This ridiculous and terrible “last word” means for those who have ears: “O Crito, life is a disease” . . . Socrates suffered life! And then he still revenged himself—with this veiled, gruesome, pious, and blasphemous saying. . . . Alas, my friends, we must overcome even the Greeks! The philosopher is supposed to live out the ideal of detached, rational intellectualism, to which the demands of the body and of the corporeal world Plato, Maternity, and Power

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more generally are at best distractions and at worst sources of evil. As Kelly Oliver notes, virility becomes the defining quality of the autonomous (male) person in Western thought: “Virile subjectivity is the notion of a subject that is contained and in control of itself and its environment.” That is, autonomous personhood maintains itself through a separation from and mastery over what is figured as feminine—the body, emotions, nature, connections to other people. The mother is defined by her ability to nurture another physical being, a connection that contaminates the intellectual transcendence of philosophy. The Symposium establishes the true origin of life as intellectual rather than physical, which positions corporeal maternity as producing merely a degenerate copy of a perfect, eternal state. In Rebecca Kukla’s words, “The maternal body has long been seen as posing a troubling counterpoint to the mythical well-bounded, fully unified, seamless masculine body.” Women come to symbolize dependence and passivity, rather than autonomous agency— an exact reversal of infants’ typical experience of their mothers. The appropriation of reproductive power is mirrored and made possible by the projection of fragility upon corporeal mothers. The dominant construction of reproduction wards off the threat of becoming— of vulnerability, of embodiment—by projecting it onto or concentrating it within the figure of the mother. Thus, we children of the Symposium remain beholden to this dualistic idea that one may be pregnant either in body or in mind, but not both. This is perhaps why walking into my Introduction to Philosophy classroom every day, during my third trimester, my belly preceding the rest of me, felt like an act of rebellion. On my course evaluations, however, I received the following comment: “It didn’t help that she was pregnant. Hormonal.” We should notice that “hormonal” has become a term of contemptuous derision, as if men and nonpregnant women did not “relate to or contain a hormone or hormones.” My ability to teach well, or to be a figure of authority, was apparently compromised by chemicals floating in my bloodstream, made visible by that anomalous belly. The student who wrote this comment perhaps knew Greek, for “hormone” is derived from a word that means “to set in motion, to impel.” But the philosopher is the one who can transcend this chain of causation, to put becoming to rest, to be self-determining. This insistent exclusion of pregnant embodiment from intellectual legitimacy derives from an ancient conception of what embodiment signifies—its vulnerability and heteronomy.

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The Fragile Mother The construction of pregnancy as a fragile state speaks to the continuing contradictions around what it means to be a woman. The perceived fragility of a pregnant body is an intensification of the general association between femininity and weakness, passivity, and dependence. As Iris Marion Young notes, traditionally “health is associated with stability, equilibrium, a steady state”— a condition that only a select group of adult men even apparently attain. Women’s bodies, and the experience of pregnancy in particular, seem then to lend themselves to a disease model, rather than the autonomous overcoming of an embodied state that defines the philosopher. How well a woman conforms to this conception of an inherently vulnerable feminine body determines to what extent she will be recognized as a “Fetish Mother” (in Kukla’s terms), defined against the delinquent “Unruly Mother.” Both of these images of motherhood act as “idealized, imaginary bodies through which we read, interpret, negotiate, and judge mothers’ actual bodies (whether these are our own bodies or not).” As many feminist and critical race theorists have argued, the deployment of these judgments is a function not only of a woman’s individual choices and behavior, but also on how others respond to her race, class, sexual orientation, and level of ability/disability. Given the centrality of reproduction to the traditional identity of women, it follows that the cultural shaping of pregnancy will magnify the assumed differences between men and women, some of which become blurred in other circumstances. A woman who is not obviously pregnant is generally free to open doors for herself, to physically exert herself, to help others. But pregnancy functions as a kind of a time warp for gender relations, in which the privileges and restrictions of highly conservative notions of femininity are laid bare, as Mary Wollstonecraft finds in the phrase “amiable weakness”: Fragile in every sense of the word, they are obliged to look up to man for every comfort. In the most trifling dangers they cling to their support, with parasitical tenacity, piteously demanding succor; and their natural protector extends his arm, or lifts up his voice, to guard the lovely trembler. Although this picture perhaps no longer describes our typical understanding of what it means be a woman (as it did for Wollstonecraft, herself thinking mainly of women of a particular race and class), the “condition” of pregnancy—in which the discourses of mythology and medicine mutually reinforce the perception of intense vulnerability—returns women to a Plato, Maternity, and Power

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state in which docility above all is emphasized. And this docility functions to legitimate the control of reproduction within the constraints of heterosexual, patriarchal marriage, watched over more specifically by a process of medical normalization. In this sense, the cultivation of a sense of fragility functions as a form of social control through the constant threat of bodily harm to mother and/or fetus: the pregnant woman is encouraged to impose a wide range of restrictions on her own behavior, but is also taught that none of these measures may be sufficient to sustain the pregnancy or guarantee the physical and cognitive health of her child. Our dominant cultural construals of pregnant embodiment create a habitus of vigilance, in Bourdieu’s sense of the word: dispositions, behaviors, and ways of perceiving the world are shaped by an ongoing fear of sudden, unprovoked, and catastrophic loss or injury caused by unpredictable natural forces. But this emphasis on biological factors covers over how anxiety is cultivated by our contemporary interpretation of reproduction, and how this interpretive framework shapes our perceptions and attitudes. The vulnerability associated with pregnancy refers not only or not even primarily to the woman’s own vulnerability but to that of the embryo or the fetus. The pregnant body is framed as the fragile container for a being who can be damaged or destroyed by any number of threats. What to Expect When You’re Expecting, a ubiquitous “pregnancy bible” (according to its own description), lists the following entries under the rhetorically nuanced section title “What You May Be Concerned About” throughout pregnancy: being a single mother, obesity, having a baby after thirty-five, incompetent cervix, living at a high altitude, alcohol, smoking and secondary smoke, caffeine, sugar substitutes, the family cat, sports, hot tubs and saunas, microwave exposure, electric blankets and heating pads, cell phones, X-rays, household hazards (including subsections on household cleaning products, lead, tap water, insecticides, paint fumes, and indoor pollution), outdoor pollution, and occupational hazards (including sitting too long, standing too long, exposure to chemicals, physical exertion, stress, contact with young children, and exposure to noise). In responding to— or in my case, producing— all of these potential anxieties, the authors provide an array of rules to be followed, and disturbing suggestions of what might happen if these rules are violated. But they also construct a conception of pregnancy that is remarkably Platonic in tone, including a reference to the “hormone-induced fog of pregnancy.” The book in fact begins with an introduction that explains the “birth” of the book with one of the authors’ litany of worries during her own first pregnancy, worries that the book is intended to address. The authors’ claim that “pregnant women have always 36

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worried” forecloses critical reflection on the culturally contingent normalization of the worried mother. The medicalization and corresponding social treatment of pregnancy complicates the ability of the pregnant woman to experience her body as a lived body, a body suff used with creative power, will, and agency. Instead, there is a dreary listing of symptoms and cata loging of risks. The pressure of being a “good mother” begins even prior to pregnancy, as all women who might become pregnant are advised to take folic acid supplements, have a genetic screening, and maintain ideal weight, but this attitude blossoms into global paranoia during the first trimester of pregnancy. The good mother is one who is attuned to all of these risks and restricts her activity accordingly. As Oliver argues, all of this communicates both subtly and overwhelmingly the basic degeneracy of women: “There is an underlying prejudice that when women are in charge, of themselves or anyone else, that things will go wrong because women are either incompetent or malicious.” Even though feminine norms continue to be defined around the idea that maternity is the natural culmination of a woman’s life, we also hear the repeated worry that women are unable to be good mothers without intense professional supervision and self-alienating vigilance. The attention paid to the pregnant body is of course also positive attention; many women are emotionally and socially compensated for the restrictions on acceptable behavior by being celebrated for fulfilling their scripted role as mothers, although race and class (among other factors) powerfully restrict who qualifies for this glorification. In Young’s terms, the subjective experience of pregnant embodiment can mark an important release from the dominant interpretation of the female body as highly sexualized: “The culture’s separation of pregnancy and sexuality can liberate her from the sexually objectifying gaze that alienates and instrumentalizes her when in her nonpregnant state. . . . The look focusing on her belly is not one of desire, but of recognition.” The desexualized framing of pregnancy, however, is tied to the problematic and traditional conceptions of femininity: one can only escape the alienation of sexual objectification through an affirmation of the telos of womanhood. But even that narrow valorization rests on the idea of the woman as delicate and self-sacrificial. Young’s analysis of “feminine bodily comportment” reveals an even more intense set of ambivalences around the maternal body—an exaggeration of the vulnerability and passivity of the feminine lived body described in “Throwing Like a Girl.” In that text, Young reminds us that “any lived body exists as a material thing as well as a transcending subject. For feminine bodily existence, however, the body is often lived as a thing that is other than it, a thing like other things in the world.” The experience of Plato, Maternity, and Power

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ambiguous transcendence does not entail a temporal split in which I am sometimes a subject enacting my will in the world and sometimes an object vulnerable to external forces. Rather, my sense of subjectivity is constantly “overlaid” with immanence; transcendence is restricted, subverted, corrupted. As with the Platonic projection of degenerate immortality upon physical reproduction (associated with women), it is because women are socialized to live their embodied lives in only ambiguously transcendent ways that others can ignore (as much as possible) the significance of their bodies, and can deny the claim of mortality and passivity that the objectified body—“a thing that exists as looked at and acted upon”—makes upon them. Dominant constructions of pregnancy radicalize that ambiguous and ambivalent bodily comportment and self-understanding, by framing the pregnant woman as deeply responsible for the being she carries, and deeply vulnerable to forces she cannot control. Pregnancy thus becomes bound up with preoccupations of mortality. Simone de Beauvoir explains the mythical association between women and death as the “horror of [man’s] own carnal contingence, which he projects upon [woman].” As in Plato, women are sharply reminded that they can give birth to merely mortal creatures. The self-relation generated by dominant discourses of pregnancy remains one of anxiety and guilt, despite the highly positive value put on maternity. And this anxiety does not originate solely with a more precise medical understanding of fetal development, but from a still-powerful mythic conception of gender. During my first pregnancy, I was diagnosed with placenta previa, which meant that a vaginal delivery would probably result in massive hemorrhaging. Transferred from the principal care of a midwife to the obstetrician in the same practice, I learned that he had told another woman with the same condition that the cemeteries were filled with women who died in childbirth before Caesarian sections were routinely done in cases of placenta previa. I thought of Wollstonecraft, who did die in childbirth (probably of septicemia), and who wrestled with the distinction between what was unchangeably part of nature and what was socially constructed and subject to human will. The medicalization of pregnancy attempts to respond to the real possibility of harm to mother or fetus/child, but it also perpetuates the cultural association between maternity and mortality. What is construed as most natural to women is also construed as pathological, a departure from the supposed immutability of the male body— and even more intensely, the (male) mind. Anxiety surrounding pregnancy is thus normalized as the proper attribute of a good mother— or a good woman, to the extent that motherhood is presented as the culmination of a woman’s life.

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The Child’s Fragility It is not only during but also after pregnancy that good mothers are disciplined to be worried mothers. Anxiety about the health and well-being of one’s child seems to function as the mark of the ideal mother: one whose entire attention is devoted to the child, particularly in the sense of anticipating and warding off dangers as the child moves from infancy to adulthood. Given the profound suspicion with which becoming has been framed in Western thought, this is unsurprising. But such vigilance sets up a particular understanding of the world, and of one’s position within it, that seems unhealthy for both mother and child. The glorification of maternity, and with it femininity, has historically been bound up with the idea that in the mother one finds refuge from the competitiveness, impersonality, and ruthlessness of the public world. The mother thus culturally functions as an “all-powerful, all-enveloping womb, as a place of utter peace.” In psychoanalytic terms, this lack of contestation and individuation is also a form of death. Luce Irigaray describes the “paralyzing” quality of this protectiveness: “With your milk, Mother, I swallowed ice. . . . You take care of me, you keep watch over me. You want me always in your sight in order to protect me. You fear that something will happen to me. Do you fear that something will happen?” In this passage, Irigaray emphasizes how easily caregiving becomes fear of becoming— of anything at all happening. This attitude seems to subvert the very aim of protecting life, in its very mutability. The construction of the maternal as a sphere of total peace (and thus death) mirrors the construction of the Platonic intellectual life as a place of eternity and changelessness. More concretely, and as others have exhaustively documented, the expected vigilance on the part of mothers also deprives the mother of confidence in her ability to judge, interpret, and challenge the advice of experts. Discussing Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care, Sharon Hays notes that “By its very form . . . this detailed, step-by-step instruction manual implicitly denied the natural, commonsense, trust-yourself approach that Spock claimed.” Like the What to Expect volumes, Spock repeatedly cautions mothers to consult their pediatricians. The mother is at once celebrated as the most important caregiver for the fetus/child and infantilized as merely the conduit for others’ wisdom. As Aristotle claims in the Politics, women are incapable of reasonable judgment, but instead must follow the instructions of external authorities, whose qualification for that role tends to come not from their experience as mothers but from recognition by a community of professionals.

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Focusing on the various ways in which individual mothers are responsible for protecting their children tends to ignore the wider context in which such activity takes place: “missing from this discourse [on mothering] are many other factors and social forces that affect children (for example, poverty, media, traumatic events, peers, discrimination, teachers, and schools) but that are too complex for mothers to control or modify.” Mothers are thus positioned as agents, but this is a form of agency bound up with anxiety and vigilance—a vigilance defined by threats that are at once naturalized (part of a social and physical world not under the control of individual women) and individualized (each woman needs to be worried about these threats). That is, this construction of the good mother refuses to recognize how mothering is both materially and discursively located in a particular culture, which shapes how mothers and children act and appear. As with the fears cultivated for pregnant women, fears about the well-being of children both reveal and reinscribe dominant forms of normalization. The sources of these threats—bullies, sexual predators, environmental toxins, and the like— masquerade as either natural or inevitable elements of the world children inhabit. But this forecloses any critical attention both to the contingent and social causes for those dangers, and to the psychological implications of the fact that children—and particularly female children—are primed to experience constant and diff use anxiety about their own safety. However, the anxieties that attend maternity may be directed at elements of that social conditioning. For feminist parents, the dangers children face include both the ideological and material threats of patriarchy: the strong possibility that its messages about domination and subordination, compulsory heterosexuality, and selfhood will be internalized, and that (internalized or not) our children’s lives will be made to conform to those norms. As I watch my five-year-old daughter go off to kindergarten, I feel keenly aware of what it means for her life that she is growing up female in a world that constructs women as vulnerable beings, normalizes and indeed eroticizes various forms of violence and objectification, and typically recognizes its own justice and nobility through myriad inadequate compensations for that inferior status—the extreme care taken of pregnant women being a prominent example. My ongoing struggle is how to prepare her for that world, whose power is real despite its contingency, without feeding such constructions of fragile femininity. In distinguishing the patriarchal institution of motherhood from the more empowering experience of mothering, Adrienne Rich claims, “The most notable fact that culture imprints on women is the sense of our limits. The most important thing one woman can do for another is to illuminate and expand her sense of actual possibilities.” I have tended to read the word 40

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“possibilities” with primary emphasis—that is, in resistance to the sense of our limits. But I am starting to read the importance of the whole phrase “actual possibilities.” It does no good to pretend there are no real dangers, no punishments for transgressing norms, no power to the ideals and images we internalize and perpetuate. How do I teach my daughter to live in a world that is not always safe (and not safe in particular ways for women), without assimilating her into feminine norms of insecurity? Indeed, one of my primary concerns for my daughter is that she will learn too well the social script that tells her that girls are in need of protection. About a year ago, my daughter came home reporting that all the girls in her preschool like pink. Unsurprisingly, she reports that pink is her favorite color, too. Given the associations between pink and the dominant narratives of femininity, I am unsure of how best to protect her from the onset of these whispering but compelling forces that will convince her of her own weakness, delicacy, incompetence, and need to gain others’ approval. I watch her largely uninhibited and unselfconscious movement through the world. At this age, is empowerment letting her choose to wear pink or is it something else? I wonder about how to translate the Marxist analysis of the creation of desire into a five-year-old child’s terms. I think about my own experience with ambiguous transcendence, or the ways in which I have absorbed norms I would like to leave behind, including the image of the Good Mother, which (in Sara Ruddick’s words) “casts a long shadow on many actual mothers’ lives.” The Good-Enough Mother Described in distinct but overlapping ways by Ruddick, D. W. Winnicott, and Julia Kristeva, the figure of the “good-enough mother” might effectively be deployed in resistance to the norm of the good mother, or the Fetish Mother. Winnicott uses this term to refer to a parent who early on in an infant’s life devotes herself to fulfilling the child’s needs, fosters the illusion of the child’s omnipotence, and so protects the child from experiencing too much disillusionment and frustration at once. In responding to the child’s needs, the parent establishes “the foundation of the capacity . . . to feel real.” This basically safe environment is the context in which a child can mature inside a sheltered form of reality. But the good-enough mother must also allow some measure of disappointment and frustration, so that the child learns gradually to navigate through a world that does not immediately and perfectly satisfy her needs. Julia Kristeva extends this idea of the good-enough mother, contrasting it more sharply with the good mother who sacrifices her own will for the Plato, Maternity, and Power

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needs and desires of her children. Kristeva’s “good-enough mother” is the mother who has independent interests and projects: “maybe the goodenough mother is the mother who has something else to love besides her child; it could be her work, her husband, her lovers, etc. If for a mother the child is the meaning of her life, it’s too heavy. She has to have another meaning in her life.”  This “something else” creates a form of situated transcendence, in which the mature self is neither the detached, invulnerable Socrates of the Phaedo nor merely the alienated realization of preexisting norms. This is a mother who resists the normalized narrative of a child who achieves maturity only through an anxiety-generating separation from the maternal, who in this narrative thus functions as a deeply problematic and ambivalent figure, embodying both the abject and the sublime. An alternative conception of maturity would be an account of a self immersed in history but able to resist, in small and large ways, its influence. That is, as mothers, as parents, we need to participate in the work of becoming, rather than positioning ourselves as anxious spectators of it. Irigaray imagines a conversation between mothers and daughters as “breach of silence where we constantly reenvelop ourselves in order to be reborn. Where we come to relearn ourselves and each other, in order to become women, and mothers, again and again.” Throughout Irigaray’s work, this notion of “becoming women” is fundamentally antiteleological, in the sense that the goal is not to realize a fixed essence but to engage in the ongoing process of creating ourselves as women. This activity can be usefully understood as a version of what Winnicott calls play, a process that resolves the disjunction between the objective world and the subjective perception of that world. Imaginative play is an extension of an inner world into experience, and it allows young children to deal with reality “in small doses.” Play is essentially a form of magic, in all its unpredictability and “precariousness,” in which the child or the adult experiences temporarily omnipotent control over a part of the world that might otherwise be perceived as indifferent or hostile. Eventually and ideally play leads to treating both inner and outer worlds as real— able to “use our imagination to make the world more exciting and . . . use the things of the real world to be imaginative about.” The political correlate of this emphasis on play would be the ability to navigate the world as it is and to keep our eye on its contingency, its injustices, its delusions, and its mutability. For Winnicott, playfulness is opposed to rigidity and limitation— an unwillingness to suspend the rules of either external reality or internal reality; the unwillingness or inability to play is a sign of severe psychological dysfunction. Jonathan Lear, a philosopher and psychoanalyst who 42

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much admires Winnicott, critiques Aristotle’s notion of the phronimos, the virtuous person who achieves rational and moral equilibrium in the face of external stimuli. He instead proposes the goal of happiness, not in the utilitarian sense but in the older and antiteleological meaning of happenstance, “the experience of chance things working out well rather than badly.”  The point is not to achieve immutability, but the ability to handle chance in an unstable and unpredictable world. In Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking, she describes humility as a maternal virtue—respecting “the limits of her will and the independent uncontrollable, and increasingly separate existences she seeks to preserve.” Humility acknowledges the fluctuating needs of the child in a situation that is also in flux, but it is by no means a form of fatalism or passivity. Instead, it is an element of the attentiveness required for real responsiveness to a growing person. As Ruddick notes, the primary demands of maternal thinking— preservation, nurturance, and training— can come into conflict. I have been focusing on the potential conflict between recognizing the protecting the physical and psychical vulnerability of a child (preservation) and encouraging that child’s growth as an independent individual (nurturance). In any given situation, the mother must make a judgment about how to weigh those competing demands. Attentiveness is the attitude that balances between them, and this requires observing and understanding the par ticu lar child in his or her particular situation. Citing Simone Weil, Ruddick describes “fantasy” as the “enemy” of attentive love—where fantasy is the imposition of one’s own interests and anxieties upon another: “Fantasy creates children to meet a mother’s desires; creates an abstract plan for their lives that will fulfill a family’s or nation’s aims; creates a mind for the child that embraces a mother’s world and a will that satisfies her desire.” Ruddick emphasizes that attentiveness is like empathy, in the sense that it requires one person to “suffer or celebrate with another as if in the other’s experience you know and find yourself.” But empathy too often connotes the collapse of the other person’s feeling into one’s own, and attentiveness at least in part is attentiveness to the separateness and independence of the other. In this sense, Ruddick gives us a moral version of the psychoanalytic problem of transference, in which the self’s experience is projected upon everything around him or her, and no revision of that narrative is tolerated. The trouble with neurotic fantasy is precisely this lack of flexibility, and its imposition of a fixed structure upon a changing reality. By its privileging of being over becoming, the Platonic understanding of reproduction is itself a fantasy— a persistent interpretation of reality that masks its status as an interpretation and resists revisions—that predisposes us to further Plato, Maternity, and Power

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transferential fantasies, through the imposition of a teleological narrative upon children (and adults) bound up in becoming. These ways of relating to our children and ourselves need to be challenged on both political and moral grounds. Transference is a form of compulsive repetition—a “blinding” form of fantasy—that refuses becoming, but only at great cost to the self. Our contemporary conception of pregnancy and childhood is part of that cost, insofar as we respond to the ambiguities of growth with fear. Attentiveness differs from the anxiety cultivated by this fantasy of the fragile child by protecting his or her capacity for growth in undetermined directions. The very indeterminacy of how children grow up and become the people they will be is neither simply a strength nor a weakness, as we normally conceive of those ideas. It is openness to change, which involves both vulnerability and possibility, in a way that resists positioning becoming as a degenerate form of being. Together with humility, attentiveness produces a general ethos of “resilient cheerfulness,” which means that part of the work of mothering is the capacity to “welcome change,” where part of that change is unpredictable and uncontrollable. As I read Ruddick, Winnicott, and Kristeva, my task as a good-enough mother is then to respond to my daughter’s needs, to protect her from the harshest elements of the world, sufficiently to allow her to “feel real,” an apt description of what sexist oppression denies; but then, gradually, to trust that she is strong enough to play in and with the world. Part of this process is modeling that activity myself. Andrea O’Reilly reminds us that “only when mothering becomes a site, role, and identity of power for women is feminist childrearing made possible.” That is, mothers need to learn to play, in this politically important way, in order to cultivate the same playfulness in their children. Feminist parenting gives rise to a dense knot of issues, where one’s positions about free will and determination and our beholdenness to the past become urgent. As the power of social forces and familial habits reveal themselves, where do we stake out room for our children to act as agents? My goal as a parent is to try to encourage in my children the ability to recognize and question the forces at work in their world, and on them—to avoid the worship of the real without discounting the power of the contingent. If what is uncanny about maternity is the mother’s association with “decay and growth,” then it is entirely understandable that the process of becoming, to which infants and children are subject, is perceived as fraught with innumerable dangers. It is only when becoming seems to stabilize into being, at adulthood, that good mothers can relax their vigilance. But if we understood becoming differently—not as a fall away from an arkhe or telos, but as open-ended transformation, in between agency and passivity, 44

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as the powerful and open-ended growth of a lived body—mothering might be afflicted with altogether less anxiety. This emphasis on nonteleological or anarchic play suggests that the resistance to maternal anxiety opens up into a wide horizon of philosophical issues regarding how we understand the self in its relation to time and materiality. The Platonic devaluation of becoming continues to shape our cultural narratives around pregnancy and parenting. It seems that a more Nietzschean privileging of play would lead to a radically different conception of what women are, what children are, and indeed what men are. Patrice DiQuinzio suggests that maternal subjectivity in its becoming might serve as a model for human subjects more generally; this position rejects the idea that pregnancy and childbirth are strange, frightening, almost inexplicable departures from the rational, autonomous, and separately embodied existence of human subjects. Instead it represents pregnancy as a crucially important instance of the embodied processes of subject constitution in which all subjects continually participate. That is, in order to tell different narratives about pregnancy and childhood, we have to interrogate the norm of autonomy against which those figures are projected. None of this means that anxiety will be altogether absent in the experience of pregnancy or in the work of parenting. There are unavoidable ways in which external reality, in Winnicott’s terms, imposes itself on pregnant women and young children, and we need to do our best to address those realities. But the overdetermination of maternal anxiety needs to be critically examined. First, we need to recognize how the history of devaluing women’s lives and restricting their behavior is repeated in contemporary medicalized conceptions of pregnancy. We also need to challenge the gendered dichotomy that equates vulnerability with fragility and autonomy with impenetrability, and how these norms of femininity are differentially deployed. And lastly, we need to value the open-ended activity of becoming, amidst uncertainty about both external and internal influences. This would be an acceptance of situated transcendence. The longstanding commitments about the distance between the philosopher and the mother are the same commitments that have provided the foundation for sharp dualities between agency and passivity, autonomy and heteronomy. The derivative anxieties about the vulnerability of children, and particularly female children, are entrenched in the privileging of being over becoming. And yet that vulnerability needs to be recognized as real, the product of a world that not only theoretically but also materially invests Plato, Maternity, and Power

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women (among others) with ambiguous transcendence. We must learn the difference between ambiguous transcendence and the less politically insidious ambiguity of the playful, lived body, which is vulnerable in multiple ways—to the contingencies of history and culture, to violence—but also, at the same time, able to resist and respond to those influences. Kukla speaks of the need for women to maintain “well-bounded” selves, to refuse the idea that autonomy requires radical independence and indifference to those around them. Th is description fits with my own sense that we need to be able to hold becoming and agency together in our conception of the self. This alternative conception would take into account the ways in which we are vulnerable to “external” forces and deeply shaped by them, without foreclosing the possibility of rewriting the effects of those forces. What would it take to reimagine pregnancy and motherhood, then, is a reconception of the self—in its freedom and determination, in its relation to others, in its relation to materiality and time. We would have to start to conceive of ourselves less in terms of sovereignty, and more in terms of the “subject-in-process.” And in that endeavor we must wish that the ideas to which Plato gave birth were somewhat less immortal.

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2

Of Courage Born Reflections on Childbirth and Manly Courage K AY L E Y V E R N A L L I S Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than selfdefense, and as courageous as either one. —Gloria Steinem Childbirth is no more a miracle than eating food and a turd coming out of your ass. —Bill Hicks

These two epigraphs express quite different attitudes toward childbirth. Steinem associates childbirth with heroic battle and manly courage while for Hicks childbirth is a merely animal process in which neither volition nor agency is present. Hicks’s joke is hostile, but is there something to it? Is childbirth not something that happens to women? And if so, how can what happens to a woman in childbirth be fairly compared to what a warrior does when, given the chance to run away from battle, he chooses to charge ahead to save his fellow soldiers? On the other hand, have women not faced risks of injury and death in childbirth in order to save the lives of their children and to contribute to the preservation of their larger communities? This chapter explores manly courage and childbirth. I will first characterize manly courage and say a little about why it matters now. Then I shall touch on two sexist conceptual frameworks within the Western tradition that have prevented us from seriously considering reproduction and childbirth in particular, as an arena for manly courage. The first of these has its roots in Christianity’s interpretation of pain in childbirth as a punishment for sexual sin, and the second concerns a gendered public/private understanding of courage traceable, in part, to Aristotle’s claim that only men can possess true courage in the noble activity exhibited in defending the city-state in battle. Finally, I will argue that childbirth is an arena for the display of courage in spite of the fact that some of the most important 47

features of childbirth often lack the traditional volitional/agential attributes of manly courage. In an era of publicized terrorism and war, the United States has become a place especially attuned to manly courage. Think of the brave, almost exclusively male, firefighters in New York who risked death to save those trapped in the World Trade Center, as well as the men on Flight 93 who attempted to wrest the plane from the Al Qaeda terrorists. These examples highlight important aspects of what is one of our most dominant characterizations of courage: the willingness to face serious risks or difficulties in order to achieve a larger social good; the willingness to die and/or face serious risks of pain, physical harm, or death; and physical engagement, which also requires a state of mental resolution that itself conjures up images of successful bodily self-control and self-command—that is, having a cool head under fire. I will refer to this cluster of features as physical, pro-social (PPS) courage. Although these features seem, prima facie, gender-neutral, they are usually identified with what we call manly courage, and the paradigmatic expression of this virtue occurs in battle. There are, of course, other forms of courage, such as political, moral, psychological, and intellectual courage, and as we would expect, these forms often exhibit overlapping features. For instance, the person who speaks out against injustice is bodily engaged—she must have courage not just to say what she intends to say but to relax the tightness in her throat. Her speaking may even put her at some risk of physical assault. Yet PPS or manly courage is centrally concerned with a kind of bodily agency and mastery traditionally associated with masculinity. It involves a cluster of capacities and skills different from those other forms of courage. For instance, a firefighter may risk his life to save a child, yet be terrified to speak up on behalf of a colleague who has been treated unjustly in the firehouse. Does my notion of PPS courage mesh with our present culture’s concept of courage? Psychologists Lindsay Rankin and Alice H. Eagley recently attempted to elicit ordinary Americans’ concept of heroism. Three core conditions were benefiting others, acting selflessly, and confronting risks. When the notion of courage is teased apart from heroism, the condition of confronting risks rises in importance. When participants were asked to identify public heroes, those most often mentioned were activists (particularly Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi), followed by political leaders (particularly Abraham Lincoln). While King, Gandhi, and Lincoln do not meet the robust form of bodily engagement found in PPS courage, all three men carried on with their projects while aware that their lives were in danger. Indeed, their assassinations verify the risks they took. Next on the list were rescuers and soldiers. Caretakers also appeared, although 48

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they were mentioned only a third as often as activists and half as often as soldiers. Notably, Mother Teresa was classified not as an activist but as a caregiver by the study participants. The association of manliness not just with physical strength, potency, and prowess but also with authority in the public sphere helps explain both the lower representation of women in visible activist roles, and the misclassification of those who could, like Mother Teresa, reasonably fit those roles. Let us turn to the rescuers and soldiers that ordinary Americans faithfully place high on their list of heroes. I cannot speak for all feminists, but I am deeply proud of the 9/11 Twin Towers rescuers (primarily men), as well as those valiant male passengers on Flight 93 who attempted to thwart the Al Qaeda terrorists. I was, however, disappointed that no women seemed to have participated actively in the group effort to avert the path of Flight 93. And that is not only because what I am calling PPS courage captures a core conceptualization of courage in our day, but also because I think PPS courage is obviously valuable to society. Are women less likely to display manly (PPS) courage then men? There is a gender imbalance in the display of this virtue where we normally look for it in the context of war, fighting fires, saving lives, etc. The Carnegie Hero Fund Commission has been awarding medals to individuals in Canada and the United States for over a hundred years. The criteria are stringent: a medalist must be “a civilian who voluntarily risks his or her own life, knowingly, to an extraordinary degree while saving or attempting to save the life of another person” In addition, The act of rescue must be one in which no full measure of responsibility exists between the rescuer and the rescued. Persons not eligible for awards are: Those whose duties in following their regular vocations require them to perform such acts, unless the rescues are clearly beyond the line of duty, and members of the immediate family, except in cases of outstanding heroism where the rescuer loses his or her life or is severely injured. Also excluded from the award are young children and members of the armed ser vices. Eagley reports that as of spring 2003, only 8.9 percent of the 8,706 medalists were women. The awards typically go to individuals who have engaged in immediate action to save people from fires, attacks, drowning, and so on. Roughly 20 percent of the awards are posthumous, and women make up a much higher percentage of those recognized posthumously. It is not surprising that women are far less likely to engage in the kinds of lifesaving activities recognized by the Carnegie Commission. Men are on average much stronger than women, particularly in terms of upper-body Of Courage Born

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strength. Differences in upper-body strength, training, and the trainingbased confidence largely explain the gender discrepancy in Carnegie awards. Women are significantly underrepresented in the kinds of occupations, such as combat positions in the military, which would develop their competence. If the Carnegie Commission did not exclude the kinds of courageous acts that are part of one’s job description (firefighter, soldier, police officer), the percentage of women receiving awards would be far smaller than it is now. It is genuinely difficult for women to develop the relevant skills of PPS courage within a tradition that praises men for their active agency and women for their emotional receptivity. One solution is to encourage girls to participate in sports and to pursue careers in mountain rescue, ski patrol, the military, law enforcement, etc. Indeed, we have made significant progress in the last twenty-five years through such efforts as the enforcement of Title IX and enhanced recruitment of women in both law enforcement and the military. We can also increase the attributions of courage to women if we place greater weight on activities that emphasize risk-taking and serving others, yet do not require the level of bodily engagement required for PPS courage or the extreme conditions faced by soldiers or Carnegie rescuers. Eagley, for instance, observes that women were more likely than men to hide Jews during World War II, to be kidney donors, and to serve in organizations such the Peace Corps. These activities exhibit the pro-social aims of benefiting others combined with taking personal risks. It is important to recognize these actions as courageous even if the risks are not as great as those found in more prototypical cases such as battle. As a society we tend to overlook these risk-taking activities, Eagley says, in part because they are not as publically visible as traditional displays of manly courage. I strongly support the two feminist strategies just outlined to develop women’s physical and cognitive capacities so that a woman is just as likely as a man to display traditional “manly” PPS courage in lifesaving or war, and to increase public recognition of non-PPS forms of courage in which women predominate. I take a third route in this chapter, in which I argue that women’s reproductive lives already provide a rich arena for the expression of PPS courage. I try to show that women already display the kind of manly courage exhibited in war. Some feminists, of course, would regard that demonstration as a failure even if it succeeds. They may say that the last thing feminists should do is ape masculine virtues— and what could be worse than celebrate the virtue most celebrated in war! What we need is imagination and a transformation of human virtues to reflect women’s experience. I take that concern to heart. But a modest step to accommodate

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that concern involves showing that our favored paradigmatic examples of PPS courage in war are limited, that we can apply the concept more flexibly than we traditionally think, and we can do so in ways that connect more intricately to women’s experience in childbirth. In any case, I need to start in this stepwise fashion. But before I can begin this task, it is important to acknowledge the deeply sexist conceptions of women’s agency and sexuality that are part of our historical past in the West, which influence the gender-inflected conception of the virtues we have today. Childbirth lies at a vortex of a culture’s practices, projections, and judgments. I am astounded by the complex challenges women throughout history have faced in pregnancy, childbirth, abortion, and mothering, and how scant the social recognition is for the myriad ways in which they have courageously faced those challenges: risk of death in pregnancy, risk of death in both legal and illegal abortions, legal and cultural restrictions on reproductive choice, the grief of miscarriage or still birth, severe pain in childbirth and disability, starvation of one’s beloved infant, and so on. In much of the world at present, and certainly in the not too distant past, even in industrialized countries, women have faced great risks during pregnancy and childbirth. Pregnancy and childbirth have often been at least as perilous to women as battle has been to men—the prime arena for manly courage. The following discussion will, I hope, illuminate Gloria Steinem’s powerful epigram, as well as the work of Adrienne Rich and other feminist writers who seek to reclaim women’s experience of childbirth and mothering. I will now turn to two of the earliest and most influential traditions (Christianity and Greek philosophy) that have fundamentally conditioned, and partially blinded us to the presence of courage in the practice of childbirth. Christianity, particularly Genesis 3:16, presents a significant impediment to recognizing pregnancy and childbirth as experiences that can occasion PPS courage. Genesis 3:16 expresses God’s explicit command that women should “bear children in sorrow.” Saint Augustine argues that suffering in childbirth is a punishment for Eve’s sexual sin. Indeed, this antipathy was embodied in various ways throughout Western history, including the practice in some towns during the Renaissance of refusing to bury on consecrated ground women who died in childbirth because they were “contaminated by the bodily fluids of lustful generation.” If suffering in childbirth is God’s punishment for sexual lust, then childbirth cannot be courageous: in general, one cannot heroically triumph over conditions one truly deserves. In God’s command that women suffer in childbirth, punishment is not limited to physical pain: God intends that punishment be, in part, the imposition of a state of mind; namely,

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shame— an emotional experience of painful immersion in the body and its sinful fluids. And if the punishment is essentially the mental/bodily condition of shame, at best women can be said to bear their rightful punishment by resolutely accepting their disgraceful fall from mind to body; but we can hardly see them as courageous in doing so. We do not speak of shameful courage or courageous shame. Shame involves a fundamental leveling down of agency to something like infantile fear or even brute animal cowering. Indeed, this is the sort of thing heroic command vanquishes. Manly courage involves potency, manifestation of strength, self-regard, and self-command; its absence is what yields the shame of the cowardly. It centrally involves activity and not passivity, ruling and not being ruled. So the passive role assigned to woman in Genesis is congruent with her shame and sinfulness: “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you” (3:16, RSV). Sin and pain in childbirth symbolize a lack of self-rule in women and they justify a husband’s rule over his wife. Traditionally, men’s honor consists in courage in battle (decisive action in the midst of killing and fear of being killed), and women’s honor consists in chastity (which essentially involves an ideal of virginity or at least avoiding the dishonor of pregnancy though rape or unlawful intercourse). Indeed, some third-century thinkers, such as Tertullian, claim that women’s sole virtue lies in chastity. As late as the 1500s, a few daring female intellectuals strove to show that chastity is not the sole virtue of women and that chastity and rationality in women are not incompatible virtues. The prime arena for the expression of women’s honor and courage in Christianity does not lie in the burdens, joys, and risks of giving birth but in the struggle to remain chaste. Adrienne Rich describes the historical contrast between men’s and women’s honor: The old, male idea of honor. A man’s “word” sufficed—to other men—without guarantee. Male honor also having something to do with killing: I could not love thee, Dear, so much/Lov’d I not Honour more. (“To Lucasta, On Going to the Wars”). Male honor as something needing to be avenged: hence, the duel. Women’s honor, something altogether else: virginity, chastity, fidelity to a husband . . .  As Rich observes, women’s honor is something that needs to be protected: hence, chastity belts. A woman’s defense of her honor is her rare act of 52

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“manly”/PPS courage in fighting to the death to avoid being raped. What are much more likely are her shame, lying, and infanticide. The identification of masculine honor with killing and feminine honor with chastity remains alive today. In “Is Courage a Masculine Virtue? Yes, Sort of . . .” Harvey Mansfield grants that a few female soldiers in Iraq possess the virtue of manly courage. However, should the desire to exhibit courage become more widespread, “harm might result from the loss of tenderness, and the loss of esteem for tenderness, in women. Do we really want two tough, aggressive sexes instead of one tough, the other tender?” If women are tough, for what end would men resolve to die in war? An old rationale, mentioned earlier, was men’s need to protect their womenfolk’s virginity, tenderness, and chastity. War often involves the systematic and widespread rape and killing of women. It is ironic that men die protecting their own women’s virginity while showing no compunction about despoiling the enemy’s. Mansfield thinks that if women show themselves competent as warriors, then the call to “be a man” in battle will mean nothing. It will mean that war itself has become feminized, or at least that there are no longer forms of honor that are distinct for men and women. He calls upon modern women to preserve some vestige of chastity: “In the age of sexual liberation, every woman not protected by poverty and extreme old age needs the courage to defend her virtue.” It is true that women’s virtue is not solely identified with chastity. After all, we do celebrate “motherhood and apple pie.” However, as long as women’s honor and courage are centrally attached to the denial and restriction of sexuality, we will fail to honor fully women’s sexual, procreative powers. Steinem’s strident claim, “Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one,” is an attempt to honor women’s procreative powers. Turning the tables on sexists such as Mansfield, Steinem asserts that childbirth is morally superior to the activities that traditionally bring honor to men (conquest and selfdefense in war), and more valuable than what traditionally brings honor to women (preserving chastity through self-defense). She recasts the arena of childbirth as an arena of battle, thereby placing childbirth in the realm not just of agency but also of heroism. Needless to say, this re-framing meets resistance, as is illustrated by the joke about birth and defecation that opens this chapter, as well as the two that follow, the first by Dave Barry, the second by Jeff Foxworthy: The old system of having a baby was much better than the new system. The old system being characterized by the fact that the man didn’t have to watch. Of Courage Born

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[Watching a baby being born] is a little like watching a wet Saint Bernard coming in through the cat door. We can laugh, partly because it is now rare in the U.S. for women to die in childbirth. We also do not live in 1591, when the midwife Agnes Simpson was burned at the stake for having attempted to relieve birth pangs with opium or laudanum. We can be grateful for that. Both jokes contain a backhanded compliment: recognition that childbirth involves a difficult or improbable feat. Yet they also erase the mother’s agency and give pride of place to men’s experience— as if a man’s watching women give birth really is the most salient feature of childbirth. This is a good moment to turn to another tradition, which primarily validates male experience, and it is well illustrated in Aristotle’s account of andreia (translated as “courage” and literally meaning “manliness”). Andreia is paradigmatically displayed by citizen warriors who imperil their lives during battle in defense of the polis. Here I rely primarily on Michelle Brady’s article “The Fearlessness of Courage.” Let us first look at a quote from Aristotle: What then are the fearful things in respect of which Courage is displayed? I suppose those which are the greatest, since there is no more brave in enduring danger than the courageous man. Now the most terrible thing of all is death. . . . But even death, we should hold, does not in all circumstances give an opportunity for Courage: for instance, we do not call a man courageous for facing death by drowning or disease. What form of death then is a test of Courage? Presumably that which is the noblest. Now the noblest form of death is death in battle, for it is encountered in the midst of the most greatest and most noble form of dangers. . . . The courageous man, therefore, in the proper sense of the term, will be he who fearlessly confronts a noble death, or some sudden peril that threatens death; and the perils of war answer this description most fully. . . . Also Courage is shown in dangers where a man can defend himself by valour or die, nobly, but neither is possible in disasters like shipwreck. It seems that in Aristotle’s view, courage is possible only when one confronts a noble death, and only battle provides the occasion for such valor. After all, he says that facing death by drowning or disease is not an opportunity for courage. Even if one dies trying to save others from a shipwreck in a case of “sudden peril that threatens death,” there does not seem to be sufficient valor in that selfless act to afford the name of courage. Yet the passage also says that the courageous man fearlessly “confronts a noble death, 54

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or some sudden peril that threatens death; and the perils of war answer this description most fully.” This suggests a weaker reading that courage is possible in circumstances rather than battle, but that battle provides the prototype or best exemplar for the display of courage. We are also told that fighting effectively in battle most of the time is not sufficient for being a courageous person. Aristotle says that paid mercenaries are motivated by money, and that they are likely to run from battle when things turn sour, because they fear “death more than disgrace” (1116b–23). In contrast, a citizen warrior is motivated by a sense of honor and seeks to avoid disgrace more than death. In Michelle Brady’s reading, a citizen warrior manifests andreia because he has deliberately chosen to belong to the polis. His honor resides in his role as citizen in protecting the polis. Andreia, at least in its paradigmatic form in battle, has a substantive end (preservation of the polis) achieved through deliberation. This is different in kind from animal thumos. As Aristotle explains, Animal thumos, even when it is expressed as a defense of others, requires no deliberation. Natural desire guided by sensation is sufficient to explain such behavior. . . . Courageous thumos, aiming at preserving a polis, does require deliberate choice. . . . A citizen can only be distinguished by reference to the idea of a particular political community. As Brady explains, “We must deliberate in order to distinguish who is part of our polis and therefore, to be defended, and we must deliberate about whether we will act for the sake of that polis.” Animal thumos, a primitive emotion that even animals possess, is refined into the genuine virtue of andreia, and it is refined through desire, rational deliberation, and action. And the end of andreia is the protection and preservation of the polis, which is one’s rationally chosen political community. Men, but not women, can possess the virtue of courage in battle because in ancient Greece only men could be citizens of the polis. Male citizens rationally chose the polis, but women are not citizens, at least in part because they are thought to lack a full capacity for deliberation and agency. The andreios man’s motive for going to war is not individual glory, or protecting his family, but rather the common good. Although women contribute to the common good of the polis through their procreative powers and they face considerable threats—including the risk of death—in doing so, Aristotle nowhere acknowledges the virtue of andreia in women’s reproductive lives. We might say that men choose courage while women are their reproductive lives. A mother may exhibit animal thumos in childbirth, but it would seem that she cannot be an andreios individual. It is Of Courage Born

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crucial that the citizen constitute himself within the vision of the common good, for the public sphere is the sphere of self-constitution and agency. The male citizen engages in war because he has chosen to be a member of the community. A woman, in contrast, is not a citizen. She has the faculty for deliberation, but her deliberation “lacks authority” (Politics 1260a:14). Unlike Plato, who believes that both men and women can partake in the same human virtues in the same way, Aristotle says of the virtues that: All shall partake of them, but only in such a manner and degree as is required by each for the fulfillment of his duty . . . the temperance of a man and of a woman, or the courage and justice of a man and of a woman, are not, as Socrates maintained, the same; the courage of a man is shown in commanding, the courage of a woman in obeying. For Aristotle, the virtues are gendered. As he explains, the virtues are indexed to one’s duties. A woman’s duties are to manage the household and obey her husband. Her virtue consists in her fulfillment of those duties, in her performing her duties well. Whatever the value of her success, Aristotle makes it clear that women’s courage is worth very little in comparison to men’s: “For a man would be thought a coward if he had no more courage than a courageous woman” (Politics 1277b:20–21). In other words, joining the Peace Corps is nice, but that is not the same as charging down an airplane aisle to stop a suicide bomber. Can Aristotle acknowledge that women exhibit courage in childbirth? First, let us see if there is some role for childbirth on par with the citizen warrior’s pro-social action of fighting in battle to protect the polis from destruction. It is notable that Aristotle insists that human union (procreation) is formed “not of deliberate purpose, but because, in common with other animals and plants, mankind have a natural desire to leave behind them an image of themselves” (Politics I, 2 1252a- 60b). Aristotle thus regards procreation and military ser vice as contributing to the polis in fundamentally different ways: the first is a mere animal function while the second occasions what is perhaps the highest virtue: andreia. Second, let us look a bit at Aristotle’s general characterization of the virtues. He explains that “they are states character, and that they tend, and by their own nature, to the doing of the acts by which they are produced, and that they are in our power and voluntary, and act as the right rule prescribes” (1114b:27–30). Courage is a mean between feelings of fear and confidence. The courageous individual is not afraid of death but of disgrace: “courage . . . is due to shame and to desire of a noble object (i.e. honour) and avoidance of disgrace, which is ignoble” (1116a:27–30). Aristotle often 56

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describes the courageous soldier as one who stands his ground as opposed to the cowardly soldier who runs away. But the courageous man can also keep a cool head while engaging in immediate action, in a manner akin to the Carnegie medalists: Hence also it is thought the mark of a braver man to be fearless and undisturbed in sudden alarms than to be so in those that are foreseen; for it must have proceeded more from a state of character, because less from preparation: acts that are foreseen may be chosen by calculation and rule, but sudden actions must be in accordance with one’s state of character. What are the similarities and differences between Aristotle’s notion of andreia as it is characterized in the paradigmatic case of battle and PPS courage? All three of my earlier criteria are consistent with the citizensoldier’s actions. Aristotle obviously embeds his account of courage in an extraordinarily rich characterization of virtue and character, including a very subtle analysis of volition and choice. Striking aspects of his account include the description of the courageous man as fearless or fearing disgrace more than death, and the constant reference to courage having honor as its end, which is a noble end. Aristotle’s accounts of the other virtues do not set the stakes so high. At least to a modern reader, “coward” sounds much worse than “intemperate.” But what is also central to Aristotle is the idea that the virtues are states of character that cause and explain actions. Courageous acts flow from dispositions whose development is governed by a deliberative faculty and an understanding of one’s proper role in the community. So we have the idea, which is still present in various forms up to the present day, that women are primarily suited to the natural, private ends of the family and not community ends. War produces the prototype for manly courage, not simply because the threat of death is ever-present, but also because one’s motives and one’s identity, at least in theory, are not those that stem from personal glory or the desire to protect one’s own family—rather they are more impartial— directed at the larger good of the community; hence, the Carnegie Medal’s exclusion of dangerous acts directed at saving family members. In conditions of war, if one fights to protect one’s own daughter’s chastity, that good is subsumed under the more abstract ideal of the community. Women, presumably, do not deliberate about their procreative contributions to the polis, and indeed, for most of history women have had very little control over their sexuality. When they have possessed some control they are seen to be motivated by their “natural” or personal desires to beget Of Courage Born

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children and to serve the ends of their own families. At best, it will be said that when woman sacrifices herself and takes risks for her family, she does so out of love. As Nietzsche once remarked: “Let man be afraid of woman when she loves: she then makes every sacrifice, and regards everything else as worthless.”  At worst, with her unprincipled passions, she becomes a destroyer of the community. There is a deep undercurrent in Greek culture and philosophy, although less in Aristotle than elsewhere, which regards the family, with its “blood bonds” born from procreation, as a fundamental threat to the polis. Plato, for instance, employs the myth of the metals to tear down allegiances to the family and to promote commitment to the community. The threat is well-articulated in Hegel’s interpretation of Antigone: “Womankind—the everlasting irony (in the life) of the community— changes by intrigue the universal end of government into a private end, transforms its universal activity into a work of some private individual, and perverts the universal property of the state into a possession and ornament for the Family.” So far I have identified two dominant misogynist strands in the Western tradition that have contributed to our overlooking PPS courage in childbirth. These misogynist biases are reflected in a variety of ideas: suffering in childbirth is punishment for women’s sexual sin; war is the prime arena for manly courage, men are active agents while women are passive and receptive, love, rather than courage, is a motivating source in women. Although there are many directions to go at this point, I want to take up one thread that continues to influence our thinking today; namely the emphasis we place on volition in attributions of PPS courage. The prototypical examples of manly courage, or at least the ones most commonly represented in myth and art, involve decisive acts in battle in response to sudden peril: leading the troops into battle, charging at a dragon with one’s sword, diving on a grenade to save a fellow soldier’s life, and jumping out of a hovering helicopter under fire to rescue a wounded soldier. These look like clear acts of volition. Courage explains why one person does the courageous act while another one does not. One person wills himself to risk his life while another person chooses to run away because he is a coward. The concept of PPS courage thus plays a crucial role in action explanation, not just at the individual level but the social as well. The courage of one army, we believe, shows up in identifiable individual acts of bravery and can be decisive in winning a war even when the other side is larger, better trained and better equipped. The results of PPS courage, at least in an ideal situation, are clear: success rather than defeat. It is volition that motivates action and determines the outcome.

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Here are two illustrations of the very same sort of decisive acts of PPS courage that one sees in battle, only this time occurring in the arena of childbirth. In 1940, the very existence of children was illegal in the Warsaw Ghetto. Virtually all Jews in the ghetto were likely to be highly conscious of their membership in a Jewish community. Those of reproductive age likely reflected carefully and deliberately about the meaning and consequences of pregnancy and childbirth for themselves and their community. A woman’s very act of intercourse with the intention to become pregnant required the courageous acceptance of terrible odds both for herself and her future child. An awareness of the deep import of these decisions is revealed in the diary of an unidentified Jew who lived in the ghetto: If in today’s dark and pitiless times a Jewish woman can gather enough courage to bring a new Jewish being into the world and rear him, this is a great heroism and daring. . . . At least symbolically these nameless Jewish heroines do not allow the total extinction of the Jews and Jewry. A very different kind of example of women’s physical, pro-social courage comes from the extraordinary developments in medical technology which can present women with excruciating decisions regarding both their own lives and their fetuses’. Consider the predicament of a woman in her late twenties who is twenty-four weeks pregnant when she learns she has a brain tumor. A former pediatric resident wrote a story about such a woman, whom she treated recently: For the neurosurgeon, the verdict was clear: An immediate operation was needed to remove the growing tumor. The invasive and complicated surgery—under many hours of general anesthesia—was likely to greatly increase the risk of fetal injury or death. . . . The oncologist said that if the surgery were delayed until the child was ready for life outside the womb, the cancer would probably be untreatable. The woman insisted on delaying surgery for four weeks to increase the odds that her child would survive, knowing that she would significantly increase the chance that she herself would die. Neither her husband nor her doctors could persuade her to undergo surgery for her tumor. She fell into a coma roughly three weeks later and the baby was born in the twentyeighth week. The woman awoke from her coma but died of her cancer before her child could go home from the hospital. Although we do not know the actors’ full motives in these two examples, they appear to be straightforward cases of PPS courage. They involve

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decisive volitional actions that display bodily self-command, pro-social ends, and involve individuals facing significant risks of harm, suffering, or death. If such cases had not registered as paradigmatic instances of “manly” or PPS courage in the past, I hope they do now. Yet there is something a bit disconcerting, perhaps, about the second case. The worry is that childbirth seems to be a rather accidental feature in the story. Other bodily activities could figure in the narrative just as well. For instance, I am courageous if I cook a meal in my restaurant for a starving Jew who has escaped from a concentration camp, while I know that the Nazis are going door to door looking for the escapee. I will likely be killed by the Nazis if I continue cooking, but if I do not help the starving escapee, she may die soon. But that scenario does not show that culinary art is an arena for the display of PPS courage. Consider another example. I could save someone from drowning in high surf, but die from exhaustion during the effort. That would not make ocean swimming a recognized arena for the display of PPS courage. That is, I have not shown that reproduction and childbirth constitute a distinctive arena for courage. To do that, I will turn to Alaisdair MacIntyre’s discussion of the role of virtues within a practice and in the larger society. MacIntyre starts with the idea of a practice as an organized and complex cooperative activity that aims at goals. Through the pursuit of these goals those participating in the activity achieve internal goods (basically the furthering of their capacities and human powers). A virtue, according to MacIntyre, “is an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices.” So, for example, the culinary arts aim at sating our appetite while providing pleasure. The virtues central to achieving that aim include such things as creativity, respect for tradition, attentiveness to minor sensory differences, and so on. Examples of practices include science, art, and medicine, as well as broader practices such as the making of war and “the making and sustaining of family life.” MacIntyre’s emphasis on cultural practices corrects our tendency to see these activities as merely part of our animal nature— as biological processes that happen to us. The idea that practices are directed at goals alerts us that we can, and some of us do, ask “What is childbirth for?” “Are there things worth giving birth for?” Just as there are some things worth dying for, there are things worth giving birth for, and of course, things not worth giving birth for. In MacIntyre’s approach, courage shows up as a virtue both within particular practices and in communities as a whole. He believes that courage, along with justice and truthfulness, is a virtue that is necessary to all practices and all communities: 60

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We hold courage to be a virtue because the care and concern for individuals, communities and causes which is so crucial to so much in practices requires the existence of such a virtue. If someone says that he cares for some individual, community or cause, but is unwilling to risk harm or danger on his, her or its own behalf, he puts in question the genuineness of his care and concern. Courage, the capacity to risk harm or danger to oneself, has its role in human life because of this connection with care and concern. This is not to say that a man cannot genuinely care and also be a coward. It is in part to say that a man who genuinely cares and has not the capacity for risking harm or danger has to define himself, both to himself and to others, is a coward. I agree that courage is a central virtue in communities and that care and concern are its bases. Aristotle said that the male citizen can exhibit andreia because he chooses his allegiance to (in MacIntyre’s words, “cares about”) the city-state through which he and others obtain basic physical security as well as their fundamental identities. While courage is a virtue that is present within almost all practices and institutions in society, there is no doubt that the form of courage I have been focusing on in this essay—PPS courage—is a very fundamental form of courage that is central to some arenas (practices and activities) and not others. The practice of war, at least ideally, has as its end the protection and preservation of the polis. Risk is endemic to war because, sadly, both the preservation of the polis and the attempt at destruction of the polis involve violent means: the attempt to destroy and demoralize the other side. In the presence of such threats of pain and suffering, “the capacity to risk harm or danger to oneself” as MacIntyre says, is the core of the central virtue of PPS courage and what demonstrates our fundamental concern. Women’s procreative practice in pregnancy and childbirth, including control of those activities though birth control, abortion, medical intervention in pregnancy, and so on also can have, at least as one of their aims, the protection and preservation of the community. Not all women at all times have thought about the larger social contribution and meaning of reproduction and childbirth, but we should not overlook such reflection. Obviously, Jewish women in the Warsaw ghetto were forced by dire circumstances to confront theses concerns, but many Jewish individuals I know today are very concerned about the long-term survival of their people, considering the present low birth rate and tendency to marry outside the community. Think also of the fear of nuclear war and the way it raised the question for many Americans of whether it is moral to bring children into the world at Of Courage Born

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all. Of late, many American women have reflected on whether they should bear children at all, or at least restrict their number, especially because they live in an affluent society that uses up natural resources and contributes to global warming at higher rates than other countries. My grandmother, for instance, was incredibly proud of having three daughters and twelve grandchildren. I am proud that those twelve grandchildren collectively produced ten children and not forty-eight. Think also of China’s one-child policy and the charges made recently by some in underdeveloped countries that the Catholic Church’s policy of encouraging large families is a significant contributor to poverty. Although some women have children for purely selfish reasons, most have concern for themselves, their children, their families, and their communities. The threats women face in their reproductive lives are often violent (such as in rape, the threat of rape, forced prostitution, and other forms of sexual abuse). Even when there is no obvious malicious threat to cause women suffering, there are the subtle pressures of sex selection even in affluent communities within the U.S., pressures to pay the high cost of IVF and to implant several embryos. Pregnancy elevates one’s risk of illness and death. Childbirth is painful. It is far too simple to say that war is about destroying life and procreation is about creating life. They both have the sustaining of community as at least part of their goal. Yet there is, I believe, a priority in reproduction. Human communities could decide to cease the practice of war, and that, one hopes, would strengthen communities and their capacities for care and concern. On the other hand, if we decide to cease reproduction and childbirth, many animal and plant species on earth will flourish, yet all human communities will cease to be. MacIntyre’s idea of a practice is not a perfect fit for childbirth and reproduction as an arena for the display of PPS courage. We rather have a large field in which various practices converge: science, medicine, midwifery, and so forth. Reproduction is really part of larger processes of human spiritual, bodily, and social development over a lifetime. MacIntyre associates practices too much to games like chess in which it is easy to identify the “point” of the game. The phenomena we are discussing are messier than that. Nevertheless, I will continue to use the term “arena” since we can identify some of the goods internal to the practice of childbirth and reproduction: saving lives, improving health in mothers and children, ending sexual exploitation, promoting spiritual, emotional, and political empowerment of women, etc. One aspect of MacIntyre’s view that I particularly agree with is that specific practices have characteristic virtues associated with them (PPS courage is a virtue in the practice of war) and the nature of those practices can be extended through self-critique. Presumably, a 62

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practice is amenable to self-critique regarding the role of the virtues in that very practice. I believe PPS courage in women’s childbirth and reproductive practices has been rendered virtually invisible and unnamed, yet it is a virtue that is embedded in those practices. Women’s reproductive activities, and perhaps especially childbirth, constitute an arena for the display of PPS courage. The culinary arts, in contrast, are not an arena for PPS courage even though we can devise examples in which one can, as mentioned earlier, both save a life by cooking and at the same time put one’s life at risk. Although necessary for the survival of the community, cooking does not have, as a rule, central to it the bodily participation, bodily selfmastery, risks of pain, injury, and death that childbirth does. MacIntyre’s approach enables us to frame the similarities between two different practices (or arenas) and ask ourselves what the internal goods are to each practice, and how the various associated virtues (excellences) enable us to achieve those goods. If one of the practices or arenas of human life has been systematically devalued by the culture because of racism, sexism, or ageism, we can attempt to right that injustice by showing point by point the similarities in the practices and the ways in which the attribution of virtues has occurred, and we can begin to change the practice of virtue attribution. What then, do warfare and childbirth have in common? The internal goods in both are fundamentally the sustaining of the community and those individuals within it. The fundamental basis of those goods is our care and concern. PPS courage is central to these arenas because of its fundamental role in the life of the community, but also because so much is at stake both for the community at large and for individuals in it. Endemic to both arenas are serious threats of pain, harm, and death. Out of war comes the ideal of manly courage: a man who expresses his agency in a decisive choice to risk his life to save another. And we can find instances of this kind of PPS courage in childbirth. I would like now to raise some questions designed to move us toward the idea that the conditions and challenges within the practices of pregnancy and childbirth may be more like conditions in war than we traditionally think. For instance, ask yourself what you think about the following: Women often do not choose to get pregnant, so some believe they cannot be said to intentionally risk harm to themselves in pregnancy for an important end. So they are not courageous. Becoming pregnant is something that just happens to them. But men are often conscripted in war. Does that make us believe that soldiers are not courageous when they overcome pain and tempt death in trying to save the lives of civilians and their fellow soldiers? The risks of childbirth seem too far in the future (nine months) for us to say that someone intentionally and courageously takes on those Of Courage Born

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risks when she gets pregnant. But now imagine that enlisted men are asked to volunteer for a special mission that involves nine months of heavy labor that includes such side-effects as sleeplessness, nausea, vomiting, bloating, high blood pressure, and even a small risk of death. At the end of nine months these men will undergo “torture” that includes excruciating pain for up to several days, and, depending on the environment, risk of incontinence, diabetes, and even death. They are told that some soldiers who have undergone this torture have believed they were going to die and others have suffered from PTSD. And all of this serves the pro-social end of making the war go better and perhaps merely saving the life of one soldier. Would we regard the men who volunteered for this mission to be courageous? Would we regard them as cowards if, once the torturous pain arrived, they said things they didn’t want to say and begged for an end to the physical pain? Would we regard the soldiers who underwent such “torture” as more courageous if we learned that such individuals rekeyed their pain calibrations of such things as kidney stones to a lower level than standard civilians? I think that our fixation on the paradigm of a single volitional heroic act in the face of sudden peril or imminent death involves a kind of idealization of volition and control. I would be the last to deny that such acts do occur. Consider the American men on Flight 93 who resolved to slamming a beverage cart into the locked pilot’s compartment in order to retake the plane from terrorists. They failed to save their own lives or anyone else’s on the plane, and yet we celebrate their heroism: They stopped the hijacking. Had it not been for them, the White House and all those in it would have been destroyed. It is glorious, and heroic acts are even more glorious and balletic when we read about them in Homeric language, but if that is what manly or PPS courage must be, we have focused too narrowly on an occurrent event (a courageous act) rather than a diachronic process (a character trait manifested in the process of living). Not a few heroes find that their own inability to explain why they did what they did leads to a deep unease about being valorized: It was just a flash! Very few instances of PPS courage will be identified in the arena of childbirth if we confine ourselves to the “decisive volitional moment” paradigm of PPS courage. But I also think that idealizing only the hero’s moment involves an obscuring of a fundamental feature of both war and reproduction. The suffering and risk of harm is not only physical pain/ harm/death, but also the ongoing bodily and emotional state of vulnerability to loss that one experiences. It is a sense of one’s absolute responsibility for others with the deep awareness that one can possess only the slimmest margin of control. The relation between courage and success is fickle. A 64

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soldier goes to Iraq to be a hero and she steps on an IED one month in country. Shipped back home, she can no longer protect her fellow soldiers, and could not fully do so even if she were there. A mother invests every effort in pregnancy to assure a healthy child and her baby dies a stillbirth. Or her baby is deprived of oxygen at birth and will be disabled for life. If all goes well, her disabled daughter will outlive her— a terrifying thought. The courage involved in facing this reality of luck and one’s vulnerability to luck is not merely emotional courage, it is bodily courage. It requires physical endurance, the capacity to calm one’s body down so that one is not in an eternal and undermining state of physical hypervigilance. It involves the capacity to keep pushing after thirty hours of labor. In war, it involves the ability to march toward the next battle, to “keep on going on” in a state of exhaustion. This is a form of PPS courage that is less about what you do, less about specific courageous acts you perform and more about the way you do things. There are courageous births, and there are births that are more than most mothers can bear. In War and Peace, Tolstoy describes the courage and vigor of young soldiers such as Prince Andrei and Nicholas Rostov. But he is far less interested in these young men than he is in the aging general Kutuzov, who offers a useful counterpoint to the image of a fully potent, active warrior. Let us look at a few passages. In offering and accepting battle at Borodino, Kutuzov and Napoleon acted involuntarily and senselessly. And only later did historians furnish the already accomplished facts with ingenious arguments for the genius of the commanders, who, of all the involuntary instruments of world events, were the most enslaved and involuntary agents. The ancients left us examples of heroic poems in which heroes constitute the entire interest of history, and we still cannot get used to the fact that, for our human time, history of this sort has no meaning. Those . . . who tried to understand the general course of things and wanted to take part in it with self-sacrifice and heroism, were the most useless members of society. He, this temporizer Kutuzov, whose motto is “patience and time,” the enemy of decisive actions, gives battle at Borodino, clothing the preparations for it in unparalleled solemnity. He, this Kutuzov, who before the battle of Austerlitz begins, says it will be lost, at Borodino, despite the assurances of the generals that the battle has been lost, despite the example unheard-of in history of an army having to retreat Of Courage Born

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after winning a battle, he alone . . . maintains till his dying day that the battle of Borodino was a victory. Kutuzov is not described as a warrior. He is in command, but he does not dominate the situation or his troops. He does not exhibit physical prowess or power. His “courage” consists, year after year, of leading the Russians in retreat and passively restraining the Russians (often unsuccessfully) from attacking the French. Kutuzov’s PPS courage consists not so much in what he did, or, even more accurately, what he intentionally forebear doing, but rather in his way of being, in how he fulfilled his role. His personal challenges, perhaps because of his age and because he has already passed through a young man’s preoccupations with courage and cowardice, glory and disgrace, involve themes of patience and endurance. Kutuzov is not grappling with fear of his own death, but hopelessness, loss of spirit, and loss of self-esteem. The counterpoint to courage is not always cowardice but demoralization. The threat that Kutuzov faces is not a failure to act valiantly in a decisive moment. It is the threat of loss, the absolute feeling of responsibility for others coupled with a profound sense of one’s vulnerability to that loss in the face of luck. Kutuzov sat, hanging his gray head and his heavy body sagging. . . . He did not give any instructions, but only agreed or disagreed with what was suggested to him. . . . The general expression of Kutuzov’s face was one of concentrated, calm attention and a strain that barely overcame the weariness of a weak and old body Tolstoy’s idea that Kutuzov embodies the spirit of the Russian people, while hackneyed metaphysics, oddly captures the correct phenomenological description of Kutuzov’s burden. Aristotle likes to say that men’s courage consists in commanding and women’s courage consists in obeying. Oddly, Kutuzov seems a mixture of these two. Kutuzov can bear that pregnant burden, that “child within,” which is his Russian army, with tremendous bodily courage. Care and concern are the deep wells that feed our courage, yet as our care and concern for others grows the more we face the possibility of loss and the limit of our control—in war as well as in birth and reproduction. Kutuzov’s mode of courage is not expressed in the decisive, volitional acts we most readily associate with manly acts of courage, yet it nevertheless fits the PPS characterization of courage. Importantly, the corpulent and aging Kutuzov hardly fits our image of a warrior. He never seeks glory for himself, and indeed, he is steadfast in refusing to let his soldiers’ selfish yearning for glory even once determine his course of action. Unlike a young, manly soldier preparing for the next battle, Kutuzov is an 66

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experienced general preparing for a long campaign, who well recognizes his profound and extended burden of responsibility for his soldiers at the same time he recognizes how much is beyond his control in the challenges they face in the present and in the future. Perhaps some mothers-to-be manifest, in childbirth, a form of courage more like that of generals than foot soldiers. While a soldier does his or her time then leaves the military, a general like Kutuzov must, over a lifetime, both sustain courage in himself and beget it in his troops, those figurative sons and daughters of his whose safety lies in his hands while peril lies all around. In fact, for a general, as well as a mother, there is always a need for a cool head (attuned situational awareness) because there is always a fire getting ready to break out. Childbirth and battle mark acute moments of risk, but PPS courage in childbirth is continuous with forms of courage that are manifested in the complex challenges of pregnancy and motherhood. In this wider context, it is clear that courage as a virtue does not stand alone, but is intertwined not just with care and concern, which we mentioned earlier, but also faith, trust, hope, and honesty. Out of war comes an ideal of manly courage. Out of the practice of childbirth comes, at least within the West, misogynist ideas that Eve’s sin condemns women to suffer in childbirth, that childbirth is a merely biological process that happens to passive women, that women’s agency, if it is involved in childbirth, is restricted to the private sphere of love. The quote by Steinem that prefaces this essay repudiates that misogyny, contending that childbirth is superior to conquest and self-defense, and is as courageous as both. Taking my lead from Steinem, I have argued that childbirth is an arena in which women do exhibit physical pro-social courage. We can more readily recognize and celebrate this form of bodily courage if we understand childbirth as a practice; expand our paradigm of courageous acts from instantaneous, volitional acts in response to imminent harm to include such qualities as remaining steadfast, facing loss, and taking responsibility for others; and expand our paradigm of courageous individuals to go beyond the “manly” warrior to include a diversity of figures, from the aging general Kutuzov to pregnant women. I would like to conclude this essay with a brief discussion of two potential shortcomings of my approach. The first concerns racial bias in theorizing childbirth and the second concerns wider political concerns about whether drawing attention to courage in childbirth can harm women politically. While a considerable amount of the research and theorizing about childbirth in the United States has been done by women, almost all of it is done by middle-class white women. The experiences of women of color have been routinely overlooked. Furthermore, much theorizing about Of Courage Born

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childbirth is crudely racist. Particularly common is the idealization of “primitive” women’s “natural” forms of childbirth, a perspective that is blind to the skilled knowledge, history, and traditions in which any culture’s childbirth practices emerge. I believe the account of courage in childbirth I develop does not idealize a unity between women and the “natural,” however that is conceived. Indeed, I think that the tendency to regard women and their experiences of pregnancy and childbirth as somehow “closer to nature” than men and their projects typically reinforces the oppression of both white and women of color. The practice of childbirth in Japan provides a cautionary note. As does the United States, Japan employs a medical model of childbirth in which women give birth in hospitals stocked with the latest technologies for performing episiotomies, caesarians, and so on. However, a distinct difference is that all Japanese women are expected to have “natural” childbirth, which means childbirth without pain medication. As Rika Houston reports in her ethnographic study, The laboring women I observed in the hospital delivery room, in keeping with the cultural norm, actively chose to not consume pain medication during labor and delivery even when it was offered to them by an attending physician. Furthermore, not only did women choose to not consume pain mediation during labor and delivery, but also they chose to give birth in complete silence. Over and over again, with rare departure, I observed this culture-bound phenomenon of “perseverance” ( gaman). Midwives scold women who cry or whimper, prompting profuse apologies from laboring women. Those who require pain medication are regarded by others as “too self-oriented to gain the empathy of a ‘true’ mother.” Such deficient women often harbor doubts about their own ability to be good mothers. Houston describes the women who forgo medication as “consuming pain,” and notes that they symbolically qualify as recipients of a “medal of honor” as true mothers. The attitudes in present-day Japan seem eerily familiar to the fairly common view in 1940s America that pain medication during labor interferes with the development of the “maternal instinct” in women. In her research, Houston describes putatively supportive practices in Japan today that the United States lacks. In the hospital, Japanese midwives bring food to women in labor, encouraging them to eat to maintain their strength. Japanese women stay in the hospital for a full week, resting and receiving instruction in breastfeeding. She says these activities also have a doubleedged meaning—they support the idea that eating, silent childbirth, and breastfeeding are all basically “natural” events. The stoical woman receives 68

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some commendation, but the woman who cries out— or worse, pleads for pain medication—is shamed and made to feel that her maternal body is abject. I do not know if Buddhism (or Shintoism) contain the myths of female sinful sexuality so prevalent in the West, but it seems clear that both traditions readily locate shame in female embodiment. Appeal to the “natural” does not seem to empower Japanese women. Of course, Japa nese practice may fi xate on the “natural” as a way of masking its severe cultural demand that women self-regulate themselves into silence. My embracing Kutuzov as a model of non-high-dramacourage is surely not the same as advocating forced stoicism. Still, there is a worry that the emphasis on “composure” and “keeping a cool head under fire,” while clearly at its extremity in Japan, could still be problematic in the United States. Is the model of PPS courage I have been developing appealing only to a certain class of Americans—namely, middle-class and upper-class whites? Is the model of PPS courage I offer here, even though I am trying to get beyond a hypermasculine volition/action-based model of courage, one that is not relevant to all American women? There is some evidence that middle to upper-class white women are quite concerned with maintaining their autonomy and self-control during childbirth. (They appear to be a more moderate version of the anesthetic averse, fiercely selfcomposed Japa nese women.) In contrast, African American women, at least of a younger generation, do not identify self-control as important in childbirth. These studies have not sought to examine women’s associations between courage and childbirth, so it is difficult to know how the model of PPS courage, which involves concentration, recognition of one’s limits, and vulnerability to loss, is relevant to various groups of women. Much more comparative research is needed. Gloria Steinem is not the first to compare childbirth to battle. Consider the following passages from Euripides’s Medea and the Middle Assyrian text Ligabue 33–50: They say that we live safe from danger at home while they prove themselves in the war of spears. You fools: I would rather throw myself into the terror or battle three times than give birth just once. The woman in childbirth has pains at delivery. . . . The mother is enveloped in the dust of death. Like a chariot, she is enveloped in the dust of battle, like a plough, she is enveloped in the dust of the woods, like a warrior in the fray, she is cast down in her blood. An even greater recognition was accorded to women’s courage in Sparta. Plutarch observes that women who died in childbirth and male warriors Of Courage Born

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who died in battle were celebrated with inscriptions on their grave reliefs. All other tomb markers remained blank. The Spartans recognized that women’s contributions in childbirth rivaled men’s contributions to the larger community. Can we be confident that a contemporary demand to honor women’s courage in childbirth will actually serve women? If we grant women’s courage, must we also concede women’s cowardice? Would it not be best to leave the language of courage outside the arena of childbirth and to “fly under the radar” of moral evaluation as much as possible? Are we not already engaged in too much moral scrutiny of childbirth? Do we not need to protect those women who cannot bear up under moral scrutiny? My own view is that this is too fearful a worry. Most women in the Western tradition have been marked by the intense misogynist ideology that regards female sexuality and childbirth as shameful. We need to reject such misogyny, but that doesn’t mean that we should seek to escape all moral evaluation in the arena of childbirth and mothering. And that is partly because, as I argued earlier, this arena constitutes a practice. Like other practices, there are distinctions between inferior and superior ways of engaging in the practice, and particular virtues find their place within that practice. We need to overcome the traditional dualism of shame (sexuality/ childbirth) versus honor (chastity). Let us start by refusing to overlook women’s courage in childbirth. We need to place moral evaluation in women’s hands. We need to claim our power and evaluative language. Adrienne Rich tells us that traditionally women have not been expected to tell the truth. Part of our truth telling involves strengthening women’s capacities to fairly assess themselves and others. Not only can woman can be courageous—they can also be cowards. I am not certain that PPS courage provides the best model for conceptualizing courage in childbirth, but I do know that childbirth is a practice in which the virtue of courage is displayed and that the recognition of courageous childbirth itself requires moral and political courage.

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3

Original Habitation Pregnant Flesh as Absolute Hospitality F R A N C E S G R AY

In this essay I develop a metaphor that evokes the idea of woman’s pregnant flesh as the original home and ground of human sociality. I explicate notions of flesh, of home, and of hospitality elaborated by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida and argue that these notions assume the temporal and existential priority of pregnant being. Underpinning my analysis is Edmund Husserl’s claim that the conscious body, as personal individual, presupposes “a plurality of subjects in mutual intersubjective understanding.” This decidedly Hegelian sentiment expresses the intuition that human selfhood requires human otherness. The existence of a “plurality of subjects in mutual intersubjective understanding” has a temporal and an existential priority over the personal. We are all born into worlds that already exist, and that will continue to exist once we die. We all come into being through our intertwining with those pluralities, which, in all of their manifestations, are the symbolic matrices with which we must contend as we grow into human being. In other words, the existential and temporal preconditions of our personal existences that help to bring us into human personhood, that help to orchestrate our subjectivities are, in essence, predicated on the plurality implicit in mutual intersubjective understanding. I argue that the fundamental intrinsic relatedness of all human life expressed in the relationship between the pregnant woman and her “second subject” is the precondition for this plurality of subjects, for intersubjective possibilities within the already given, what has to be presupposed. Note 71

that this relationship between pregnant flesh and her “second subject” is not itself an instance of “plurality of subjects in mutual intersubjective understanding,” but merely a condition of its possibility. The stress is on preconditionality: in a very basic sense, the “twoness” on which Luce Irigaray insists as a principle of individuation is exemplified in the pregnant flesh metaphor. I take the second subject to be a subject other than, but simultaneously the same as, the woman’s flesh, a subject who inhabits her body, a separate consciousness created in, and as a result of her bodily environment. I maintain that pregnant woman is not just body, but living body, living experience. Hence I adopt Merleau-Ponty’s term “flesh,” which “is not matter, is not mind, is not substance” but is “midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings style of being wherever there is a fragment of being. The flesh in this sense is an ‘element.’ ” If flesh is an incarnate principle that brings style of being, then, I argue, pregnancy, pregnant flesh, is a specific style of being with a unique style of relationship. In my view, pregnant flesh anticipates the possibility of all mutual intersubjective understanding, as an elemental communion evolves between a pregnant subject and the potential subject cohabiting in one flesh: the singularity of the woman’s flesh is transformed through the growth of another flesh, an immature other with its genesis in her flesh, her semblé. I then argue that Jacques Derrida’s claim that unconditional or absolute hospitality is impossible does not take account of pregnant flesh as an originary ground of being. The pregnant woman as host participates in a hospitality that potentially models a temporary abandonment of her self in pursuit of the interests of a dependent, immature being. Pregnancy can be seen as the original host-guest relationship: it is ethically primitive. Its ethical primitiveness consists not in the fact that a host offers hospitality to a preexisting guest. Rather, pregnancy is an actualizing of being, an enabling of life that has not previously existed. In that sense, pregnancy does not follow the Derridean model of hospitality as gift. Last, I consider the implications of my argument in relation to two contentious issues in moral philosophy: unwanted pregnancy and the abortion debate. I focus in particular on Judith Jarvis Thomson’s article “A Defense of Abortion,” in which she raises the idea of woman as house. The claims I make in this essay, I argue, can be seen as an elaboration of Thomson’s idea, and they illuminate the notion of a woman’s right to decide what happens to her own body. From a phenomenological perspective, some host-guest relationships in pregnancy need to be seen as a corruption of original hospitality, as when a pregnant woman neither desires to become pregnant nor, once pregnant, decides to remain so. The question of rights 72

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of the pregnant woman and the right to life in the being in the uterus are predicated on this primary, albeit metaphorical, relationship of host and guest. I consider Caroline Lundquist’s arguments regarding rejected and denied pregnancies as a possible counter to my claim about original hospitality. There, the full importance of the status of the metaphor comes into play. But what is the status of the metaphor of the body as original habitation? The human body has a “life-will” or body intentionality of its own, regardless of what we think, how we construct the body, and how we would like the body to be. Essentially, absolute hospitality is an expression of the body’s life-will or intentionality. Pregnant flesh’s subjective will and its relationship to its own pregnancy are predicated on the fundamental lifewill of the body. Ultimately, the body as a living entity that is a product of evolution and the elements, the material being that we all are, will triumph over any of our efforts, demands, and wishes, taking us to our ensured demises in old age, withering, and death. Certainly, we can mold the body: we can exercise, diet, use biotechnologies, surgical procedures, and drugs to transform our bodies. Th is attempt to construct the body—to discipline, to make its heart beat faster, its muscles bigger, its frame thinner, its joints more flexible, to respond to injury, to impregnate—relies already on its essential materiality. And that is the ground of the metaphor of original habitation. The status of this metaphor is derivative of a preestablished biological harmony (to borrow from Leibniz) of anatomy and physiology, of function, ends (telos) and limits that are fixed, and boundaries that can be overcome. This metaphor is a biometaphor, a metaphor of life and livingbeing, that permits us to perceive the body as original habitation, but which does not preclude the possibility of the body’s own conscious reflection on itself, at times bounded by its own subjective will. Through that reflection and the structures of language, the body is able to construct and picture itself, represent itself to itself, “do” and “make” the aforementioned constructions. How we experience the body, particularly our own bodies, is an effect of both the very materiality we bodies are, together with the kind of consciousness that permeates human being. The originary body, this amazing bioconsciousness, is the complex out of which moral considerations arise with respect to our bodies themselves, as discreet yet community-bound flesh, to bring us to our situatedness in the world. To that extent, the originary body needs to be acknowledged as itself the ground of flesh and morality. The metaphor of original habitation has two subjective aspects: our own lived experience, and the origin of that experience in the pregnant flesh. Considered as a preestablished biological harmony, the human body is Original Habitation

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value-neutral—it does what it does irrespective of our moral perturbations and ruminations. Thus I maintain that the material body as the origin of consciousness and flesh, is the logical precondition of personhood: the material body is, in this sense, preconscious, preflesh, prepersonal, and prediscursive; but is the ontological condition of the value laden-ness we find in theorizing of the body such as Michel Foucault’s and Judith Butler’s accounts of the body. In other words, epistemology is grounded in ontology of the body, the expression of which is bound to value systems. Pregnancy, abortion, and unwanted pregnancy will need, then, to be seen within this biometaphorical framework, as a response in other words, to the “life-will” of the body. The metaphor of original habitation belongs in flesh, as I shall shortly argue, but it is the materiality of the body that enables originary flesh, a materiality that is both “inside” and “outside” consciousness. Subjective Ground To begin, I comment on two points from Julia Kristeva’s “Motherhood According to Bellini.” Its opening lines are: Cells fuse, split, and proliferate; volumes grow, tissues stretch, and body fluids change rhythm, speeding up or slowing down. Within the body, growing as a graft, indomitable, there is another. And no-one is present, within that simultaneously dual and alien space, to signify what is going on. “It happens, but I’m not there.” “I cannot realize it, but it goes on.” Motherhood’s impossible syllogism. This becoming-a-mother, this gestation, can possibly be accounted for by means of only two discourses. There is science. . . . There is Christian theology. Kristeva later argues that the Orthodox Catholic Church has given to Western Christianity its “practice of honoring Christ’s mother, his Nativity and her ‘Dormition,’ ” which was a consequence of the Orthodox “annexing the Oriental rites of mother-goddess and fecundity.” My essay deals with neither science nor Christian theology. Furthermore, it is not embedded in empirical investigation, but is, rather, an interpretation of the symbolic precedence of pregnancy and the prematernal body. In this light Kristeva’s reference to Orthodox refiguring of Oriental rites of mother-goddess and fecundity lead her to speak of conceptions of the Virgin (Mother) as ergasterion—privileged space, living area, ladder (of Jacob), or door (of the Temple, in Ezekiel’s vision)—dwelling, in short. She is thus seen as a union, a contact without gap, without separation, and these functions make her a metaphor for the Holy Ghost. 74

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Kristeva’s reading of Common Testament allusions to Mary as the embodiment of ontological place, with the further allusion to Mary as metaphorically the Holy Ghost or the love between Father and Son, implies a theo-cultural idealization of the pregnant woman and the mother as a location or site. The idea of Mary as mediatrix between Father and Son, by virtue of her maternity, is exaggerated in her Virgin Mother status. The theological issues that arise from this reading are not my concern here, and the notion of mediatrix is tangential to the issues of this essay, so I leave this for now. What is pertinent is that the notion of the Virgin as woman, as mother, as place, and as dwelling are precisely the symbolic tropes that can be extrapolated to all pregnant women. The gift of Mary’s body to an unknown other, theologically speaking, the Origin of Origins, in the formation of the primeval guest–host relationship, underscores the special status of the flesh. Yet Mary’s consent is crucial to the event that will follow. Specialness of the flesh is the focus of Merleau-Ponty’s use of the term. Neither one category of being nor another, neither body nor mind this is a new category that captures what it is to be human. Mary, in this story, is a kind of symbolic cultural ideal. Symbolically, the Mary and Jesus story tells us what it means to be human and that to be human is to be a product of unconditional hospitality. Indeed such images perhaps precede and inform the theological account, a view endorsed by the following considerations. Kristeva’s claim that there is either the scientific or Christian theological account for becoming-a-mother and gestation echoes similar divisions of discourse kinds found in the work of, for example, Husserl. In one sense, it can be seen as a limitation on discourses available for such accounting; in another, it is useful as a conceptualization of the dualistic thinking that has been identified in recent scholarship as counterproductive evaluations of the way the world is. Much better, the argument would go, to recognize and acknowledge the interdependencies and reciprocities involved in the way the world is, and to use discourses that express this relation. Such is the case from Hegel to Husserl, to de Beauvoir, to Merleau-Ponty and beyond. In the thinking of the phenomenologists Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, emphasis is placed on the body in the world from the beginning. There is no point of insertion, no choice to be made: the body as body emerges from, and is permeated by, the world. On this account, the dualistic structures of thinking that divide, separate, and impose are seen as inauthentic strategies of power imposition and maintenance. The integrity of the body needs, then, to be seen in terms of its relations in and with the world. If we look at Husserl’s account of the conscious body in the world, we see an attempt to deal with the universal structures that are manifested in those relationships and contingencies, as well as the Original Habitation

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body’s situatedness in the world. Meaning arises through one’s reflective capacity, and its activity, that is expressed in the cogito. The pregnant body is no exception to such an envisaging: The question of meaning and the language one uses with all of its ontological commitments in making that meaning are pertinent to all states and conditions of the living and lived body. Meaning has to do with centrality of the cogito, but the cogito is not a disembodied aspect of being except insofar as it operates in a specific intentional manner. That manner, which Husserl holds is prior to the natural world in which we find ourselves, he articulates as the act of identifying the pure ego. This is what Husserl says: The world is for me absolutely nothing else but the world existing for and accepted by me in such a conscious cogito. It gets its whole sense, universal and specific, and its acceptance as existing, exclusively from such cogitationes. In these my whole life-world goes on, including my scientifically inquiring and grounding life. By my living, by my experiencing, thinking, valuing and acting, I can enter no world other than the one that gets its sense and acceptance or status [Sinn und Geltung] in and from me, myself. Husserl goes on to argue that once one puts oneself above this life and no longer takes the world as it is given (in the natural attitude), then “I thereby acquire myself as the pure ego, with the pure stream of my cogitations.” Husserl’s construction of the transcendental ego through the method that is the phenomenological epoché is not something I intend to defend here. I think, though, that one cannot speak about the living and lived body, and the ego’s formation of concepts on which it acts in the world, without mentioning the debt owed to him by later phenomenologists. His idea that the body is living and in a life-world has deep implications for the pregnant body that is the source of the living body, above all because meaning and symbol are articulated as a consequence of the activity of the cogito. The body in the world is a particular kind of fleshy being among other fleshy beings, with its interactions and reciprocities, its remarkable capacity to learn through imitation, to create and to reflect, to reproduce, and the body owes its being and its coming into the world as flesh already to another, to pregnant flesh. So let us ask the question, “What makes possible and forever symbolizes the pregnant body as original home?” And if we use Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh, how does this help to figure the uniqueness of the relationship between the pregnant body as host, and the embryo/fetus as guest?

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The Body as Flesh; and Flesh as Ground of Being In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty argues, “My personal existence must be the resumption of a prepersonal tradition. There is, therefore, another subject beneath me, for whom a world exists before I am here, and who marks my place in it. This captive or natural spirit is my body, not that momentary body which is the instrument of my personal choices and which fastens upon this or that world, but the systems of anonymous ‘functions’ which draw every par ticu lar focus into a general project.” What are we to make of the concept of a resumption of prepersonal tradition? While Merleau-Ponty identifies his body as the subject underlying this prepersonal tradition, it is his body as a fact of being, a continuous and continuing being to his existence, his lived and living body in spite of himself, to which he is referring. Yet his argument seems to be suggesting that his body and the systems of anonymous functions constituting that body are replicated in all bodies: He is a member of a group with biological and various sociocultural histories. So his particular body is a resumption insofar as it is one body among a continuous history of conscious body, a history of human being, situated before during and after the existence of his specific body. The body in the world is a body of and by the world, a body among other similar bodies and anonymous systems that come to see and recognize each other. The notion of “prepersonal tradition” is not unambiguous, though. It can be extrapolated to a number of different occasions, above all, as Merleau-Ponty insists, because there must be a resumption of that tradition. I argue that this tradition is not merely the fact of the body and its being in the world, not merely systems of anonymous “functions” but a tradition of pregnant embodiment, of pregnant flesh as original home, framed, ideally by consent and acceptance, welcoming and anticipation. The ideality of this framing can be countered, as we shall later see, by the recognition that the provision of original home is an unacceptable choice for many women. That said, it remains the case that prepersonal tradition is always predicated on pregnant body; pregnant body is the means of our entry into the prepersonal tradition. As such, any individual body is a replication of other, similar bodies intertwined with each other, and simultaneously directly and indirectly connected with my body, as human body, as Merleau-Ponty would surely acknowledge. Community, ethical relation, biology, and genealogy are aspects of those connections. However, replication through the contributory agency of a biological father and, after implantation, in woman’s body, suggests that there is a “subject beneath” that is not voiced by Original Habitation

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Merleau-Ponty. It is not simply woman’s body that is pregnant. Woman is a subject, a she who is pregnant flesh bearing flesh. She is flesh by virtue of the kind of being she is. We see that for Merleau-Ponty, “flesh” is neither animated body nor embodied mind, or spirit or soul. “Flesh” is a third category of being that echoes not only Descartes’s union of the intermingling mind and body in Meditation VI, but also his subsequent emphasis on sensation in Meditation VI. “Flesh” is both sensible and sentient, a multidimensional mass of living being that situates us in the world and the world in us. In my view, the flesh that is woman, and the woman who is flesh is a condition of the resumption of the prepersonal tradition, a tradition predicated not only on “body” and its situation in a world, but also on the very being of feminine, pregnant flesh. Let us follow this thinking through. In “The Intertwining—The Chiasm,” Merleau-Ponty uses the term “flesh” or “carnal being” to accentuate the importance of the body as “sensible mass” and mass as the “sensible body” in excess of its mere materiality. Merleau-Ponty highlights the two dimensionality of the subject qua subject and object, in its living carnality. It is the body and it alone, because it is a two-dimensional being, that can bring us to the things themselves, which are themselves not flat beings but beings in depth, inaccessible to a subject that would survey them from above, open to him alone that, if it be possible, would coexist with them in the same world. When we speak of the flesh of the visible . . . we mean that carnal being, as a being of depths, of several layers or several faces, a being in latency, and a presentation of a certain absence, is a prototype of Being, of which our body, the sensible sentient, is a very remarkable variant. These two aspects of the flesh lend themselves readily to the corruption of the complex ethics of the flesh that is symbolized in the pregnant body. The pregnant body, sensible and sentient, is pregnant flesh who is subject and that, by virtue of her visibility in the world as a pregnant human being, becomes an object of a specific kind of specularization. The doubling of the flesh as both subject and object, the sensible sentient, what sees and is seen, touches and is touched, is the natural (and by “natural” I mean “first”) state of all humans. Yet in the pregnant flesh, that natural state takes on a new dimension, situated as it is in the process of reproduction not only of the species as body, but species as new flesh. Inhabitation of pregnant flesh by body already rendered flesh because of its origins has the transformative effect of converting the being of the woman from potential place to actual place. Thus her subject/object singularity is temporarily suspended in two ways: her singular flesh now becomes two fleshes in one 78

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place; and her singular flesh is now symbolically the flesh of all humans, in its plurality and multiplicity, symbolically, that is, the being of all flesh. The importance of this fact is not lost to Emmanuel Levinas, whose focus on woman and the feminine, and their centrality to hospitality, fundamentally reinforces masculine paternal interpretations of motherhood and, by extension, its enabling state. The family, the interior of sociocultural relations, seen in the parental home, has had, as a matter of fact, woman at its center, and Levinas recognizes this. He argues that the home is privileged because it is the condition or ground of all human activity, “and in this sense, its commencement.” As such, it is foundational for all sociality. What, in the very first instance, makes the home possible are the familiarity and intimacy “that are produced as a gentleness that spreads over the face of things.” In this gentleness, he argues, “I” is constituted, but only in response “from an affection [amitié] for that I. The intimacy which familiarity presupposes is an intimacy with someone.” For Levinas, that someone is woman, who is, likewise, “the condition for recollection, the interiority of the Home, and habitation.” Hence woman instigates the inaugural conditions of hospitality through becoming the intimacy so central to dwelling, so central to one’s being in the world. The initial relationship is with feminine alterity, a presence prior to, and on which, all transcendence is predicated. “The woman is the condition for recollection, the interiority of the Home, and inhabitation.” Home is the original siting of one’s self, the formative environment in which feminine alterity is presupposed by the transcendence that is language: Language comes after one experiences woman and the feminine. In this sense, woman is the prelinguistic domain of intimate being. Habitation, dwelling, familiarity, intimacy, gentleness, interiority, and recollection are interwoven, with woman constituting the matrix that makes possible the complexity of the relationships that emerge. Levinas’s idea that the “intimacy which familiarity presupposes is an intimacy with someone” has its origins, I argue, in the primary situation that is pregnancy, a phase that precedes the later mother/child relationship that he seems to have in mind. Pregnancy is a situation, a place of unique relationship and identification. Hence the relationship between the flesh that is pregnant host and the flesh that is embryonic guest, an intimacy of flesh with flesh is, a different, and uniquely intimate relationship. MerleauPonty’s flesh as “an incarnate principle that brings style of being where there is a fragment of being” is pertinent here. The difference and uniqueness of the relationship between pregnant host and embryonic guest consists in its style of being where, from the first, fragment of being is expressed. Until recently, our fragment of being began, unambiguously, as flesh within flesh, as the original life situation and process. So let us be Original Habitation

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cognizant of the fact that pregnant flesh is pregnant flesh by virtue of its transformed state via the intimate presence of an other who is just like herself (semblé), but above all, by virtue of the unique, prematernal relationship that exists between the two. This two, yet one, is the ground of maternity, but not maternity per se. And it is the ground of absolute hospitality, a symbolic expression of moral possibility, of moral aspiration. But I do not say this without qualification, as we shall shortly see. Levinas had already argued that the Face of the Other (Visage d’Autrui) is the absolute ground of ethics when Jacques Derrida  distinguished between conditional and unconditional hospitality. Indeed Derrida’s analysis is dependent on the ethics of the Face, the conceptualization of ethics as unqualified regard for the Other as well as the Maussian contention that a gift is never free, that it always demands a return. Derrida argues that the history of hospitability in the West is a history of conditionality, or hospitality framed always by laws, “those rights and duties that are always conditioned and conditional.” In contrast, absolute hospitality, says Derrida, is unconditionally given as a welcome to one’s home. Absolute hospitality requires that I open my home and that I give not only to the foreigner (provided with a family name, with the social status of being a foreigner, etc.), but to the absolute unknown, anonymous other, and that I give place to them, that I let them come, that I let them arrive, and take place in the place I offer them, without asking of them either reciprocity (entering into a pact) or even their names. The law of absolute hospitality commands a break with hospitality by right, with law or justice as rights. Just hospitality breaks with hospitality by right; not that it condemns or is opposed to it, and it can on the contrary set and maintain it in a perpetual progressive movement; but it is as strangely heterogeneous to the law to which it is yet so close, from which in truth it is indissociable. Derrida notes that there is reciprocity between these “two régimes of a law of hospitality” so that they are indispensable to each other. While absolute hospitality is transcendent to laws and justice, absolute hospitality is itself universal law as ethic, an ethic concerned with the stranger or foreigner. Derrida’s exposition of hôte, symbolically framed by Pierre Klossowski’s Roberte ce soir, calls on the (handwritten) Laws of Hospitality placed by the narrator’s uncle above the guest’s bed “and under glass,” above the bed as if to suggest the transcendence of the law. Yet the laws of hospitality, “those rights and duties that are always conditioned and conditional” and which we can trace through from the Greco-Roman tradition to Kant and Hegel, the family and the State, conflict with or form an 80

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aporia, an antinomy with, the law of hospitality, unlimited as it is by status, or condition “without asking a name, or compensation, or the fulfillment of even the smallest condition.” The law, argues Derrida, is above the laws, nomos anomos; however, it is dependent for concretization on the very laws that “deny it, or at any rate threaten it, sometimes corrupt and pervert it. And must always be able to do this.” Derrida’s claim that hospitality is always conditional is tied to his simultaneous insistence on unconditionality as an ideal of hospitality. “Responsibility” underlies the relations that are constitutive of hospitality: one is responsible to another. But Derrida also argues that the guest is eagerly awaited by the host, that there is an entering “without waiting” a “come inside,” “come with me” not only toward me, but within me: occupy me, take place in me, which means by the same token, also take my place, don’t content yourself with coming to meet me or “into my home.” Crossing the threshold is entering and not only approaching or coming. Strange logic, but so enlightening for us, that of an impatient master awaiting his guest as a liberator, his emancipator. In Adieu Derrida asks, “Is not hospitality an interruption of the self ?”— the question that he appears to be elaborating in his description of the eagerness of the host in anticipating the guest’s arrival. “ ‘Occupy me,’ ‘take place in me,’ can be seen as the unspoken corollary of absolute hospitality: I give myself to you,” and as, Derrida suggests, It’s as if the stranger or foreigner held the keys . . . as if, then the stranger could save the master and liberate the power of his host; it’s as if the master qua master, were prisoner of his place and his power, of his ipseity, of his subjectivity (his subjectivity is hostage . . . the one who invites, the inviting host, who becomes the hostage— and who really always has been . . . The guest (hôte) becomes the host (hôte) of the host (hôte). Clearly, Derrida is proposing what might be seen as an unattainable ideal: the giving over of oneself in the manner he describes implies an abandonment of self, a selflessness out of step with how many of us see and live our lives. Intrinsic to the idea of the transformative moment that sees guest and host transposed is complete trust and the consent of the host. That pregnancy fits neatly into this schematizing is moot, yet there is something compelling about Derrida’s descriptive ideal that does not seem misplaced in relation to pregnant flesh. For example, one might ask, “Is the transposition of guest and host enacted in pregnancy, and if so, to what Original Habitation

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degree?” Is such a transposition a moral requirement of pregnancy? And what of the possibility of bad guest, the guest who is does not express gratitude, (for this would be an inappropriate exchange that would erase the true giftness of hospitality), who is not trustworthy, and who cannot be countenanced in this ideal frame? Insofar as the context of responsibility prevails (Dostoyevsky: “All men are responsible for one another and I more than anyone else”) as reiterated by Levinas and endorsed by Derrida, it is difficult to reconcile the notions of responsibility and reciprocity in relation to pregnancy. We might wonder what it is that constitutes the boundaries between a you as Autrui and an I. While I am responsible, you, also, as the I that you are, are equally responsible. Yet Levinas’s insistence on the asymmetry of the ethical relationship in one’s responsibility for the Other overlooks the network of responsibilities that point toward not a personal, ego ideal, but toward a collective ideal of mutual and symmetrical moral reciprocity. This is what we find in Derrida’s elucidation of the guest–host relationship and its conflation and transformation. Yet, as we have seen, Derrida’s description of the elision between guest and host takes no account of pregnant flesh, where a merging of flesh unique to pregnancy is enacted. His description of the host and guest relationship assumes a radical otherness that is not, and yet is, witnessed in pregnant flesh. This is the paradox of pregnancy. The unique relation of flesh within flesh in living individuality yet asymmetric dependency, contains both radical otherness and radical oneness. Core to this claim is the idea that pregnant flesh is symbolically the site par excellence of absolute hospitality that is expressed in elements of Derrida’s spatial terminology: “ ‘come inside,’ ‘come with me’ not only toward me, but within me: occupy me, take place in me, which means by the same token, also take my place, don’t content yourself with coming to meet me or ‘into my home,’ ” and in his notion of the absolute, unknown other. The doubling of flesh both delimits and embodies the suspension of subjectivity: woman as pregnant flesh is two subjects, yet one subject. The blurring of boundaries of flesh with flesh, the doubling of flesh as both subject and object that we find in the pregnant flesh is the condition of Derrida’s transposition of guest with host and host with guest, yet is impossible in its own fulfillment. Host is one with guest, yet host and guest can never be one. In this view, pregnant flesh as original hospitality precedes and models the political or social function or process that we see in his account of absolute hospitality: pregnant flesh is the model, prototype (and archetype) of hospitality: the original relationship(s) expressed in pregnant flesh are the primitive hospitality of

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intersubjective oneness and, simultaneously, twoness. The language of blurring of boundaries, elision, transposition of the place of guest and host, is seen first in pregnancy: hospitality as a social function of the human world is secondary to the relationships we find embodied in pregnant flesh. These notions, however, turn on the important distinction between body-will and subjective will, on that is, the subtlety of the biometaphor I introduced in the beginning of this essay. The pregnant flesh expresses a metaphorical idealization of absolute hospitality, articulated in terms of life-will of the body. Given the primitive nature of pregnancy as hospitality, we need to rethink the Derridean account, especially as he articulates hospitality in terms of the gift. In my view, pregnant flesh does not give a gift either being, or birth, to her semblé. Giftness presupposes both giver and receiver, just as guest and host presuppose each other, but the presuppositions here are unrelated. Female flesh is the occasion of a potential hospitality, which is actualized only with impregnation. That pregnant flesh accedes to its own telos with respect to her semblé and prepares the ground for a potential guest–host situation. But this is not a given. Pregnant flesh as original hospitality is expressed always already in the rise of primary inter-subjectivity, regardless of Derridean guest–host considerations. What throws a spanner in the works, however, are questions around unwanted pregnancy and abortion, my last concern in this essay. Abortion and Unwanted Pregnancy In “A Defense of Abortion,” Judith Jarvis Thomson examines what she terms “the extreme view” that abortion is never permissible, even to save the life of the mother, and argues that abortion is permissible under some circumstances. She accepts for the purposes of her argument that the being in the uterus is a person from conception. As such, it has a right to life, since, as she also accepts, all persons have a right to life. She then explores how the notion of right to life is played out in the abortion debate, and in the process analyses competing rights claims that might be made against the right to life. She uses several thought experiments in constructing some illuminating analogies that are seen to represent a woman’s pregnant state. As part of her argument, and in disrupting the reliance on thirdperson arguments of what a pregnant woman can and cannot do in relation to her own pregnant state, Thomson introduces the domestic space, a tiny house, which you are asked to imagine yourself occupying with a very fast growing child. The house is so tiny and the child growing so fast that if

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you do not do something soon, you will be crushed to death. Thomson argues that it is permissible in these circumstances for you to defend yourself against the child rather than “to wait passively while it crushes you to death.” That will mean, of course, that you will have to kill the child. Thomson comments, “Perhaps a woman is vaguely felt to have the status of house to which we don’t allow the right of self-defense. But if the woman houses the child, it should be remembered that she is a person who houses it.” She adds that the pregnant woman and the being in the uterus are not like “two tenants in a small house which has, by an unfortunate mistake been rented out to both: the mother owns the house.” While Thomson is using this particular example to throw more light on why what a pregnant woman can and cannot do is deduced from third-party decision making and choice, the notion of woman as owner of her body that is figured as house emerges as an important, and very telling, trope. The language of her argument is not only the language of the corporeal but also of the domestic residence. She brings together, in other words, the clear notion that a pregnant woman, or in my terminology, pregnant flesh, is host to the being in the uterus, and as such, has a right to decide the appropriateness of some tenancies. One implication of my argument is that pregnant flesh as original and primitive hospitality is a further elaboration of the extreme view. But as I shall show, this implication does not follow. Very clearly, my argument supposes that pregnant flesh embodies a relationship between a subject and a potential subject who are simultaneously material bodies, flesh. It is moot that this relationship is between two persons. For the purposes of this essay, I leave that question aside. What I would like to stress is that the subjectivity of woman as pregnant flesh requires that recognition be given to the circumstances in which she finds herself. Even though pregnant flesh as originating body is metaphorically, and ideally, the site of original and absolute hospitality, it is not incumbent on every woman to either exhibit or to maintain absolute hospitality in every circumstance. Hospitality, as an act of subjective generosity, is desirable but not obligatory. While there might be biological imperatives for there to be some acts of absolute hospitality, at the moment, it is not clear that such acts and the state that results from them, will always be. Technology may become such that humans are all produced in vitro or by some other means. Second, the relationship expressed in the notion of original hospitality can be corrupted, as it is, I suggest in pregnancy resulting from rape, itself already an invasion of the flesh. Were my house to be broken into and a being who would destroy my life as I understand it, and which I did not

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want, left behind, I am not obliged to maintain its existence by letting it remain in my house. Furthermore, where a woman finds herself accidentally pregnant, it is a corruption of original habitation, original hospitality, to require the continuance of an unwanted state. To invoke a metaphor that will come into play shortly: I may decide that sparrows nesting in my roof must go: they wake me early, make a mess everywhere, and are taking over the place: they have to go. I do not have to be a Good Samaritan to them. Thomson’s view that in the United States “woman are compelled by law to be not merely Minimally Decent Samaritans but Good Samaritans to unborn persons inside them” is pertinent here. The answer to the question, “Can a woman be compelled to be the site of absolute hospitality?” is “No.” To compel someone to do that which is characterized by the giving of herself in Derrida’s terms of the “come inside, occupy my place” is to abandon the ethically primitive nature of the relationship that ensues. It is important then, to read absolute hospitality, as not a mere biological state or process, but as a metaphor for conscious, living, pregnant flesh. Note that in my view, a pregnant woman qua pregnant woman is not yet mother to this specific life in her uterus. Indeed, the notion of a prematernal intimacy, an intimacy constructed around intrauterine life and the pregnant flesh, can be seen as a way to problematize the notions of a prebirth guarantee of the acceptability of the guest, sought in genetic selection and of rights seen so often in abortion debates. Julia Hanigsberg has argued that the abortion debate is fueled by the assumption that once pregnant, woman is already mother to the life in her uterus. I follow her in rejecting this conceptualizing of pregnancy. Pregnant flesh is bracketed from the responsibility of the maternal, even as it gives rise to the maternal. Maternal ethics arise in relation not to pregnancy, but as a result of birth that proceeds from pregnancy. Relationship with the newly born Other postbirth actualizes the potential that exists in prematernal intimacy. This does not mean that there is no ethics attached to pregnant flesh: rather, in the case of pregnant flesh, stress needs to be placed on the prematernal, on the intimacy that is possible for pregnant flesh. That such intimacy is possible does not carry with it a moral obligation for actualization of that possibility. Indeed, elaborations of maternal ethics that begin in pregnant flesh suggest the erasure of a boundary that is important to women’s self-determination. In her analysis of the maternal body, Lisa Guenther remarks that the “maternal body welcomes an Other whom she did not make or cause; she bears this other who remains a stranger despite her bearing, unseen and perhaps even violent: kicking at her ribs, altering the shape of her body,

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shifting her bones from within. She bears the pain of the Other for the sake of the Other; in this bearing, she becomes responsible for the child, for the child’s responsibility, and even for the pain the child inflicts.”  I think that Guenther’s analysis is overdetermined by the notion of Levinas’s “maternity, which is bearing par excellence, bears even the responsibility for the persecuting by the persecutor.” But I would also question Guenther’s claim that the maternal body— as she sees it—“welcomes an Other whom she did not make or cause.” How are we to understand this claim? In my discussion of the metaphor of original habitation, I argued that the material body has its own life-will, that the body is the ontological precondition of pregnancy. Given the material nature of pregnancy, one might ask that if the maternal body does not make or cause that Other, what does? What is this Other if it is not itself a material Other in its fundamental being? Furthermore, the burden of responsibility for the Other can arise only given the material preconditions of pregnancy. But Guenther’s analysis also raises an issue about the notion of responsibility in terms of both Levinas’s and Derrida’s interpretation of hospitality and the gift. I do not welcome or regard as guests the sparrows that nest in my roof, yet I give hospitality to those sparrows by letting them remain: they occupy my home, they are an absolute, unknown Other. I have no responsibility toward them, nor they to me. My hospitality arises in light of a certain opportunism exhibited by the sparrows. Initially, pregnancy is very like the sparrows nesting. However, the analogy ends there. Sparrows preexist my hospitality; the fetus does not so preexist. What distinguishes the pregnant flesh as absolute hospitality is its unique coming into being that is coterminous with the making of the fetus: It is the primary expression of abandonment to an unknown Other, who is yet to be. At the beginning of this essay, I argued that the metaphor of original habitation has two aspects: as body-life with its own telos, the origin of pregnant flesh, and as the site of subjective will (and consciousness). I also argued that the human body is value-neutral—it does what it does irrespective of our moral perturbations and ruminations, and in this we can detect a body-life-will or body intentionality. We need now to note that at times subjective-will can override the intentionality of the body. Such is the case with abortion. In other words, body-will and subjective-will do not always match, nor should they: only would the extreme anthropocentrist insist on such unremitting consistency. While the body might express its life-will independently of one’s subjective-will, the limits of body lifewill escape the control of subjective-will: the body may spontaneously abort in early pregnancy or go into early labor. The value-neutrality of the body and the value-ladenness of the subjective-will clash in the unwanted 86

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pregnancy and abortion debates. Thus, as I see it, there are, from a body-will perspective, no grounds to compromise the subjective will of a pregnant women: her integrity must be honored and preserved: the phenomenon of pregnant flesh must find itself open to the contingencies of women’s intentions, of women’s vision of their own being.

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4

The Birth of Sexual Difference A Feminist Response to Merleau-Ponty LISA GUENTHER

The first response to the announcement of a new birth is typically a question: “Is it a girl or a boy?” Th is question is both banal and revealing; it interpellates the newborn as a being for whom certain colors, toys, and modes of interaction will be deemed appropriate or inappropriate, but it also suggests a certain relation among birth, time, and sexual difference. What do we expect when we’re expecting, if not a girl or a boy? Prospective parents may choose not to discover the sex of their child until the moment of birth, but this only postpones the inevitable question. At some point, the pronoun “he” or “she” begins to insinuate itself, structuring almost everything that can be said about the newborn. Whether in pregnancy or in the first chaotic weeks of taking care of a new baby, the duality of sexual difference may seem like the only legible signpost in an otherwise inscrutable landscape of tears and other leaky fluids. It is tempting to read this signpost in a way that locates the future of the child in present attributes, looking for footballer legs or supermodel smiles in bodies that are more or less indistinguishable apart from genital sex. And when infants are born who do not fit neatly into one or the other category, efforts are routinely made to disambiguate the intersex infant, as if the child would have no future unless recognizable as one or the other sex. Iris Marion Young has criticized the temporality of expectation as a model for pregnancy:

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The dominant culture projects pregnancy as a time of quiet waiting. We refer to the woman as “expecting,” as though this new life were flying in from another planet and she sat in her rocking chair by the window, occasionally moving the curtain aside to see whether the ship is coming. The image of uneventful waiting associated with pregnancy reveals clearly how much the discourse of pregnancy leaves out the subjectivity of the woman. From the point of view of others pregnancy is primarily a time of waiting and watching, when nothing happens. The temporality of expectation reduces the woman to a container for the future emergence of a child. But, as I will argue, it also reduces the future of the child to a present waiting to be unpacked from its box. Both the subjectivity of the pregnant woman and the singular, unexpected character of the newborn are effaced by the model of expectation. In order to think birth nonreductively, we must come up with new models for the temporality of pregnancy and gestation, and new ways of articulating the sexual difference of the newborn beyond the “girl or boy” question. In what follows, I look to Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of the flesh and the institution of a future in order to develop a nonreductive account of birth, focusing primarily on embryological development. While Merleau-Ponty does not reflect on birth or sexual difference at any great length, I extrapolate from his work in order to think beyond the model of expectation, and beyond the restriction of sexual difference to an either/or duality. “A Pregnancy of Possibles” On a number of occasions throughout his work, Merleau-Ponty compares the relation between self and other to a pregnancy. In “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” for example, he claims that “each one of us is pregnant with the others and confirmed by them in his body.”  In “Dialogue and the Perception of the Other,” Merleau-Ponty describes the other as “reproduced from me,” born through “that strange filiation which makes the other forever my second, even when I prefer him to myself.” In most of these formulations, the kinship between self and other seems to begin with me and extend to others, in a movement that recalls Husserl’s account of intersubjectivity in the Cartesian Meditations. The other is a “replica of myself,” “a wandering double” reproduced from me by analogy with my own experience. This approach to intersubjectivity is open to the criticism, made by Levinas and others, that the other is thereby reduced to an alter

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ego or “another me” whose alterity is limited or even foreclosed by the consciousness that (re)produces it. And yet, in other passages, sometimes in the same texts, Merleau-Ponty’s references to birth suggest an other who is not so much made by me as from me or with me, with an unchosen passivity that implicates my body’s gestures, responses, perceptions, and expressions. The other is not just an alter ego, but also an other who is capable of surprising me, turning against me, even altering my own self-perception. In the introduction to Signs, Merleau-Ponty argues that others are not merely “fictions with which I might people my desert . . . but my twins or the flesh of my flesh.” In “Dialogue,” he asks: “To the infinity that was me something else still adds itself; a sprout shoots forth, I grow; I give birth, this other is made from my flesh and blood and yet is no longer me. How is that possible? How can the cogito emigrate beyond me, since it is me?” A response to this question— and indeed, a reformulation of the question itself—may be found in Merleau-Ponty’s late reflections on the flesh as “the mother” from which apparent oppositions such as vision and visibility, touch and tangibility, or self and other are “born by segregation.” Images of fecundity and birth in The Visible and Invisible suggest not a miraculous parturition of the other from the self, but rather a mutual fecundation of self and other, a divergence from one common flesh, such that neither I nor the other can be designated as first or second, active or passive. Rather than the self giving birth to the other, both emerge from an anonymous, impersonal flesh that generates differences within itself by folding or coiling over itself—“by dehiscence or fission of its own mass”— such that differences do not emerge through opposition, but rather through intensive self-relation and self-divergence. Merleau-Ponty calls flesh “a pregnancy of possibles,” where the possibilities brought forth are not extinguished in their actualization, but remain generative of new possibilities. What sustains the flesh as a “pregnancy of possibles” is a concept of negativity that refers neither to pure nothingness nor to a determinate negation of something that is, but rather to a temporalization, a delay whereby reversibility is “always imminent and never realized in fact.” My right hand touches my left hand, and in so touching becomes touched, just as the touched hand begins to touch; but touching and touched never absolutely coincide. They are rather always on the verge of one another, diverging and encroaching upon one another, with an endless reversibility that hollows out a space into which the other is received. The temporalization of the flesh thus implies a spatialization: the hollowing-out of a place for possible emergence, or for the emergence of the possible. This concept of a “hollow” formed through the mutual divergence of reversible sides of one sole flesh helps to explain the sense in which the 90

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other may be “born” from my own embodied experience, without for that reason being constituted by consciousness. Already in my ordinary experience of the world, there are different perspectives from which to view an object. I can walk around the table, look under it, stand on top of it, and so on. From each one of these perspectives, certain aspects of the world become visible while others are hidden; I cannot see the whole world at once, indeed I cannot even see the whole of a simple object like a table all at once. And yet, without this variability of perspectives, through which one vantage point is lost, yet retained, while another is anticipated, I would not have an experience of the object as a whole. Even the simplest experience already implies a multiplicity of possible perspectives, each of which is a variant of the others, and each of which could potentially be fi lled by someone other than myself. This simple experience implies a process of temporalization— successive profi les lost and gained, retained and anticipated— and a process of spatialization of the object as one and the same throughout all its successive profiles. But if this is the case, then my experience of the world “hooks into” the experience of others, whether or not other viewers are factually there. Even when I am utterly alone, my perception is already brimming or “pregnant” with other possible viewers. Myself and the other, seeing and seen, touching and being touched, become mutually implicative possibilities of a structure that belongs to neither of us: the chiasmatic structure of the flesh. To be pregnant with the other in this sense is not to constitute her perspective on the basis of my own, but rather to bear within myself the possibility of becoming-other, altered by a perspective that did not begin with me, but that implicates me as one who is seen and touched as well as seeing and touching. Precisely because my body is reversible flesh, and because no body contains the full sense of flesh within its own localized being, my body bears the alterity of the other, not as a pure void, nor as a mystery that resists my full comprehension, but as the hollow that shapes my own existence. The sense of the other emerges here “not as what contests my life but what forms it, not as another universe in which I would be alienated but as the preferred variant of a life that has never been my own.” From this perspective, myself and the other are “extreme divergences of one same something.” We are neither identical nor opposed, but rather variations of a common flesh that articulates itself through the movement of mutual divergence and co-implication. While this radical reversibility complicates the Husserlian account of intersubjectivity in interesting ways, it also draws Luce Irigaray’s criticism—albeit for different reasons—in her reading of the chiasm. If flesh is “the mother,” and if the flesh is an impersonal, anonymous dimension The Birth of Sexual Difference

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or universal as well as an individual, then where has the specifically feminine mother disappeared to? Irigaray argues that the logic of radical reversibility appropriates the language of birth while distorting its irreversible trajectory from mother to child, and neutralizing the maternal-feminine into an unsexed, inexhaustible, and fully reversible flesh. This logic excludes the mother by including her in a closed circle where she can only be the primordial condition for man’s self-relation, and never emerge on her own terms as a full subject or other. While I agree with Irigaray’s criticism of Merleau-Ponty’s failure to take sexual difference into account, I think her critique overlooks some potentially interesting resources for her own project of thinking through sexual difference. By mobilizing these resources within Merleau-Ponty’s work against his own tendency to efface or ignore sexual difference—but also against Irigaray’s limited reading of Merleau-Ponty—we find a provocative (if somewhat quirky) resource for interrogating the ontology of pregnancy and gestation in relation to sexual difference. Merleau-Ponty gives no clear indication of whether he thinks sexual difference plays a part in the “birth” of self and other, but he does rely on the logic of sexual difference to explain intersubjectivity. In a working note for The Visible and the Invisible, he writes: The I-other relation to be conceived (like the intersexual relation, with its indefinite substitutions . . . ) as complementary roles one of which cannot be occupied without the other being also: masculinity implies femininity, etc. Fundamental polymorphism by reason of which I do not have to constitute the other in face of the Ego: he is already there, and the Ego is conquered from him. Just as masculinity implies femininity, the self implies the other; neither side of these mutually implicative relations can be properly understood on its own. Rather, both must be understood in relation to the field of possibilities that gives rise to the relation. Confusions arise when we attempt to take one side of the relation as a starting point for explaining the other, as when classical phenomenology attempts to explain the genesis of the other in consciousness, rather than the mutual divergence of self and other within the reflective structure of flesh. In this working note, Merleau-Ponty seems to assume that the masculine-feminine relation is straightforward enough to explain the I-other relation without requiring any special explanation of its own. But given that he has described the I-other relation at greater length throughout his work, we may be able to work backwards from the relation that Merleau-Ponty finds necessary to explain toward the relation he invokes without explanation. 92

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In what sense does masculinity imply femininity? If sexual difference marks a basic cleavage within humanity, such that all human beings are either “girls or boys” (bracketing for the moment all the various exceptions and complications of this rule), then it is impossible to conceive of one without the other. One could no more posit men without women than left without right, inside without outside, since these are relational terms that make sense only in pairs. Throughout all the “indefinite substitutions” of what Merleau-Ponty calls “the intersexual relation”— all the different ways in which men and women relate to one another across the threshold of sexual difference—the terms “masculine” and “feminine” remain irreducible to each another, emerging through mutual divergence from a polymorphous field of being that is itself neither masculine nor feminine, but that gives rise to both through mutual divergence and encroachment. Like self and other, masculine and feminine exist as different but mutually implicated articulations of the flesh, neither of which tell us what to “expect” from any given subject, since the meaning of sexual difference for each of us is modified by our relationships with the other sex, and with other ways of being the same sex. And yet, there is also a significant disanalogy between the self-other relation and the masculine-feminine relation. While the former is fully reversible, such that no one occupies one side or the other permanently, the latter seems irreversible except through significant medical intervention. Furthermore, even if we acknowledge that masculinity and femininity are mutually defining, it is not clear that this mutuality gets us beyond the implied duality of the “girl or boy” question with which we began. In another working note from The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty further complicates these issues by taking us a step back, and then a leap forward, within the same sentence. He relates “the male-female relation” to “two pieces of wood that children see fitting together of themselves, irresistibly, because each is the possible of the other.” On one hand, MerleauPonty presents male and female as if their bodies were destined for one another like a lock and its key. But on the other hand, the phrase, “each is the possible of the other,” suggests a way of developing our account of sexual difference in terms of a mutual divergence of the flesh. On this reading, feminine and masculine would not be the two basic forms of a more general human “type”; rather, the feminine would exist as the possible of the masculine, and the masculine as the possible of the feminine. The mutual divergence of these possibilities would create a porous zone of interpenetrating possibilities in relation to which no single being could posit itself as purely masculine or purely feminine, since it also bears the possibility of the other. This idea might fecundate a notion of humanity that does not base itself on one (apparently universal) standard, but rather facilitates a breaking-forth The Birth of Sexual Difference

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of many different polymorphous forms of sexuate life. If masculinity and femininity are considered not as separate terms but rather as bearers of the “possible of the other,” then one might say that they are “pregnant” with each other, already anticipating and enabling the difference of the other. And yet, this brings us back to the question of irreversibility raised by Irigaray in her reading of Merleau-Ponty. Is it really anything more than a fantasy to imagine the masculine as “pregnant” with the possibility of the feminine— a fantasy that betrays the specificity of women’s experience of pregnancy and birth? Furthermore, Merleau-Ponty’s image of the two pieces of wood that fit into one another as if by “destination” threatens to reduce the possibility of double divergence to a complementary pairing in which two mutually exclusive forms fit neatly together, to the exclusion of all other possibilities. In addition to reinforcing a normative duality of male and female, this view seems to sanction heterosexual pairing as an inevitable outcome, as the only way for human beings to complete themselves. How might we make sense of Merleau-Ponty’s provocative suggestion that “each [sex] is the possible of the other” without restricting the sense of sexual difference to a two-way street where male and female are destined to fit together like pieces of a puzzle? I turn to Merleau-Ponty’s remarks on embryology for a possible response to this question. Tracking the Embryo In a chapter of The Visible and the Invisible entitled, “The Chiasm—The Intertwining,” Merleau-Ponty explains the logic of the flesh in relation to, among other things, embryonic development: [It is] as though, through all these channels, all these prepared but unemployed circuits, the current that will traverse them was rendered probable, in the long run inevitable: the current making of an embryo a newborn infant, of a visible a seer, and of a body a mind, or at least a flesh. In spite of all our substantialist ideas, the seer is being premeditated in counterpoint in the embryonic development; through a labour upon itself the visible body provides for the hollow whence a vision will come, inaugurates the long maturation at whose term suddenly it will see, that is, will be visible for itself, will institute the interminable gravitation, the indefatigable metamorphosis of the seeing and the visible whose principle is posed and which gets underway with the first vision. What we are calling flesh, this interiorly worked-over mass, has no name in any philosophy.

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While Merleau-Ponty’s concern is to explain the ontology of the flesh through a brief reference to the embryo, my aim is to develop an ontology of birth starting from, but also diverging from, his concept of flesh. Merleau-Ponty’s brief remarks suggest a way of explaining how a new, independent person— a new seer, a new thinker—gradually emerges from a single fertilized egg cell. This new person does not suddenly appear out of nowhere— s/he does not “come in through the door” as Colette notes— but rather develops “invisible” capacities such as vision in tandem with visible structures like the eyes. The newborn, endowed with both visible and invisible dimensions, is both unrepeatably new and also the inheritor of countless biological and cultural legacies. She has her father’s eyes, her mother’s smile, and she will speak the language of her primary caregivers; but her life nevertheless marks a unique divergence, a new departure in the midst of multiply overlapping similarities. In a working note for The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty writes: [T]he vortex of the embryogenesis suddenly centers itself upon the interior hollow it was preparing——A certain fundamental divergence, a certain constitutive dissonance emerges . . . It is in the universal structure “world”— encroachment of everything upon everything, a being by promiscuity—that is found the reservoir whence proceeds this absolute new life. For Merleau-Ponty, the newborn is both unique and familiar, encroaching and diverging, absolutely new and already premeditated. How can these apparent contradictions be sustained? In a series of lecture notes from the Collège de France (1954–55, shortly before he started working on The Visible and the Invisible), Merleau-Ponty develops the concept of institution as an alternative to Husserl’s concept of constitution. For Husserl, the genesis of meaning is in first-person consciousness; hence he begins his account of intersubjectivity with an “I” who encounters an other and attributes consciousness to him/her through analogy with itself. For Merleau-Ponty, however, meaning is not constituted in individual consciousness, but rather in an impersonal field of possibilities whose repetition creates patterns that “endow the experience with durable dimensions, in relation to which a whole series of other experiences will make sense.” Self and other are both effects of this field, mutual divergences that make sense in relation to each other, rather than starting from the side of first-person consciousness. This field is not a static set of parameters, but rather a pattern that is both repeatable and open to modifications, both rooted in a material past and oriented toward a future

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that calls and demands a response. Merleau-Ponty explains the temporality of institution in enigmatic, but suggestive, detail: Time is the very model of institution: passivity-activity, it continues, because it has been instituted, it fuses, it cannot stop being, it is total because it is partial, it is a field. One can speak of a quasi-eternity not by the escaping of instants towards the non-being of the future, but by the exchange of my times lived between the instants, the identification between them, the interference and static of the relations of filiation . . . (neither an objective filiation nor the choice of the ancestors). Lateral kinship of all the “nows” which makes for their confusion, their “generality,” a “transtemporality” of decline and decadence . . . Originary time is neither decadence (delay back upon itself) nor anticipation (advance forward upon itself), but is on time, the time that it is. Like the flesh, institution involves a “pregnancy of possibles.” It engenders a “lateral kinship” of instants that are not simply arranged in a linear order from past to present to future, but rather communicate with one another to the point of confusion, generality, or “transtemporality.” This lateral kinship is not a cause/effect relation whereby a parent-instant produces a child-instant; rather, as a pattern of transtemporality, it involves the cross-fertilization of different possibilities in exchanges that are neither active nor passive but passive-active. Through these exchanges, a meaningful pattern— a sense with “durable dimensions”—gradually emerges, but this pattern remains open to alteration, not only by future developments but also by the pressure of past moments that retain their kinship with the present and future. Time is less like a line than like a tissue or field through which all moments are related and cross-fertilize one another in patterned, but also unpredictable, ways. The fecundity of these interconnections hollows out a place for the emergence of both the familiar and the new. Each emergence has the potential to make the entire past light up differently; nearforgotten elements may be brought forward to contribute to a sense that never existed before. This is not to say that time is a free-for-all, but rather that there is a plasticity of originary time that linear accounts of past, present, and future fail to grasp. Merleau-Ponty explicitly compares institution to birth: [F]rom the moment of conception and still more after birth, there is an encroachment towards a future which is made from itself, under certain given conditions, and which is not the act of a Sinngebung [or sense-bestowal]. Birth [is not an act] of constitution but the institu96

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tion of a future. Reciprocally, institution resides in the same genus of Being as birth and is not, any more than birth, an act: there will be later decisionary institutions or contracts, but they are to be understood on the basis of birth and not the reverse. From the perspective of institution, birth is the emergence of someone to whom something can happen; it is the opening of a future, not from nothing, but from a field of possibilities that shifts and reconfigures as some of these possibilities are taken up and others left behind. The future of the newborn encroaches on the present and the past; it is neither projected nor mapped out in advance, but rather develops from the tissue of relationships that hollow out a space for someone new in the midst of what was already there. In his Nature Course Notes (1956– 60, the years immediately following the Institution lectures), Merleau-Ponty discusses the embryological development of human and other organisms, arguing against the view that the sense of the organism is merely unpacked from a ready-made “sack of possibles.” Rather, the embryo develops in space and time through the elimination of concrete alternatives. In his discussion of these notes, David Morris explains that while the embryological growth of legs or antennae may be genetically prescribed, their precise locations do not come already mapped out in extensive space; rather, these locations emerge gradually through an overlapping of genetic signals that restrict the growth of legs in one place and so allow it in another. The growth of legs does not merely happen “in” space and “in” time; rather, they are instituted through the temporal rhythms of genetic signals that spatialize their growth. In this sense, we could say that the body is made of space and time; its material structures emerge in response to processes of temporalization and spatialization regulated by the patterned circulation of genetic messages. Moreover, it is not merely the content of these messages, but their elimination from certain domains and restriction to others, that makes possible the growth of a leg in the appropriate place. Both the direction of embryonic development and the burgeoning sense of the organism rely on spatiotemporal processes whereby being is neither localized in advance nor produced all at once. Morris comments: [I]t is because there are intensive differences of place and time, it is because being is not all one that being is generative of sense . . . Being is not a plenum, it is emptied out by intensive place and time differences; but these differences, we must note, are not even yet given as such, we must not think that being is already emptied out, for this would reduce negative differences to a positivity. The Birth of Sexual Difference

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The unfolding of a new possibility, such as the possibility of growing legs, does not involve a simple transition from nonbeing to being, potential to actual, or plan to execution. Rather, future events may open up new directions in processes that are already underway, such that certain possibilities only appear as such in retrospect, as details that have become significant only in light of later developments. The possibilities of the organism, then, exist as much in the past as in the present or future; any given possibility is constantly modified by other emerging possibilities, which are in turn restricted by other processes of elimination and restriction. Not only the placement of arms and legs but also the sexual morphology of the embryo develop through the gradual restriction or elimination of certain possibilities in response to chemical signals. Up until its sixth week of development, the human embryo does not yet have sexually differentiated reproductive organs; rather, it has what is called an “indifferent gonad” with both proto-male (Wolffian) and proto-female (Müllerian) ducts. At this point, the embryo’s sense—its meaning and its direction— remains open, pluripotent. Even if it has XX chromosomes, and even if it is typical for an embryo with XX chromosomes to develop ovaries, a uterus, a vagina, and so forth, a substantial increase in testosterone at this point may orient the embryo toward the development of testes and/or a penis. As with the development of legs or antennae, chemical signals create certain possibilities for the organism by eliminating others; to the extent that sexuation is taken in one direction, the structures necessary for taking the other direction wither away, and to the extent that neither direction is taken more than the other, both sets of structures may develop to an equal extent, eventually producing an infant body with a vagina and/or a penis, an ovary and/or a testis, or a combined ovo-testis. Given the range of different possibilities for human sexuation, Anne Fausto-Sterling proposes a continuum model of sexual difference, identifying five points or clusters along this continuum: females, ferms (female pseudohermaphrodites), herms, merms (male pseudohermaphrodites) and males. These terms do not refer to discrete “kinds” but rather to what we could now call, in the context of our previous discussion of Merleau-Ponty, degrees of mutual divergence. An organism with XY chromosomes does not automatically become phenotypically male, as if determined in advance by a genetic blueprint; rather, it develops in a male direction to a greater or lesser extent by limiting the possibilities inherent in its initial pluripotency. If a certain negativity is essential to the process of embryonic growth—if restriction and elimination condition the very possibility of growth, such that these possibilities are not merely unpacked ready-made from a sack, but emerge in dynamic interrelation with past, present and future events— 98

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then we might expect to find a similar negativity also at work in the process of sexual differentiation. When we consider the matter more closely, we find that this negativity is even more complicated in the case of sexual development. A leg may or may not grow, and it may or may not grow in the usual place. But the process of human sexuation regularly produces at least two, and by some counts five or more, ways of being sexed, each of which emerges in mutual divergence from the others, beginning from an “indifferent gonad” with both proto-male and proto-female structures. The more determinate the sex of the embryo becomes, the more it must eliminate other directions for growth; sexuation entails a certain loss for the individual organism, even for the hermaphrodite who develops both a penis and a vagina, for example, only by not developing a more extreme sexual determinacy in either direction. What is the sense of this loss, and what is its significance for sexual difference? We could understand the loss of alternative directions as the blockage of a possibility that was not actualized, and has therefore ceased to be possible. But this understanding would fall back into the “sack of possibles” theory of development, reducing possibility to a potential presence that either remains in a state of nonbeing or exhausts itself in becoming actual. It would also commit the mistake of ontological localism, as if the sense of sexual difference could be located in a single organism or in one of its parts. But if we want to understand sexual difference phenomenologically, we cannot look to this or that body or part, nor even to a collection of bodies and parts. Rather, we must articulate the field of being from which the sense of sexual difference emerges, and this means articulating the relations of mutual divergence that distribute sexual difference across differently sexed bodies through a temporalizing and spatializing process that begins in the womb, but does not end there. Viewed from this perspective, the loss of certain directions of sexual development for one body does not extinguish the possibility of different modes of sexuation, but rather distributes this possibility across the field of intersubjective relations. I encounter the possibility of being sexed otherwise every day in my exchanges with parents, friends, sexual partners, colleagues, and even strangers who are sexed differently from me, and I also encounter it in those who have different ways of being the “same” sex. The possibility of being sexed otherwise, a possibility that was “mine” before I even had a sense of myself as consciousness, is not lost but rather encountered across a threshold of intersubjective difference, or alterity. Where divergent forms are possible for an organism, where it is not just a matter of having or lacking certain parts, but of being differently, the sense of this difference is not contained in any one being or form, but The Birth of Sexual Difference

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rather distributed across the plurality of different beings who embody these forms. As with the seeing-seen relation, no single body can encapsulate the full sense of sexual difference, since this sense is not deposited in the individual body, but rather distributed across a range of different bodies whose development takes different directions and produces different sexuate forms. A zone of mutual divergence and encroachment remains between these bodies, like a connective tissue or flesh that both distinguishes bodies and orients them toward one another as the site of (their own eliminated possibilities for) sexual difference. Precisely because there are others who embody the other forms in whose direction I could have, but did not, develop, I discover my “lost” possibilities for the first time outside of myself, in the bodies of others. This suggests that these possibilities were never really lost, because they were never mine to begin with; they exist in the web of relationships between bodies that differ from one another within a field of mutual divergence. This field forms the very texture of our sexuate lives; it is not merely an abstract ontological concept, but (also) the dimension within which our sexed bodies make sense as nodes of possibility rather than fixed points or destinations. To translate this into the language that Merleau-Ponty uses in The Visible and the Invisible, sexual difference forms a chiasm with intersubjectivity; the masculine-feminine relation not only mirrors the I-other relation, it forms a double relation of mutual implication with it. Sexuation makes sense across the terrain of intersubjectivity, where self and other encounter each other as “extreme divergences of one same something” or as “the preferred variant of a life that has never been my own.” Likewise, intersubjectivity makes sense not merely in relation to the duality of masculine and feminine, but in relation to the plurality of mutually divergent sexuate forms, each of which bears “the possible of the other.” This approach to sexual difference complicates the “girl or boy” question in interesting ways, and the temporality of institution offers a compelling alternative to the model of expectation often associated with birth. But where, if anywhere, do actual mothers figure in Merleau-Ponty’s account of birth? If both self and other, masculine and feminine, emerge through mutual divergence from an impersonal field, then either the field is “the mother,” as Merleau-Ponty suggests of the flesh in The Visible and the Invisible, or mother and child create one another reciprocally. In the end, Irigaray’s critique still holds; Merleau-Ponty turns the mother into an impersonal ontological structure in order to make impersonal ontological structures more motherly, but he also effaces the asymmetry between mother and child as if the child also gave birth to the mother. While MerleauPonty offers a complex and compelling account of the development of the 100

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embryo, he utterly neglects the experience of pregnancy from the perspective of the mother, and so he also misses the gradual emergence of an intersubjective relation between mother and child from an initial radical asymmetry. If anywhere, the mother appears in Merleau-Ponty’s work as the impersonal backdrop for the embryo’s own process of “laboring” on itself, diverging from itself, and hollowing out the space of its own emergence. But by drawing on the figurative power of birth in a sexually undifferentiated way, without engaging with the experience of actual mothers, Merleau-Ponty overlooks the pregnant woman’s own way of laboring, diverging, and creating hollows. By focusing entirely on gestation, and even attributing the woman’s labor to the solitary embryo, Merleau-Ponty effaces both the subjectivity of the pregnant woman and the relationship of mutual divergence between woman and embryo. In the final section, I will sketch in this missing dimension with the help of some feminist accounts of pregnancy and birth. Women’s Experience of Birth Birth is both the condition and the result of intersubjective relations across a threshold of sexual difference. Without birth—real, physical births in which women engender others in their own bodies—there would be no human community, no question of sexual difference to investigate. Not only do self and other, masculine and feminine, diverge from one another ontologically, but the body of a pregnant woman also diverges from itself, generating a new embodied subject from one of her own fertilized egg cells. This self-divergence eventually produces another subject, both familiar and new, from whom the subjectivity of the woman also diverges. Pregnancy and gestation are two sides of the same process; they mutually imply one another, cannot happen without each other, and yet they could not look more different from each other. On the side of gestation, as we have seen, a fertilized egg cell develops into a cluster of cells, an embryo with arms and legs, an increasingly sexually differentiated fetus, and so on. The capacity to feel, to see, to think, to speak, and to take up a conscious self-relation gradually develops as the newborn becomes an infant, a toddler, a child, and so on. At each point in its physical and psychical development, the natal subject is embedded in a field of material and social relations that shape the “sense” of who this person is. But it is difficult— and often pernicious—to pin down the exact moment when matter becomes conscious, or when a cluster of cells becomes a person. The important point is that the emergence of a new subject is possible thanks only to a field of possibilities in which intersubjective The Birth of Sexual Difference

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relationships, first and foremost the relationship to a mother, precede and make possible the development of embodied subjectivity. The mother is not identical to this field, but is rather a subject in her own right, likewise embedded in a field of possibilities that shape the sense of who she is. Like the flesh in The Visible and the Invisible, the field is ontologically more fundamental than both mother and child; every being is an articulation of the field, but no single being can encapsulate it or personify it as such. In this sense, the mother is not a field, and the field is not a mother. Rather, the relationship between mother and child occupies a unique place within this field. On one hand, the mother gives birth to the child in an irreversible way; her body diverges from itself to create a new body that can eventually exist on its own. But on the other hand, there is a sense in which the meanings of “mother” and “child” mutually imply one another, just as the meanings of self and other, or masculine and feminine, imply one another. The sense of motherhood is not given in advance, but is rather constantly instituted through a wide range of different relationships, not all of which involve genetic kinship. Sometimes the mother-child relationship emerges through gestation and birth, sometimes through adoption or prolonged care. Male, transsexual, and intersexual subjects can become mothers, but not without a woman who gestates and gives birth. In this sense, we could say that the relationships between adult and infant or embryo bodies produce the sense of both motherhood and infancy, even though the mother’s body is an absolute and irreversible prerequisite for reproduction. There is both a reciprocity and an asymmetry involved in this relationship, both a reversible and an irreversible aspect; but in order to understand the full complexity of this relationship, we need to examine it not only from the side of the embryobecoming-child, but also from the side of the woman-becoming-mother. From the perspective of the woman, pregnancy begins as a transformation of one’s own body. Her breasts become heavier, hips wider, belly large and firm. She may experience morning sickness, unfamiliar cravings, or unexpected leaks—bodily sensations that do not feel completely her own. Certain clothes no longer fit, favorite sleeping positions no longer work, and activities like tying shoes or lifting large objects may become difficult or impossible. She may develop an iron deficiency, gestational diabetes, or other health conditions. Her body is still her own, and yet it diverges from its own habits and familiar shape in sometimes predictable, sometimes unexpected ways. At a certain point in this process, the pregnant woman begins to feel the fetus moving inside her own body; her own selfdivergence shifts into a divergence from and a relationship with someone who is coming into existence in increasingly perceptible ways. Adrienne 102

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Rich beautifully articulates the sense in which the embryo “is, and yet is not, part of oneself.” For Rich, the separation of mother and child does not happen abruptly at the moment of parturition, but rather unfolds through a gradual process of mutual divergence: I [did not] experience the embryo as decisively internal in Freud’s terms, but rather, as something inside and of me, yet becoming hourly and daily more separate, on its way to becoming separate from me and of-itself. In early pregnancy the stirring of the fetus felt like ghostly tremors in my own body, later like the movements of a being imprisoned in me; but both sensations were my sensations, contributing to my sense of physical and psychic space. For Rich, the gradual divergence of mother and child continues after birth, as the child becomes increasingly autonomous and the mother regains her own independence, or what Rich calls her “being-unto-herself ”: The child gains her first sense of her own existence from the mother’s responsive gestures and expressions. It’s as if, in the mother’s eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message: You are there! And the mother, too, is discovering her own existence newly. She is connected with this other being, by the most mundane and the most invisible strands, in a way she can be connected with no one else except in the deep past of her infant connection with her own mother. And she, too, needs to struggle from that one-to-one intensity into new realization or reaffirmation, of her being-unto-herself. Rich presents pregnancy and gestation as two sides of a process that not only brings forth a new subject but also, perhaps more crucially, generates an increasingly intersubjective relationship between mother and child. Feminist accounts of pregnancy and birth from the perspective of the mother add a dimension that is missing in Merleau-Ponty’s otherwise rich account of birth as institution. As such, they address two potential problems in Merleau-Ponty’s work: first, the risk of conflating the mother with an impersonal ontological field, and so reducing her distinct subjectivity to a transcendental condition for the possibility of subjects; and secondly, the risk of emphasizing reciprocity and reversibility to the point where asymmetry, radical divergence, and rupture become difficult or even impossible to account for. While Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of embryological development is fascinating, and while it opens up new possibilities for thinking through sexual difference, by neglecting the perspective of the gestating mother, Merleau-Ponty not only misses the “other side” of this process, but also shuts down a whole area of phenomenological investigation. The Birth of Sexual Difference

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The embryo does not experience its own process of development, or at least not in any recognizable way; but there is someone else there, in addition to the embryologist, whose bodily experience is intimately intertwined with the developing body of the embryo. To overlook this experience is not only politically problematic, but also phenomenologically incomplete, especially by Merleau-Ponty’s own criteria. Pregnancy performs the everyday miracle of creating two (or more) bodies out of one. But this miracle is not always experienced as positive or desirable; as long as women are denied access to effective birth control and/ or forced to bring unwanted pregnancies to term, the self-divergence of pregnancy can seem like an alienation and splitting, a loss of self rather than the emergence of a new intersubjective relationship. In The Woman Beneath the Skin, Barbara Duden describes how, in the centuries before medical imaging technologies such as ultrasound, it was up to the woman to say when a pregnancy had “quickened,” when she felt the existence of another being inside her, or—in the language we have been developing from Merleau-Ponty—when the experience of self-divergence had transformed into an intersubjective experience of mutual divergence. Without the woman’s own announcement of quickening, the pregnancy was not “real,” it did not take, and the “false” pregnancy could be safely expelled through the administration of herbs by a doctor or midwife. In her own analysis of pregnancy, Iris Marion Young argues that, as long as pregnancy is treated as a disorder (or, in health insurance lingo, a “preexisting condition”) requiring ongoing surveillance and routine intervention, pregnancy and birth is likely to be experienced by many women as a traumatic feeling of splitting rather than a process of mutual divergence. When women’s own perspectives on birth are ignored or suppressed, both the theory and the practice of birth becomes distorted in ways that exacerbate the silence and invisibility of women. By using birth as a touchstone for explaining concepts such as flesh and institution without considering the experience of birth from the perspective of women who actually give birth, Merleau-Ponty creates a blind spot in his philosophical work. He grasps the richness of birth as a metaphor for intersubjective life, and he investigates the process of gestation from the side of the embryo, but he neglects the concrete experience of pregnancy and birth from the perspective of women who become mothers. He suggests an analogy between intersubjective difference and sexual difference, but he fails to develop the implications of this analogy, or to explore the possible sources of disanalogy; as a result, his account of intersubjectivity remains curiously unsexed, even while being suff used with reproductive and erotic imagery. But as I have attempted to show, Merleau-Ponty’s 104

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texts—when read in dialogue with feminists such as Irigaray, FaustoSterling, Rich, and Young—nevertheless raise interesting possibilities for an interpretation of birth that complicates both the temporality of expectation and the restrictive duality of “girl or boy” that it implies. In birth, and arguably in other dimensions of intersubjective life, the balance of symmetry and asymmetry shifts over time; but birth is unique in that it brings another subject— and another intersubjective relationship—into existence. This relationship both presupposes a certain duality of male and female and also multiplies this duality into a range of different possibilities for sexuate life. By acknowledging Merleau-Ponty’s blind spot, and by reading his work from the very location of this blind spot, we may find new resources for a feminist philosophy of birth.

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Ethics

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Birthing Responsibility A Phenomenological Perspective on the Moral Significance of Birth GAIL WEISS

Most of the books available to expectant parents and others who are interested in learning about pregnancy and childbirth, whether they are conventional or unconventional, are united by a common goal: to describe and explain the normal as well as not so normal physiological and psychological changes experienced by the gestational mother and fetus during pregnancy, labor, and delivery. While this informative (and quite lucrative) genre of literature tends to concentrate heavily on the profound alterations undergone by birth mother and fetus over the course of a pregnancy, in this essay I will be focusing on a less attended to topic, namely, the moral implications of the birthing process itself. A central claim I will be making is that the birth of a child is simultaneously a birth of responsibility that extends beyond the gestational mother to encompass other people and institutions who are caring for her and the newborn infant, both professionally and nonprofessionally, formally and informally. Th is does not mean that many of the same people and institutions did not already have responsibilities toward the fetus; rather, I am maintaining that a new responsibility for the infant as well as new ways of fulfilling it, emerge for the first time at birth. In defense of this latter claim, I am proposing that there is a distinctive moral significance in the transition from the status of fetus, dependent for survival upon the aqueous environment of the placenta implanted within the pregnant woman’s uterus (what Luce Irigaray refers to as a “placental economy”), to a newborn infant living in an oxygenated environment independently of its gestational mother. More specifically, 109

I suggest that the neonate must be understood as a new moral agent in her own right. As a new moral agent, she is in turn expected to assume increased responsibility for her own existence as she grows older unless she has a serious disability that prevents her from taking up this task; in such cases, others must provide the ongoing care needed for her continued flourishing. In the pages that follow, I will discuss two primary ways in which the birth of a child (or children in the case of multiple births) can be understood as generating or producing responsibility. In particular, I will argue first that birth creates an immediate, new, and unmediated responsibility for a newborn infant that is shared (though not necessarily equally) by those who care (or fail to care) for that child. Second, birth creates a fullfledged moral agent regardless of whether or not the infant will eventually be capable of acting responsibly toward herself and others. If we inquire as to the origins of this responsibility for the neonate, the source seems clear: It is the activity of childbirth itself that produces this new responsibility to and for the newborn infant as an independently existing entity; indeed, this new responsibility both literally and figuratively emerges from the body of the birth mother. Th is does not mean, as just noted, that only birth mothers have this responsibility or that their responsibility for the well-being of the infant is (or should be) greater than that of another parent or other primary caretakers. Rather than address the complicated social, political, economic and legal questions concerning which people and institutions are responsible for which infants, and what the limits of both individual and collective responsibility might be for any given child, what interests me is how the responsibility to and for the fetus is radically and profoundly transformed by the morally significant event of childbirth, the moment when a fetus transitions from intrauterine existence to infancy outside the mother’s body. In contrast to both Irigaray’s and Kristeva’s psychoanalytic privileging of the symbiotic (and, according to Kristeva, semiotic) maternal-fetal dyad as the earliest, universal, and most profound experience of intersubjectivity for every human being, I am proposing that we focus more carefully and systematically on the experience of childbirth itself in order to understand the unique intercorporeal obligations that morally bind one human body to another. While I agree with Irigaray, Kristeva, and Iris Young that the philosophical, psychical, ideological, and gendered significance of the maternalfetal relationship has been ignored and devalued throughout the history of Western culture, and find their respective efforts to remedy this pervasive form of epistemological ignorance by offering rich first-person accounts of pregnant experience from a birth mother’s perspective provocative and invaluable, I nonetheless think it is important not to privilege the maternal110

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fetal dyad or even maternity too much because this runs the risk, as Kristeva trenchantly points out in the opening paragraph of “Stabat Mater,” of conflating femininity with maternity and viewing this latter as a paradigmatic model of intersubjectivity. In her words, We live in a civilization where the consecrated (religious or secular) representation of femininity is absorbed by motherhood. If, however, one looks at it more closely, this motherhood is the fantasy that is nurtured by the adult, man or woman, of a lost territory; what is more, it involves less an idealized archaic mother than the idealization of the relationship that binds us to her, one that cannot be localized—an idealization of primary narcissism. One reason that idealizing the maternal-fetal dyad, in par ticu lar, is problematic is due to the extremely idiosyncratic nature of this experience, namely, the fact that any interactions that the birth mother or anyone else sustains with the fetus take place in and through the former’s body. Significant as this primordial experience of intercorporeality may (or may fail to) be for both birth mother and fetus, I believe it offers an insufficient framework for helping us to understand the specific moral obligations that bind together physically separate yet, as Eva Feder Kittay emphasizes, nonetheless interdependent human bodies, that is, individual persons whose intersubjective relations may originate within, but far exceed, the maternal relationship. Yes, as Adrienne Rich argues, we are all “of woman born,” and indeed this universal fact has been historically, politically, economically, and culturally devalued even as it has led to a paradoxical idealization of maternity that has oppressed women for centuries. Still, if one wants to understand the special responsibilities that bind human beings together as distinct moral agents, the maternal-fetal dyad will not get one very far, because it involves an “embedded” embodied relationship in which the body of the fetus is literally inside the gestational mother’s body. To repeat my earlier claim, while such a relationship is morally significant in its own right, this significance alters radically and irreversibly the moment a child is born, with profound ethical consequences. A Child Is Born The face is present in its refusal to be contained. In this sense it cannot be comprehended, that is, encompassed. It is neither seen nor touched—for in visual or tactile sensation the identity of the I envelops the alterity of the object, which becomes precisely a content. —Emmanuel Levinas Birthing Responsibility

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Th is well-known passage from the opening section of “Ethics and the Face” eloquently describes what Emmanuel Levinas declares to be the primary ethical imperative: the singular and unknowable face of the other. Despite the explosion in the use of intrauterine imaging technology that reveals an enormous wealth of details about the developing fetus, it is only at the moment of birth that we can first gaze directly upon the face of the newborn child. While it is undeniable that no two faces are alike, even in the case of identical twins (and as a mother of identical twins, I can readily attest to this fact), and while it is also the case that no matter how long I may study a particular person’s face, I can never come to know it completely, the moment of birth is especially noteworthy because it allows those who are present at the birth to encounter directly the face (and body) of the newborn infant for the first time. And if, as Levinas asserts, the face of the other is the ground of ethics, the first occasion on which this face is exposed to the light of day, exposed directly to the gaze or even the caress of the other, should indeed be of tremendous moral import. The ethical imperative that issues from the singular face of the other, that calls me to responsibility for the other, Levinas maintains, arises out of its expressivity and vulnerability. In a passage that is intended to refer to any human face but that perfectly describes the first sight (and sounds) of the newborn infant, Levinas claims, “the being that expresses itself imposes itself, but does so precisely by appealing to me with its destitution and nudity—its hunger—without my being able to be deaf to that appeal.” The expressiveness of the other’s face, Levinas insists, is not a “representation” of the other’s thoughts or feelings. Instead, it is the other, the irremediably other, who can never be reduced to my thoughts, feelings, or perspectives on her. The other who is thus directly exposed to my gaze (and to my other senses as well), engages my freedom, calling me to responsibility by, “introducing into me what was not in me.” What the other offers me, Levinas suggests, is her radical alterity, her singularity to which I bear witness. And yet, as he repeatedly reminds us, despite this direct encounter with the other, she never fully gives herself to me. Agreeing with Levinas that the face-to-face relationship is the ground of ethical experience, and agreeing that the other’s alterity is a mark of her transcendence, Cynthia Willett nonetheless calls Levinas to task for “stripping the face of its full range of expressive power” by reducing the expressive (and ethical) significance of the face of the other to the single biblical commandment “thou shalt not kill.” She also criticizes Levinas for describing the paradigmatic, primordial encounter with the face of the other as a visual encounter with the fraternal stranger that seems to come after adolescence, thereby ignoring the earlier, “tactile sociality” that defines the maternal112

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infant encounter and that sets the stage for the infant’s future interactions with others. In her words, “the face-to-face encounter with the Other does not derive its most original formulation in the encounter with a fraternal stranger but in the nonverbal interaction between nurturer and child.” With Luce Irigaray, Willett emphasizes that the face of the other is available to touch as well as to sight, to the caress as well as the gaze. “These hands” Willett claims, “bring forth the ethical bond, a bond that has disappeared from the dominant narratives of our culture. In the beginning is not the word; it is the touch.” Like Irigaray, Willett stresses the mutual recognition that takes place in the interaction between caretaker and child; it is not a one-way interaction in which one individual encounters the transcendent and ultimately unknowable face of the other, but rather, more like a dance in which each partner is responsive to the expressive body of the other. This nondiscursive relationship is undeniably facilitated by vision, but it does not require vision. Willett describes the dynamics of this face-to-face encounter between nurturer and infant as a dialectical tactile sociality and claims it is the ground of ethics. It is the birth of a child that inaugurates this relationship that has such unique moral significance. Indeed, birth itself is a moral activity: a tremendous responsibility that at present can be accomplished only through, but can never be reducible to, the maternal body out of which a new, singular moral agent erupts into the world. Interlude The face of the other. No matter how wanted or how eagerly awaited an infant may be, the first encounter with the neonate, face-to-face, is always a surprise. There is no way to prepare oneself adequately for it. A new being. Even in the case of biological parents and their loved ones who search the baby’s face for inherited physical features that identify this child as “theirs” (for example, dad’s eyes, mom’s nose, grandpa’s mouth, an uncle’s chin, etc.), the infant is always singular, always unique. The very incarnation of vulnerability and need. How to meet this demand? When will I know I have met it properly? Can I ever meet it fully? Freedom Encountering Freedom: From Limit to Possibility to Responsibility Thus in expression the being that imposes itself does not limit but promotes my freedom, by arousing my goodness. —Emmanuel Levinas Birthing Responsibility

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In contrast to the conflictual model of being-for-others presented in Being and Nothingness, where my freedom and sovereignty as a being-foritself is threatened by the very existence of the other (even as Sartre also somewhat paradoxically acknowledges that without the other, we would not be human, since to be human is to be not only a being-for-itself but also a being-for-others), Levinas claims that the other “does not limit but promotes my freedom, by arousing my goodness.” By insisting that an individual’s freedom is advanced rather than undermined by a face-to-face encounter with another human being, Levinas not only offers an implicit (and occasionally explicit) critique of Sartre, but also finds an unlikely ally in Simone de Beauvoir. This is because, despite developing her “ethics of ambiguity” out of a Sartrean framework that largely preserves the latter’s oppositional duality between being-for-itself and being-for-others, de Beauvoir also famously declares that in order for a person to realize her freedom, she must simultaneously recognize and promote the freedom of others. De Beauvoir’s crucial distinction between the original, ontological freedom that she agrees with Sartre is every being-for-itself ’s “birthright” insofar as we are all, as he tersely observes in his “Existentialism is a Humanism,” “condemned to be free,” and a “genuine” ethical freedom that must be consciously willed in order to be realized, allows her not only to maintain her loyalty to the Sartrean ontology of Being and Nothingness, but at the same time to move definitively beyond it. Indeed, it is only on the basis of this distinction between an original freedom that we have whether we want to have (or are even aware of having) it or not and a willed freedom that is a genuine ethical accomplishment, that she argues in The Ethics of Ambiguity that “freedom will never be given; it will always have to be won.” Moreover, de Beauvoir reminds us again and again, one cannot “win” alone; as she famously proclaims, “To will oneself free is also to will others free.” Although this line is most often cited on its own, usually as “proof” that an existentialist ethics is not and cannot be solipsistic, the lines that directly follow take us right back to a Sartrean understanding of human relations as grounded in conflict: “This will is not an abstract formula. It points out to each person concrete action to be achieved. But the others are separate, even opposed, and the man of good will sees concrete and difficult problems arising in his relations with them.” Levinas is well aware of the antinomy produced by both the Sartrean and Beauvoirian understanding of my freedom as in conflict with the freedom of others who “are separate, even opposed,” and he rejects it altogether though not in the way one might expect. This is because Levinas affirms the separateness of each individual even as he puts into question 114

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the fundamental opposition between individuals that is posited by both Sartre and de Beauvoir. Indeed, though de Beauvoir’s spirited appeals to each individual to actively will the freedom of others in order to realize her own freedom are some of the most moving and most powerful passages in The Ethics of Ambiguity, it is also extremely difficult to figure out exactly why and how I must will the freedom of others to will my own freedom within a Sartrean framework. Countless scholars have tackled these passages, myself included, attempting to justify their ethical imperative, and yet, these efforts are never fully satisfactory, never completely compelling. The most popular and promising way to go seems to be to distance de Beauvoir’s own views of freedom, responsibility, and the intersubjective dimensions of existence from Sartre’s (often by aligning her position on these matters more closely with that of Merleau-Ponty, who views our beingfor-others as inseparable from our being-for-itself rather than in tension with it), but given de Beauvoir’s own firm and often passionately proclaimed allegiance to Sartre’s existentialist framework, this requires reading de Beauvoir against de Beauvoir in order to make sense of de Beauvoir. Of course, such a project is always possible, but it does open up a fundamental tension in her work that seemingly cannot be easily resolved within it. By rejecting Sartre’s solipsistic ontology altogether, even as he affirms both Sartre’s and de Beauvoir’s insistence on the radical alterity of the other, Levinas is able to provide a less conflictual and ultimately more satisfying account of the ongoing ethical demand the other makes upon my freedom; how my freedom can only be accomplished through rather than hindered by the other; and the unique responsibility I have to the other people I encounter (and fail to encounter). As Cynthia Willett also suggests, it is our first direct exposure to the face of the other at birth, rather than the maternal-fetal relationship, that presents the paradigm case of how the vulnerability, singularity, and radical alterity of the other can promote our freedom and arouse our goodness. Th is is not to suggest, however, that mere exposure to the face of the newborn is at all sufficient to enable such a positive outcome to occur. Indeed, this is precisely where I think de Beauvoir’s emphasis upon ethical freedom as a real achievement, rather than something that simply is the case, is indispensable. For the birth of a vulnerable infant is certainly no guarantee that her freedom will be respected, nor is it always the case that she will “arouse our goodness” as the shocking number of neglected, abused, and abandoned newborns throughout the centuries and across vastly different cultures dramatically attests. It is certainly possible to argue that fetuses, as well as infants, are vulnerable, singular, and radically other. The vulnerability of a fetus may even appear to be greater than an infant’s in at least some respects, for its parasitic Birthing Responsibility

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existence within the gestational mother’s body makes it entirely incapable of existing on its own without ceasing to be a fetus altogether; it too, is an entirely new entity, even though it is located within the gestational mother’s body and can only be accessed through her body. And yet, the needs of the fetus are not directly expressed as are the cries of the newborn. This is a morally significant fact. This is because the needs of the fetus, in contrast to those of the neonate, can only be expressed and responded to through another body. Not surprisingly, this alters the type of responsibility anyone may have to a fetus as well as the ways in which it can be fulfilled. For example, during pregnancy a woman fulfills or neglects her responsibility to the fetus through taking care or failing to take care of her own body (eating and sleeping well, avoiding any drugs that may harm the fetus if at all possible, and so on). Moreover, a doctor’s or midwife’s responsibility for the developing fetus is also mediated by the gestational mother’s body. A medical intervention cannot be performed on the fetus without directly impacting the gestational mother’s body. The responsibility that birth mothers, significant others, medical professionals, and even larger institutions such as insurance and pharmaceutical companies have for the fetus is therefore what I would call a “mediated responsibility.” It can be enacted only by means of the pregnant woman’s body. Thus, in contrast to the case of the newborn, meeting the needs of a fetus does not require a direct face-to-face (or at least body-to-body) encounter. The latter’s needs are met (or unmet) through the body of the birth mother, whether or not she acquiesces in this task. Once the child is born, however, responsibility for the child must be assumed directly, even if, through breastfeeding for instance, its nourishment may continue to be provided through the body of the birth mother. This does not mean that a relationship with a fetus cannot also promote freedom and arouse goodness since it, too, is a call to responsibility. However, my point is that the maternal relationship as well as anyone else’s relationship to the fetus is completely altered by the birthing experience, because this is when the infant is first exposed to the world in her nakedness and hunger, making her singular, urgent appeal to whoever is there to witness her extreme bodily vulnerability. Not only is this appeal not made to the birth mother alone (as one might be tempted to argue, is the indirect appeal of the fetus to be cared for in utero) but if the birth mother is unconscious or otherwise severely incapacitated when she delivers the baby, she also may be the last person to be able to register and respond to this appeal. Even in the best of circumstances, it is extremely rare for the birth mother to be in any position to attend to the most immediate needs of the newborn herself, such as cutting the umbilical cord, suctioning out the baby’s nose and mouth to 116

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remove any ingested meconium, and so on. Not only do these needs often require an expertise that she lacks, but she is at a distinct disadvantage in fulfilling them even if she knows what to do, because she still has to deliver the placenta (or have it removed in the case of a caesarian section), and so the birthing process remains unfinished for her even as it comes to an end for the neonate. Though I am maintaining that a new responsibility emerges with the birth of an infant to and for that infant that cannot be mediated through the birth mother’s body, I am not claiming that the independence of the nonetheless extremely dependent infant from the birth mother’s body means that we no longer have a responsibility to her and/or to the other or others who assume primary caretaking responsibility for that infant. Indeed, as Kittay urgently reminds us: “to nurture a dependent being well, and without damaging the nurturer, requires that the nurturer herself be nurtured.” Kittay’s model of “nested dependencies” expresses well the numerous and complicated relationships of dependency that connect birth mothers with infants, as well as significant others, doctors, nurses, midwifes, hospitals and clinics, the medical profession, drug companies, insurance companies, employers, and the larger society in which first the birth mother and now the infant live. Moreover, it is clear that every relationship of dependency carries with it its own unique responsibilities. While I do not want to privilege the responsibility specific individuals and institutions have to infants over all other responsibilities they may have, I am suggesting that there is a unique moral significance to the relationship all of these entities sustain (albeit in different ways) with a newborn infant precisely because her naked needy body must be cared for by others. Moreover, this can only be done with deliberate and explicit effort; the infant can no longer be cared for through caring for the pregnant woman’s body (even if the latter activity undoubtedly helps her to care for the infant). The pregnant body, however, is hardly incidental to this new responsibility that must be assumed from the moment of birth for the physical, psychical, and social flourishing of the infant. Indeed, one thing that makes the birthing experience especially unique from an ethical perspective is that, although we all have many responsibilities to others throughout our lives, the activities of labor and delivery produce not only a child but also a responsibility to and for an other, even though it does not follow that the birth mother alone can or should bear this responsibility. The birth mother, then, produces through her body a responsibility that can and must exceed herself. As Lisa Guenther argues, “To be born is to be given to Others, such that I do not choose my own origin; further, it is to be given in responsibility.” If the gift of birth is indeed a birth (birthday gift?) of Birthing Responsibility

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responsibility, it is imperative that we properly recognize and value this “dual birth” in a way that does not fall into the trap of assigning this responsibility primarily to birth mothers over adoptive mothers, fathers, and/or significant others who come to play an equal or even more central role in the child’s life. Birthing Responsibility How are we to understand this responsibility to and for the infant that arises directly out of the expressive appeal of her face and flailing body, the ethical imperative that issues from her first audible cries? As a singular appeal that emerges from this particular infant, does it only appeal to us as singular individuals? Although Levinas concentrates on this ethical dynamic as it unfolds between two individuals in the face-to-face encounter, and although he stresses the passivity of this encounter insofar as he maintains that the obligation I sustain to the other I encounter is immediate, inalienable, and something I have whether I consciously assume or actively take responsibility for it or not, can we also make sense of the multiple and often impersonal, institutional, responsibilities the medical establishment of a given society, and indeed a society as a whole, has for both newborns and gestational mothers on a Levinasian model? To begin to address these latter issues, I will first call attention to what I take to be a crucial distinction: responsibility to an infant as opposed to responsibility for an infant. While I have already invoked both responsibilities, I have not yet indicated how or whether they are in fact distinct from one another. I do think these expressions, responsibility to and responsibility for, refer to different, albeit intricately related types of obligations that can sometimes be separated from one another in our relations with other human beings. However, they cannot be easily separated in the case of infants because of their extreme dependence upon others to meet all of their basic needs. Ordinarily, if I have a responsibility to another human being, this does not necessarily mean that I am actually responsible for him or her. For instance, while it seems fairly uncontroversial to ague that human beings have ongoing ethical responsibilities to other human beings (and, I would add, to many nonhuman beings as well), this does not mean that I am actually or directly responsible for the welfare of those other people or beings. One way of making this distinction clearer is to specify the different activities associated with these two types of responsibility. Responsibilities to others, I suggest, can be upheld by treating them honestly, respectfully, and caringly. To say that I am responsible for someone else, on the other 118

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hand, implies a very specific relationship of dependency where I may be legally, politically, economically, medically, and even socially obligated to make decisions on behalf of another person under the presumption (which can often be incorrect as the egregious treatment of so many disabled people clearly reveals) that she is not in a position to do this for herself. Responsibilities for others are not typically understood to be reciprocal. Indeed, I am usually expected to be responsible for others such as infants, young children, and severely cognitively and physically disabled individuals who are patently unable (at least at the time) to be responsible in the same way for me. However, I would also argue that responsibilities to others cannot be understood as reciprocal either, despite their binding force on us as human beings who co-exist, face-to-face, within one and the same world that we are all dependent upon for our continued existence. As the cases of infants, young children, and severely cognitively disabled people clearly demonstrate, the inability of an individual to comprehend or act upon a responsibility to others does not mean that others do not have responsibilities to them; indeed, the inability to assume a responsibility to another actually intensifies other people’s responsibilities to as well as for that person. While Levinas would most likely reject the distinction I am making between responsibility to and responsibility for another person altogether, insofar as a responsibility to the other seems to be simultaneously a responsibility for the other on his account, it is evident that there are different types of responsibilities that bind people (and institutions) to one another, and that it is exceedingly difficult to delineate once and for all when and where one responsibility ends and another begins. And yet, birth is a morally significant experience precisely because the very act of giving birth produces a new responsibility for a new being that extends far beyond the birth mother herself, a new network of responsibilities more accurately, that can be understood as moral imperatives issuing directly from the infant’s body. Even if there was unanimous agreement concerning the unique responsibilities birth mothers and those who care (or should be caring) for them might have to and for fetuses (indeed, the question of when and where responsibilities to fetuses begin and end as well as who exactly has them have been perennial sources of controversy), the unique “bodily imperatives” that issue from the infant’s body did not and could not exist before the infant was born.

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6

Birthmothers and Maternal Identity The Terms of Relinquishment D O ROT H Y RO G E R S

Much is made of the nature of motherhood, particularly of the ways in which maternal identity is derived in and through our children, making our life choices, and at times even our sense of self, contingent upon them. The women I know through my daughter’s friends are almost always first “Morena’s mom,” “Jonah’s mom,” and “Lien’s mom.” Only after a time do they become “Diana,” “Rachel,” and “Mei-Xing.” We laugh about it, of course. So much of our time is spent managing our children’s lives and attending to their needs that deriving our identity from them in this way is just “more of the same.” But we also take this transformation of our identity—from self-directed women with responsibilities primarily to ourselves to an identity formed in and through the role of “mother”—seriously. We recognize and accept our parental obligations to our children, their need for us to provide for them, for their security, and their well-being. In some sense, everyone’s identity is derived from and contingent upon our relationships, perhaps most profoundly so within our families. Parenthood is so thoroughly life-changing that the ways in which our identity is derived from our role as mothers, rather than intentionally formed by our own actions and choices, are perhaps not really more pronounced; they just come more readily to our awareness. What happens when a woman is just “Someone’s” mom? When motherhood is deferred? What does a woman do when her maternal identity is derived from a child who is not present in her life? As Lorraine Dusky has put it, she is “a mother without a child.” 120

This essay explores such questions through the experience of birthmothers—women who chose adoption when faced with an unplanned pregnancy. Let me disclose at this point that the essay is in part personally motivated. I am a birthmother myself, and as I began research on the experience of relinquishment, I was surprised to see how similar my own experience is to that of other women. Like most birthmothers, my experience has been nonlinear and variegated, and my narrative/reflections do not march along neatly from point A to point B. Yet, by exploring other women’s experiences, I have discovered threads of commonality within them that provide philosophical insight, feminist understanding, and social/political critique, all of which I believe can be valuable to the readers of this volume. From “Good Girls” to “Good Mothers” Two developments in the feminism of roughly 1970–90 provide a valuable prism through which to view the challenges birthmothers face: the mantra adopted early in the movement, “the personal is political” and later critiques of the concept of the “good mother.” In this discussion, I have found the two to coalesce. Even in our relatively enlightened age, just about the worst thing a woman can do (short of working in the sex industry) is bring a child into the world when she is unattached, uneducated/undereducated, unemployed/underemployed, without the social sanction of marriage, and with no economic backing— in short, to become the much-maligned welfare mother who is assumed unable to be a “good mother.” Criticism of such women began percolating in the 1980s and reached a crescendo in 2009 as media attention focused on Nadya Suleman, the so-called OctoMom, and her decision (which most critics deemed decidedly unwise) to use reproductive technology to give birth to multiples when she was already the mother of six and dependent on welfare. The paparazzi descended, and death threats against her advisors ensued. Clearly, the personal does not become more political than this. The concept of the “good mother” is intertwined with the judgments we often pass when we picture the “typical” low-income single mother. While the “good mother” has been examined and dismantled by feminists, the concept still has currency in the lives of individual women, particularly among those birthmothers who opt to speak or write about their experiences. Birthmothers’ accounts of adoption, whether in memoirs, essays, interviews, or surveys, express remarkably similar feelings: a sense of obligation to be a good mother; fears about their ability to parent adequately; and the duty to do the “right” thing by giving their child over to an adoptive Birthmothers and Maternal Identity

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couple, rather than raise the child as a single mother without the appropriate social status or networks of support the western world expects of us. Birthmothers who have shared their experiences in interviews, surveys, or in online forums express a strong sense of having committed a grievous error by having an unplanned pregnancy. Particularly in the 1950s, ’60s, and into the ’70s, birthmothers reported seeing their status change suddenly from “good girls” to “bad girls.” There were serious repercussions, sometimes in the form of a rupture in their relationships with their parents who sent them to homes for unwed mothers; even more often in the form of abandonment by the males who fathered their child. Although sexual morés have become more relaxed since the mid-1970s, an unplanned pregnancy is still seen as a moral shortfall, a reason for embarrassment, if not exactly shame. Particularly in that earlier time, however, before Roe v. Wade, the sense of wrong these women felt carried over into their decisions—very often coerced—to give up their children. The perception was that if they were such “bad girls” they would most certainly be “bad mothers.” They had surrendered themselves to desire, failed to guard their virginity, to “save themselves” for that special man who would be their one and only true love. How then could such bad girls be good mothers? Such judgments were sometimes imposed from without, sometimes internalized. In either case, the birthmother’s main task was to “make things right.” As one birthmother in a religiously sponsored home for unwed mothers recounts, “They constantly reminded us that we had to atone for what we’d done, start a new life by hard work and prayer. They told us that, unless we hated our babies, we’d give them up.” Adoption and Parental Obligation With unplanned pregnancy, each option simply magnifies the challenge of meeting one’s parental obligations: Raising the child alone or with a patchwork of support by family and friends (assuming they are both able and willing to help) is not only overwhelming, but can be unfair to the child as well. The ability to parent effectively in this context is often contingent on an unprepared, unwilling, or unreliable partner or on the good will of family and friends, and/or on a capricious social welfare system. The idea of terminating a pregnancy brings far more soul-searching than pro-life lobbyists would have us believe and more anguish than pro-choice advocates sometimes care to admit. The abortion decision is fraught with a tangle of questions and uncertainties for many women: Is a fetus merely an organism with the potential for personhood or an honest-to-God person here 122

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and now? Is abortion simply a way of intercepting the formation of a life, or a means of actively terminating it? Politicians in recent decades have spoken of adoption as the loving, humane alternative to abortion. But accounts of birthmothers’ experiences show that they are often burdened by despair at the loss they have undergone, as evidenced by this woman, who was forced to relinquish her child when she was seventeen years old: My life revolves around my relinquished daughter. Wanting her has been the theme of my life. . . . I wouldn’t let myself have another baby for twenty-two years. I was doing penance and grieving, fulltime. I denied myself the joy of having another child. And, when I finally gave in to my last husband and had another baby, it was a catastrophe. The longing for my first child became unbearable. What I’d lost became even more clear. It got so bad that I wanted to die unless I could find and touch and love my Brooke, or my Susan, or my whatever-name-that-baby-had-been-raised-by. The pain of losing her had stayed with me—no, it had grown— all these years. Lorraine Dusky, a pioneer in advocating for birthmothers’ rights, expresses some of the same feelings more wistfully: The child was everywhere. True, I stopped thinking about her every hour, and maybe sometimes several days would manage to slip by when she didn’t come floating into my mind. But then something: forsythia painted on a greeting card, baby clothes in a store window, commercials for gentle Ivory Snow, safe for baby; my mother writing to ask what I wanted her to do with a dress she’d made for me when I was six or seven, a sheer pale blue with lace and ruffles; the gold pin my father gave me that once belonged to his mother. . . . All of these things would fill the secret pockets of my heart and head and say: fallen woman who gave her child away. I began to understand fully what it means to live with one of those things that time would never heal. I would always be a woman who gave away a child. Adoption may be the “loving” and “responsible” decision, but for a birthmother, it is laden with questions and has a long-lasting impact on her identity. Whichever choice women make regarding an unplanned pregnancy, at issue is parental obligation. It starts with mandates to embody the “good mother.” In developed Western societies, we cannot simply sling a baby on our backs and continue on with life. Nor can we dispose of the potential life within us as if nothing ever happened. Nor finally can we just leave a Birthmothers and Maternal Identity

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baby on a doorstep. And, given the complete dependence of children in the earliest stages of life, this is fitting. Are the burdens of childcare disproportionately placed on women? Perhaps. They are also enshrined in thousands of years of culture, literature, and faith traditions, and they face women full-force in the case of unplanned pregnancy. Aside from loving a child, parents are expected to: Care for the child physically, attending to its basic needs for nutrition, warmth, security, and affection. Care for the child materially, providing clothing, shelter, playthings, and economic well-being. Nurture the child emotionally, helping them develop a sense of selfawareness, identity, and confidence. Nurture the child socially, helping them develop healthy, respectful, and egalitarian relationships. Nurture the child intellectually, encouraging a love of learning and ensuring access to formal education as the child grows. Make the child’s needs and interests a priority, sacrificing your own well-being to do so, if necessary. Standards of how much is “enough” care/nurture in each of these areas ranges widely, depending on social and economic factors, of course. Material care in the developed world reaches a level far higher than has ever been achieved in earlier historical periods. In Western societies, we have all seen our share of overindulged children along the way. In contrast, many less-developed countries exceed the levels of physical care we grant our children in the West (assuming freedom from major famine or other crises), constantly holding and hugging their children, routinely sharing a family bed, and the like. Meanwhile, we in the West have what may well be a too-high level of concern for our children’s social, emotional, and intellectual development—witness all the smart-baby videos and computer toys out there for children who are not even out of diapers. At the same time, the standards we live with today— of an intense level of care and nurture for our children— are here to stay for the foreseeable future. These are the standards that birthmothers have imbibed or have had imposed upon them when facing the prospect of relinquishing their child. The last of these mandates, to make the child’s needs and interests a priority, even at the cost of your own well-being, connects most directly to women’s adoption decisions. In fact, the willingness to let go of a child for its own good has long been the mark of genuine and praiseworthy maternal love in the Abrahamic faiths. Note the Solomon story of Hebrew scripture: 124

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Two harlots came to the king, and stood before him. The one woman said, “Oh, my lord, this woman and I dwell in the same house; and I gave birth to a child while she was in the house. Then on the third day after I was delivered, this woman also gave birth; and we were alone; there was no one else with us in the house, only we two were in the house. And this woman’s son died in the night, because she lay on it. And she arose at midnight, and took my son from beside me, while your maid-servant slept, and laid it in her bosom and laid her dead son in my bosom. When I rose in the morning to nurse my child, behold, it was dead; but when I looked at it closely in the morning, behold, it was not the child that I had borne.” But the other woman said, “No, the living child is mine, and the dead child is yours.” The first said, “No, the dead child is yours, and the living child is mine.” Thus they spoke before the king. Then the king said, “The one says, ‘This is my son that is alive, and your son is dead’; and the other says, ‘No, but your son is dead, and my son is the living one.’ And the king said, “Bring me a sword.” So a sword was brought before the king. And the king said, “Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one and half to the other.” Then the woman whose son was alive said to the king, because her heart yearned for her son, “Oh, my lord, give her the living child, and by no means slay it.” But the other said, “It shall be neither mine nor yours; divide it.” Then the king answered and said, “Give the living child to the first woman, and by no means slay it; she is its mother.” And all Israel heard of the judgment which the king had rendered; and they stood in awe of the king, because they perceived that the wisdom of God was in him, to render justice. The fiercely protective mother who is willing to fight for her child, to do all she can to guard its safety and/or her relationship with the child, is laudable. Every mother is expected to be something of a lioness, ready to fight off predators, to establish a safe and secure domain for her child. That was the main point of anguish in the film Sophie’s Choice: her failure to fend off the Nazi harasser and fight for her child or die trying. But the woman who would surrender her own happiness as a mother by entrusting her baby’s care to another, as in this biblical story, rather than risk seriously damaging or destroying it, constitutes another ideal. For centuries this story has been the gold standard of the genuinely loving mother. Such a mother has a love untainted by concern for her own well-being, with always and only the best interests of the child in mind. She becomes not simply a “good mother” but the “best mother,” the ideal mother. Birthmothers and Maternal Identity

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Birthmothers report hearing exactly this message. Giving up their children made them the best mothers they could be—under the circumstances. It is almost as if the only way to make amends, to do penance after becoming a “bad girl” and thus promising to be a “bad mother,” was to surrender the child, to become an absentee mother. Sometimes this message was imposed, sometimes it was internalized. In either case, any sense of loss she felt— of short-term grief or of long-term mourning—had to be set aside, denied. She had done what needed to be done to ensure the child had a life with adoptive parents who could provide the care and nurture the birthmother could not— or was perceived to be unable to provide— that was all that mattered. What surprised me about my own experience, and what other birthmothers report experiencing as well, is the way in which maternal identity develops and stays with you. A relinquished child stays present in a birthmother’s mind, in her thoughts, in her relationships. Birthmothers routinely report observing birthdays— sometimes joyfully, more often mournfully. They make birthday cakes and buy cards or gifts in the hope that they can bestow them if or when they have a reunion with their child. They look with longing at the one or two treasured pictures of their child, or, absent a concrete physical image, they clip a picture in a magazine, as Lorraine Dusky reports having done, convincing herself it was her child. Recurrent dreams and even nightmares are common: of danger or harm to their baby; of a kidnapped or stolen baby. One woman had a recurrent dream that she accidentally left her baby at a highway rest stop and could not find it when she returned. Sometimes a dream of reunion comes to reassure them. Birthmothers share common coping patterns after relinquishment. Particularly in the first few years, they may devote themselves fully to their careers, “trading” professional success for the loss of their child. As Dusky recounts: I threw myself into my new job [as a reporter]. I covered science and medicine and what-have-you from 8 A.M. to late afternoon. I volunteered to write reviews. . . . That summer, there were lots of times when I’d work a full day, come home for an hour or so, drive up to Saratoga, get back to the office around midnight, and finish my review between one and two in the morning. And be back at work at 8 A.M. You don’t have to think about much if you keep on running. Or so I thought. . . . But since I don’t have the child, I had better do something worth doing.

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Even professionally driven birthmothers may tend to sink into periods of despair, losing themselves in alcohol, drugs, or depression. I was perplexed to observe myself as I followed exactly these patterns: recurrent troubling dreams, nightmares, birthday observances, and an intense postadoption career drive mixed with depression and despair. At the time I had not read any of the birthmother literature, so did not realize that these were indeed patterns, quite directly connected to my sense of loss. Not surprisingly, it is termed “birthmothers syndrome,” and Merry Bloch Jones has identified it as being characterized by signs of unresolved grief, posttraumatic stress symptoms, diminished self- esteem, selfdestructive/self-sabotaging tendencies, and an either/or mentality. This is a psychological phenomenon with moral implications. On the surface, birthmothers are often able to function well. Their sense of loss remains, though, compounded by a sense of moral failure: First, they had failed the “good mother” test, so felt compelled to relinquish their child. Second, they find themselves unable to manage their loss with stoicism, and see this as a moral weakness on their part. There is simply something about being a birthmother. All the maternal energy that the self-help books and magazines alert new mothers to remains present in the hearts and minds of many birthmothers. Even in his absence—perhaps especially in his absence—my child was profoundly present to me. In a sense I was like any number of birthmothers, not just an absentee mother— one who either merely abandons or fails to attend to her child’s needs. Instead, I was a childless mother. I was constantly thinking of him; the stages of growth and development he was going through over the years; his health, happiness, and well-being. Many birthmothers report having the same experiences. Because they desperately wanted the best for their child but were unable to give it, they are relegated to merely dreaming about and hoping for the best for their children. But our sense that we are mothers persists. Models of Parenting It would be easy enough to dismiss birthmothers and our experiences as pathological. “These women need therapy!” you might say. “Just give them better social support, maybe some medication to work their way out of their grief. They’ll heal over time.” Merry Bloch Jones notes that many of the women she interviewed acknowledged that they might have had some emotional issues prior to their pregnancies that were exacerbated by relinquishment. Then again, so many of them were teenagers or young adults

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when they became birthmothers that the experience simply may have shaped their lives in ways that cannot be measured. Therefore, it might be difficult, if not impossible, for us to know which came first: the dysfunctions or the trauma. Because these feelings seem to be so common among birthmothers, we should not dismiss them too readily. The fact of the matter is that adoption as we practice it today is a relatively new phenomenon. Only in the past one hundred years has absolute relinquishment—the surrendering of any and all parental rights to a child— been widely practiced in the United States, as formal, standardized procedures in part of a larger child welfare movement. Forms of informal adoption and foster parenting have existed for centuries, but rarely have they involved an absolute break from the birth family, with biological ties completely severed. This is partly due to the “property model” of parenting we operate under today, which Janet Farrell Smith has wisely criticized. As Smith notes, the property model of parenting has roots in patriarchal traditions in which a man was the head of the household, who in ancient times held absolute dominion over his entire household, particularly the children, over whom he had the rights of life, death, and enslavement. Over time, patriarchal right/power was enshrined in modern Europe and then in America by casting the home as the private realm, outside the boundaries of the public/political realm. In the nineteenth century these ideals transformed into a “separate spheres” view, which held that hearth and home was the domain of women. Articulated most definitively by Hegel, in the “separate spheres” view, women were innately suited for their life within the home. They were internal and subjective, maintaining a natural tendency toward inwardness. They were also more emotive than men and with an intuitive (not an intellectual) understanding of morality. In this sense they were almost childlike in Hegel’s view, with natural urgings toward feeling and faithfulness, but without cognitive awareness of the ideals behind those urgings. These ideas were current in the common culture during Hegel’s lifetime, and he is the most prominent of the philosophers of the modern era to firmly enshrine them in intellectual life. Modifications of Hegel’s ideas developed throughout the nineteenth century, giving women a greater role in society as mothers and teachers. Prominent women in the public eye, such as Sarah J. Hale and Catharine Beecher, were among the idea’s most faithful proponents, rankling feminists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton to no end. Their reasoning was that as emotive, moral, and nurturing beings, women are naturally suited to teach children and foster both their spiritual and intellectual development as they grow. So, though mothers were not characterized as “owning” children 128

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as fathers had been, they were certainly seen as the prime movers in children’s lives. Women-as-mothers were directors of their children’s emotional and moral development and possibly even of their spiritual fate. Thus the images of the “good” and “bad” mothers we live with today. Political and legal developments in the progressive era reined in the excessive power parents could have over children, as child labor laws and neglect/ abuse provisions were established. But still, the idea that parents by and large “own” their children was put into place and still has force. And it carries over into today’s adoption policies and practices. Smith is critical of the property model of parenting, partly because it negates a child’s moral status. Yet she also recognizes that, given the realities of moral psychology, parents do feel a sense of possessiveness toward their children. I want to consider the “naturalness” of this model a bit as it relates to both the mandates of parenting discussed earlier and birthmothers’ experience. Developmental psychology has taught us that babies and children seem quite naturally to want— and even to need—to bond emotionally with their caretakers. This is true whether in the typical biological family, adoptive family, foster family, or even childcare setting. Even young babies express a great deal of distress if they are in surroundings unknown to them, without a consistent, friendly face, or a warm, familiar cuddle to give them comfort. Familiarity can be achieved relatively quickly with babies and very young children, of course, but the need for close, secure emotional relationships is a human reality. Smith casts it as a matter of role responsibility— of particular parents to a particular child. In a sense then, contemporary infant and child psychology and moral philosophy serve in tandem as the ultimate argument against Plato’s thought experiment about the wisdom of raising children in common. It is also a strong argument for the property model of parenthood that we operate under— at least in the sense that it provides deep emotional bonds that help children develop secure and loving relationships. Anita Allen picks up the moral responsibility argument as she probes the trend toward open adoption. She notes that there are other models of familial bonding that could reconfigure our understanding of parenthood, particularly as it relates to adoption. One is the “family fusion” model. In traditional cultures and extended family situations, the bounds of “family” are much more fluid. Parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, older siblings and/or older cousins often play significant roles in childrearing. A child’s mother or father still may be the most influential in his/her life, but the child also has deep bonds of love and affection with these other family members, relying on them for emotional support, momentary advice, or long-term guidance throughout his or her life. Birthmothers and Maternal Identity

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Many indigenous cultures have informal adoption practices, or even formal adoption ceremonies to welcome an outsider into their family network or community as a whole, practices which lead to lifelong bonds of commitment for both parties. And in centuries past, foster parenting and adoption was relatively common, though often without formal sanctions. Perhaps history’s most famous adoptee is Marcus Aurelius, who was raised by his grandfather after the death of his parents. Throughout history, foster parents, stepparents, or extended family raised countless children when early death due to illness or other contingencies of life made it impossible for their biological parents to care for them. A classic case involved the children of Sarah (Hooper) (Hawkes) and Samuel Wardwell, both of whom were charged with witchcraft in colonial Salem, Massachusetts. Samuel was executed in 1692. The couple’s property was seized to cover court and prison fees, and their four minor children were “placed out” to other families—two of them relatives. Grandparents or other family members raised countless other children when their mothers were young and unwed, spending the majority of their lives believing that their mother was just a much older sister. But over time, the property model of parenthood began to make headway. The political/legal world began replacing these informal models of foster parenting with formal, legal structures, in the interest of assuring sound family structures. By the mid–twentieth century, home visits and detailed profiles of both birthparents and would-be adoptive parents had become standard. In many ways, this is fitting. Children need and deserve a loving, nurturing household. Visits by adoption professionals and other seemingly bureaucratic measures are meant to protect children’s interests. Ostensibly, they also assure that a young woman placing her child is doing so of her own free will. Allen recognizes not only that there are precedents for the family fusion model—precedents that I will add are deep-rooted and have long been considered “natural”—but also that it is more humane for birthmothers and less mysterious for adoptive children. Open adoption policies of the past thirty or so years have aimed to serve this purpose—to make adoption more humane and less mysterious for all involved. Today’s openly adopted children have access to their birthparents. In some cases, they even have nicknames or special titles for them, such as “Birthmom” or “First Mom.” Birthmothers and their advocates are pleased with this trend and recommend increased openness. Lorraine Dusky struggled to open adoption files for years in the mid-1970s and early ’80s, chronicling the early years of that struggle in Birthmark. After reporting on both women who had experienced standard closed adoption procedures and women who were 130

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experiencing open adoption, Merry Bloch Jones goes so far as to suggest that cooperative parenting is a model to consider, although some birthmothers themselves have noted that open adoption can serve as a means for them to “hang on” to their child. Open adoption does not provide a guarantee that women will automatically be at peace with their decision. As one birthmother observed, there is no such thing as immunization from the pain inherent in relinquishing a baby. While there is some discussion of the ways in which an adopted child’s life and experiences can be enriched in an open adoption setting, parental obligations to their children do not seem to me to be fully considered and taken seriously. It is not difficult to imagine some of the ways that the interests and priorities of birthparents and adoptive parents can conflict in open adoption settings. Short of allegations of neglect or abuse, when conflicts do arise, whose interests and priorities should prevail? In adoption controversies, the courts have demonstrated a preference for biological ties— particularly when birthfathers have surfaced to assert parental rights to the child after charging that they were not informed of the adoption decision. As the consenting biological parent who signed adoption papers, birthmothers have not prevailed in any of the high-profile adoption controversies in the past twenty-five years. In the famous Baby M surrogacy case, the biological mother was granted only visitation rights, not custody—not because she had contracted to bear her child for the adoptive couple, but because both she and the adoptive father had biological ties to the child. In this case, the court essentially forced an open adoption arrangement on the parties involved. But in other high-profile cases—Baby Jessica (1993), Baby Richard (1995), and more recently the Vaughn family’s case in Indiana (2010)—the courts have reverted to a sole-custody decision, which is deeply grounded in the property model of parenting. Drucilla Cornell criticizes the either/or nature of granting all parental rights to adoptive parents and no rights, not even some version of shared custody, to birthparents. A shared custody model is certainly not free of its own set of complexities. The everyday emotional tugs and pulls of managing the birth/adoptive parent relationship can be unexpectedly challenging, as this account demonstrates: The agency encouraged prospective adoptive parents to meet birth parents and offer to provide letters and photographs throughout the child’s life. Fearful of not being selected to adopt, Sue and Brad reluctantly met [their baby’s] unmarried expectant birth parents, Jill and Chris. Jill was a retail clerk and Chris was a college student. The foursome Birthmothers and Maternal Identity

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“clicked” and agreed with enthusiasm and relief to proceed with the adoption. Sue and Brad offered to provide letters and photographs. After Jill gave birth to Lynn, Sue proposed that visits with Lynn might ease Jill’s considerable emotional pain at being unable to muster the emotional and financial resources needed to keep her baby. Sue and Brad presumed that only a few visits would be required to assist Jill, while Jill presumed that the door had been opened to ongoing contact. After the initial few visits, it seemed to the adoptive parents, Sue and Brad, that . . . Jill clearly wanted more contact and connection among the group than the other three adults. For example, Jill wanted her stepsisters and an uncle in another state to meet Lynn. Jill wanted Brad and Sue to attend a musical event in another city in which Jill’s best friend was performing. Chris was not especially attentive to Lynn. He fell asleep during one visit . . . Sue and Brad came to doubt their abilities to raise Lynn competently, as one of four cooperating parents, each with issues and needs of his or her own. . . . Sue and Brad believed their family would be better if they limited contact with Chris and Jill to an exchange of letters and photographs a few times a year, as originally agreed. Perhaps not surprisingly, Jill, the birth mother, was upset by the decision to discontinue face-to-face visits. Neither Sue nor Brad felt that they had made promises. Jill felt that she had been misled by the agency, Sue, and Brad— perhaps intentionally. The four parents nonetheless planned and participated in a final face-to-face visit, shortly after Lynn’s second birthday. Thereafter, using the adoption agency as an intermediary, Sue sent photographs and letters to Jill and Chris two or three times a year. When this sort of stress manifests itself in the relationship between birthparents and adoptive parents, it would make plenty of sense for the adoptive parents to curtail their interactions with the birthparents— or even to terminate their relationship altogether. From a legal standpoint, the birthparents could easily be relegated to the status of any estranged member of one’s extended family, like the aunt who lives in the next town, but whom you have not seen in twenty years and might not even recognize on the street. Would this be fair to the birthparent? To the child? Maybe, or maybe not. But with the property model of parenting we operate under, it is certainly within the rights of parents to do what they consider best for

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their child. If that means altering or ending a relationship with a friend or family member, so be it. The family fusion model—like open adoption, shared custody, or cooperative parenting—invites exactly these sorts of complexities, if not conflicts. We can easily imagine that in our litigious society, in extreme cases one party might take the other to court: the adoptive parents to curtail interactions, or the birthmother to press for a greater role in the child’s life. In simple extended family situations, an estranged aunt or uncle does not have grounds to take such matters to court. It is rare for even grandparents to sue for visitation rights, except in disputes related to neglect/abuse or divorce cases when custody rights are unresolved. In such cases, what should the courts decide? Should they favor the biological parent, who has presumed natural ties to the child, but little to offer it in terms of emotional or material stability? Or should they privilege the adoptive parents, who have the benefit of not only parental rights in the legal sense, but who in most respects will have more social, economic, and political power than birthparents? Allen recognizes that socioeconomic factors are the basis of the biases infused into the discussion of adoption. To counter this bias, she insists that birthmothers must be considered the moral equivalents of adoptive parents, deserving of equal concern and consideration if or when a family fusion model of adoption is in place. Yet, she also recognizes the moral obligation of parents to provide reliable and consistent care to their children. If we consider the example of the adoptive parents, Sue and Brad, it appears that this was a primary concern of theirs as well. Birthmothers and Social/Emotional Mobility Allen’s conclusion is that open adoption is problematic because of the difficulties it creates for adoptive parents. Open adoption is also problematic because of the difficulties it creates for both adopted children and birthparents. If expectations are not made exceptionally clear and agreements not put into writing, open adoption can very easily muddle a child’s sense of self. Children’s need for consistent reliable care by a particular set of parents is paramount. We do not need to hold a static, traditionalist view that the only acceptable family structure is the picture-book image of the squeaky-clean nuclear family living in the suburbs in the 1950s in order to hold this view. Families can and should be dynamic, but they need not be jumbled. And a fused family, with adoptive parents and birthparents trying to choreograph a delicate dance of parental care and authority, or an

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unintentional struggle for the child’s love and devotion can make for a very jumbled-up experience for a child. In addition, the socioeconomic inequities that will invariably enter into the interactions of adoptive parents and birthparents complicate matters. Allen is concerned to speak to the discomfort that these inequities will present for adoptive parents. But as a birthmother myself who was in that very vulnerable place of having absolutely no economic means and little social power as a young woman who was pregnant, alone, afraid, and uncertain of my future, I would like to speak to the difficulties these inequities present for birthparents. I had not quite finished college when I became pregnant, and while making my decision, I worked at an ice cream shop where I earned roughly $60/week, half of which my parents needed for room and board. Coming from a working-class, working-poor family, I remember my parents resorting to welfare at different points in my life. There was the government food: big buckets of peanut butter, big long blocks of orange cheese, powdered milk, and instant mashed potatoes that tasted completely fake and made me shudder every time I tasted them. There was the option to participate in the then relatively new Head Start program, though Mama decided not to send me; “Kids grow up fast enough as it is!” she said. We were eligible for free or reduced lunch throughout school. Then in high school there were Dad’s unemployment checks, when the crash of the lumber industry and age discrimination left him without a job. But my parents never took undue advantage, were not those fabled welfare cheats, milking the government for all it was worth. In fact, they raised us with a strong work ethic and drew on welfare themselves only when they absolutely had to. So when I went back home to be pregnant and try to decide what to do, I reluctantly followed suit. I signed up for Medicare to cover my doctor visits. I also signed up for food vouchers through the Women, Infants and Children program. I looked at job ads for something more career-oriented and more lucrative than scooping ice cream. The news was reporting a 25 percent poverty rate in the state that winter, though, and the little bit of searching I did was futile. The prospective adoptive parents, by contrast, were a couple in their mid-thirties. They were both professionals. They were people of faith and active in a mainstream Protestant congregation. They were progressively minded, and they would always let my baby know he was adopted. They would be happy to consider open adoption. Knowing that open adoption was a possibility was comforting, but I opted for a semi-open arrangement instead. Their identities were unknown to me, but updates and pictures could be sent to me through my doctor. 134

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Allen talks of the need for adoptive parents to have their own emotional space from birthparents so they can form and maintain a family structure that is theirs—for each parent, for their child, for the relationship they each have with their child. Birthparents need that space, that healthy, critical distance, too. Once the first set of pictures arrived, it became clear to me that an open situation was less than ideal for me. My son looked so much like other babies in my family—that little round face, those slightly puff y eyelids— that seeing those pictures only fi lled me with longing and regret. I broke down and cried every time I looked at them. Later, my therapist cautioned me, wisely, that getting updates and photographs might simply continue to feed my grief: “Look at this beautiful little boy I can’t have.” She was right. Those pictures simply served as a reminder of my sense of loss, combined with what I considered grave moral failures—to be a “good girl,” to be a “good mother.” So I put them away and did not attempt to keep up contact. Like Lorraine Dusky and others, I found myself working to launch a career, particularly in the first decade after my son’s birth. It was an effort to fend off the vulnerability that characterized my experience along the way— during and after the decision to relinquish. Without emotional and social space from the adoptive family, I would not have been able— or at least not as able to do this. Contact with them would have simply served as a reminder of my own failure to be a parent. The reciprocal nature of social interaction would have set up a dynamic in which they were the strong, capable, in-control people, while I was the weak, needy, and vulnerable one. Perhaps over time that dynamic would have changed. But one thing is clear: Birthmothers need the chance to separate themselves from the situation, from their grief. Some critical distance is essential, so that they can move beyond the vulnerable state they were in when making their adoption decision and get a sense of control over their own lives. Conclusion The combination of the mandates on women to be good mothers, of the property model of parenting, and of the dynamics of socioeconomic class, make the adoption experience especially complex for birthmothers. In making their decision about relinquishment, birthmothers ask themselves (and others, by implication, ask them): Do you have what it takes to fulfill your parental obligations to this child? Do you have the physical energy and the material resources to care for him or her? Do you have the social, emotional, and intellectual maturity to nurture a child? Birthmothers who find themselves answering “No” to one or more of these questions then Birthmothers and Maternal Identity

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take what is to them the next logical step, which is to sacrifice their own maternal needs and desires in order to accommodate the needs of their child. If a birthmother is unable to take proper care of her baby, she must do the next best thing: entrust her or him to someone who is capable of doing what she could not do. Many birthmothers believe this is the only way they can fulfill their moral obligations to their child. Though the property model of parenting is clearly flawed, it does have its strengths. It allows custodial parents to develop strong bonds of attachment with their children. It also provides stable family ties— or at least ideally this is the case. The family fusion model has been practiced in centuries past and certainly has its merits. At the same time, open adoption, as a form of family fusion, brings with it a set of complexities that threatens to confuse adoptees, to impinge on the parental rights of adoptive parents, and to truncate the social and emotional growth of birthmothers as they work through— and with luck beyond—their grief as well as their emotional and social vulnerabilities. Interestingly, the two events that have given me the greatest sense of reconciliation with my own adoption decision each manifest these dueling models of parenting. I had my first moment of reconciliation when I became pregnant with the daughter my husband and I very much planned to bring into this world. I immediately went back into therapy to prevent any adoption-grief/baggage from sneaking into my role as a mother. I realized in those sessions that it had been eighteen years since I had made my decision to relinquish my son. Eighteen years is a lifetime—literally for my son, figuratively for me. It was time to forgive myself for failing to be a “good mother” so many years ago. I was now ready to embark on parenting for the first time—to operate on the property model of parenting. The second moment of reconciliation came when I had a reunion with my son shortly after he finished college. Meeting him gave me reassurance that my decision was for the best. He had lived just the sort of life I had hoped, with parents who clearly loved him and provided great opportunities for him to grow and develop as a person. He had majored in music and minored in philosophy. (He also got to meet one of my favorite baseball players!) When I met his parents, his mother whispered “Thank you so much!” when we hugged in greeting. After our meeting, we exchanged contact information, and we now write each other occasionally—the family fusion model. There is, of course, no perfect model of parenting. And, as my own experience illustrates, ideal types do not often exist in real life anyway. Just as with any form of parenting, being a birthmother is an ongoing process

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and demands patience, strength, and resilience. And, if the Eastern understanding of pregnancy and parenthood is correct, we are all just vessels that bring these little souls into the world anyway. None of us “owns” our children. Our job is simply to get them here safely and make the best decisions we can for them, however and wherever we can.

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7

What’s an Adoptive Mother to Do? When Your Child’s Desires Are a Problem M E L I S S A B U RC H A R D

Parenting can be a daunting project under even the most “ordinary” of circumstances. Although we make many assumptions about how our children will turn out, we can fully predict or control little about a child’s future. My partner and I undertook parenting unusually deliberately. We decided to adopt two siblings through social ser vices in our region. Working with an agency that did extensive and intensive training, we knew our children would come with some history of neglect and/or possibly abuse. After two years of thought, training, soul-searching, and angst, we adopted biological brothers in whose history DSS had found little evidence of serious abuse. Unfortunately, the history was there, but no one in “the system” yet knew. Being queer ourselves and living in a deliberately queered environment, we had already given thought to the possibility that these children, like any, might evince queer desires as they grew up (they were nine and four when they came to live with us). What we have found is that there is more, and different, that is queer here than we ever suspected. That is, given a broad understanding of queer as nonnormative with regard to gender, sexuality, and/or desire, parenting has turned out, for us, to be quite a queer enterprise. In this essay I explore the problematics of mothering/parenting when one’s children exhibit desires that are queer in ways, and as a result of events, that cannot be celebrated. This is a difficult topic for many reasons, not least 138

of which are deep and justified concerns regarding simplistic connection of queer sexualities/desires with pathologies, a tactic that has done much damage to queers and queer movements. I reject such simplistic tactics entirely, and I align myself instead with usages found in the queer theory of activists and scholars such as Kate Bornstein, Martin F. Malanson IV, Nikki Sullivan, David Halperin, and Denis Flannery, among many others. For these writers, the term “queer,” particularly in the active sense of “queering,” enables an opening of discussions and discourses that can lead to challenging dominant norms regarding gender, sexuality, and sexual identity in a variety of ways. This can be done in terms of challenges to the discourse of “labeling,” in which nonqueer, or not queer enough, identities are taken to be marked or fixed in ways that contribute to hegemony. Bornstein, for example, raises this challenge when she examines her own sex change: was she really a man before the change? Is she simply a woman afterward? Malanson signals this kind of challenge in his assumption of “the radical potentials of queer desires, practices, and institutions.” Halperin takes such questioning of the possibility of identities even further, saying that “queer” really is a positionality (rather than an identity) that “can be taken up by anyone who feels marginalized as a result of their sexual practices.” This use of “queer” politicizes sexuality, making it possible to use the term in an active way: “queering,” in a way similar to what we have seen with the term “gendering.” For my project, then, queer theory seems a useful approach, although obviously not the only possible one. What it does for my work is open up possibilities for understanding children’s desires in a much more complex way than just unfortunate, bad or wrong, something to be “fixed” as quickly as possible. Queer theory helps us complicate children’s sexuality by allowing us to recognize components of pleasure and power in their experiences of sex and even of abuse. Thinking through queer theory helps us see how much there is to respond to in children’s experiences of sexual abuse—the multiplicity of levels that desire works on, and that sexual abuse may come to overlay. It can help us value an abused child’s sexuality rather than responding to their abuse by denying aspects of those experiences because we find them wrong, disturbing, abnormal. “Queering” the discourses of child sexual abuse, and childrearing generally, politicizing these discourses and practices around sexuality and desire, opens space for us to understand more fully what has been done to them, and to consider more fully what may be good for them in the aftermath. One further value that queer theory has for such a project as mine, given the temptation for adults to simplify or simply banish what they cannot or do not wish to know, as Flannery says, is that it not only opens room for questioning the normative, What’s an Adoptive Mother to Do?

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but it “is wise and forceful enough not to impose lucidity where lived realities and cultural forces have rendered that impossible.” On the basis of these considerations, I use “queer” in the broad sense of nonnormative and/or marginalized in talking about desires of children, like mine, for whom sex and awareness of sex was imposed on them violently and abusively, perhaps by those responsible for their care and safety. I also use “queer” in the sense of challenging or transgressing norms in talking about what might serve as parenting practices capable of responding lovingly, effectively, and responsibly to the needs of such children. That is, I believe children who have been sexually abused are likely to develop queer (nonnormative) desires, and parents of such children will need queer (transgressive or counternormative) parenting practices to help children recover from or come to terms with their abuse. To explore these issues, I offer a set of questions and reflections on the complexities of mothering/parenting children whose desires are both queer and a problem. I turn first to a feminist theory of parenting articulated by philosopher Sarah Ruddick to establish general goals of parenting. From Ruddick’s work I derive the thesis that the basic goal of parenting is to empower independent persons who can function as reliable moral agents, which includes the task of managing desires. In this section I also include a brief description of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), since it often accompanies sexual abuse. I next offer an examination of concepts of desire and how those concepts might explain the perceived wrongness of children’s desires. After this I turn to expressions of wrong desires in a family, and then to contemporary interpretations of Aristotle and Kant to consider some possibilities for responding to children’s wrong desires and the difficulties of that project. Finally, I critique norms of both parenting and “healthy family” to show that in some, perhaps many, settings, the project of raising children will have to be transgressive, and we will have to be flexible in our understandings of success. I argue that queering parenting is necessary for children who have been sexually abused, and that it is most likely to be enabled through a supportive queer “village.” Parenting as a Project In 1989, feminist philosopher Sara Ruddick published the book Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace. In that book she articulates a discourse of maternal practice, outlining the work of childrearing in a systematic way, with its own technical vocabulary and a clear sense of the thought and skills that are necessary for its success: “I devise a very general description of maternal work in terms of the demands to which the worker re140

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sponds. These demands shape, and are in turn shaped by, the metaphysical attitudes, cognitive capacities, and identification of virtues that make up maternal thinking.” The Demands of Parenting Ruddick’s methodology, which I find useful for my project as well, begins with reflections on her own experience of raising children and finding that the normative expectations involved are confusing and counterproductive. What Ruddick offers is a broad theoretical approach to understanding parenting as a practice. Given this approach, she explains that in order for childrearing to be done well, three demands or goals must be satisfied: the demands for preservation, growth, and social acceptability. Responding to these demands, she says, “constitute[s] maternal work; to be a mother is to be committed to meeting these demands by works of preservative love, nurturance and training [of the child].” The first of these demands, preservation, seems both basic and preeminent. It demands that children be kept safe, whole, unharmed, and uninjured to the best of our ability; that they be preserved to live and grow. The second demand, for nurturance, follows closely on the first. Research shows conclusively that children who do not receive adequate attention and touch, encouragement, and support in their development may not in fact develop the ability to form bonds with others. An undeveloped ability to attach, or a damaged ability, leaves a child insecure at best, and at worst, damaged to the point of being unable to feel empathy for other persons or creatures. Perhaps the most controversial of the demands Ruddick identifies is social acceptability. In this era of emphasis on individuality and uniqueness, training one’s children for acceptance in one’s main communities may sound like heresy. But basic acceptance in a social matrix is necessary for any attempt to develop or express uniqueness, and the need to find a place to “fit in” is a deep one for humans. It may be that one’s children will reject the social groups that one has identified for them, but they will rework themselves to enable them to fit some other. An Assumption, and Some Alternative Circumstances I accept Ruddick’s basic picture of what the project of parenting is. However, Ruddick’s theory of maternal practice assumes, as most general theories do, that all other things will be equal. Although I think that Ruddick’s articulation of the basic demands of childrearing probably can be understood as What’s an Adoptive Mother to Do?

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universal, I also think that when all other things are not equal, the demands may look different, or be differently felt by both children and parents. Further, what it takes to respond to those demands will certainly change when the context is shifted away from our general assumptions about ordinary life. When the children that we are committed to parenting come to us, from whatever origin, with trauma, damage, and needs that exceed the norm, then our parenting must also move beyond norms in order to respond. Certainly there are ways in which the problems we experience are familiar to most parents: kids do not always want to follow their rules, they go through phases of not liking their parents, they throw tantrums. Certainly the work of parenting always requires some approach to the “problem” of desire; children must in general be taught to manage desires as part of their social acceptability. But ordinarily, parents have a bond and a trust built with their children that provides a deep and abiding sense of connection and a belief that things can somehow, eventually, be worked out. When children are removed from their birth homes by social ser vices/ child protection agencies, they suffer in a number of profound ways. The most obvious is that they lose their homes and their parents. Regardless of what those parents have done or not done, losing parents is always a traumatic experience for children, the effects of which children struggle with for years, if not their entire lives. Children also suffer effects from whatever caused the removal. The reasons range from criminal neglect to use of illegal drugs to outright physical, emotional, and/or sexual abuse. Any of these experiences can produce trauma, and the effects tend only to worsen the longer the damaging behavior continues. One of the things this means is that children who are adopted (or fostered) after being removed from their birth homes due to such causes are traumatized by loss of their home at the very least and probably damaged in other ways as well. This takes them out of the category of what “everybody goes through”— a refrain offered when people hear about difficult circumstances, like ours, and do not know how to respond. What it will take to preserve, nurture and train such children is in fact different from more ordinary cases. The demand for preservation may well include not just keeping them from accidentally falling out of windows, as in an example Ruddick uses, but keeping them from breaking windows and using the glass to cut their wrists or throats. The central task of our parenting really has been literally keeping them safe, from themselves, from each other, and occasionally us, as we reach the ends of our ropes. On the other hand, the demand for nurturance in the face of such trauma and insecurity has meant a constant and deep battle to convince 142

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and assure them that they are worthy of love, even of not being abused, in order that they may begin to accept nurture and respond to it in positive rather than negative ways. Rather than simply nurturing, we have had to drain ourselves dry of emotional and physical energy just in the effort to show them (literally, because just telling them can never be enough) that we are not going, ever, to abuse them. The demand for training in cases like ours is really a demand for retraining, since we must first break down the damaging “socializing” that was required in their family units, and the maladaptive behaviors they learned as survival skills. Before parents can teach such children to be acceptable members of their social groups, they must “untrain” the children’s habits of acting out to get help instead of asking for help; of closing off all access to emotion rather than allowing the possibility of being hurt again; of hurting others before somebody does it to them. More Alternatives There are, of course, many ways in which the circumstances of childrearing can be different from what is assumed as the norm in our heteronormative culture. Although my focus is on nonnormative desires in adopted children, it seems to me that other circumstances of difference will also require significant challenges to the norms of parenting and of family more generally. Children in the category of “special needs” often present the demands of childrearing in ways that might be understood as queer. For example, children who have disabilities may present demands that are out of the norm. Their demands for nurture may be significantly higher than ordinary, if they are, say, unable to feed themselves or use the toilet. Committed parenting for such children may entail queering the cultural norms regarding embodiment in order to support a child’s sense of being worthy of love and respect in the body s/he has. It may require challenging norms of acceptability in one’s own communities in order for the child to gain a sense of belonging. Desire may certainly present queer problems in families in which a child’s cognitive abilities are not such that they are capable of managing their desires, or even of understanding what that would mean. In different but parallel ways, biracial children and children of transracial adoptions often have needs that do not fit within the norm. Biracial children may find it difficult to “fit” if they cannot “pass,” so they too need parents who can challenge the community’s norms of acceptability and can support them in developing a strong and healthy identity. Some serious controversy has developed in transracial adoption practices over the last What’s an Adoptive Mother to Do?

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thirty years or so due to competing concerns between placing kids in a timely manner, which usually means with a white family, and finding placements in which racial and/or ethnic identities can be matched. Queering Parenting I: Understanding Wrong Desires Physical and sexual abuse of children is far more prevalent in this country than any of us want to know. Conservative statistics estimate that more than three million children are abused each year, and that four are killed through abuse every day. These numbers should stagger us, but because sexual abuse is associated so heavily with shame and guilt, this reality is kept under the carpet. Although a certain level of sexual feeling and interest is considered normal for children, those who have been sexually abused may exhibit heightened levels. Because sex has been “normalized” for them by this forced participation, they may display sexual behaviors openly and/or publicly. On the other hand, if they have been trained, often through threat, to keep their sexual behavior secret, they may give very little indication of sexual interest, or show their interest and feelings in roundabout, subtle, or manipulative ways. Whatever their particular way of showing it, it is generally true that such children have been sexualized: that is, their ordinary sexual development has been hi-jacked such that they are more than ordinarily sexual in their thoughts, feelings, behaviors and relationships. They are far more likely to have sexual, including bodily, responses to a wide range of stimuli, and young as they may be (in our case, even before our younger son came to us at four years old), they are likely to be sexually knowledgeable, although they may be unable to articulate much of that knowledge. Their sexuality has been, so to speak, “turned on” by their early sexual experience, no matter how brutal or unwanted, and it cannot be simply “turned off ” again. This means, then, that children who have been abused are, in the broad use of the term, queer. That is, they have nonnormative sexual desires and engage in nonnormative behaviors. They are queer in the sense that their desires do not accord with the norms of heterosexist dominant culture, and so are prohibited. The norms of the dominant culture allow for “exploration” of sexuality, singly and in pairs or small groups, but this is understood to consist mainly of looking (“you show me yours and I’ll show you mine”) and minimal, superficial touching. The norms, however, condemn children (especially under puberty) engaging in what is generally considered to be “adult” sexual activity: insertion of body parts or objects vaginally 144

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or anally, licking or sucking genitalia. When children desire and do these things, they are queer. However far American culture has come in accepting queer sexuality of some types, this is a queer that is rather uncontroversially considered wrong. It is considered wrong for children even to have such desires, and wrong for them to act on them. The wrongness is understood vaguely but firmly as moral as well as developmental. The developmental aspect of wrongness is in terms of physical and emotional well-being: children under the age of puberty are considered too young to deal with the physical effects of sex, since their bodily orifices, for example, are too small, and the emotional effects, since they have no emotional distance from their experiences and no developed sense of self through which to resist. The developmental wrongness of children’s sexual activity is believed to be relatively well understood in the fields of mental health and social work. The moral wrongness is much less clear, perhaps because our moral discourse is, I would argue, generally weak. Giving Meaning to Desire Desire is a difficult concept to begin with, as we tend to be uncertain about where it is, how it works, and what it actually does for us. There is no strong consensus in philosophy regarding desire, except perhaps that it tends to be a problem (not just for children but in general). In the introduction to his book Philosophy and Desire, Hugh Silverman explains that twentiethcentury continental philosophy sees two major options for the formulation of desire: one in terms of sex (traced to Freud), and the other directed toward power (traced to Hegel). The Freudian theory of desires usually interprets them roughly as appetitive, or as a drive. Contemporary drive theorist Clark Leonard Hull posits drives as motivations or desires created out of deprivation and driving the person toward behaviors expected to achieve what is necessary to satisfy the need. In Hull’s theory we can see some incorporation of the understanding of desire as lack. The notion of desire seen in Hegel, and, I would argue, Sartre as well, is as a need for self-affirmation or recognition through the exercise of power. Here desire indicates a fundamental impulse toward self-awareness or consciousness, which requires the coerced participation of at least one other. Because one’s own consciousness depends on the possession or mastery of another consciousness, desire becomes an impulse to control others, violently if necessary, in order to force their recognition of one’s (superior) self. What’s an Adoptive Mother to Do?

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A further trend in the history is the tendency to figure desire in terms of the notion of lack. Alan D. Schrift argues that this formulation can be seen throughout the history of Western philosophy, using Plato, Descartes, Locke, and Sartre as examples. Under this formulation, desire is made sense of by focusing on the relationship between the desire and its object. We desire that which we do not have; if we already had it, we would not desire it. Thus desire becomes an expression of what is missing, an impulse to move toward that thing or to try to obtain or possess it. This gives desire a negative quality, as expressive always of that which does not (at least currently) exist. A specifically sexual desire, on this understanding, might be an impulse to move toward or obtain some object or action that will enable sexual feelings to be enacted and/or satisfied. On the other hand, Schrift argues that there is a contemporary counterstrain to this line of thinking that can be found in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, but it also perhaps can be traced to such figures as Spinoza and Nietzsche. Here desire is figured as generally productive (Deleuze), as associated with the ability to act, especially in a self-conscious way (Spinoza), and as change-producing (Nietzsche). Schrift draws out in a very helpful way how Deleuze and Guattari figure desire less as a force or yearning directed toward a specific object than a field of play in which subjects and objects constitute each other through the workings of desire. Under this construction, desire is not an expression of lack but a productive, constitutive force that functions in the interplay between subject and object. This makes desire a much more social than individual thing, much in the same way, perhaps, that Foucault’s model of power is a social model. These conceptions of desire are of course much more complex than can be shown here, but they are useful in brief because they provide a context for understanding what it means to say that children’s desires are wrong desires. Having some model(s) for desire, we can indicate how those desires might go wrong, and why we tend to be uncomfortable with children expressing desires that are considered both sexual and appropriate only to adults. Giving Meaning to Wrongness Consensus in the contemporary field of sexual ethics claims that what is morally wrong in human actions generally will also be morally wrong in sex. In a very broad sense, we can say that the basic moral requirement is that we simply accept and follow the norms/rules of the culture, unless we

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can justify doing otherwise. More specifically, three norms are perhaps particularly important in their carryover into the sexual domain: the no harm principle, the problem of perversion, and the need to respect/protect autonomy. This suggests three very broad claims regarding the wrongness of sexual desires. One is that desires are wrong when they include the desire to harm or the need to harm in order to be satisfied, and, given what Robert Solomon calls the “liberal sexual mythology,” if they are satisfied nonconsensually. Issues of consent are, of course, notoriously controversial, and even more so when children’s consent is involved. Whether and under what conditions children can genuinely give consent is a matter of ongoing dispute. Wrong desires under this claim would include desires that are (too) coercive, or that attempt to coerce the wrong persons, and again, desires that harm or desires to harm the wrong persons or to do too much harm. The second claim regarding wrongness of desire regards those falling under the category of “perversion.” These are desires that “disturb” ordinary (normative) sensibilities by going against the dominant culture’s standards of ordinary and acceptable behaviors. These standards are often unarticulated or incompletely articulated, but function in an “I’ll know it when I see it” way, usually based on the feelings of disgust or revulsion that are a large part of people’s responses to what they see as perverse. Although many contemporary theorists in sexual ethics argue that perversion is an obsolete category because we have learned that some things previously thought perverse should not be (e.g., same-sex sex), it seems clear that mainstream culture has not yet fully made this leap. Consequently, I would argue that we still need a good understanding of how perversion “works” to identify and condemn actions as wrong, and that offered by Mortimer Kadish seems useful in its grounding of perversion in the moral sensibilities of a community, whose identity perversion threatens. Finally, desires are seen as wrong when they damage or obstruct any person’s ability to exercise proper autonomy (that is, autonomy that is age and ability appropriate, and does not restrict another person’s similar ability to exercise autonomy). Autonomy is obviously tied to consent, but it is important enough in our moral standards to warrant separate consideration. We understand autonomy to be an important feature in our ability to form and maintain relationships, to set goals and life-plans, to construct ourselves as individuals and to choose moral values. We see it as a fundamental feature of our humanity, deserving of respect and protection when necessary. Desires that are wrong in terms of autonomy might include those that sever or damage connection or the ability to connect; desires that undo

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or unmake others coercively; desires that constrain the subjectivity of the desired, or that burden or disrupt the consciousness or emotional life of the desired; desires that disrupt or destroy positive value; and finally, desires that objectify too strongly, or in too instrumental a way. I see children’s sexual desires as falling mainly into two categories, given this depiction of wrongness. Perhaps most obviously, their desires “disturb” normative sensibilities, by twisting around or turning away from ordinary or “correct” behavior. Examples of this kind of wrong desire include, for example, the desire to play with and/or taste or eat feces or the desire to engage in sexual behavior with family members, stuffed toys, or animals. For some, children having and exhibiting “real” sexual desire as opposed to just “ordinary” sexual curiosity is already disturbing, so much so that adults who perceive it may simply deny its existence, leaving children who may need help without it. The other way that children’s desires tend to be wrong is in their use of tactics of manipulation, coercion, and instrumental objectification, which may violate either the no harm principle or the requirement of respect for autonomy. These wrongs tend to be a fairly direct result of ordinary behavior modeling. If the behavior they have had for a model is wrong in these ways, the children will take on wrongness in the belief that it is simply what everyone does. Further, the more chaotic and unstructured their early and formative upbringing, the more likely children will be to develop a desire to control others around them, including adults. This desire may also come partly as a matter of modeling, since abusers tend to be controlling, but could function as a survival tactic as well. Children learn that if they can manipulate, for example, by deflecting punishment or abuse onto others, or even by acting as accomplices in the abuse of others, they may escape some of the damage that would otherwise be directed toward them. Of course, wrong desires exhibited by children who have suffered abuse and/or neglect at the hands of others may well form in response to desires directed at them by those others, often older family members. When adults or older children abuse children, they are acting on wrong desires themselves. Again, these desires may be wrong in terms of their being either contrary to norms (“perverse”), coercive or harmful, or both. The wrong desires of adults toward children also reflect the different conceptions of desire. For example, wrong desire toward children may stem from a deep sense of lack, of insufficient self-worth. Perhaps a sense of the value of children as a hope for the future kindles desire in an adult to take that hope for him or herself in a forceful, bodily way. Such a desire would

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be wrong in its destruction of the value of the child, its disruption of the child’s sense of self, its use of coercion and violence in an attempt to displace the subjective worth of the child onto the other. Adult sex with children may be generated by a variety, even a confusion, of desires. Some adults are acting out their own trauma on the bodies of children. Others may believe that their desires are simply ordinary sexual desires and that their actions will not harm the child, or that sex is an expression of love for the child. On the other hand, the felt need of an actual abuser to control may go deep enough to be experienced as a drive, a bodily compulsion, to obliterate any possibility of refusal from the child. Certainly many parents feel that they need to control children, especially when they are young and/or unable to either control themselves or respond rationally to requests that they control themselves. It can be strong enough, as alluded to above, to push even usually stable parents to the brink of violent response. Pulling together the discourses of wrongness and queerness is tricky, because doing so risks the misunderstanding that the two are interchangeable. But articulating the discourse of moral wrongness makes clear that desires that are queer must meet further criteria in order to be considered wrong. Desires that are wrong in that they violate the no harm and/or autonomy requirements may also be understood as queer: for example, in their nonnormative object choices (same-sex, adults, family members) and/ or nonnormative behaviors (hurting others or wanting to be hurt by others as part of sex, exposing themselves or masturbating publicly). Desires that violate normative sensibilities are probably seen as more “obviously” queer, again in terms either of object choice (family pets, household objects) or behaviors (keeping dirty underwear under the pillow, trying to watch others undress or use the bathroom). However, on the understandings of queer articulated earlier, this could be turned to advantage if our goal is to aid children who have been sexually abused, or have queer desires for other reasons. Queering the discourse of wrong desires, and queering the children who have them, may help us see the damage that is done in erasing the fact that children do have desires, that they are sexual beings and that they are not simply wrong on that basis. A queer lens may make it possible to see the desires as they are, to see the children who have them more clearly, and to respond to them more lovingly and fully, with less fear, without disgust. As Dennis Flannery has suggested, queering the desires of abused children may help us keep open the “problem” of desire for these kids, instead of closing off their desire and/or sexuality by imposing on them a reality that we prefer,

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simply because it is less complex, less disturbing, less challenging—less sexual. Queering Parenting II: The Intransigence of Wrong Desire In an article written in the midst of the “feminist sex wars” of the 1980s, philosopher Sandra Bartky takes on what were considered the problems, for feminism, of women engaging in sadomasochism. Her approach was more complex and considered than others, and she focused it on two concerns: one was the idea that sadomasochistic sex might be contrary to feminist principles in re-creating the power imbalances of the dominant culture. The other was what happens when one’s desires, for example to be dominated or beaten in sex, seem directly to counter one’s political or moral beliefs. The question was, as she saw it, whether one might have some moral responsibility to change one’s desires, or to suppress them, or perhaps at least not to act on them. She pointed out that desires seem particularly intractable elements of our identities, and even given new theories positing postmodern and fluid identity construction, changing our desires may feel like an impossible challenge. Bartky’s reflections on this latter problem have provided me with much food for thought as I have worked to sort through what appears to me to be an expectation that I encourage my children to change their desires. Of course, given the difficulty of such a task even for someone who has not been formed and constituted through abuse, what we are facing is probably a lifelong project for us and our children. Understanding desires and understanding why we might think them wrong is helpful, but we cannot rest there, because we live with the concrete reality of them and the behaviors that express them. Wrong desires in the family can take many forms, erupt in many settings, and figure in many relationships. In a support group we were part of as we learned how to “work with” the specifics of our children’s abuse, we came to realize that for these children, almost no desires were simple or ordinary. In particular, their sexual desires are mixed with more ordinary desires for love, comfort, approval, and attention. These desires are likely to disrupt the new family’s attempts to create bonds or be successful with the ordinary demands of childrearing. Preservation may be difficult due to the child’s sense of lack of worth and the seemingly random and bizarre ways s/he may express that desire for worth in the new family. Nurturance may be hampered by the child’s conflicting desires for both love and rejection: loving the new family may feel like disloyalty to the birth family, and the fear of not receiving love may lead the child to rebuff 150

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bonding in order to avoid the possibility of being rejected and hurt. Two desires have been especially problematic for us: the sexual desire that is directed toward parents, and the desire for extreme and/or inappropriate control. On Being the Object of Wrong Desire When children are abused by adults, especially by parents or parental figures, they may develop sexual desires for those adult figures, whether they wish to or not. One way that the foster or adoptive family of such children is queered, then, is through the child’s wrongly directed desire, or differently said, through the child’s wrong “choice” of sexual object. Although it is often difficult for outsiders to believe ( just as many “straight” persons find it difficult to believe that same-sex desire can be real), this desire is strong, very real, and truly sexual. Children whose desires have been formed through sexual abuse to want sex with adults may continue to desire sex/ sexual contact from the adults/parents in their lives. Again, they may not be able to separate the sexual contact from more ordinary affection, and become angry or feel rejected by the new parent’s refusal to provide the kind of physical intimacy they feel they need. If this contact does not seem immediately forthcoming, some children will attempt to re-create the circumstances in which they were used to receiving it. However they do this, for a child to experience and exhibit sexual desire for a parental figure or other adult is queer in roughly the same way that same-sex desire or a fetish for underwear is queer: the object of the desire is, in terms of the norms of the dominant culture, wrong. If this desire is complicated with a further desire for sexual activity that is violent, painful, or harmful, it is even “more queer.” This queerness is, or can be, experienced in the family not just in terms of the adults’ understanding that they are being figured as objects of desire. For a parent, being an object of wrong desire—sexual desire from one’s child—is a complex and difficult experience that seems to require being drawn into that queerness to some extent. However, this queer desire is almost universally felt by its object as confusing and inappropriate at least; at worst, repulsive and unintelligible. We are, after all, strongly conditioned to revile a desire that if consummated would be named as incest. But being a parent and being committed to meeting the demands of childrearing means that one is not free simply to turn away from that queer desire, especially if it appears to be wrong as well. If we are committed, we must maintain open acceptance toward the child as that child is, in order to assure the child that we are not going to desert her because, or even though, What’s an Adoptive Mother to Do?

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she is wrong in her desire. To reject a child on the basis of these wrong desires would be similar to rejecting a child on the basis of her exhibiting same-sex desires. If the one is not an acceptable parenting response, the other must not be either. In fact, we have to become familiar and conversant with wrong desire in order to help our children recover from abuse. We cannot responsibly ignore it, hoping that they will grow out of it. Neither can we attempt to force a change in their desires, since this would itself be abusive as well as futile. It seems to me that helping abused children will require understanding not just that they have such a desire (or whatever queer or wrong desire they may have), but also learning to see what it expresses about the child’s experience and sense of self, what it might tell us about who that child is, here and now. This means we will have to become particularly good at managing our own desires, because we will have to be able to do many things that we will not wish to. We have to be able to live in, to stand in the wrongness without becoming wrong ourselves, and without condemning the children who are wrong in their desires. Desires Out of Control The other major queer desire the abused child may bring to the family is the desire to be in control. This desire is queer in that it upends the ordinary relationships of power in the family. The ordinary expectation, as spelled out in the demands of childrearing, is that adults/parents are in charge of children and have responsibility for their well-being, nurture, growth and training. Our usual understanding of this is that children are not yet capable of understanding their own or others’ needs, their own or others’ short or long-term interests. Consequently, part of the charge of parenting is to protect those needs and interests while at the same time teaching the child the skills necessary to eventually choose and act for herself in a reliably moral and responsible way. Children who have suffered abuse in their families, however, may have responded by forming an intense desire to be in control. This may take the forms of “bossing” others, including adults, anticipating directives and acting before receiving instructions or permission, or undermining the authority of adults through manipulation, misdirection, or even flat-out refusal. Children in whom this desire is especially strong may deliberately break rules or act counter to instructions in order to show that they are in charge and that adults cannot effectively tell them what to do. The queerness of this desire is more complex than it appears. Although the desire is manifested as wanting to control, child therapists tell us that 152

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a deeper desire is being expressed here. Contemporary attachment theory reports that most children feel insecure and unsafe when the adults around them seem not to have control of the environment. Since children depend on adults for their safety, if those adults appear unable to manage events adequately, children are likely to attempt to secure their own safety by attempting to take control. Since sexual abuse often occurs in an ambience of uncertainty or even chaos, children who suffer it often develop an exaggerated (in the sense of its being unusual) desire to control adults, as a tactic of satisfying a deeper desire for security and predictability. In the family, this queer desire may go unrecognized, depending on the child’s tactics and skills. If the child expresses this desire openly, it may take the form of power struggles on one hand, or exaggerated “care-taking” on the other. If the child is manipulative, however, this desire may be expressed in ways that cause unease but are difficult to pin down. Children may become very skilled at distracting adults, or at inserting suggestions that lead adults to act in ways they may not have intended. Such covert behaviors may be difficult to spot. They tend to walk the line between compliance with parental authority and rejection of it. Some parents report feeling that they are constantly being tricked or taunted in some way they cannot quite “see.” Like many desires, this one is queer when it reaches a certain level. That is, it is not unusual for children to desire control, and this desire increases as they grow and become more capable of handling it. But when the desire for control becomes compulsive, or it encompasses the wrong objects (for example, control over adults instead of control over self ), then that desire is queer. The desire for control, when it is excessive, is also a moral concern in that it expresses a lack of proper understanding of the feelings and the worth of others. This may again be a result of modeling behavior. If an abuser treats a child as an object for the satisfaction of his/her own desires, that child learns that treating others as objects is something that one can do, something that gets results, that gets one what one wants. Since many sexually abused children experience significant emotional detachment or “shut down,” they are more likely not to develop an ordinary sense of empathy. Consequently, they may understand that they are expected to care about the feelings of others, but not be able to; or, they may even find the expectation to care about others simply unintelligible. Such a lack of empathy greatly facilitates the use of others as instruments or objects, and obviously creates difficulties of desire within the family setting, as a child may attempt to use siblings and/or parents to satisfy desires for control, sexual or otherwise. Again, I refer to control beyond what is ordinary or What’s an Adoptive Mother to Do?

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appropriate, as, for example, coercing a younger sibling into sex, or using violent tantrums or threats (hitting, kicking, biting, throwing and/or breaking things, threatening to seriously hurt self or others, and so on) to get what they want. No Desire to Change I mentioned Judith Herman’s claim that abuse and its subsequent trauma forms and reforms (or deforms) the self. Her words remind us that our formative stages are considered profound, and that once certain milestones in development have occurred (or been prevented), it is very difficult to reform the self (short of retraumatizing). While cognitive science has begun to influence therapeutic work with ideas of neural mapping and synaptic pathways in ways that look extremely promising, I myself turn to some classical ethical theory for suggestions about what changes might be possible— or even desirable—in these embedded desires, and what it would require to make them. Following recent interpretations of Kant and Aristotle, I show that these traditions in ethics appear to make suggestions for directions to work in. But is what they are asking more than we can expect kids to do? Seiriol Morgan uses Kant to take up the issue of consent in sexual ethics, arguing in particular against Igor Primoratz that consent is necessary but not sufficient for us to judge any sexual act as morally permissible. Morgan’s concern is that “the complex and frequently dark nature of human sexual desire requires a certain kind of ethical sensitivity from us, and also places upon us obligations not to act on certain sexual impulses we might have, even if there is no-one who fails to consent to their gratification.” His argument obviously meshes with mine in that his concern is with both “dark desires” or what I am calling wrong desires, and with what it is that makes them very difficult to shift, or whether we should be expected to. It is not surprising that his argument should begin with human rationality (it is Kant, after all), but it is surprising that he reads Kant as saying that the “unsociable nature of our basic incentives emerge[s] from our freedom,” itself a product of our rationality. Th rough our freedom we have a tendency to develop a passionate inclination (desire) to express our wills as we wish, and to “accept no limitation on that will.” Thus we find ourselves in an inevitable, and apparently frequent, conflict. All of us “affirm [our] choices as of supreme importance, and . . . chafe when those choices are thwarted by others.” The upshot is, according to Kant, that we respond to this conflict by developing the habit of “striving” to impose our wills on others, and subordinate their wills to our own. This 154

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means, of course, that we develop a habit of treating others as means mostly, rather than as ends, and Kant characterizes this attitude of superiority toward others as self-conceit. Further, self-conceit is obviously selfdeceptive, since on Kant’s view there is no reason that justifies the elevation of one’s own will and desires over those of someone else. Even worse, through this self-conceit we “take pleasure in feeling ourselves superior to others, and we can enormously enjoy their humiliation,” to the point of inflicting pain, harm, and even killing. These are dark desires indeed. For my project, two points are especially useful in Morgan’s interpretation. One is that, as others also do, he points to the connection between desire and plea sure; that is, desires are directed toward pleasures, either immediate or longer term. Second is that the phenomenon of self-conceit creates a condition of competition in societies, and that means our selfworth is grounded in a comparison with others. Because this self-worth is unstable, being not under our rational control, we are threatened by the success of others, motivated to attempt to assert our wills at their expense. On this line of thinking, then, wrong (dark) desires arise out of an experience of threat, instability, and self-deception. Wrong desires are those directed toward pleasures that do not properly recognize or respond to the human value of the other, making it possible (even easy) to treat others as means merely, or at least mostly. This interpretation accords with my argument that desires are wrong on the basis of their undermining autonomy, coercing, and/or treating others as means or instrumentalizing them. But because Morgan reveals the moral psychology at work in the dark desires, we can get a sense for what it might take to “right” those desires, if Kant’s insights are at all correct. If dark desires are grounded in a threatened sense of self (as certainly makes sense in the case of abuse), then what needs to happen is that the self be strengthened and made secure. If the reason that we treat others as means is that we are too afraid of their besting us to treat them as full persons, as ends, then security is necessary for enabling us to allow the “submission” of our wills to those of others. So children who have been abused and traumatized, then, need to be guided in reforming a more secure sense of self and self-worth in order to properly infer the worth of others as subjects, and not mere objects of desire. On Morgan’s reading, Kant’s suggestion seems to be that in order to change our desires, we must change our selves. In fact, this is in large part in line with what current trauma theory and therapy for sexually abused children says. One effect of the violation experienced in abuse is that children (and adults) tend to, and are encouraged What’s an Adoptive Mother to Do?

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to by perpetrators, see themselves as bad, unlovable, unattractive, incapable. Because they have been treated as objects (means), made into and used as objects for someone else’s pleasure, and because such violation and objectification is a forceful and fragmenting experience, it is difficult for abused children not to believe that they are worthless. Self-esteem is a major problem resulting from sexual abuse/assault (and of course from other violations as well). Much of the work of aiding recovery is in encouraging children to come to believe that they are, in fact, worthy of good things rather than pain and punishment. Kant, then, offers a useful understanding of the task of aiding recovery, but his account also points to the intransigence of wrong desires once they are in place. To change the self in any small way is often experienced as an enormous effort. To change the self in this way, to learn to trust the world and the (kind of) persons (adults, even parents) who have betrayed and violated; this is probably a lifelong project. One of the things that has been most difficult for us, as parents of deeply wounded children, is that not just the kids, but we will be doing this work in one way or another for the rest of our lives. As the project of self-construction is an ongoing, lifelong project in general, we understand that we will be supporting our children in this work for as long as we can. No Desire for the Good Aristotle’s work highlights the difficulties of working for recovery in a different way and on a different level, suggesting that what we need to change are the wrong desires themselves. Presumably not even Aristotle believed this an easy task; certainly his emphasis on the right teaching and training we need throughout our development to create the right dispositions indicates as much. But his theory of plea sure and desire presents at least an understanding of what is going wrong in wrong desires. Devin Henry offers a new interpretation of the “puzzle” of moral weakness, that is, the problem of how it is that a person can understand what is the right action, yet choose against his or her own understanding. Henry says that the traditional way of reading this problem is that the weakwilled, or akratic, person, either does not truly understand what is right, or else is truly overcome by the strength of desire, “to the point where we yield to it contrary to our better judgment.” This is not self-indulgence, Henry explains; the self-indulgent person “pursue[s] the excess of bodily pleasures because he is convinced that he ought to pursue them (or at least that it is not wrong to do so).”  The akratic or morally weak person, on

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the other hand, genuinely believes that he or she ought to be temperate, that it is a right goal, but is routinely or habitually defeated by desire. Henry claims that Aristotle’s work taken as a whole provides a different way to see the problem of moral weakness. A genuinely akratic person is not acting under a lack of knowledge, nor simply overwhelmed by desire. What Henry points out is that Aristotle’s theory of plea sure and desire implies that “genuinely akratic behaviour is due to the absence of an internal conflict that a desire for the proper pleasures of temperance would create if the akratic person could experience them.” For Aristotle, pleasures, the objects of desire, are associated with the activities that generate them. In addition, desire is required for action, including moral action, as knowledge or rationality alone does not compel action. But since moral action is action in accord with right reason (temperance), acting rightly or well involves more than simply knowing what is right: we must desire it as well. What true akrasia is, then, is a lack of right desire due to an inability to take pleasure in temperate action. This makes moral weakness something of a misnomer, since akrasia is not actually a matter of being overwhelmed by wrong desire, but rather a lack of anything that can contend or compete with it. What makes akrasia different from temperance (the person who always wants to act in accord with reason) and self-control (the person who is tempted by wrong pleasures but routinely masters the temptation because s/he is able to experience plea sure in abstaining from excessive indulgence) is that the akratic does not experience any internal conflict that would arise from the need to choose among different types of pleasures. As Henry says, the akratic lacks correct desire because s/he does not feel the (proper) plea sure generated by right action. For the “weak-willed,” then, it is not a matter of being weak, but rather of there being no contest at all. What the akratic does have is wrong desire, that is, desire for pleasures that are either “derived from an unworthy source (e.g. adultery)” or from “bodily pleasure in excess of the mean (e.g. if the proper amount of wine . . . is two glasses, and a person indulges in five . . . ).” What makes this useful for thinking about abused children is again, that Aristotle’s approach is a developmental one. This means that his explanation for how this state of routine wrong desire comes about is through “uneven or incomplete moral training.” Our moral training is not just a matter of learning and internalizing rules, but also requires “learning to take pleasure in acting in accordance with those rules.”  The person who exercises self-control against wrong desires is one who takes pleasure in defeating appetite, but this is a

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learned pleasure. For abused children, learning where to take pleasure may be utterly haphazard, and may come from models who are themselves akratic, or be distorted and confused by the trauma of violation. Being trained in excess through the intense experience of abuse will make it difficult or even unlikely that a child will learn to take enough plea sure through temperance to offset the pleasures of wrong desire. What I see as the problem for abused children is that the pleasures of temperance, of acting according to reason, are simply not as vivid as the pleasures that they have learned to take through wrong desires. Bad pleasures are probably made more intense through their badness; perhaps through the experience of transgression that may come with them, but also for abused children, through the fear that may accompany the “learning process.” Further, as Aristotle says, our training works to make these experiences of plea sure dispositional— but if that is the case, then learning where to take pleasure is self-constituting. If a child’s self is constituted (in part) through the intensity of experiencing not just wrong but even violent and dangerous “pleasures” which have been imposed on them by forces they are literally overwhelmed by, then what we are trying to do is get them to shift their desires to pleasures that are probably too rational to feel intense enough to be self-constituting. Further, this process of constituting self through our experiences of pleasure is complicated even more by the confusion, or conflation, in dominant moral discourse, of “bad” with “morally wrong” and with “queer.” This is a problem I believe queer theory has not yet fully addressed, and is still highly uncomfortable with. That is, there is no clear boundary (and perhaps there cannot be) between queer pleasures/desires that are “merely” nonnormative and those that are morally wrong qua harmful. And given that what is harmful may not always be morally wrong—for example, if it is fully consensual—the assumption that what is harmful automatically is morally wrong also comes into question. When we put these boundary issues into play with the problems of intensity of bad/wrong desires, the level of ambiguity we are working with in how to encourage children with wrong and/or queer desires to reshape those desires and their identities is itself enough to discourage almost anyone. Queering Parenting III: Challenging Discourses of Parenting The question asked earlier about whether desires can or should be changed is one that has an enormous impact on parents of children with wrong and/or queer desires. The demand of childrearing that we train for social acceptability appears to dictate that part of the project of parenting is to 158

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“school” desires such that our children desire rightly. When children come to us with deeply imbedded wrong desires, we must ask the question whether they can or should be “righted,” and it is no mere intellectual exercise. We must come up with answers. Further, we must be careful not to mistake “queer” for “wrong” in helping our children school desires. We must not mistake “normal” or “normative” for “healthy.” Discourses of “Healthy” Child Development As parents, my partner and I have learned more about developmental theories and standards of healthy children in therapeutic and social work than we ever dreamed of. Much of our learning has been in response to psychological, emotional and behavioral problems that we certainly never wanted to know about, much less become familiar with. Through all of it, as we have learned, adopted, and adapted information and tactics to help us “deal with” our children and our own responses to them, we have experienced some deep misgivings regarding what the project of “making” our children “healthy” seems to require. In the discourses of therapy and mental health, our children are among those described as damaged and sick; some of their behaviors are described as unsafe and unhealthy. The goal for these children is to be “turned around” (which implies also that they are perverse) and ushered toward recovery, safety (both in self and toward others) and health. Given the level of abuse some children have suffered, what this “turn” amounts to is the creation of an almost entirely new self. That new self would entail, evidently, new and better desires. The discourses of the practices that are dedicated to helping families like ours, then, also seem dedicated to eliminating (at least certain) queer desires. The tactics prescribed to make these changes sometimes make us uneasy. Current therapeutic practices include requiring that children (or any traumatized person) tell about their trauma in significant detail, essentially reliving it in order to create a new ending to the story. For our younger child, this telling traumatized us all, as he could not express it verbally, and most of it came out first in his behavior. Like many children, he expressed his trauma by attempting to re-create it. If we had not been trained to recognize what he was doing, I cannot imagine that we would have felt capable of keeping him at that point. Making children tell and relive their experiences is not easy. Some have built amazing internal walls around their memories and/or feelings to which they hold with a desperate tenacity. They may believe that they cannot survive a reliving of their past; they may believe that if they allow their What’s an Adoptive Mother to Do?

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past to be known to their new families, they will be reviled and rejected, betrayed again by the adults who said they would love and protect them. In such intractable cases, therapeutic practice can feel like nothing less than breaking the child’s will; that is, stripping children of all their defenses and forcing them to lay bare their deepest fears and pains. We are taught, and we do believe, that this is necessary in order to begin rebuilding, moving toward a new and healthy self. But it is intensely disturbing both in the violence that it does to the child, and in the totalitarianism it seems to require in the family. Because the desire and need to control felt by abused children is not just a wrong desire but also a dangerous one, parents are sometimes instructed to take away from the child all ability to decide or choose for themselves. This tactic is intended to show the child both that the parents are in fact in control, and that it is safe for them to let themselves submit to the control of the parents. In short, the strategies recommended for restoring or creating “health” for abused children sometimes feel like exercises in extreme domination. Not only is this is counterintuitive, given the demands of parenting for nurture and protection, but it seems also to be, in a way, queer. That is, it is parenting in a deliberately transgressive way, against ordinary normative patterns. We feel the queerness of it when our children challenge authority publicly and “ordinary” parents around us respond. We feel their disapproval of what seems unreasonably strict or harsh discipline. Often other parents tell us directly, “It’s ok,” that the kids are not doing anything unusual, that all kids are like that. Not realizing that therapeutic practice insists on an unshakable consistency in discipline in order to rebuild trust and enable health and safety, others, including family members at first, have exercised the power of social disapprobation toward us in a way that is similar to that directed toward a lesbian couple holding hands in public. We are made to feel our “wrongness,” the wrongness of making others uncomfortable regarding standards and practices of parenting. Is Sexuality in Children Always Queer? Others are also made uncomfortable by the openness with which we address our children’s sexuality. In fact, there are many who do not accept that young children even have what can properly be called sexuality, or sexual desires, although this is common understanding among children’s therapists and in child development. Still, even those who work with children on a daily, professional basis, such as teachers and childcare workers, may be reluctant to believe the extent to which children, abused or not, may be interested in and desirous of sexual contact with others. 160

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In his article “Feminism, Child Sexual Abuse, and the Erasure of Child Sexuality,” queer theorist Steven Angelides reviews the recent history regarding professional and popular understandings of children’s sexuality. He argues that this history shows clearly that child sexuality was taken for granted in many eras, including most of the twentieth century in the United States as well as in many other cultures. Further, during the sexual liberation movements of the 1960s and ’70s, there was open advocacy for the repeal of age of consent laws, and in some quarters, arguments against the bans on incest. However, Angelides reports, as the feminist movement of the 1970s and ’80s extended its analysis of rape as a crime of violence and power more than of sexuality to the sexual abuse of children, “a monumental shift occurred in the representation of child sexuality.”  In its emphasis on protecting children from violence and preventing blame from falling on victims of sexual assault, the feminist movement against child sexual abuse worked, however inadvertently, to minimize children’s sexuality. What this has created is a contemporary belief in the “innocence” of children, and the assumption that it is “abnormal” for children to “really” have sexual desire rather than mere curiosity. I am uncertain, myself, about where to stand in this debate. What I do know is that my own children have high levels of sophisticated sexual desire, desire for sexual activity that looks very “adult,” and have had since we got them (again, at ages four and nine). Whether it is normal or not, we have to work with it on a daily basis. While many parents are still uncomfortable with the “sex talk” that eventually has to be had with teenagers, we are regularly talking in very explicit terms about what kinds of sexual desires our children had at school today, what sexual acts they were thinking about, and how they handled those thoughts and desires. Though of course this is not something we share with many people, their teachers, for example, need to know some things in order to properly understand and respond to their behaviors, and we have on occasion had to work very hard to convince teachers that these “sweet little kids” could really “mean it.” Even family and close friends who are also parents have found it very disturbing to learn that children the same ages as their own could have sexual desires that are so profound. The thought that as parents they might have to address such issues themselves meets with distaste at least and revulsion in many cases. It does seem to be the case, as Angelides and others argue, that in mainstream culture, concerns about protecting children from sexual abuse have encouraged a strong discomfort with the idea that children can or should be sexual beings in their own right. Our family’s incorporation of child sexuality into our daily lives is often felt by others to be deeply challenging to the norms of parenting. Having What’s an Adoptive Mother to Do?

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sex as such a part of our family dynamic certainly is a queering of parenting work. Queering Platitudes in Parenting In so many ways, we have found that what we need to do challenges the norms of parenting. For example, we have learned that therapy begins at home. For us, parenting is therapeutic work. Having trained as therapeutic foster parents, and having adopted children whose therapeutic needs are profound, we have learned that no number of sessions with professional therapists can accomplish what we need. We continually run therapeutic analysis on attitudes, actions, innuendos, and language. We have often been told by “ordinary” parents that such surveillance is unnecessary, and even inappropriate. People are invariably taken aback, for example, when they find out that we have automatic doorbells on our children’s bedroom doors, seeing it as an unreasonable invasion of privacy. We, however, know from experience that we absolutely must know, at every hour of the day and night, where our children are. Not knowing leaves them unprotected from each other and themselves. So far, unfortunately, for us, a cigar has never turned out to be just a cigar. For us, the demands of parenting have to be queered, as we are training our children to be acceptable in queer social groups. This is partly because our groups were already queer to begin with, but also because we see that changing their queer desires is an unlikely project. It is probably futile, but more important, we would not attempt it simply because the desires are queer. What we are working toward is training our children to manage their desires. Like all children but perhaps more intensely, they have to learn limits around their expression of desires such that they do not impose them on others, do not use them to manipulate others, and do not harm others through them. In other words, reliable moral agency is our goal in training, not heteronormative desires. We have also realized, through trial, error and grief, that love just isn’t enough. Love is wonderful, but it can trap people in situations they can’t survive. Love can be used as a weapon, albeit unintentionally. So love by itself is not enough to meet the demands of childrearing; it has to be bolstered by commitment, moral engagement, patience, stability, and trust. If for some reason only one of these can be had, love is actually the least reliable, and so in fact the last in importance on this list. Perhaps we really began to think of ourselves as queering the practice of parenting when, among the notes we put up around the house to support ourselves when things get just too frustrating or discouraging, was this one: 162

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“Remember that they don’t have to love you. They do have to be able to trust you.” Concluding Thoughts in Queer Directions Fortunately, we have managed to build enough trust that we can work on love as well, and as we have queered parenting surely we must also queer love itself. It is not controversial to say that love should never be taken for granted. But in our case it is the quality of the love that we must guard ferociously, in order that it never be unconsciously distorted into the patterns that shaped our children’s lives so wrongly. We must verbalize our love, all aspects of it, so that it is never misunderstood by our children. They must verbalize their love for us so that we can continue to work on reshaping their understanding of how you love “correctly” or safely. We can never have our children sit on our laps, for example, or get into bed with us on Sunday mornings, because doing so confuses their emerging sense of personal, bodily boundaries, which never developed in the atmosphere of continuous violation they lived in. We cannot let them kiss or hug us, or others, without expressly asking permission, since they have only a fragile sense of the meaning or importance of respect for persons, having been formed without being respected. Severely sexually abused children may never be able to fully understand or “do” love without at least some sexual component to it. This is queer love when it is between friends, for example, or between child and parent, although as argued by Angelides and others, perhaps it is not as unusual as heteronormative standards would have us believe. But queering love, and queer love, is not what worries us. After all, successful lives are not necessarily heteronormative. Queering “Success” And so if successful lives may be queer, then we could also say that we have learned to queer success—to queer our understanding of what success looks like, in order to realize how successful we are. First and foremost at all times for us is the queerness of being able to say, with fervor and full hearts, that our biggest success is our children are not any longer being abused. It would never have occurred to me before this experience that a statement like this could represent for me, in a way, the absolute pinnacle of success in parenting. Isn’t that queer? Another example of success for parents like us is this one, which we heard in a parenting support group: A parent shared the story of her kindergartner, a boy who was reenacting his sexual abuse in part by persuading What’s an Adoptive Mother to Do?

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and/or coercing smaller boys to participate in oral sex in the bathroom stalls. After months of work specifically directed at getting this child to understand that this was not appropriate, and that he must not do it in spite of the fact, in his own words, that it felt so good, he was able to report compliance with the new rule. He came home bubbling with pride and announced “I didn’t suck anybody’s penis today!” We laughed heartily in group that day, feeling doubly successful: that his not sucking anyone’s penis is success, and that simply being able to laugh in our support group is a different kind of success. How queer is that? In mainstream culture staying together as a family is considered success, and separation usually seen as a sad and terrible failure, especially for the children. Our queering of success has included the turning around of this norm in two ways: the first, of course, when our children were separated from the abusive family they were born into. But the harder lesson of success for us was the one that required the separation of our new family, when it became clear that our two boys would not be able to recover from their abuse while they were together, as they were reinforcing and reenacting their trauma on each other. We were counseled to place our older son in a group home specializing in sexual abuse and sexual offense issues, and after we tried everything else, we did. The pain of this lesson continues to be enormous, but luckily, so has been the success: Being apart from each other has enabled them to turn their focus to their own pain and trauma. They have begun learning how to live in a world in which sex is not what makes them valuable and is not required in exchange for love. For us as parents, the success has lain partly in our not having to try to attend to the complex needs and pains of both of them at the same time. Our success includes having learned to ask for, and accept, the help (sometimes perceived as “interference”) of professionals in building our family and creating parent-child relationships that can be healthy. When we began our journeys in parenting, I myself was fully committed to the belief that separation would be a failure. Having learned not just to challenge but to reject this norm has made it possible for me, and for us all, to realize how limiting the norms of family are in general. For us, queering parenting and the family is what has made success a reality. Queering the System It has been said that it takes a village to raise a child, and certainly we have needed an extraordinary amount of support from professionals, friends, and family. We need, and have been lucky to have, a queer village. Rather 164

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than force our children to conform to heteronormative standards, we attempt to recruit queers into our childrearing community, and queer those who are already in it. We work to educate others regarding our children’s queer desires and our queer parenting tactics, so that we and our children can be intelligible in our communities. We have spent countless hours, for example, educating our children’s teachers and school administrators so that they can recognize our children as needing their support and care rather than seeing them as bizarre, unpredictable, and dangerous. Queering the village has become a major part of our parenting effort. In this task we have been reminded that in some ways the “village” rests on foundations that are deeply resistant to queering, to being challenged or questioned. Although we have been very lucky to work with many professionals who are utterly dedicated to protecting children and helping families with special needs, we have also had our run-ins with “the system.” Our experiences have taught us a number of things. One is that individual people working in the system are, of course, individuals. Like any other group that is generalized and stereotyped, there are individuals who are dedicated, concerned, and committed as well as those who are lazy, uncaring, and incompetent. So one trick to working the system is finding those persons who really are helping. By and large, our experience here has been good more often than unpleasant or disappointing. Another thing we have learned, though, is that the system is designed, whether deliberately or not, to shake people loose. That is, the procedures, language, and expectations of the system are tedious, complicated, officious, and definitely not “user-friendly.” The result of this is, predictably, that many people who need and are entitled to benefits and assistance will not get it because they cannot make their way through the paperwork and language required. Simply reading letters from Medicaid “explaining” changes in policy or eligibility requirements takes a level of time and effort that many working families can hardly manage. Our children are legally entitled to benefits and ser vices, but if we do not maintain the determination necessary to secure those entitlements, they will not be forthcoming. Consequently, another thing we have learned is that we are somewhat anomalous in “the system” in at least two ways, both of which are tied to very high levels of privilege. One is, as we hear from surprised social workers, teachers, and bureaucrats on a frequent basis, that we are very highly educated. My partner and I both have postgraduate-level educations that give us the skills to decipher most of the “officialese” that passes for “communication” from administrative entities such as Medicaid, Social Security, What’s an Adoptive Mother to Do?

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or the State Department of Health and Human Ser vices. Perhaps even more important, the privilege of education means that we already know that our children are in fact entitled to benefits, and consequently gives us the confidence to ask for, and in some cases insist on, what might otherwise not be mentioned, or obscured. Even before we have to bring those skills to bear, we have realized that we benefit already just because of how we look. We are white, and we have experienced white privilege far too often and too obviously to be able to ignore it. At DSS, at Social Security, in doctors’ offices, we see that we are often treated in ways that are different, sometimes quite subtly, from nonwhites in the lines and waiting rooms with us. This difference is not always deliberate, or even conscious, but it is undeniable nonetheless, and creates even more of a burden for persons who are just as entitled as we. Although the privileges of education and whiteness together are enough to make us seem almost as if we do not “belong” in the halls of social services, further layers of privilege are surely at work in making it possible for us to “get what we deserve.” We “look right” not just because we are white, but also because we can pass easily for a heterosexual couple. Being queer in ways that do not show means that we never have to endure the disapprobation and self-righteousness of “gatekeepers” who have the ability to make the experience of obtaining ser vices even less pleasant. For our part, we take advantage of the opportunity to queer things for those who would, for example, reassure us that children who are sexually abused by same-sex adults do not necessarily “turn out gay.” Although we have also seen the change in attitude toward us in the faces of some who realize suddenly that we really are not “like them,” the other privileges we wield usually enable us to weather this disadvantage in relative safety. Obviously, the ways that the system needs to be queered are many and varied, and of course those with privilege like ours have a responsibility to do what we can to challenge this status quo. I have argued in this essay that the task of childrearing is to create persons that are reliable, responsible moral agents who can effectively control their desires, whatever those may be. This task is complicated exponentially when children have been removed from their birth homes due to circumstances that damage and traumatize them, because reliable moral agency probably can only be grounded in a realistic belief that one is safe. This need for safety must not be contingent on whether one’s desires are queer or not, nor on any issues of the origins of one’s desires. However, if our children do have queer desires, then normative criteria for agency and health may not be helpful or appropriate in raising them. Abused children will not feel safe if they do not feel “acceptable” as they 166

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are. Thus if normative criteria in the system, in parenting, in health care, in education or other locations we live in work to create or perpetuate shame, guilt, and self-loathing, then those criteria themselves become abusive and must be challenged, countered, and transgressed. I believe that parents in general need to rethink our conceptions of success, recovery, “good” agency, and “health” in childrearing under a queer, transgressive framework. Moral agency and healthy lives and personalities must not be measured only according to heteronormative standards or equated with heteronormativity. Further, we need new, queer and queering language in which to talk about these crucial issues and practices of childrearing in order to avoid invoking those limited and distorting standards. Whatever discourses we invent or subscribe to, we need continually and committedly to examine them for elements that frustrate our abilities to meet the demands of childrearing for all our children.

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Politics

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The Pro-Choice Pro-Lifer Battling the False Dichotomy B E RT H A A LVA R E Z M A N N I N E N

The term “pro-life” tacitly implies that those who are on the opposing side of the abortion issue, those who are “pro-choice,” are anti-life. Then there is also the term “pro-abortion,” which many individuals interchange with “pro-choice.” Yet very few people (if any) are really pro-abortion; that is, very few encourage abortions or view them as a cause for celebration. Why, then, do so many equate being in favor of abortion rights with being in favor of abortion? How can those of us who are pro-choice battle this straw man of our position, and why should we care to? These are the questions I hope to address in this essay. I will argue that the pro-choice community needs to do more to illustrate respect for fetal life, and I will propose two ways in which this respect can be demonstrated. In effect, I am responding to Julia Hanigsberg’s call for the pro-choice community to articulate a “vision of the value of intrauterine life.” A False Dichotomy The “pro-choice”/“pro-life” labels are a false dichotomy. Hanigsberg notes this when she writes: “The apparent dichotomization, which equates antiabortion forces with concern for ‘life,’ and ‘pro-choice’ forces with indifference to it, is an obvious and damaging oversimplification.” According to some, “pro-choice” is not just interchangeable with “pro-abortion,” but also with being anti-baby or anti-child. In a recent episode of the reality show 30 Days, a pro-choice advocate spends a month living among pro-life 171

advocates in a maternity home designed to help care for pregnant women and new mothers. Two aspects of this episode are important for the purposes of this essay. First, the commentator and director of the 30 Days series, Morgan Spurlock (known for his movie Supersize Me), sets up the episode in the following way: “Will Jennifer hold on to her conviction that women should have the right to choose an abortion, or would she reconsider her position once she is surrounded by devoted new mothers?” A clip of smiling children and newborn babies are shown concurrently with these words, while Jennifer cuddles with the children and expresses joy at an infant’s arrival at the home. The tacit implication here is that an appreciation of children and infants can lead someone to become pro-life, and, consequently, that it is a lack of appreciation for infants and children that underlies a pro-choice stance. Later in the episode, the head of the home, known as “Pastor Al” (who describes himself as “pro-life without apology”), expresses surprise that Jennifer could be so good with children. He was not expecting that someone who “encourages abortions” (even though Jennifer made it clear that there is a distinction between being “pro-choice” and “pro-abortion” and that she does not encourage abortions) would have any connection with, or love of, children. He says: “You know what intrigues me so much about Jennifer? Is the fact that these children love her so much. Because children can read you and they understand the nature of a person.” What intrigues me is that Pastor Al would find this fact about Jennifer so intriguing. Why is it so surprising that someone who is prochoice would also have an appreciation for infants and children? Unfortunately, this is a common misconception of pro-choice advocates, and one that I have been personally confronted with at least twice. My pro-choice position is well known among my family and friends. When I became pregnant with my daughter, I was repeatedly told that being pregnant would change my mind because I would “finally understand how precious life is.” When my position did not change after her gestation and birth, it was attributed to my lack of ability to derive the appropriate meaning from the pregnancy experience. The message here was clear: being pro-choice is incompatible with properly respecting or appreciating fetal life. The second time such a belief was expressed to me was when I was standing in line at airport security. A TSA agent told me that the button pinned on my book bag, which read “Pro-Family, ProChild, Pro-Choice,” was a contradiction. The message is clear enough: although the pro-choice/pro-abortion label is an instance of a false dichotomy, it is a deeply pervasive stereotype fueled by misguided assumptions concerning what it means to be pro-choice, coupled with an unwillingness to engage pro-choicers about the reasons behind their position. I often 172

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wonder if pro-life advocates seriously believe that pro-choice advocates support the killing of actual infants, or that pro-choice women do not, or cannot, appreciate the wonder and beauty that can come with (voluntary) pregnancy and motherhood. As a pro-choice advocate who finds such a stereotype insulting and hurtful, I believe more must be done to combat it. To find out what the public believes about pro-choice advocates, I searched the Internet for the phrase “Why I am pro-life.” The following are some justifications that I found: Thank you for taking the time to read this testimony. It will help you to understand why I am avidly “pro-life” rather than “pro-choice.” What did I see on that sonogram screen? I saw a tiny, moving, living child. I saw little, developing arms and legs. I saw motion, moving, kicking. I saw a human being! Very little, yes, but clearly, unequivocally a human being. And it is with this in mind that I realized, as I came to terms with the validity of the human-ness of a embryo and fetus, that I had to accept there was a moral point at which a “woman’s right to choose” ended. Her right to decide what to do with her body bumps up against the right of that baby’s right to exist. . . . A woman’s right to choose an abortion cannot logically co-exist with a embryo/fetus’ right to be born. Simply put, life trumps choice. I think it is essential for a society to value its unborn citizens. If these are the reasons given in support of the pro-life position, the tacit assumption that lies beneath these justifications is that pro-choice advocates do not see the fetus as a human being, that they do not acknowledge that a fetus has a right to exist, or that they do not value intrauterine life. If it were true that all pro-choice advocates held to these claims, then it becomes easy to see why so many individuals conflate the pro-choice position with a proabortion one; for if a fetus has no intrinsic value apart from the woman who carries it, then why should its death matter at all? Indeed, if fetuses possessed no value at all, abortions would be, as Mary Anne Warren puts it, morally neutral actions, akin in moral import to obtaining a haircut. Yet, my own position on the moral dimensions of abortion throws a wrench into the view that all pro-choice advocates harbor little respect or value for intrauterine life. Before my experience of pregnancy and motherhood, the stereotype was certainly true of me: I was pro-choice because I considered fetal life to have little value; certainly never valuable enough to trump a woman’s interest in obtaining an abortion. The first sonogram of The Pro-Choice Pro-Lifer

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my baby girl did much to change that perspective. Gestating, birthing, and caring for her has resulted in my regarding fetal life with deep value and, to some extent, with reverence. Yet, I am still pro-choice; I call myself a “pro-life, pro-choicer,” and therefore my position on abortion has two horns. First, I believe that women possess a right to an abortion simply because every person (male or female, pregnant or not) has a right to decide whether she wants to use her body in order to aid the life of another. Yet, I also believe that fetal life can be understood as valuable, and that prochoice advocates should not shy away from having such a proposal play a role in their position (providing, of course, that they believe the proposal to be true) because, contrary to what pro-life advocates may believe, there is no mutually exclusivity between being pro-choice and respecting intrauterine life. The Intrinsic Value of Fetal Life Objects can be either intrinsically or extrinsically valuable. An object is intrinsically valuable if it is valuable in and of itself, that is, if something about its nature makes it worthy of value for its own sake. An object has extrinsic value if its value is cashed out in terms of others valuing it; an object with extrinsic value may or may not be intrinsically valuable as well. A noncontroversial example of an object with intrinsic value is a human person. Persons have value in and of themselves; if no one in the world valued a certain human person, say a hermit who no one knew existed, we would still hold that this hermit has value simply in virtue of him being a human person. A human person may also have extrinsic value, that is, other people may value her existence, but in absence of extrinsic value, the intrinsic value remains, and would suffice to render her an object worthy of respect and dignity. An uncontroversial example of something with only extrinsic value is a bicycle. A bicycle has value insofar as its owner, or some other person, perhaps its maker, values it. If no one in the world valued the bicycle, however, we would have no qualms about destroying it. The value of certain other objects, however, is less clear. Although I believe that some animals, for example, dogs or cats, have intrinsic value in virtue of their sentience and consciousness, others—Immanuel Kant, for one— disagree, and may regard animals as only having extrinsic value. Some individuals, such as Jeff McMahan, maintain that human beings in permanent vegetative states lack intrinsic value, though they may still be extrinsically valuable given that family and friends may still attribute value to them. There is vast disagreement concerning whether objects in nature, such as trees, lakes, and mountains, are both intrinsically and extrin174

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sically valuable, or whether they are solely extrinsically valuable. Human fetuses are entities that seem to fall into a category where the exact nature of their value is not uncontroversially clear. Certainly fetuses can be extrinsically valuable, and if the parents of a fetus value the pregnancy and the fetus’ health, the rest of us would be remiss if we did not respect that value. For example, we should not aim to inflict bodily injury onto the pregnant woman who carries the fetus with the intent of killing it. When a woman miscarries a very early fetus and subsequently feels sorrow, it would be insensitive, to say the very least, to dismiss her feelings and advise her that she should just “get over it.” The value that she places on the life of her fetus requires certain behavior of others— at the very least not to harm the fetus and to respect any grieving she illustrates if she were to lose it. It is uncontroversial, therefore, that fetuses can be the bearers of extrinsic value. The controversy lies when attempting to assess if fetuses have some degree of intrinsic value. If a woman did not value her pregnancy at all, and if no one else valued the fetus that grows within her, does that mean that the fetus, like the bicycle, can be disposed of with equal abandon? If we did hold that fetuses possess intrinsic value, to what degree would it have value (even if a dog is taken to have intrinsic value, for example, many would hold that, at least prima facie, a dog would have less intrinsic value than an innocent human person, and that, therefore, it would take far more to be willing to violate the value of the latter than that of the former, even though the value of both should be respected as much as possible)? To argue fully that fetal life has intrinsic value, and the degree to which it has it, would take much more development than I able to provide in this essay. However, I would like to present at least one reason to think that fetuses can be considered the bearers of some degree of intrinsic value. Rosalind Hursthouse well encapsulates this reason when she writes: Pregnancy is not just one among many other physical conditions; and hence that anyone who genuinely believes that an abortion is comparable to a haircut or appendectomy is mistaken . . . to think of abortion as nothing but the killing of something that does not matter, or as nothing but the exercise of some right or rights one has, or as the incidental means to some desirable state of affairs, is to do something callous and light-minded, the sort of thing that no virtuous person and wise person would do. It is to have the wrong attitude not only to fetuses, but more generally to human life and death, parenthood, and family relationships (237– 8). Human fetuses are, if nothing else, precursors to human infants. Human fetuses are created by an act that, ideally, is a physical manifestation of The Pro-Choice Pro-Lifer

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intense love and connection between two human beings. Human fetuses, therefore, are intimately connected to human sexuality, childbearing, and childrearing; they are connected, by their very nature, to other values that we, as a society, hold dear. All of us began our lives as fetuses and it is because we were nurtured and cared for as fetuses and, subsequently, as infants and children, that we are alive today and in a position to care for others. Without going into a full exposition concerning what it means to have value and precisely how value can be determined, it seems plausible to hold that, because the human fetus is so intimately connected with these values, that it too possesses some degree of intrinsic value. At the very least, fetuses are valuable because they “constitute an arena for expressing one’s commitment to human life.” It does not follow from this, however, that abortions are impermissible and ought to be criminalized. There are situations where beings with intrinsic value may be permissibly killed. For example, although I believe a dog has some degree of intrinsic value, I recognize that there may be situations where painlessly euthanizing a dog would be called for. The salient feature between a morally permissible and impermissible instance of euthanizing a dog would be largely, though perhaps not exclusively, influenced by what motivates the decision. A person who wishes to euthanize her dog in order to be spared the hassle of taking the dog on a cross-country move is not respecting the value of that animal, whereas a person who wishes to euthanize her dog to spare him the pain that comes with a cancer diagnosis may indeed be illustrating proper respect (especially since the dog suffers in virtue of the very same property that gives it value in the first place, that is, sentience). What follows from the contention that human fetuses have some degree of intrinsic value is that there is a moral dimension to an abortion decision that is not exhausted by rights-claims alone. Hursthouse writes: Supposing only that women have such a moral right, nothing follows from this supposition about the morality of abortion . . . once it is noted (quite generally, not with particular reference to abortion) than in exercising a moral right I can do something cruel, or callous, or selfish, light-minded . . . that is, act viciously. . . . The fact that the premature termination of a pregnancy is, in some sense, the cutting off of a new human life, and thereby, like the procreation of a new human life, connects with all our thoughts about human life and death, parenthood, and family relationships, must make it a serious matter. David Boonin agrees with Hursthouse that, in granting that women have abortion rights, it does not follow from this alone that it would always be 176

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advisable for a woman exercise such rights. That is, there may be some cases in which a woman who exercises her right to an abortion would be acting in a manner that is “morally criticizable. . . . To say that an action is permissible is not to say that there are no moral reasons against doing the action. . . . The moves from ‘I have a right to do it’ to ‘It is right for me to do it’ or to ‘I cannot be morally criticized for doing it’ are simply invalid.” Like many of the rights that we possess, there are proper and improper ways of exercising them; I have a right to use my financial earnings in any (legal) manner I see fit, but it would certainly be callous to tauntingly wave my money in front of an impoverished person. I am in favor of free speech, for example, and will defend anyone’s right to exercise their free speech. This does not mean that I revel and celebrate when, say, the Westboro Baptist Church decides to use their right to free speech in order to defame American solders at their funerals, celebrating their death as an act of punishment and vengeance from a righteous God for American’s alleged support for homosexual lifestyles. While I can respect their right to free speech, I can also admonish their particular use of free speech. This is not meant to compare the acts of the Westboro congregation to abortion, but rather to help draw a conceptual distinction that those who conflate “prochoice” with “pro-abortion” seem to miss: there is a logical distinction between supporting someone’s right to x and encouraging a particular use of x or celebrating a particular use of x. Therefore, although I will always defend a woman’s right to procure a safe and legal abortion, because the human fetus is a being that can be regarded as having some degree of intrinsic value, it is an entity that is worthy of some level of respect, and therefore ought not to be killed or disposed of as a being that simply “does not matter.” Any exercise of the abortion right that views the fetus in such a manner is not a virtuous or decent exercise of the abortion right. Hursthouse devotes a substantial portion of her article to delineating ways in which we can determine whether a woman who procures an abortion is exercising her right in the way a virtuous person would. Given her reliance on virtue ethics, Hursthouse cashes this out by determining which character traits influence a woman’s abortion decision. According to her, there very well may be times when a woman procures an abortion “without manifesting a vice.” When women are in very poor physical health, or worn out from childbearing, or forced to do physically demanding jobs, then they cannot be described as self-indulgent, callous, irresponsible, or light-minded if they seek abortions mainly with a view to avoiding pregnancy as The Pro-Choice Pro-Lifer

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the physical condition it is. . . . Consider, for instance, a woman who has already had several children and fears that to have another will seriously affect her capacity to be a good mother to the ones she has— she does not show a lack of appreciation of the intrinsic value of being a parent by opting out of abortion. Nor does a woman who has been a good mother and is approaching the age at which she may be looking forward to being a good grandmother . . . nor, necessarily, does a woman who has decided to lead a life centered around some other worthwhile activity or activities with which motherhood would compete. Although Hursthouse argues that parenthood is an intrinsically worthwhile activity, there are instances, such as the ones she lists, where a vicious character would not be manifested if someone were to reject parenthood. In these cases, the motivation for procuring an abortion does not necessarily manifest disrespect for a fetus’ intrinsic value. Yet, there are reasons for procuring an abortion that does indeed manifest vice: Some women who choose abortion rather than have their first child, and some men who encourage their partners to choose abortion, are not avoiding parenthood for the sake of other worthwhile pursuits, but for the worthless one of “having a good time,” or for the pursuit of some false vision of the ideals of freedom or self-realization. In other words, according to Hursthouse, the litmus test for determining whether a woman exercised her right to an abortion in a manner exempt from moral reproach is to determine whether her reasons for procuring an abortion “fall under a vice-related term” or whether an abortion, in her situation, is a decision that “the perfectly virtuous could recommend.” A common stereotype of women who procure abortions is that they do so wantonly, purely as a means of birth control, or that their abortions are merely “elective.” As I will illustrate, this is far from an accurate stereotype; many women who do procure abortions experience it as an emotionally difficult, and often heart-wrenching, experience. Yet I would be dishonest if I did not admit to personal interaction with women who procured abortions for reasons that most certainly manifested vices. I know of one woman who aborted a thirteen-week-old fetus for the sole reason that it was interracial and, while she was willing to have sexual relationships with black men, she did not want to raise a black child. I know of another woman who claimed to have had eight abortions in her lifetime, and each time it was because she would forget or deliberately fail to use birth control. These women, in addition to displaying nonvirtuous character traits such as 178

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racial prejudice and irresponsibility, failed to illustrate any type of respect for the life that grew within their respective womb. Yet I also know women who have had abortions for reasons that are hard to condemn. One woman’s family and the father of her fetus turned her away. She lived alone in a small apartment and had no medical insurance. Yet another woman I know was taking medications for severe bipolar disorder and would have had to have stopped doing so, to her own mental detriment, in order to not affect the health of the fetus. Yet another woman I know was a victim of date rape and could not bear to carry for nine months daily reminders of her aggressor, who had gotten away with his crime. These three women’s decisions to abort in their respective situations did not illustrate a lack of respect for fetal value. The upshot of this discussion is that a woman should always “hold all the cards,” so to speak, when it comes to the decision whether to use her body in order to gestate and give birth to another human life. But in holding those cards, we must remember that there are vicious and virtuous ways to play our hand, and we should, as with all the rights that we possess, always strive to exercise this right in a virtuous manner. The human fetus is, of course, a human being; indeed, what other species could it possibly be? I also believe that it becomes a person at some point during gestation (although, even after years of studying this issue, I have yet to decide what stage that is. I am, admittedly, partial to the onset of sentience and consciousness due to my metaphysical views of the nature of diachronic personal identity). But no matter how far along in development it is, being pregnant with my daughter taught me that fetuses are much more than simply a clump of cells with no value of their own. Feeling her kicks and somersaults, her reaction in my belly to music and to books that we read to her, nourishing her growth by resisting my desire for junk food and alcohol, and meeting for the first time the little being who lived within me, and yet seemed so distant at times, cemented my new reverence for fetal life. Many philosophers would perhaps write off the phenomena of pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing as purely emotional or visceral responses, and therefore not good enough reasons to support the contention that fetal life has value. I, however, see it as a privileged epistemological viewpoint. Christine Overall aptly describes how the lived experience of pregnancy can expand one’s epistemology and lend itself to the conclusion that intrauterine life is valuable in its own right. Yet, such an experience, she contends, also allows one to see why pregnancy is something that should not ever be compelled. Paradoxically, the experience of carry ing a fetus inside my body profoundly deepened my understanding of the abortion issue in two The Pro-Choice Pro-Lifer

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respects. First, the sensations of the active, unpredictable fetus with its turns and kicks, its hiccups, and it rare rest periods, convinced me that this entity within my body was definitely independent and alive, no mere appendage, and not a part of my body in the way that an arm or an eye or a heart is. At the same time, the experience of being ‘with child’ was sufficiently engrossing, disturbing, even overpowering at times, to persuade me that no woman should ever have to go through this experience— an experience that philosopher Caroline Whitbeck has suggested is akin to literally being possess or taken over by another being— against her will. It is not just the phenomenology of pregnancy, however, that lends itself to the conclusion that fetal life has value. Many individuals acknowledge the value of fetal life, even if only tacitly. Hanigsberg notes that women “distinguish between intrauterine life and mere parts of their own bodies.” Margaret Olivia Little points out that most individuals have a gradualist view of the value of intrauterine life. That is, while many individuals do not give much value to a newly fertilized zygote (indeed, the fact that we never see pro-life advocates protesting in front of IVF clinics, which routinely discard surplus embryos after fertility treatments, is a testament that very few people really regard embryonic life as on a par with the life of an infant or child or even a later-term fetus), most all individuals believe that third-trimester fetuses ought to be accorded similar moral status and legal protection as neonates. In addition, almost everyone would agree that contraception is morally preferable to abortion, because “even early abortion involves a morally sober loss . . . even at early stages, human life has a value worthy of respect.” Ronald Dworkin argues that what bothers so many people about abortions is that it “wastes the intrinsic value—the sanctity, the inviolability— of a human life . . . [in this sense, abortions are] objectively a shame.” Although Overall clearly explains how the phenomenology of pregnancy can influence the belief that fetal life has value, the second half of her citation is equally important; the deeply intimate, physically taxing, and emotionally engrossing experience of pregnancy also lends itself to the conclusion that it should never be forced upon a woman. Indeed, in cases where pregnancy is, for one reason or another, compelled, women often relate to the situation as a type of invasion upon their bodies, a form of torture in which they are nothing but passive observers. In such cases, as Caroline Lundquist eloquently puts it, the woman “does not make the child, but rather the child makes itself within her.” Often, women who undergo compelled pregnancy regard the “fetus as radically other, even hostile . . . the fetus is not perceived as an emerging subject during gestation.” Such 180

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an experience is hauntingly described in Slavenka Draculic’s novel S.: A Novel About the Balkans, a fictionalized account of the very real crimes committed against women, including rape, during the Bosnian war. In the beginning pages, Draculic describes the emotions and thoughts of the title character. S is a woman who was chosen to be an inmate in a “woman’s camp,” a brothel to ser vice the soldiers of the war. S becomes pregnant after a particularly horrendous rape, although just one of many that she experiences, and the book begins after she has given birth to the resulting child. Instead of the elation that many women feel at the birth of their child, S feels absolutely no connection with the infant. On the contrary, “S feels nothing but animosity towards this creature. The first thought that came to her mind when she realized she was pregnant was death. . . . She had to carry through her pregnancy to the bitter end, with a swelling stomach that deformed her beyond recognition and made her hate her own body.” When S discovers she is pregnant, she describes the fetus as an embodiment of the war that is now being fought “in her womb.” The fetus is not a child to S, but rather a “disease . . . a tumor which will grow and spread and become increasingly visible.” According to S’s phenomenology, the fetus “is a burden she is carrying in her stomach. Because she has been forced to do so. It is something that is stealing her cells and reproducing, feeding on her blood, on the air that she breathes. To her it is a parasite.” If the phenomenology of a welcomed pregnancy adds credence to the belief that fetal life has value, does not this very different phenomenology of pregnancy equally support the opposite contention? Not necessarily, Hursthouse would argue (and I concur). A woman who obtains an abortion in such a horrendous situation “does not manifest any lack of serious respect for human life or a shallow attitude to motherhood,” however, in such dire situations, what the decision to abort represents is that “something is terribly amiss in the conditions of their lives, which makes it so hard to recognize pregnancy and childbearing as the good that they can be.” Tellingly, after describing the ambivalence, if not outright abhorrence, that S feels toward the entity that forcibly invaded her body for nine moths, she does feel a surge of warmth after the newborn infant is placed at her breast. She feels how everything inside her is focused on the child, on the fact that this is a child, after all, not a monster. As if, by looking at this sleeping being, a deep gash open up inside her, like a wound that will never heal. When contemplating the birth of the child and the fact that she was too far along when she discovered her pregnancy to abort it, S feels “glad that The Pro-Choice Pro-Lifer

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she gave birth to him, that she gave him life rather than death. How easy it is to forget that death also marks the person who causes it.” If fetuses lacked intrinsic value, if their destruction were no more morally weighty than the destruction of a bicycle, then there would be no reason why a person who causes its death should be “marked.” McFall, Shimp, and Thomson’s Violinist Much ink has been spilled concerning whether the human fetus ought to be regarded as a person, and American society is no closer to reaching a consensus on this issue due to the varying metaphysical, religious, and ethical backgrounds that underlie our respective positions on this question. Moreover, the issue of whether a fetus is a person is, I think, irrelevant when we are discussing whether women have a legal right to an abortion. Even if the fetus were considered a person with full moral status and rights, I disagree with the statement that “a woman’s right to choose an abortion cannot logically co-exist with an embryo/fetus’ right to be born.” The 1978 Pennsylvania case McFall v. Shimp illustrated that the law cannot compel one person to submit to an intrusion of her body in the interests of sustaining another person’s life. Even though David Shimp was found to be the only person with matching bone marrow for his cousin, Robert McFall (who was dying of aplastic anemia), the court decided that it could not force Shimp to submit to a compelled bone marrow extraction in order to donate it to, and thus save the life of, McFall (who succumbed to the disease two weeks after the case was decided). Philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson had reached the same conclusion in her article “A Defense of Abortion” seven years earlier with her use of the now (in) famous violinist example. Imagine, she writes, that an ailing violinist needs to stay hooked up to your kidneys for a certain amount of time in order to survive a rare affliction. If you choose to unplug yourself, the violinist will surely die. According to Thomson, if you have not consented to this dependency relation, you are always free to terminate it, even if doing so results in the violinist’s death. Thomson does not deny that the violinist is a person who possesses a right to life. Rather, she questions what follows from this right; it is certainly not the case, she maintains, that the violinist’s right to life automatically entails that another person has an obligation to provide him with whatever he needs to survive. Analogously, she argues, even if the human fetus were considered a person from conception, it does not follow from this alone that a woman must be compelled to gestate it until it can survive independently of the womb.

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I am not arguing that people do not have a right to life. . . . I am arguing only that a right to life does not guarantee having either a right to be given the use of or a right to be allowed continued use of another person’s body— even if one needs it for life itself. So the right to life will not serve the opponents of abortion in the very simple and clear way in which they seem to have thought it would. Similarly, constitutional scholar Donald H. Regan writes: It is a deeply rooted principle of American law that an individual is ordinarily not required to volunteer aid to another individual who is in danger or in need of assistance. In brief, our law does not require people to be Good Samaritans. . . . If we require a pregnant woman to carry the fetus to term and deliver it—if we forbid abortion, in other words—we are compelling her to be a Good Samaritan. . . . The equal protection clause forbids imposition of these burdens on pregnant women. In 1988, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down abortion restrictions using a similar logic: Forcing a woman, by the threat of criminal sanction, to carry a foetus to term unless she meets certain criteria unrelated to her own priorities and aspirations, is a profound interference with a woman’s body and this a violation of security of the person. Constitutional scholar Robin West argues in a similar fashion: citizens generally . . . are sovereign over their bodies. They need never donate their bodies or parts of their bodies to serve the physical needs of others. If they do, they are admirable, or courageous. But they are not required to do so. [Laws that prohibit abortion render it the case that] pregnant women alone must, by law, give their bodies over to the survival needs of others. Of course, many have contested Thomson’s argument. Despite the criticisms of Thomson’s violinist example as aberrant, it seems that her conclusion concerning how to balance competing moral rights in this regard is sufficiently analogous to the Pennsylvania court’s conclusion in McFall v. Shimp to render Thomson’s argument transferable into the legal realm. That is, the McFall v. Shimp case is a “real-life” violinist example in all relevant respects. Moreover, her conclusion clearly mirrors Regan’s and the Canadian Supreme Court’s conclusion concerning abortion rights. Since

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it is not my objective here to argue in favor of abortion rights, I will not attend to these objections. However, if one does think that these arguments are sound, it follows that there is no mutual exclusivity between granting fetal personhood and granting abortion rights. Relying on this method of argumentation can also shed light on how it is possible to respect fetal life in tandem with being in favor of abortion rights. Surely the judges that decided McFall v. Shimp regarded McFall as a person with rights, moral status, and the same basic worth and dignity that all human beings possess. It does not follow from that moral status, worth, and dignity, however, that Shimp had to be subjected to unwanted bodily intrusion for McFall’s sake. As much as I would value the life of a human being at the end stages of some sort of kidney ailment, I could not sanction forcibly extracting someone else’s spare kidney in order to save the afflicted person’s life. Consider the (particularly heartbreaking) case of Simon Pretty, who was dying of leukemia and whose sister, who was a perfect match, refused to donate bone marrow for him. Initially, Pretty survived after an anonymous donor in America provided the bone marrow he needed. However, Pretty’s body ultimately rejected the donation, and he died in 2007, leaving behind a wife and three children. Pretty was certainly a person in the legal and moral sense, and his life certainly had both intrinsic value (in virtue of his personhood) and extrinsic value (in virtue of his relationship to his wife and children). As much as his sister’s decision ought to be admonished (the reasons she refused to donate her bone marrow for him seemed related to her still being angry over a disagreement they had a few years earlier), she still acted within her rights and indeed was not legally compelled to donate, a decision that ultimately resulted in Pretty’s death. All this illustrates that respecting a human being’s right to decide whether he wants to use his body in order to aid in another’s survival does not entail devaluing the person in need of that aid. Indeed, in some situations we may even sympathize primarily with the person in need of the aid. Why Respect Matters There are two important reasons why pro-choice advocates should begin contesting the stereotype they necessarily hold an indifferent, if not callous, attitude toward intrauterine life. Francis Kissling adequately captures the first reason: The precise moment when the fetus becomes a person is less important than a simple acknowledgement that whatever category of human 184

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life the fetus is, it nonetheless has value, it is not nothing. . . . I am deeply struck by the number of thoughtful, progressive people who have been turned off to the prochoice movement by the lack of adequate and clear expressions of respect for fetal life, people who are themselves grappling with the conflict between upholding women’s rights and the right to conscience and respecting the value of nascent human life. There is a strong distaste of the prochoice community in many facets of society because of the inability or unwillingness to acknowledge one iota of value in fetal life. It almost seems as if there has been a “hardening of the heart” resulting from the prochoice position. In other words, the pro-choice side is gradually losing the public relations battle. One reason why this should concern pro-choice advocates is that, in the past two election years in the United States, several states have attempted to pass “human life amendments” that aim to extend legal rights, including the right to life, to embryos and fetuses. It was no secret that supporters of such an amendment desired to use the adoption of this law in their respective state in order to begin the process of overturning Roe v. Wade. In reference to Georgia’s 2008 initiative, Richard Thompson states: The Human Life Amendment provides Georgia with the best legal means of overturning the central holding of Roe v Wade. At the very least, it ensures that Georgia immediately becomes a pro-life state the moment the shackles of Roe are broken . . . The adoption of this amendment will place Georgia at the forefront of the battle to restore the sanctity of innocent human life. The website for Colorado’s version of the amendment, Proposition 48, features a video of proposition sponsor Kristi Burton, who argues that the main reason to supporting passing the initiative is that: “life has been devalued in our society, it has been cheapened.” If pro-choice advocates begin to emphasize that being in favor of abortion rights does not entail adopting a wanton or cheapened view of fetal life (no more than being in favor of Shimp’s/Pretty’s sister’s right to his bodily autonomy entailed devaluing McFall’s/Pretty’s life), then pro-life advocates can no longer use this accusation as ammunition against the pro-choice position. Doing so may help to persuade many people, many voters, that the pro-choice position is more palatable than it is being portrayed as by individuals such as Thompson and Burton, and therefore that it isn’t a choice between voting in favor of a human life amendment or being insensitive toward fetal life. The Pro-Choice Pro-Lifer

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A second reason why pro-choice advocates should begin to acknowledge and respond to the value of fetal life is itself twofold. A common stereotype of women who procure abortions is that they are promiscuous and irresponsible individuals who callously seek to kill their infants in order to continue a carefree lifestyle. While perhaps there may be individuals who procure abortions for such reasons (or for other dubious reasons as described before), this is certainly not the case for many women. In fact, many women (and men) suffer due to the abortion decision, even if they may not come to regret it. And yet, as I will illustrate, many women feel that admitting to this suffering would somehow be traitorous to the prochoice side. Acknowledging that this suffering exists and that it is a valid response to an often heart-wrenching decision, and taking steps to allow women and men to mourn abortion in a socially open and sanctioned way, first allows pro-choice advocates to emotionally support the women whose rights they defend. Second, it helps to battle against the villainous (and erroneous) stereotype of people who procure abortions. In addition, openly mourning fetal death after an abortion helps to illustrate proper respect for intrauterine life by acknowledging that, whether one thinks women should have abortion rights, the death of nascent human life is always a somber occasion, whether that be because of the death itself, or because of the unfortunate circumstances that influenced the decision to abort. The Need to Grieve Far from the stereotype that women who procure abortions are indifferent to the value of fetal life, or to the act of abortion itself, women tend to take abortion very seriously because they understand that abortion entails, not just the loss of fetal life, but also the rejection of the identity-altering event of becoming a mother. Many women suffer emotionally in its aftermath, even if they remain convinced that abortion was the best possible option given their respective circumstances. Bobbie Jean Kennedy, an abortion nurse, writes about dealing with the emotional reactions of women after abortion. She tells the story of a woman who “reached out her beautifully delicate young hand, gently touched the cheek of her newly aborted tiny fetus and said ‘I’m sorry, baby.’ ” Another woman, after the fetus had been expelled, “raised herself up on one elbow to see what had just come out, and she let out one of the most blood curling screams I have ever heard.” There was yet another woman who procured an abortion after her fetus was diagnosed with a deformity: “The woman said: ‘I don’t want to deny that this baby existed.’ She gave it a name, had a funeral for it, and buried it in the family plot alongside her grandmother.” 186

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Although often unspoken, many men also feel grief after their respective partner’s abortion, and “the emotional toll can manifest itself in lowself-esteem, substance abuse, failed relationships and sexual dysfunction.” One man describes the experience as something that “seeps into the subconscious and always stays with you.” One study found that “adult men who experienced a partner’s having undergone an abortion during the teen years reported markedly more distress in early adulthood than peers who had not experienced a partner’s abortion.” Yet another study found that “many males appeared so eager to protect the female’s well-being that they tended to discount or suppress their own needs” and that abortion is a “far greater dilemma for men than researchers, counselors—and women— have even begun to realize.” While researching this essay, I came across an anonymous blog written by a woman who had procured an abortion and, while she did not regret the decision, spoke of her grief and her need to mourn her loss via a ritualized grieving process. Because our society does not provide such an outlet, she created a makeshift funeral for her aborted fetus. She first lighted candles in honor of the fetus, shredded the diaphragm that proved useless to her, and created a bundle clothed in a blanket that she rocked back and forth while apologizing to it for cutting its life short. She promises her fetus that she “will love and care for it if it can return to me in a different state or at a different name.” She further writes: I gently lay the tiny bundle into the peach basket. Releasing the basket in the hole in the earth, I hear the words, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” escape my mouth. I give myself some time before using my hands to cover the tiny casket with dirt. . . . The shovel fills in the rest of the hole, save for a dent for the perennial. As I plant the flower I talk of finishing school, of being able to finance myself instead of depending on him for allowance money, of the children I will have in future when the time is right, once I’m on solid ground, once I am solid ground, when I’m better able to support and nourish their growth. What I value in the rite above is that this forest funeral speaks to me. The actions and symbols are in my bones; they resonate within me. Cultivating a rite involves mixing symbols, actions, and words that have a personal intensity to them. Rituals are effective because this mix of activities and ideas somehow gets to a deeper part of the brain than just words alone. . . . For me, the abortion act needed to be acknowledged and mourned in some manner. This experience most likely reflects the silent pain that many women who have procured abortions face, and the need to have some sort of socially The Pro-Choice Pro-Lifer

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sanctioned (and perhaps public) grieving ritual for women who wish to mourn the death of their fetuses via abortion. (I want to stress that nothing in this essay implies that women ought to grieve their abortions, or that failure to do so is a moral fault, only that for those women who do want to grieve, some avenue should be provided for them where they are free of reproach and are instead emotionally supported.) In short, there is a need to grieve among many women (and men) who have procured abortions. There are two reasons, I suspect, why this need is largely unrecognized and therefore unmet. First, it is perhaps assumed that women have no need to mourn the death that they deliberately sought and caused. However, contra Warren’s contention, many women do not see abortion as a morally innocuous action or as comparable to getting a haircut; as evidenced earlier, many do suffer from its aftermath. The second reason is the one that should concern pro-choice advocates because it, like Kissling’s and Pastor Al’s comments, offers another window as to how the general population regards us. Many women are reticent to express their grief because they are afraid that they would be shunned by the pro-choice community: if a woman expresses “loss or regret, she’s [perceived to be] a traitor to the pro-choice movement. [Yet for some women] abortion is a loss, so why shouldn’t it feel like one?”  Another woman is hesitant to express sadness over an abortion precisely because she fears being seen as traitorous to the feminist movement: “There seemed to be this unspoken rule that a good feminist isn’t supposed to grieve.” Indeed, this perception of pro-choice advocates has lead to many pro-choice women reluctant to align themselves with the pro-choice community. Heidi also feels alienation from reproductive rights activists, who, in her view, treat abortion too casually. She says, “I find myself not being a great supporter of the pro-choice movement. When I ask myself why that is, since I believe in the right to choose, what comes back as my answer is that it is something you are killing. You are killing a child.” Heidi laments that so much of the pro-choice side “tries to pretend that’s not true. These are just a collection of cells and da-da-da-da-da.” She feels uncomfortable that pro-choicers say “it’s just a medical operation” and it’s not about “the taking of, at least, a potential life.” How to Be a Pro-Life Pro-Choicer In responding to Hanigsberg’s call for pro-choice advocates and feminists to display some sort of respect for intrauterine life, I propose that one way to do so is to acknowledge and validate the emotions of women who feel that abortion constitutes a somber loss. Abortion rights advocates should not 188

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make women feel like traitors to the pro-choice or feminist movement because of those feelings. If we continue to do so, whether explicitly or unconsciously, we run the risk of alienating many of the women (like Heidi) whose reproductive and bodily rights we so vehemently fight for. One way to achieve this validation is by providing women (and men) who feel grief due to an abortion a socially sanctioned manner of displaying this sorrow. The need for such a ritual is clear. Although America is lacking such a ritual, aborted fetuses have shown up at the doorstep of churches because “it is as close to a Christian burial as [women] can get.”  We can look toward current Japanese practices as a possible example for modeling abortion-grieving rituals. In Japan, abortions are legal and are viewed as generally morally permissible. However, they are never viewed as morally innocuous; indeed, the event of an abortion is considered a result of an unfortunate state of affairs, and aborted fetuses can be honored in some capacity. In his studies of Japanese Buddhist culture, William LaFleur notes: There is a consensus that abortion constitutes a painful social necessity and as such must remain legal and available, although religiopsychological mechanisms for relieving bad feelings about abortion— the mizuko rites, for instance—in most cases probably play a positive therapeutic role. . . . The first concern is that people not become inured to abortion and trivialize it. Many Buddhists are worried that, especially if there is no real grief and ritual, a kind of personal degradation becomes the pattern: from repeated abortions to a flippant acceptance of the practice and from there to deterioration in a person’s capacity for generalized sensitivity. The methods of performing these rituals vary. For example some individuals purchase “a stone image of Jizo, often at considerable expense, and [have] it enshrined in a (generally Buddhist) cemetery. At some temples one can find thousands of Jizo statues clothed in bibs and sweaters, surrounded by children’s toys.” While there are some women who perform the ritual out of a sense of guilt or fear that the spirit of the fetus will avenge its death, many women perform the ritual in order “to facilitate the grieving process. Through the ritual they acknowledge the significance of their loss and their feelings of sorrow, depression, resentment, and loneliness.” The Japanese Buddhist manner of approaching abortion illustrates that it is possible to simultaneously hold that abortion rights are necessary to retain in a society, and yet that fetal life has value, and that the act of abortion always has serious moral dimensions; more often than not, they are instances of “necessary sorrow.” The Pro-Choice Pro-Lifer

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Another way to emphasize respect for intrauterine life is to support social programs that help women and men facing unwanted pregnancies to care for the ensuing child. This way, abortion is less likely to be viewed as the immediate or only option when an unplanned pregnancy occurs. [A feminist articulation of the value of fetal life] should translate into advocating that the state play a prominent role promoting the welfare of all intrauterine life. This life must be valued regardless of the race of its parents, the age of its mother, or the socio-economic stratum into which it would be born if it were carried to term. . . . Intervening to prevent woman’s poverty will have a direct correlation both with the health of intrauterine life and with the number of babies that are carried to term. . . . Moreover, access to adequate prenatal medical care, education, and nutrition for pregnant woman would also promote the welfare of intrauterine life. Hanigsberg also uses this point to challenge pro-life advocates, stating that “the adoption of the term ‘pro-life’ obscures the fact that the ‘pro-life’ movement has been consistently more concerned with ‘the unborn’ than the conditions of living women and children.”  Indeed, the 2004 and 2007 Children’s Defense Scorecard illustrates that 113 members of Congress who have consistently voted against child welfare programs also proclaim to be pro-life. In contrast, the top members of Congress who have supported children’s social programs were all Democrats, and many of them have a voting record that reflects a pro-choice allegiance. Indeed, the scorecard reveals that support for children’s social programs follows a a strict party line, with Democrats favoring social programs for children far more than Republicans. Therefore, pro-choice advocates can fill the gap that pro-life advocates have left behind; with luck, doing so will help to reduce the number of abortions by helping to curb their need. There is much evidence that corroborates Hanigsberg’s claim that improved social support for pregnant women reduces the prevalence of abortion. A recent report released by the Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good finds that: the abortion rate among women living below the poverty level is more than four times that of women above 300% of the poverty level. This study of all U.S. states from 1982–2000 finds that social and economic supports such as benefits for pregnant women and mothers and economic assistance to low-income families have contributed significantly to reducing the number of abortions in the United States over the past twenty years. 190

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The pro-life website Real Abortion Solutions states that one of the ways the prevalence of abortion can be curtailed is by supporting sex education as a manner of preventing unplanned pregnancies, and by offering various instances of social support for individuals facing unplanned pregnancies. For example, RAS suggests: expanding coverage to pregnant women and unborn children through Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), banning the discriminatory practice against pregnant women in the health insurance industry by removing pregnancy from all “pre-existing condition” lists in health care, making adoption tax credits permanent, provid[ing] grants for low-income parenting college students, fully funding the federal WIC program [which, Hanigsberg notes, is extremely underfunded despite evidence that it is effective in promoting neonatal health], increase[ing] funding for domestic violence programs, and provid[ing] free home visits by registered nurses for new mothers. Adopting the goal of curtailing the prevalence of abortion is one manner in which pro-life and pro-choice advocates can find common ground. President Barack Obama, for example, supports abortion rights, yet he also supports finding ways to reduce the need for, and subsequently the procuring of, abortions. None of this entails that women do not have a right to obtain an abortion. Acknowledging the demand for organ donation and the need to obtain more organs and expressing regret for the lives that are lost due to a lack of available organs do not entail that we should sanction a law that would result in compelled organ procurement from otherwise healthy persons. Encouraging individuals to become bone marrow donors, and grieving the lives of those who are lost due to a lack of available bone marrow, does not mean that we can force individuals to succumb to the bodily intrusion entailed by a bone marrow extraction. Similarly, pro-choice advocates can retain their conviction that women have a right to bodily autonomy and integrity, and that women ought to retain that right in the face of a potential bodily intrusion—pregnancy—that is unique to them. However, this does not mean that the pro-choice position must be utterly devoid of some sort of pro-life philosophy. We can acknowledge respect for intrauterine life by supporting women and those who possess a need to publicly grieve the death of their fetuses and by offering some socially sanctioned ritual that allows them to mourn and say good-bye, if they so wish. We can respond to the circumstances that lead to so many abortions by supporting ways for women to financially and medically support themselves and their The Pro-Choice Pro-Lifer

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children, thereby offering an alternative to abortion in times of desperation or financial need. That is, respect for fetal life needs to translate into respect for infant life and for motherhood in general. While not eradicating abortions completely, there is much evidence to suggest that it can go a long way toward curbing their occurrence.

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9

The Political “Nature” of Pregnancy and Childbirth CANDACE JOHNSON

According to recent reports from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, “the use of assisted reproductive technology (ART) has increased dramatically since the first in vitro fertilization in 1981.” The range of permissible ARTs (defined through federal legislation in 2004) includes the donation, freezing and storage of eggs, the donation of sperm and other reproductive material, in vitro fertilization, and surrogate motherhood; on the horizons of medical research and ethical imagination sits human reproductive cloning. Future technological interventions are the subject of great speculation, as well as consternation, and have raised questions about the degree to which these sorts of interventions threaten to fundamentally alter human nature. The CIHI indicates that in 2001 only 0.4 percent of all births in Canada were the products of in vitro fertilization, but it is likely that the number of assisted conceptions will continue to rise, given that the current trend is toward women delaying reproduction until they have established careers or other goals (the average age at which a woman has her first child is approximately 29.7. Delay of pregnancy and childbirth can pose fertility challenges, and the benefits of scientific technological development offer to off set or diminish those challenges with an ever-expanding range of options. Such possibilities, for better or worse, have created a profound historical moment, one in which reproductive technologies have outpaced ethical deliberations over their utility. For women and their partners, there are new possibilities for the creation of families. ARTs provide for the contestation 193

of old, biologically determined understandings of who qualifies as a parent and how patterns of career and family can be established. This moment provides unparalleled reproductive choices for women in navigating their reproductive lives. For many feminists, choice has been the goal of their political and scholarly activities, and so for them, this current moment should constitute a major victory. In this context of technological advancement, there are those who cling to the vestiges of nature, and in so doing, carve out contemporary understandings of what we are as women, or human beings. These defenders of “the natural” contribute to ethical debates concerning ARTs. This essay focuses on the return to nature that can be observed in the feminist debates (and trends in women’s preferences) concerning the “medicalization” of pregnancy and childbirth. My research for the essay draws on empirical evidence of a trend toward less medical intervention in pregnancy and childbirth (from care provided by midwives in hospitals or homes to “free births,” which are not attended by anyone at all), sometimes contrary to public health protocols. However, the main argument is mostly theoretical in its construction. It draws on empirical data to formulate the primary research questions, namely, why do some women (mostly privileged and in developed countries) demand less medical intervention in pregnancy and childbirth, while others (mostly vulnerable women in both developed and developing countries) demand more (regardless of actual need)? Why do privileged women tend to express their resistance to medical intervention in the language of “nature,” “tradition,” and “normalcy”? Why do there seem to be simultaneous trends toward greater medicalization of conception (from ovulation predictors to ARTs) and less medical intervention in pregnancy and childbirth? The exploration of possible answers to these questions is conceptual; it draws on theoretical literatures concerning medicalization and the sociopolitical construction of nature, tradition, and identity, and it is situated within ongoing debates within feminist political theory regarding public-private distinctions and split subjectivity. The evidence seems to suggest that arguments about the negative impact of medical intervention in the lives of women, “medicalization,” seem to resonate only among privileged populations. As indicated by Laura Purdy, medical intervention in pregnancy and childbirth is evaluated very differently in different contexts, and the expression resistance among privileged women in developed countries often appeals to “nature”: “When we learn that African-American women in the United States die more often in childbirth than white women, and that horrifying numbers of Third World women are dying as we speak, nobody concludes that preventive action would be morally intrusive. Yet we tend to be bewitched by the claim that 194

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menstruation and pregnancy are natural processes and thus inappropriately dealt with in the medical realm.” In poor countries or communities or underser viced areas, medical care is a necessity upon which exercise of agency and autonomy is contingent. But the refusal of pharmaceuticals and clinical care among affluent or well accommodated (by a universal health system, for example) women is at once a form of political resistance and an assertion of identity. Medicine, Midwifery, and Maternal Health Recent trends in Canada toward increased utilization of midwives’ ser vices are evidence of suspicion of, and a desire for alternatives to, obstetrical care. According to a report by the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI), “the number of publicly funded hospital births attended by midwives is increasing in several provinces. . . . Ontario saw nearly a seven-fold increase between 1994–1995 and 2000–2001.” The same report confirms that pregnancies and births attended by midwives are characterized by fewer medical interventions, which includes lower cesarean section rates. Midwifery care is also preferred by many women because the experiences of pregnancy and childbirth are validated through holistic approaches to understanding pregnancy and birth and are enhanced or developed through more extensive meetings, discussions and interactions than would be possible under the care of an obstetrician. In addition, with care by midwives, home births are possible and fully supported. In short, care by midwives seems to provide avenues for the generation and exercise of greater agency for women. Choices expand for location and type of care, and women are included, recognized, and respected as “subjects” in the experiences of pregnancy and childbirth (rather than treated as passive patients receiving care from medical personnel). Women have greater agency, it is argued, when professionals do not determine choices on their behalf. Such determination extracts fundamental value from the experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood, if not womanhood, and results in “disembodiment, imagined as existing elsewhere— outside the body.” Powerful forces that pull in the direction of less medical intervention, hospital-centered care and obstetrical oversight in some contexts are matched by forces that are equally powerful in the opposite direction in others. In developing countries with alarmingly high rates of maternal mortality, such as Haiti (523 per 100 000 live births), Bolivia (230), and Peru (185) (in the region of the Americas), both public health and many feminist voices call for increased medical intervention in pregnancy and childbirth, in the form of more prenatal care and monitoring, greater access The Political “Nature” of Pregnancy and Childbirth

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to hospitals and clinics, and higher rates of births attended by fully trained medical personnel. Alicia Ely Yamin and Deborah P. Maine explain that “of the most commonly used health indicators, maternal mortality reveals the greatest disparity between developed and developing countries.” They proceed to argue that “the great variation in frequency of maternal deaths between more developed and developing countries is in no way attributable to exotic complications of pregnancy and childbirth in developing countries. . . . Indeed . . . [there is] a remarkable similarity between the leading causes of maternal death in the world as a whole and in the United States in particular.” Furthermore, their evidence (based on comprehensive reviews of public health literature) shows that “most life-threatening obstetric complications can neither be prevented nor predicted, though they can be treated.” In other words, focus in many country contexts on preventative measures and processes such as improved prenatal care and education is misplaced. The leading causes of maternal mortality can be addressed only with improved medical care at the time of delivery (and in the eventuality that complications arise prior to the delivery). The UN Millennium Project explains that “recognizing that most women in high-mortality countries deliver at home, early programs focused on training traditional birth attendants in safe and hygienic practices.” However, studies have shown that “although training programs for traditional birth attendants may improve the care that mothers and newborns receive, these interventions proved ineffective in reducing maternal deaths.” Therefore, public health imperatives that insist on greater medical care or intervention in pregnancy and childbirth seem to be correctly focused on treatment and medical service provision (in well equipped facilities and attended by trained personnel), particularly at time of delivery. The transition from more traditional approaches (by traditional birth attendants, for example) to more advanced medical models in these contexts is evidence of development, empowerment and gender progressivity. Countries that do not prioritize the reduction of maternal mortality rates are denounced as failing women. Thus, it seems to be the case that in developing countries, agency and subjectivity for women are at least partially contingent on the availability (and encouraged use) of medical ser vices. “Medicalization” (as the systematic preference of the technological over the natural) is not necessarily a problem for women in developing countries, or women in disadvantaged populations in developed countries. Rather, it seems to be a problem for privileged women, one that is likely connected to the sharpness of the division between their public and private spheres of identity and existence.

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Privileged Populations: Women in Canada Canada has the lowest maternal mortality ratio in the region of the Americas (7.8 per 100,000 live births) and one of the lowest ratios in the world. This owes to “relatively high levels of education and economic well-being and an effective health care system.” Therefore, the evidence provided by these indicators confirms Canada’s success in achieving maternal and reproductive health. However, broader understandings of health and wellbeing reveal that biomedical approaches to women’s health have had negative consequences. According to feminist bioethicists and practitioners, many women feel as though they are constantly under medical surveillance. Women feel pressure, exerted by medical professionals, agencies of the state, women’s magazines and pharmaceutical marketers to monitor their diets, weight, appearance, activities, behaviors, and thoughts for any signs of abnormality or illness. During pregnancy this surveillance effort is increased, as medical doctors and nurses conduct tests to ensure that mothers are complying with best medical practices and fetuses are developing normally. For example, ultrasounds and genetic testing are routinely undertaken, regardless of whether the pregnancy indicates that intervention is necessary. This monitoring results in “disembodiment,” and “alienation,” and the “commodification” of fetuses. Iris Marion Young explains that “medicine’s self-identification as the curing profession encourages others as well as the woman to think of her pregnancy as a condition which deviates from normal health.” To be in the care of a physician or obstetrician creates a relationship of dependency, as the medical professional possesses the knowledge necessary for “cure” and the woman/patient is reliant on the doctor for this knowledge; she is not a “knowing” subject. This dependence enables the obstetrician to control the situation, and thereby, whether intentional or not, control the experience of pregnancy and delivery. Such is the problem of “medicalization” of pregnancy and childbirth. But how can this problem be taken seriously in light of these indicators? Why does medicalization seem to be experienced much more acutely by privileged women in societies where options for excellent medical care are available in abundance? Possible explanations seem to go well beyond the effects of poverty and class to implicate social and political dynamics. It is not simply the case that the observed discrepancy can be explained by the fact that women in vulnerable communities are constrained by material conditions in ways that privileged women are not. Preferences in pregnancy and childbirth seem to reveal important dimensions of identity and intersectionality among women. The Political “Nature” of Pregnancy and Childbirth

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Kevin White notes that medicalization, as it emerged in the literature, was initially a matter of concern for developing countries: The medicalisation debate has raged on, with much of the discussion being couched in terms of comparing the West with underdeveloped societies, in which medicine is fused with law and religion. In comparison with these societies it is argued that western society is not medicalised. This conclusion is systematically challenged by feminist research in two areas: the intrusion of medicine into the social and psychological aspects of mental health; and its colonization of women’s reproductive capacities. Concerning the latter, Peter Conrad explains that “childbirth probably reached its zenith in the 1950s. Typically, at least in middle class families, doctors delivered babies while the mother was sedated or under anesthesia, often in stirrups. Episiotomies and pain medications were routine, formula feeding was recommended for newborns, and so forth.” Th is complete medical determination of pregnancy and childbirth gave rise to the “natural childbirth movement,” which “had considerable success, especially promoting less intervention in childbirth, giving mothers more control and choices, and including fathers as labor coaches in the birth process.” The movement was also responsible for bringing about changes in hospital procedures and birthing strategies. Maternity wards in hospitals offered “more comfortable, even homelike, birthing rooms,” and “some women selected midwives for their births, and a few even chose to give birth at home.” However, Conrad qualifies, “as important as these changes were, they affected middle- and upper-class women much more than poorer women.” Therefore, the feminist challenge to the orthodox view of medicalization (as identified by White), was launched (and sustained) largely in the interests of privileged women. Medicalization and Agency At this point it will be useful to examine medicalization discourse and its various feminist formulations. The term, “medicalization” is used to describe a wide range of phenomena, from complete social control exercised by the institution of medicine to a complex system that is “a protean, dialectically shifting, social and political dynamic.” There is no consensus on the consequences of medicalization. For some contributors to the debate, medicalization condemns medical intervention in the lives of women. Heather Cahill claims that “the appropriation and medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth by men are rooted in a patriarchal 198

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model that has been centuries in the making” that pregnancy and childbirth have been inappropriately declared “abnormal,” “diseased,” and that the implications of medicalization are seriously negative: “Medicines’ continued dominance within obstetrics has meant that not only are doctors able to control the nature and scope of their own work but also that of the midwives.” Ann Garry, by contrast, separates the negative elements of medicalization from the proven benefits of medical care. She carefully explains that “many feminists are extremely critical of the practices and institutions that medicalize people’s lives, especially the lives of women and other marginalized groups; nevertheless, a critique of medicalization does not necessarily imply a rejection of medicine.” Laura Purdy provides a skeptical feminist treatment of the concept. According to Purdy, “analyzing the pervasive and often subtle ways medicine now controls women as it provides care is important work, but the more I think about it, the more obvious it seems that the problem is sometimes the current culture of medicine rather than the fact of medicalization.” What this contradiction might indicate is a “contested space” or “borderland,” “where there is a ‘continuous confrontation of two or more referential codes.’ ” The borderland in this instance is occupied by the competing forces noted above: nature/tradition and medicine/technology. The coding of experiences in this space is inherently political, which is to say that it is both constitutive and demonstrative of power dynamics. Th is point, concerning pregnancy and childbirth as sites for the construction of identity, is confirmed by the work of Lorna Weir. In her examination of the biopolitical dimensions of pregnancy, Weir states that “the understanding of pregnancy as a state of health is both a task and a way of belonging for midwifery, a profoundly normative claim” and that the “contemporary midwifery ethos . . . forms a normative relation between midwifery and women during pregnancy and childbirth.” It is this “normative” relation that expresses resistance and identity, and it varies according to cultural contexts rather than medical or evidence-based indications. Put another way, the body is politically significant, and it reflects the power dynamics of different cultural and socioeconomic contexts. Further, these contexts are overlapping, intersecting, and multiple, and the ways in which women navigate these political spaces reveals a great deal about the power differentials that exist within them. Garry makes this point in the following statement: Although all people are subject to medicalizing practices, medicalization is a feminist issue because women, along with other marginalized The Political “Nature” of Pregnancy and Childbirth

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people, are particularly disadvantaged by it. Medicalization is a means of social control that interlocks with other practices of domination to increase the damage caused to the lives of marginalized people. The purpose of this statement is twofold: It recognizes that medicalization affects everyone to some degree, and then declares women and other marginalized populations to be disproportionately affected. Garry continues: “In addition, insofar as marginalized people by definition ‘deviate’ from the norm, standard features (‘natural’ processes) of their lives stand at greater risk for medicalization.” This analysis seems to suggest that degree of medicalization would be proportional to disadvantage: that the most disadvantaged populations would also be the most “medicalized.” However, upon closer examination, the reverse seems to be true. In developing countries, appeals are continually made for more medical intervention in pregnancy and childbirth, not less. And with few exceptions, there are no feminist complaints about inappropriateness of (scarce) medical care for pregnant and parturient women in countries with high rates of maternal mortality. Further, in the United States, higher rates of maternal mortality among African American women serve as evidence for the need for better access to medical care. And for indigenous populations in Canada and Australia, birth outcomes for women and infants are compromised by poor availability of medical ser vices, although these populations remain suspicious of the institutions of western medicine. However, the preference expressed by many privileged women in affluent countries, such as Canada and the United States, for midwifery care and home births, is curiously at odds with public health data and ethical arguments. It is a rejection of privilege that simultaneously confirms it. Therefore, the problem of medicalization seems to apply disproportionately to privileged women. In fact, some of the most serious pronouncements of medical interference in pregnancy and childbirth as a “natural, normal, woman-centered event” come from women of considerable privilege and authority. In the American context, Naomi Wolf states: The medical establishment too often produces a birth experience that is unnecessarily physically and psychologically harmful to the women involved, even according to its own standards of mea surement. And American women are profoundly undersupported—by their families, their workplaces, and the larger society—in coping with the strains of new motherhood.

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In the Canadian context, the voices of feminist scholars such as Margaret Lock and Maria De Koninck echo this sentiment. Lock says the following about social constructions of health and disease: Despite the availability of complex etiologies to buffer feelings of helplessness in the face of illness, the question of why some people become sick while others remain healthy, even when the sickness is widespread, or why some babies die at birth while others do not is always of concern. In attempting to quell such concerns, governments, communities, and individuals must either assume that chance is at work or, much more frequently, undertake practices, ranging from divination to epidemiology and genetic testing and screening, to locate reasons and allocate responsibility for the unequal occurrence of distress and sickness. De Koninck extends this admonition to reproduction. She explains, “Obstetrical practices are permeated with technological developments and technological logic currently determines how events unfold. Women’s experiences all too often involve feelings of solitude, apprehension, fear, and disappointment.” This assessment requires alternatives to medical intervention and care, even when medical ser vices seem to be the shortest path to relief from illness, disease and suffering. According to De Koninck, overemphasis of biomedical approaches to pregnancy and childbirth are insufficient. What is needed is an approach or series of approaches that examine social, gender, and legal conditions for women. Without the latter, the former threatens to medicalize virtually any type of medical intervention, regardless of how well intended it might be. De Koninck pushes her argument further in claiming that reduction in maternal and infant mortality rates might not be the most culturally appropriate goals, which renders most public health responses invalid. She draws from her experiences in the West African country of Benin, where maternal and infant mortality rates are alarmingly high, and explains that many women have come to understand that death is simply a part of the natural order of things, and should not be questioned. However, this apparent acceptance seems to be consistent with Third World women’s ability to make virtue out of necessity, rather than evidence of a desirable and authentic experience of mother/womanhood. Returning to Nature Preservation of the “natural order of things” has become imperative for some women, while others have continued to demand medical options

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(such as assisted reproductive technologies and elective cesarean sections). Peter Conrad notes this paradox: In the current era, we have a bifurcation of childbirth practices: some births are less medicalized (e.g., with childbirth classes, birthing rooms, and no anesthesia), while others are more medicalized (e.g., with internal fetal monitors, cesarean sections, and attendant neonatal infant care units). In 2004 the C-section rate in the United States reached an all-time high of 29 percent (R. Rubin 2005). Of interest, the number of elective C-sections has risen in recent years; this number now constitutes approximately 2.5 percent of all births, including a significant increase in first-time mothers (Health-Grades, 2005). In short, there has been resistance to medicalized childbirth, but the overall medicalization of childbirth is still predominant and may be increasing in some quarters. It is also important to recognize that the trend toward more births attended by midwives might be evidence of both resistance to medicalization and its increase (in that midwives are now part of a state-sanctioned and regulated health profession). However, the trend toward options that are “natural,” “normal,” or “traditional,” regardless of whether or not they are actually any of those things, is undeniable, and it is this set of claims that is the focus of this essay. As explained by Margaret MacDonald, “identification with tradition is often used as a rhetorical strategy in political struggles of the present,” or is used as a “political symbol.” She elaborates: “In other words, calling something a tradition creates a sense of authenticity and ownership for the group making that claim. To understand tradition as invented does not invalidate its authenticity, nor the right of the group or culture to claim it, but rather draws analytical attention to the processes of its production and use.”  Furthermore, this paradox offers the opportunity for examination of a threshold, as articulated by Lorna Weir, who explains that, “a threshold makes possible a relation between heterogeneous places, practices and perceptions,” and that “women in pregnancy bear the between, the entrance across which the unborn must pass in order to be distinguished from those who carry them.” Critics of medical intervention in pregnancy and childbirth seem to emphasize the significance of this threshold, and claim that it requires recognition as a natural and/or normal event. The official websites of the Canadian and provincial midwives Associations and Colleges tend to describe their profession as one that is dedicated to the facilitation of “normal birth.” For example, the Canadian Association of Midwives, which is “the national organization representing midwives and the profes202

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sion of midwifery in Canada,” declares that “we believe that midwives have a unique and essential role to play in the facilitation and preservation of normal birth through the art and science of midwifery.” The College of Midwives of Manitoba identifies “childbirth as a normal physiological process,” and that “the entry level midwife should have the knowledge and skills to “promote normal birth” and this commitment to the “promotion of normal birth” is echoed by the Colleges of Midwives of Ontario and British Columbia and the Association of Ontario Midwives. The Midwives Association of British Columbia states that the “midwifery model of care offers you . . . Non-interventive care based on the most recent medical research available.” The Alberta Association of Midwives states that “midwifery is grounded in the belief that having a baby is a natural life process and an opportunity for considerable growth.”  The themes of nonintervention and birthing as a natural process are perhaps most clearly stated by the Midwives Alliance of North America: A midwife-attended birth gives a woman a measure of control generally unavailable with a physician—the freedom to move, eat, bathe, or whatever else might help her labor and birth more confidently. The role of a midwife is to monitor labor, guiding and supporting the birthing woman safely through the birth process. For many women, care with a midwife allows them to birth their way, safely and naturally, supported by the people they love. Many studies show that midwifery care through labor and delivery lowers complication rates and reduces the likelihood of unnecessary cesarean section. In addition, personal and popular accounts overwhelmingly describe the ideal birth as natural (which seems to be what it intended by expressed commitments to “the normal”). For example, a recent article in Canadian Living Magazine online offers “10 tips for a natural birth,”  and many personal and advocacy websites assert the superiority of “natural” and/or “organic” childbirth. Popular culture coincides with trends in childbirth education and advocacy that promise calm, woman-directed, painless childbirth, such as “hypnobirthing,” “mindfulness childbirth,” and “birthing from within.” This view is taken to the extreme by the recent (predominantly American) trend toward unassisted childbirth, or “freebirth.” According to Laura Shanley, who is considered to be the foremost expert on the practice, “[unattended childbirth] made so much sense to me. Here is this thing that is insuring the continuation of the race, and it’s going to be fraught with peril. What kind of sense does that make?” Shanley and other proponents of freebirth explain that childbirth has been transformed by the medical The Political “Nature” of Pregnancy and Childbirth

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profession from a natural process into a disease, and that unassisted childbirth provides a way for women to reclaim their power. While it is important to acknowledge that this “trend” appeals to or affects a very small number of women in the United States (current estimates are around 5,000 per year for North America), the underlying sentiment, that medical interference is inappropriate and should be rejected when alternatives are available, is widespread. Many women who advocate for midwifery (such as Wolf) or free birth believe that medical intervention in pregnancy and childbirth creates complications (while it misleadingly claims to respond to or guard against them). Both sets of claims (by midwives, who argue for the importance of reinstating woman-centered approaches to the natural and normal process of childbirth, and freebirthers, who suggest that through the instinctive direction of mind over matter, the birthing process can be self-controlled) seem to be philosophically oriented toward the ethical imperatives of biological determinism. However, as Donna Haraway warns, “we must never again connect as parts to wholes, as marked beings incorporated into unmarked ones, as unitary and complimentary subjects serving the one Subject of monotheism and secular heresies. We must have agency— or agencies—without defended subjects.”  Yet, many (privileged) women, critical of the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth, through philosophical argument and political practice, try to do just that. The debate between those who defend nature and those who acknowledge the cyborgification (meaning the inevitable and inseparable fusion of nature and culture/technology) of women (as well as men) is made problematic by the intersection of socioeconomic status and race with understandings of “nature.” It is further complicated by the naïve assumption made by the defenders of nature that they can extract themselves (and others) from the technological, cultural and political dynamics of social domination. Sheryl Nestel’s examination of the reemergence of midwifery in North America reveals that professional status was obtained by (mostly white) women through processes of racial and socioeconomic domination. Prospective Canadian midwives often traveled to birthing clinics on the US– Mexico border in order to gain practical experience in delivering babies. The parturient women who were attended by these midwives-intraining were poor, Mexican, Spanish-speaking women, whose status made them appropriate recipients of student care. However, Mexican women who had worked as midwives while living in Mexico did not have their experiences recognized when they immigrated to Canada. To the contrary, the same experiences gained by women of Mexican origin, practicing among the same populations, were not considered to be legitimate. 204

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Further, Mexican (and other foreign-born/foreign-trained women) were required to pass difficult English language tests (which were routinely failed by native English speakers), as it was considered necessary that midwives could communicate easily with their clients. However, it was not considered necessary by Canadian regulating authorities that Canadian women be able to communicate effectively with Spanish-speaking birthing women in the bordertowns. Further, the culture of midwifery has simultaneously revered, appropriated, and devalued the myth of the primitive or Third World woman who is closer to nature. Nestel states that “Indigenous Latin American women have been awarded a particularly revered status in natural childbirth iconography. . . . The theme is that women in the West have lost the innate ability to give birth naturally, while those in the Third World, frozen in time, have retained it.” The fantasy of the natural, Third World woman is also a possible means for Western women to congeal their own identities or subjectivity, to search for and find a whole meaning, a consistent narrative, for their lives. Haraway posits that “the search for a ‘full’ and total position is the search for the fetishized perfect subject of oppositional history, sometimes appearing in feminist theory as the essentialized Third World Woman.” In addition, for bell hooks, subordinated women are accorded by dominant groups an exaggerated power or false agency, which diminishes evidence of disadvantage: By projecting onto black women a mythical power and strength, white women both promote a false image of themselves as powerless, passive victims and deflect attention away from their aggressiveness, their power (however limited in a white supremacist, male-dominated state), their willingness to dominate and control others. These unacknowledged aspects of the social status of many white women prevent them from transcending racism and limit the scope of their understanding of women’s overall social status in the United States. This total position, as identified by Haraway, appears, at a superficial level, more honest and powerful than it actually is. Its legitimacy is further compromised by the fact that it is mostly white women who consume and provide midwives’ ser vices. In part, this is due to the purposeful exclusion of women of color from the practice of midwifery. It is also due, it seems, to the different views of the self (relative to nature) and to differentially politicized personal and public spaces. The role of midwives and traditional birth attendants in subordinate or subaltern cultures and societies is highly contested. Analyses are disparate, contradictory, as they are taken from a variety of literatures and contexts, The Political “Nature” of Pregnancy and Childbirth

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and often do not come from the women who are the focus of the study. For example, Patricia Jasen’s historical account of race and childbirth in Northern Canada reveals an enduring ambivalence between mythical or romanticized notions of “primitive” childbirth and the markers of disadvantage. Jasen explains that Whether the differences among races were due to nature or culture was always a matter of debate among Europeans, but the notion that women in ‘savage lands’ were fundamentally different from European women gained a wide following through the myth of painless childbirth. Eighteenth century naturalist comte de Buffon reported that the women of Africa ‘bring forth their children with great ease, and require no assistance’, and the same was frequently said of indigenous women elsewhere. The simultaneous reverence and dismissal of “primitive” women as different from European women is well documented and central to postcolonial and critical analyses. It is also one of the products of the Enlightenment, as evidenced by the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. At the heart of the debate was the question of “how close other races might be to a state of nature, and whether that condition was an enviable one or not.”  For Rousseau, the “natural” was enviable, and fundamental to freedom. Yet for others, such as John Locke and Immanuel Kant, the “natural” was inferior, uneducated, uncivilized. And in contemporary feminist theory, this debate is reproduced through the countervailing arguments of Simone de Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone, and Adrienne Rich, who claim that women’s essence (regardless of race) is not determined by nature, but by societal and material relations, those such as Caroline Whitbeck, who defends and explains the distinctness of women’s biological character, especially in relation to their reproductive and mothering functions, and those such as Carol Gilligan and Sara Ruddick who acknowledge women’s essential qualities, but do not fully attribute those qualities to nature. It is further represented in debates concerning the degree to which medical/cultural/ technological interventions are appropriate in pregnancy and childbirth, or whether the relatively “natural” condition procured by midwives and traditional birth attendants is an “enviable” one or not. The myth of painless childbirth, as explained by Jasen, served and continues to serve at least three political purposes. First, it provides “evidence” for racial difference that goes beyond mere skin color to include more fundamental traits. Second, it declares this difference to be a marker of inferiority: “painful childbirth [was associated] with a higher level of human development, a belief that would become more pronounced 206

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under the influence of evolutionary theory. And third, it declared as “natural” European women’s delicate constitutions and passive roles in pregnancy and childbirth. And while science seemed to confirm these propositions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, advances in the twentieth century would turn them on their heads, leaving not complete reversal, but disruption and disorientation concerning women, nature, and childbirth. Subjectivity, Identity, and the Public/Private Dichotomy In an earlier section, I made reference to Iris Marion Young’s influential article on pregnant embodiment. Young argues that obstetrics (in the United States) alienates women from their experiences of pregnancy and childbirth. She argues that pregnancy “reveals a paradigm of bodily experience in which the transparent unity of self dissolves and the body attends positively to itself at the same time that it enacts its projects.” While the first part of her argument implicates medical systems (of power, control, and knowledge) in the disembodiment and disempowerment of pregnant women, the second part of her argument implicates a very different source: the psychological event of split subjectivity. On this matter, Young quotes Julia Kristeva: “Pregnancy seems to be experienced as the radical ordeal of the splitting of the subject: redoubling up of the body, separation and coexistence of the self and an other, of nature and consciousness, of physiology and speech.” Such a splitting of the self is exemplified by Wolf, who states, “Although few women in the West actually die in childbirth today, we deny the many symbolic deaths a contemporary pregnant woman undergoes: from the end of her solitary selfhood to the eclipse of her psychologically carefree identity, to the transformation of her marriage, to the decline in her status as a professional or worker.” Throughout her book, Wolf describes her divided self during her pregnancy and subsequent motherhood. In a chapter entitled, “Losses,” she recalls visiting an elaborate playspace with a friend and her daughter. Upon entering the playspace, each mother and child were given nametags that identified the parent-child coupling as a unit. She reflects on this experience: For perhaps the first time, I had an inkling of the radical loss of privacy that lay ahead. I remembered the new mothers who had told me, “I’m not able to go to the bathroom alone.” I realized that my identity was about to be cloven in two, my independence cut by half. It was the first time I could see it spelled out for me in all its sweetness and regret, in all its ambiguity. The Political “Nature” of Pregnancy and Childbirth

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Young tells similar stories of her split subjectivity, of walking through the stacks of books at the library, looking for a copy of the Critique of Dialectical Reason while experiencing false contractions; of sitting with friends in a jazz bar, listening to the music while feeling the kicking of the fetus. Young explains that “in attending to my pregnant body in such circumstances, I do not feel alienated from it, as in illness. I merely notice its borders and rumblings with interest, sometimes with plea sure, and this aesthetic does not divert me from my business.” The concept of split subjectivity as advanced by Young has its modern roots in psychoanalytic theory, and is often attributed to feminist interpretations of Jacques Lacan. However, its genesis can be traced to the work of Rene Descartes, who revealed that the subject recognizes and analyses itself, and thereby creates an internal-external (reflexive) duality. Split subjectivity can be defined as the occupation of two or more psychic spaces, which compete with one another and shape (or frustrate) identity. In the example offered by Young, the self is divided into two coexistent identities: academic and mother. Naomi Wolf’s experience at the playspace demonstrates the same duality: the identity of the individual woman competes with the identity of mother for recognition and agency. This view of split subjectivity as competitive has also been applied to several other discussions, such as race and colonization, masculinity, ethnographic research methodology, country music, and the requirements of citizenship and capitalism. Current research by Robin Root and C. H. Browner, Mignolo and Tlostanova, and Somerson has used the concept to delineate the negotiation of the duality. This entails examination of (both conceptual and political) “borderlands.” For example, Root and Browner state that “women negotiate diverse subjugated and authoritative knowledges to suit their individual needs and desires. We suggest that pregnancy is, above all, characterized by a split subjectivity in which women straddle the authoritative and the subjugated, in telling and often strategic ways.” The negotiation of the contested space reveals “a broad spectrum between compliance and resistance.” Their research considers the ways in which women comply with and/or resist prenatal (biomedical) norms. The women who participated in their study demonstrated contradictory cognitions and behaviors concerning prenatal care. As subjects and the subjugated, they experienced the liberating and regulating effects of the cultural norms of good motherhood and good medicine. Moreover, they constructed knowledge from “expert” (external) and internal sources, and resisted the former in order to develop a “subjectivity that heeds its own self-determined rules.” Therefore, there is a double duality presented: one of internal— external or subject— subjected dialogue, and one of the pregnant woman and the fe208

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tus. According to the authors, “it is a split-subjectivity that serves to highlight the almost necessary co-habitation of the one (authoritative) with the other (subjugated) as each derives its status only in relation to the other.” The research of Deborah Lupton also demonstrates this duality. Firsttime mothers in advanced industrialized countries, explains Lupton, experience a much sharper split subjectivity than did their forebears. She states, “motherhood in western societies at the end of the twentieth century is a site of cultural and social contradictions and tensions. Over the past quarter-century, women with children have been encouraged to construct their identities increasingly through the public domain, including through paid labour. Yet they are still also expected to conform to ideals of ‘good motherhood.’ ” Furthermore, and borrowing from psychoanalytic theory, she posits that “bodily boundaries may be experienced as more permeable and fluid for women who mother. It has been argued that at the psychodynamic level of identity women experience the self, or ‘ego boundaries,’ as more diff use and less differentiated than men because of the ways in which they are socialized from infancy.” The result of this duality is a “love/hate relationship of women with their infants” (and presumably with themselves). Lupton concludes that the division of the (pregnant) self has intensified and is likely to continue to intensify as the pressures for the development of the autonomous self and the good mother increase. My research supports Lupton’s findings. It also reinforces the understanding of the pregnant and/or mothering subject as doubly divided (internal— external dialogue and mother—fetus cohabitation). Consistent with arguments of Root and Browner, I have suggested that nature has been reclaimed as a resistance strategy, and as a means of negotiating split subjectivity in developed countries and among privileged populations (although the embracing of medical technology (even when unnecessary) is an effective resistance strategy in developing countries and/or among vulnerable populations). The ambivalence produced by these experiences of split subjectivity seems to be reproduced and amplified by the persistence of the public/ private distinction in North American societies. The continued expectation that women will serve different functions, perform different roles, assume different identities in private and public spheres, reinforces the division of the subject. Therefore, experiences in one sphere require that women are separated or alienated from fundamental experiences and characteristics that are the domain of the other sphere. As noted, the sharpness of the division between public and private spheres does not seem to be maintained to the same extent, or in the same form, in many developing countries. Women’s lives, while limited in many other ways, seem not to be The Political “Nature” of Pregnancy and Childbirth

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divided, split, or “cleaved” into public and private obligations, opportunities or experiences. But in Western societies such as Canada and the United States, women’s “emancipation” from lives of domestic servitude (with no political rights or independent social status) has been replaced by an impossible choice between two options: public or private fulfillment. One need only to look at the low numbers of women in senior positions in the workforce, absence of public daycare programs, rates of declining births and delayed age of pregnancies, and the countless magazine articles and television talk shows that address the difficulty of balancing work and home life for evidence that women do not embody a unified subjectivity. It seems to be possible, therefore, that feminist critiques of the medicalization of childbirth serve as political commentaries on and sites of resistance to the split subjectivity/private-public dilemmas. Resistance to structural disadvantages for women is recoded as resistance to medical control over our lives, or to technological intervention in our most intimate and prized experiences. Economic, political and social systems are, in many respects, impossible targets, whereas the dominant medical “gaze” of obstetricians is more easily identified and connected to the feelings of loss of self, identity and control. Therefore, the impediment to agency and unified subjectivity in pregnancy and childbirth becomes medicine and not capitalism, liberalism, or patriarchy. The feminist project is redirected— oppression, a common theme in feminist political theory, is reframed as “medicalization.” With this reframing comes the substitution of narratives of cold, medical control with narratives of natural, traditional, woman-centered approaches to the elusive nature of the authenticity of motherhood. As explained in a previous section, Third World women’s experiences with traditional or natural birthing practices have been appropriated and romanticized by first world women, often to the detriment of the subaltern women. Sheryl Nestel claims that “conceptually, images of Third World women have served to define middle-class white women’s midwifery identities through both negative comparison and fantasized idealization.” The Canadian Association of Midwives states, “We believe in a primary care model of midwifery that is community-based and collaborative. This model is founded upon principles of woman-centred care, informed choice, continuity of care and choice of birth place. We recognize and value the richness of diversity that is inherent in women, the community, and the midwives who serve them.” Further, it is worth recognizing that “fantasized idealization” and commitments to “woman-centered care” are selective and not universal. Laura Purdy notes that abortion has been spared from feminist critiques of medical intrusiveness in areas that were previously the exclu210

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sive domain of women. She asks: Suppose we rejected the paradigm of medicalization for abortion? Over time, women have developed various folk methods of aborting themselves, and perhaps those methods should be revisited.” Of course, this seems to be an absurd proposition, although it might be worth asking why abortion is treated as distinct from other reproductive rights (such as those associated with pregnancy/childbirth and new reproductive technologies) in medicalization debates. Part of the reason would no doubt relate to the centrality of pregnancy and childbirth in women’s lives, and to their deep and enduring significance. It is precisely this significance that is implicated in the problematic dualities of split subjectivity and private/public existences examined above. The political dimensions of women’s lives are investigated, questioned, and resisted in their experiences in pregnancy and childbirth. And while maternal health might not be at stake in privileged populations, identity and agency (as the power to exert control over directing that identity) clearly are. But this analysis only addresses one part of the observed trend in pregnancy and childbirth—reverence for “the natural.” What about the countervailing trend, the increased medicalization of these events through ART and elective C-sections? It is possible that in addition to pregnancy and childbirth as a site of resistance for women, it is also a site for the construction of identity. As such, natural childbirth, exclusive breastfeeding, ARTs, and elective C-sections form a range of reproductive choices, the extremes of which are sought as cultural markers of one’s place in society. One extreme affirms the natural events of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood, and the other allows for greater control over the birthing process, which can be painful, risky, and unpredictable, and thereby affirms the narratives of choice, control and the defiance of other natural events (infertility, labor complications). The one extreme reveres the birthing mother as a force of nature, whereas the other provides elevated status to a woman for the degree of control that she can exercise over her own body. Both extremes are socially constructed as simultaneously empowering and oppressive. And they are decidedly oppositional—they do not seem, in either feminist analysis or practice, to coexist happily as possible choices for pregnant and parturient women. Interestingly, this debate might also shed light on the importance of an individual or group’s relative position in the medico-cultural context. In a press release addressing the trend toward elective cesarean sections, the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Canada (SOGC) stated the following: “The Society is concerned that a natural process would be transformed into a surgical process . . . The SOGC will continue to promote natural childbirth and make strong representation to have adequate The Political “Nature” of Pregnancy and Childbirth

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resources available for women in labor and during childbirth in Canada.” This statement confirms nature as a contested political space. As such, it provides further evidence that women are continuously renegotiating their cultural position, in this instance by reclaiming, redefining and, in some cases, rejecting nature. To a certain extent, medical approaches to care during pregnancy and childbirth have become less alienating in recent years. Many hospitals in Canada have created maternity centers that offer women more comfortable, private, and less clinical environments for birthing. Often these more private environments include birthing pools, balls, and other equipment and techniques for encouraging natural labor and nonmedical pain management. Procedures such as “twilight sleep” are no longer used, newborn babies are kept in the room with the mother rather than whisked off to the nursery, and breastfeeding is encouraged in the hospital. In addition, there is improved coordination between local public health departments and hospitals, so that women have access to a broad range of care and support through prenatal classes, in-hospital care, and postnatal support. However, in interviews (n = 120) conducted in Guelph, Ontario, Canada, where all of these ser vices and amenities are available to women in the local hospital, many women still complained about the alienating effects of the medical approach to care during pregnancy and childbirth. For women who opt for care provided by an obstetrician, regular check-ups are done in clinic in the hospital, where routine testing (weight, blood pressure, and glucose level monitoring) takes a matter of minutes. Women complained about feeling rushed, and processed rather than cared for. Women who opted for care by a midwife appreciated the time spent with them at each routine check-up. Moreover, they valued the relationships that they developed with their midwives, and were assured that at least one of the two midwives on their “team” would be in attendance during their entire experience of labor, birth, and postpartum adjustment. Women cared for by obstetricians did not develop those same close relationships and were not guaranteed to be attended by their own obstetrician when admitted to hospital; the obstetrician on duty at that time provided the care. The World Health Organization, which tends to establish the agenda and set the tone for global health approaches, identifies the primary goal of maternal health to be risk management/mitigation. In other words, the focus is on “curing” the persistent causes of maternal and infant death. The cultural dimensions of care are of secondary concern. In Canada, women’s preferences (as determined through the interviews mentioned above) seem to address various elements of these two divergent imperatives: risk mitigation and cultural meaning-making. The Guelph interviews also revealed 212

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that immigrant women, many of whom are originally from developing countries, tend to emphasize the former, whereas the relatively privileged, Canadian-born women tend to emphasize the latter. This bifurcation can be attributed to experiential differences (immigrant women from countries with higher rates of maternal mortality recognize the risks associated with pregnancy and childbirth and believe that the ultimate goal is survival of mother and child), and cultural differences (the experience of childbirth is often celebrated and valued through familial and community traditions that are quite separate from the birthing experience itself, whereas for Canadianborn women, the actual birthing experience is an opportunity to create cultural meaning in a broader societal context that tends not to celebrate of value childbirth). Conclusion The differences in treatment of women subjects in pregnancy and childbirth require greater attention to the intersectionality of disadvantage among vulnerable populations and the fragile dimensions of identity among privileged populations. Such an investigation will help to clarify the value and limitations of medicalization critiques and shed light on the political dynamics of pregnancy and childbirth in various contexts. Because body politics are different in Canada, the United States, Haiti, Bolivia, and Benin, the applicability of medicalization discourse is highly variable. But such variability is problematic for feminist theory that claims to be not only universal, but also integrative of women’s experiences. The fantasy of Third World women’s natural experiences of childbirth has become iconic among first world women, even if these experiences are more imagined than real. This creates multiple opportunities for exploitation, as the experiences of Third World women are used as a means for First World women to acquire knowledge, experience, and perspective on “natural” or “traditional” birthing practices, while denying the importance of medical ser vices that privileged women take for granted. It is also important to consider the reasons why medicalization resonates more strongly in privileged populations than in disadvantaged ones, when the latter are much more vulnerable to dominant institutions (like medicine). As explained in the preceding section, the sharpness of the public/private distinction in North American societies seems to intensify the split subjectivity of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood. Resistance to this phenomenon creates reverence for the natural and the traditional; at the very least it demands the restoration of a focus on caring. Iris Marion Young concludes that “the alienation experienced by the pregnant and The Political “Nature” of Pregnancy and Childbirth

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birthing woman would probably be lessened if caring were distinguished from curing, and took on a practical value that did not subordinate to curing.” Such is the approach taken by midwives in distinguishing themselves from obstetricians, which seems, in many respects, eminently sensible. However, such arguments need further examination in privileged populations in North America (and elsewhere), as well as in vulnerable populations in both developed and developing countries, where preferences for woman-centered care and natural childbirth options tend to reflect material and cultural requirements, most often in the absence of advanced medical ser vices.

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10

Disempowered Women? The Midwifery Model and Medical Intervention SONYA CHARLES

Feminist theorists have spent a lot of time critiquing the medical model of childbirth. By contrast, they have paid little attention to the midwifery model because they widely assume that it empowers women. While I agree that the midwifery model is a huge improvement over the medical model, I believe there are aspects of the midwifery model (as it is practiced today) that do not empower women. In this essay, I focus on one way this is the case—namely, how the midwifery model can contribute to women’s sense of shame, failure, and isolation when medical intervention is necessary. Proponents of the midwifery model often share stories of women who felt angry, depressed, and betrayed when hospital procedures or physicians and nurses who support the medical model thwarted their attempt to have a natural birth experience. Those who support the midwifery model use these stories to educate women about unnecessary medical interventions and promote the midwifery model as a better alternative. Since feminists tend to presume that the midwifery model is a better way to conceptualize childbirth, few have devoted much time to analyzing the promotion and implementation of the midwifery model. When we do such an exploration, however, we discover some ways that the midwifery model can disempower women by encouraging unnecessary self-recriminations or causing women to blame themselves when they need medical interventions during labor. Here I discuss three aspects of the midwifery model—the uniformity of birth stories, the explanation of the mind/body connection, and the attitude toward medical interventions—that potentially disempower women 215

by encouraging feelings of shame, failure, and isolation when medical technology is necessary. My argument is that, by encouraging unnecessary self-recriminations, the midwifery model fails women who adopt the midwifery model but end up requiring medical intervention. In addition to explaining the problems, I also include some thoughts on how we can reform the midwifery model to make it more in keeping with the broader goal of female empowerment. Uniformity of Birth Stories What I love about stories the most is the power they have to teach us of possibilities that might not occur to us without them. —Ina May Gaskin

In this section, I discuss how the stories that circulate about childbirth shape women’s interpretations of their childbirth experiences. My argument is that we need a greater diversity of stories to help women make sense of the variety of birth experiences. To better understand why I focus on stories and how they relate to women’s childbirth experience, I draw on the work of Richard Nisbett and Lee Ross as well as Hilde Lindemann Nelson. In their work on naturalized epistemology, Nisbett and Ross argue that “to understand the social world, the layperson makes heavy use of a variety of knowledge structures normally not expressed in propositional terms and possibly not stored in a form even analogous to propositional statements.” They call these “schemas,” which individuals use to place objects and events into various categories or interpretive frameworks. They further break down into event-schemas or “scripts” and person-schemas or “personae.” The two dominant models of childbirth (the medical model and the midwifery model) rely on both types of schemas. According to Nisbett and Ross, “A script is a type of schema in which the related elements are social objects and events involving the individual as actor or observer.” These scripts usually have a “causal flavor” where one event leads to the next much like the snapshots you receive in a comic strip. The scripts are specific enough that a person knows the basic outline of the story, but vague enough to apply to a number of specific contexts or situations. For example, a classic is the restaurant script in which you order, eat, pay, and leave. One could convey this series of events with minimal visuals or details. Indeed, showing a person signing a credit card receipt and giving it to a waiter is often enough to allow the individual to fill in the rest of the story. However, this script is also vague enough to accommodate many 216

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specific experiences such as different types of restaurants, good or bad experiences with the food, wait staff, and fellow diners. Any story or script also has a set of characters, some of which are iconic enough to be schemas of their own. Nisbett and Ross call these person schemas or “personae.” “Central to any dramatic script is the dramatis personae, or cast of characters. Indeed, to specify the characters is often sufficient to convey much of the action of the script.”  They give examples such as the sexpot or the girl-next-door. Returning to our restaurant script, we could talk about the surly waiter or the arrogant maître d’. These person schemas or “personae” are like stereotypes except that they do not always carry negative connotations. In sum, these scripts and personae work together to help people make sense of their world. On one hand, they can be shorthand when explaining an event or sharing a story. You need only give a part, and the listener can fill in the rest. On the other hand, we use them to interpret our own experiences. Nisbett and Ross argue that once we have incorporated a specific script it will shape our interpretation of specific experiences. It will direct our attention toward certain details and lead us to ignore others. In this way, these schemas allow us to go beyond the information given. If we consider the two dominant models of childbirth, we can see that we have two distinct scripts with two distinct personae. In the obstetrical model, we have a distinct series of causal events: the onset of labor, the drive to the hospital, the relief of the epidural, the intensity of childbirth, and the baby delivered to mom and dad via the physician. The persona in this script accepts the need for high-tech monitoring of labor and appreciates the supervision of the medical community. Women who adopt the medical model view childbirth as inherently dangerous, or at least view technology and medicine as the safest way to deliver a baby. They also often view labor as something to be endured, not as an experience that requires their active engagement (beyond pushing or otherwise following physician directives). To be clear, I am not arguing that women who adopt the medical model are dupes of the medical system. Some are educated and active consumers in their own health. What I am arguing is that they have accepted the belief that childbirth is safer if you rely on high-tech equipment and that labor is something to be controlled rather than experienced. In contrast, the midwifery script emphasizes the idea that a woman’s laboring body will work if allowed to do what it needs to do. The events of the midwifery model include stages of labor that often relate to the various stages of pain (since the goal is an unmedicated birth). The birth stories usually include an early stage of labor when the woman realizes she is in labor and is alternately excited and anxious. This is followed by a more Disempowered Women?

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intense stage of labor when the woman usually relates the various coping mechanisms she employed to try to ease the pain and speed the birth. This part of the script usually peaks with “transition,” the stage when most women feel like they cannot go on and lose faith in their ability to complete the process. This is followed by the pushing stage where many women feel a renewed sense of purpose. Finally, the baby is delivered (either by the midwife or caught by the woman herself), after which the woman feels a sense of accomplishment and bliss. The persona in this scenario might be the classic “earth mother,” but need not be. Key aspects of this persona are that she expects her caregiver to be more of a partner in the birth process. She has a general trust of her body, the process of labor, and a general skepticism of high-tech interventions. Perhaps most important, she expects labor to be an empowering experience, rather than just something to be endured. At this point, I am going to leave the medical model/script behind. In this essay, I am not interested in debating the pros/cons of the two models. Instead, I am interested in exploring the limits of the midwifery model and how it might be reformed to be more inclusive of women who deviate from the “ideal” script. If these scripts shape how we interpret our experience, what happens to the woman who does not fit the script? I turn now to the woman who adopts the midwifery model/script, but then finds herself needing medical intervention (such as a cesarean section). Her persona does not fit the obstetrical model, but her script does not fit the midwifery model. How is she to make sense of her experience? Building on the work of Nisbett and Ross and others, Hilde Lindeman Nelson gives more insight to the importance of stories. According to Nelson, not only do stories work as interpretive frameworks, but they are also central to our personal identity. According to Nelson, we take these stock plots and characters and weave them together into one or more personal narratives. These narratives shape our personal identity and understanding of who we are. By selectively depicting and characterizing the acts and events of my life that are important to me, by characterizing myself in terms of the features of my body and personality that I care about, by plotting these various elements in ways that connect my stories to other stories and that give my stories their overall significance, I come to an understanding of who I am. The woman who adopts the midwifery model focuses a special attention on pregnancy and childbirth as a significant transformative event. Rejecting the use of various technologies during birth is a key component of her 218

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personal narrative. This has become significant for her personal identity as well as her interpretation of the experience of birth. Her story is connected to other stories. She identifies with natural birth stories and feels connected to a group that believes birth is “natural” and “empowering” and, as such, we should avoid technology and trust women’s bodies. If the midwifery script is both a significant component of your personal identity and your interpretive framework for making sense of your experience of labor, then what happens when you are unable to enact that script? You are left with insufficient interpretive tools (your script no longer fits) and you are an outsider to your chosen community. You are no longer at home with your fellow midwifery model adherents because your story is aberrant, but you also do not fit with the obstetrical model adherents because your persona is still committed to the midwifery model. Given the work of Nisbett, Ross, and Nelson, a large part of women’s general depression and guilt if they require medical interventions entails the fact that they had one script or story in mind, and once their story deviated from that model, they have nothing with which to replace it. In other words, women who identify with the midwifery script, but end up needing medical intervention, do not have the tools to make sense of their experience. More important, as Nelson points out, our stories are intertwined with other stories. In this way, our personal identity requires social recognition. Women who identify with the midwifery model, but need medical intervention are left without a community or “social recognition” of their experience. Their personal identities/personae are still committed to the midwifery model, but they are now outsiders to that community. By “outsiders” to the community, I do not mean that women will necessarily be ridiculed or ostracized. However, they will feel different (their story does not match) and they may be subjected to subtle judgmental comments (whether intentional or not). For example, a significant part of the midwifery model’s critique of the medical model is the over-use of cesarean deliveries. Critics argue that physicians (either for convenience or from a fear of litigation) encourage (or manipulate) women into getting C-sections when they are not truly necessary. Since there are almost no stories about medically justified cesareans, any woman telling her cesarean story to her community of midwifery supporters knows her story is likely to be met with skepticism. Members of this community will likely be listening for some indication of how or why this C-section was not “really” necessary. In this way, a woman who truly needs medical intervention may come to question her own story. Was I duped? Was there something else that I could have done? Sharing medically justified cesarean narratives can help rebuild a sense of personal identity that was lost. In her anthropological analysis of birth, Disempowered Women?

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Robbie Floyd-Davis recounts Marianne’s story. Marianne spent a long time coming to terms with her emergency cesarean. After immersing herself in research, she finally decided her C-section was medically justified. This not only helped her to stop “feeling like a failure” but also lead her to reach out to other women. She began giving talks entitled “Having a cesarean is Having a Baby.” Her talks were very well received by the cesarean mothers who heard them, because her theme validated their conceptual need for the right to consider themselves as fully women, as fully birth-givers, and as fully mothers as their friends who had achieved “natural childbirth.” Her talks thus became a vehicle through which other women could reinterpret the meanings of their cesarean births. Here we see both how stories help shape events and how they are important to personal identity. Women steeped in the midwifery model feel a sense of failure when medical intervention is used— even if the intervention was medically justified. We also see the importance of shared stories. By sharing her story, Marianne helped other women make sense of their stories and regain a significant aspect of their personal identity. Our stories tie us to (or isolate us from) others. To summarize, women use conceptual schemas or stories to make sense of their childbirth experience. While it may have been initially necessary to focus on home births and the ecstasy of the natural birth experience as a counter-balance to the medical model, we now need more diversity of stories to help women make sense of their experiences. The narrow focus of these stories leads women who need medical intervention to feel a sense of failure and isolation. If we agree that medical intervention will sometimes be necessary and that laboring women are not to blame for these complications, then proponents of the midwifery model need to recognize these uncertainties in the stories that circulate. Specifically, we need stories that help women maintain their persona that is aligned with the midwifery model and their home community while incorporating the need for medical interventions. I believe proponents of the midwifery model can do this by drawing on other aspects of the midwifery model such as a commitment to women’s agency and the supportive connection between the laboring woman and her caregivers. Thus, we need to broaden the general stories or scripts associated with the midwifery model. I understand why proponents of the midwifery model are reticent to include stories that end in medical intervention. The medical model has been so dominant in our culture that supporters of

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the midwifery model want to emphasize another way. Nonetheless, it is time to broaden that model for a number of reasons. First, the uniformity of stories emphasizes how women’s bodies are made for childbirth and will work best without medical intervention. Since the midwifery model developed in response to the medical model, this emphasis (including only stories of unmedicated vaginal birth experiences) was meant to help restore women’s trust in their own bodies. Yet this single-mindedness of focus does a disser vice to women who legitimately need medical intervention. They are left with the impression their bodies are somehow defective or inferior since their bodies did not “work” appropriately. Including stories of women who adopted the midwifery model but needed medical intervention can help alleviate some unnecessary self-recriminations by opening women to the uncertainty of birth. Even with the most diligent planning and preparation, we cannot guarantee how labor will progress. These alternate stories can also show that complications are not always a scary thing. In this sense, these alternate stories can actually help promote the idea of homebirth. For example, in the popular documentary, The Business of Being Born, the director Abby Epstein attempts a homebirth, but eventually has to transfer to the hospital. Even though Abby is in active labor and very uncomfortable on her way to the hospital, there is no sense of impending doom. Her backup obstetrician is supportive and reassures her that there is plenty of time to complete the C-section (or safely deliver her baby). More stories like this can highlight the fact that most complications that happen during labor allow plenty of time to transfer to the hospital if necessary. Indeed, it is very rare for an emergency to suddenly arise with no previous indications. Therefore, including stories like these could actually make women feel more comfortable with the idea of a home birth. Second, through these stories we could explore ways women might still be able to express parts of their persona that are in-keeping with the midwifery model even though they needed medical intervention. For example, would it be possible for women with uncomplicated C-sections to not be separated from their babies during recovery? Could women request extra help initiating breastfeeding postsurgery? Are their ways we can continue to attend to the woman’s emotional needs and help keep her as relaxed as possible during a surgical birth? Since continuity of care and fostering a trusting relationship between the midwife and the laboring woman are also important parts of the midwifery model, we need some discussion about what the proper role of the

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midwife is once medical intervention is necessary. Severing this connection to a woman’s primary caregiver (especially in the middle of labor) can lead to a sense of abandonment that also makes women feel isolated from their chosen community (which can lead to additional stress during labor and deliver and unnecessary self-recriminations after childbirth). With this in mind, I end this section with a story from Spiritual Midwifery. I offer Susan’s story as an example of the type of stories we need. Ina May felt my belly and couldn’t tell exactly what position the baby was in. It was definitely not head first. All this time my rushes got heavier and heavier. Since the baby was premature and probably breech as well, we decided to go to the hospital. Kathryn, a midwife trainee, came with me into the labor room. She held my hands as the rushes got heavy and I looked into her eyes. It felt really good to have a Farm midwife there, since my husband was out in the waiting room. The doctor came in and felt my belly. He, too, wasn’t sure of the baby’s position, so he sent me up for an X-ray to figure it out for sure. The X-ray told us that the baby was sideways. The doctor put his hands on my belly and tried to turn the baby around. He kept trying but the baby wouldn’t budge. He said that I was too far into labor and it was too late to move him. I really love him for trying, though. He told me that he’d have to do a cesarean. He said I could go on for days and days in labor like that and accomplish nothing. The thought of a cesarean blew my mind. I never imagined that I would ever have a baby like that. I knew, though, that it was the only way of getting the baby out alive; so I agreed to it. They asked Kathryn to leave since I was going into surgery. I didn’t really want her to leave but I knew it was their rules. When she left, one of the nurses took my hands and we exchanged energy just like I had been doing with Kathryn. She had been watching us and really liking how we were doing it. She felt good and I was very happy to have her there. She had had a cesarean herself a little while back. Soon after that I was thinking, I’m glad we’re going to get this baby out okay, whatever it takes. When I woke up, my husband was there. I was still a bit groggy, but glad to see him. They had to take my baby to a bigger hospital for more intensive care. (He is now a strong, healthy kid.) For me, it was major surgery, but I healed up fast and was grateful to have my baby alive and well. Obviously, Susan’s story took place a while ago. She appears to have been put under general anesthesia, and her husband was not allowed to be in 222

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the surgical room. Still, her experience was overall a positive one. Why? First, she trusted her caregivers, so she was comfortable in the decision that this was a necessary procedure. Second, her caregivers continued to treat her as a whole person, tending to her emotional as well as her physical needs. A trusting relationship with your caregiver and a holistic approach are both key aspects of the midwifery model and, I believe, they helped Susan have a good birth experience despite needing medical intervention. Even though Susan never imagined giving birth via C-section, she did not have a sense of failure or isolation because of her experience. Instead, she was confident in her decision and stayed connected to her home community. This was partly due to living on The Farm, so that her midwives were also her neighbors and friends. As we collect and reflect on more of these alternate stories, we will also need to clarify a more general conception of what role a woman’s midwife might take when medical interventions become necessary. Mind/Body Connection Since body and mind are One, sometimes you can fi x the mind by working on the body, and you can fi x the body by working on the mind. —Ina May Gaskin

Feminist philosophers have raised numerous criticisms against dualism. I will focus on just a few of the problems they have identified. On the most basic level, feminist philosophers argue that dualism is simply metaphysically wrong. The world does not fit into nice neat opposing categories. Instead, the world is full of complexity and diversity. However, more problematic is the nature of dualisms. As Val Plumwood explains, “Dualism is the process by which contrasting concepts (for example, masculine and feminine gender identities) are formed by domination and subordination and constructed as oppositional and exclusive.” Notice that dualisms are not just dichotomies. Dualisms are formed through domination and subordination, so a hierarchical relationship where one part is revered and the other is denigrated is central to dualistic thinking. For example, we have a long history of elevating men (and “masculine traits”) above women (and “feminine traits”). To reinforce the hierarchal categories that are created, dualisms also work to create as much distance as possible between the categories. Again, consider our attitudes toward gender differences. In the nineteenth century, men and women were considered so different that it was sometimes argued a woman was so unsuited for “masculine” intellectual pursuits that higher education would actually cause her uterus to Disempowered Women?

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atrophy. The idea that men and women are radically different carries forth today in popular books such as John Gray’s Men Are from Mars— Women Are from Venus. Thus, in dualisms, one category is formed in opposition to the other, and any overlap in characteristics is ignored or actively negated. Plumwood goes on to argue that as specific dualisms are created, they are formed in relation to each other making a kind of interlocking set. In this way, they reinforce each other. These connections also help to “naturalize” the differences so it seems this is just the way the world is—which also makes specific dualisms even harder to challenge or question. For our current discussion, I will discuss the elevation of mind, reason, and culture over body, passion/emotion, and nature. At least as far back as the ancient Greeks, reason has been elevated over emotion and instinct. For example, Plato understands the soul to have three parts—the rational part, the spirited (or passionate) part, and the appetitive part (instincts like hunger)— and believes that the rational part should rule over the spirited and appetitive parts. Does it not belong to the rational part to rule, being wise and exercising forethought in behalf of the entire soul, and to the principle of high spirit to be subject to this and its ally? . . . And these two . . . will preside over the appetitive part which is the mass of the soul in each of us and the most insatiate by nature of wealth. They will keep watch upon it, lest, by being filled and infected with the so-called pleasures associated with the body and so waxing big and strong, it may not keep to its own work but may undertake to enslave and rule over the classes which it is not fitting that it should, and so overturn the entire life of it all. Here we see not only that reason should “rule” over the other parts of human nature, but also that bodily “pleasures” are denigrated. Plato also considers any soul that is “enslaved” by the appetitive part to be a great tragedy. While we see aspects of the mind/body dualism in Plato (and other historical figures), Descartes is most relevant to our current understanding. Descartes posited a literal split between the mind and the body. The mind was immaterial, rational, and our “true” self. The body was material, instinctual, and a flawed tool for the mind. As we see in both Plato and Descartes, reason (our better part) is associated with the mind while emotions and instincts (our lesser or flawed parts) are associated with the body. The dualisms of men/women, mind/body, reason/emotion, and culture/ nature work together to mutually reinforce one another. If we review the 224

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history of Western culture, there are numerous examples of how men are considered more rational than women. Why? Women are considered too rooted in their bodies. With monthly hormone cycles and the realities of pregnancy and birth, it is argued that women cannot “escape” their physicality in the same way men can. Of course, we are all rooted in our physicality, but by focusing on things such as menstruation and pregnancy (instead of, say, defecation and hunger) Western culture makes it impossible for women to “escape” their physicality in the way men can pretend to. Tying women to their physicality accomplishes two related goals. The body is seen as irrational and at the whim of passions and emotions. Therefore, women are seen as less rational than men. Our bodies also remind us of our animal nature and, in this way, tie us to the natural world. Therefore, women are tied to nature through their bodily processes and are thereby never as “civilized” or as much a part of “culture” as men. The culture/nature dualism became particularly relevant during the Enlightenment period. It worked to support both the Scientific Revolution and colonization. In the Scientific Revolution (coinciding with industrialization), we began to view the world as mechanistic. The natural world was thought to have predictable laws that we could learn through our use of reason and science. Once we increased our knowledge of these laws we could control nature. This worldview also helped to support colonization. The natives of many colonized countries were seen as more “primitive” (closer to nature) than the more “civilized” Europeans. It was the colonizers’ duty to “civilize” them by imposing our culture on theirs. These dualisms are central to the professionalization of obstetrics and the current split between a medicalized model of birth and a midwifery model. Historically, obstetricians promoted their field and made a role for themselves using these same hierarchies. Midwives were “dirty” and “ignorant” while hospital births were “sterile” and “scientific.” Since (at the time) midwives were exclusively women and physicians were exclusively men, this made it easier to argue that (male) physicians were more “rational” (and “civilized” since science was equated with progress) than the (female) midwives (who were associated with more “primitive” cultures and practices). Today the rationality associated with science has been attached to technology. Technological inventions are more rational because they are created through science and are more uniform and not subject to human error. Technology is considered more authoritative knowledge (versus any sort of body knowledge that may have been central to traditional midwifery, often denigrated as nothing but “old wives’ tales”), and it works to control the birth process (or adds to our presumed mastery over nature). Given this conceptual split between obstetrics and Disempowered Women?

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midwifery, we can see why many feminists support the midwifery model. Let us consider two examples that illustrate why feminists are more likely to support the midwifery model. The dualistic view that values reason and science also shapes what counts as authoritative knowledge. By dismissing more intuitive or bodily ways of knowing, this worldview diminishes the woman’s own knowledge and role in pregnancy and birth. Women are not really considered pregnant until a physician confirms the pregnancy. During labor, women are hooked up to electronic fetal monitors that tell the health care providers when the woman is having a contraction. The lure of this more “scientific” knowledge is so strong that some women have actually apologized for feeling the pain of a “contraction” after the monitor says it is over. In contrast, the midwifery model values the woman’s own experience and account of what is happening to her body. While physicians often refuse to let a woman push until they can confirm that she is fully dilated (and then insist she push whether she is ready to or not), midwives often tell women to push when they feel ready to push. Again, we can thank many of our canonical figures in philosophy for popularizing a worldview that denigrates bodily and intuitive knowledge over more “scientific” knowledge. Plato felt that pure abstractions were more knowable (and therefore more real) because they were unchanging (unlike our material world that was imperfect and in a constant state of flux). Similarly, Descartes considered true knowledge to be only that of which he could be absolutely certain or things for which he could not theoretically doubt. This also led him to value theoretical deductions over lived experience. We can trace a line from these influential philosophers to our current valuing of technology and quantitative knowledge. Returning to the idea that we should control nature, we again see the results of this dualism in the obstetrical approach to birth. The various technological interventions used in a standard hospital birth are meant to control the progression of labor. Specifically, there is a model of “normal” birth and the technological interventions are used to make all births conform to this model as much as possible. For example, once a woman is considered to be in labor, she has a set amount of time to complete dilation and begin the pushing phase. If she does not appear to be making progress quickly enough, she will be given Pitocin to augment contractions and speed up the process. In contrast, the midwifery model recognizes that labor is an unpredictable natural process. Each woman is unique. Sometimes labor will “stall” for an extended period of time, but the midwifery model does not see this as a problem. Perhaps the woman simply needs time to rest or perhaps labor is progressing slowly to give her body time to adequately 226

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stretch and prepare for birth. As long as the woman and fetus are not in distress, midwives are happy to let nature take its course. With this brief introduction to the philosophical underpinnings of the conceptual differences between obstetrics and midwifery, let us turn our focus to the split between mind/reason and body/emotion and its relation to mechanistic thinking. With a switch in our worldview to mechanistic thinking, medicine also began to treat the body as a machine. As such, the mind is irrelevant to bodily health, and in this way medicine contributes to the mind/body split. For example, if you are diagnosed with high blood pressure, you will likely be given a pill to help control your blood pressure and probably told to modify your diet. Both of these remedies focus solely on the body. While the physician may ask you about your personal life, it is unlikely he or she will spend any significant amount of time assessing your stress levels or trying to help you develop a plan to lower them. (In fairness, physicians are also not trained for this sort of intervention—which illustrates how the dualistic and mechanistic conceptual models are inherent in the profession.) In contrast, the midwifery model addresses both the woman’s emotional and physical health. Rather than thinking of the body as a machine, the midwifery model conceives of the body as an organic organism. It is this conceptual shift which I will spend the rest of this section analyzing. While the holistic approach of the midwifery model is mostly positive, I believe there are some parts of the attempt to overcome mind/body dualism that need to be reassessed. As many feminist theorists have discovered, it is hard to find the right language (and approach) when trying to overcome dualism. Indeed, it is almost impossible to not talk about “the” body and “the” mind which already implies a separation. In this way, it can be easy to slip into language or attitudes that reinforce dualism, control, and privilege the mental over the physical. Unfortunately, the midwifery literature is no exception. It is commonly said that the midwifery model treats the whole woman. During prenatal care, midwives encourage women to take control of their own health through proper nutrition, exercise, and being a partner in their healthcare visits. During labor, midwives are attuned to the woman’s emotional state and how it relates to her physical state or the progress of labor. Consider these personal accounts: When I pushed, ancient sounds came out of me. I wondered if I was too loud or whether someone outside could hear me. I had these thoughts between pushes, but then I kept hearing, “Good, right, these are good birthing sounds,” “You look so pretty,” and so on. Disempowered Women?

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As I approached full dilation, I lost my mind. I just did not think I was going to make it. I kept saying, “I can’t do this anymore!” I started to panic, and it was really scary, but Ina May talked me down and reminded me that this was all normal and that the more I said I couldn’t do it, the more I was doing it. Mary gave me a progress report and said this was the fullest part and by the next push the baby’s head would probably be out all the way. It was so good to get this kind of reassurance. I loved Mary so much for being so compassionate with me that she could know exactly what my sensations and feelings were. Okay, I thought. I can do this, no problem.  Gaskin calls this the “Sphincter Law,” or the idea that labor progresses best if the woman is as relaxed and calm as possible. Just as it is difficult to urinate or defecate with an audience, Gaskin says it is difficult to relax and let your cervix open enough to help a baby through the birth canal if strangers are making you uncomfortable or screaming at you to push. When a person’s sphincter is in the process of opening, it may suddenly close down if that person becomes upset, frightened, humiliated, or self-conscious. Why? High levels of adrenaline in the bloodstream do not favor (sometimes, they actually prevent) the opening of the sphincters. This means that we must tend to women’s fears and respect their privacy (or the intimacy of birth) as well as attending to the physical changes that take place during labor. In this way, the attempt to overcome mind/body dualism in the midwifery model is a very positive thing. As Gaskin points out, the obstetric model often blames women for a “dysfunctional labor.” Instead, if we understand the sphincter law, we also understand how hospitals work against helping labor progress. In a hospital the woman is surrounded by strangers who can (and do) barge in and out with no warning. The laboring woman is also pressured to submit to hospital routines or policies that might increase her anxiety. For example, hospital policies such as limiting food and drink and requiring an active IV or at least a Hep-lock serve as a constant reminder that a potentially serious complication could happen at any time. In fact, forcing these policies on all women regardless of her specific medical history or current labor situation exaggerates the possibility of these risks. These (and other) circumstances surrounding hospital birth often increase women’s anxiety and fear and, thereby, inhibit their ability 228

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to relax and stay calm. This is the exact opposite of what you want if you are trying to facilitate the progression of labor. Although discussion of the body/mind in the midwifery literature is mostly positive, there are parts of this discussion where explanation of the connection between body and mind slips into language that seems to imply the mind can control the body. In this way, we see a contradiction in the literature that opens the door for self-recrimination for women whose labors do not progress normally. On one hand, Gaskin acknowledges that “sphincters cannot be opened at will and do not respond well to commands.” On the other hand, Gaskin relates stories such as this: Dawn was so relieved that the plan she had devised with her nursemidwife was coming to pass that she smiled with gratitude throughout labor. After a while I checked her internally to see how open her cervix was. She said, “I just want to open up and let this baby out.” As she spoke these words, her cervix yawned open another two centimeters beneath my fingers. Now I was experiencing behavior that I didn’t normally see, since I had never heard a woman express the wish for her cervix to open while I had my fingers on it to confirm that it was happening. Pretty fancy, I thought, to be able to tell your body exactly what you want to happen and have it comply.” Later in the same chapter, Gaskin also states, “Excited about my new knowledge, I began researching what others had written about the phenomenon of a woman shutting down or actually reversing labor, whether voluntarily or involuntarily.”  Here we have moved from understanding how a woman’s emotional state can influence her bodily processes, to implying that a woman can willfully control her bodily processes with the right mental intentions. Although Gaskin does not take this a step further, it is easy to see how one implication could be that women who have labors that do not progress normally were simply not in the right frame of mind. More important, this inadvertently reinforces valuing the mental over the physical or the idea that the mind should control the body. If we just will hard enough, our minds can make our bodies do what they need to do. I do not believe this is intentional. In fact, in addition to the earlier quotes, there are other places where Gaskin argues that the rational mind can interfere with labor. I believe her intention is to increase women’s confidence by showing unacknowledged powers of the female body. However, we must be very careful with language and how we present these cases. For example, in Dawn’s story, instead of saying that Dawn was able to tell her body what she wanted it to do and have it comply, we could say that stating her intention was a tool that helped Dawn relax and open up. Disempowered Women?

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After all, the first part of the story already acknowledges how other factors were contributing to her ability to relax and let labor progress. If we reframe how we interpret this story, it becomes another tool to help women relax instead of implying that they could make their bodies comply with their will. Let us briefly consider another example. Gaskin relates a birth story where Pamela had dilated to seven centimeters and then stalled for more than a day. Gaskin knew Pamela was happy about the pregnancy and did not have any excessive fears about childbirth. She asked Pamela if she had any worries and found out that she was preoccupied thinking about her wedding vows and how her husband refused to include until death do us part. After repeating their vows with this lifetime commitment included, Pamela’s labor progressed and her son was born within two hours. If we acknowledge that anxiety and fear interfere with a woman’s ability to relax and let labor progress, then it makes sense that if this woman was actively worried about her wedding vows during labor, then this preoccupation probably did inhibit her ability to fully relax. Still I worry about this story in a way that I do not worry about stories that discuss the need to eliminate the fear of dying, particularly intense contractions, tearing, and so forth. I worry that stories like this one will lead women to wonder if they had some other unresolved issues that they were not aware of that interfered with their normal progression of labor. Overly broadening our discussion of how emotions and mental preoccupations can interfere with the progression of labor can actually give women more to worry about. For example, in Spiritual Midwifery, Gaskin says, “If progress is slow, ask the mother if there is anything in her heart that she doesn’t feel at peace with.” I fear this line of thinking leads us down a dangerous path of self-recrimination. Women who end up needing medical intervention might think: Perhaps there was something holding me back? Perhaps a little bit more self-reflection would have allowed me to have a normal birth? Again, I do not think this is Gaskin’s intent, but we have to be very careful of how we frame these issues and the language we use. Instead of talking about unresolved issues (which sounds like women should enter therapy as a standard part of prenatal care), perhaps we should focus on issues that inhibit women’s ability to relax during labor. At the time a woman goes into labor (especially once she is in active labor), the midwife might ask her if there is anything that keeps her from being in the present moment. If the woman is consciously worrying about something besides her labor, then obviously the midwife should try to deal with the issue or try to help the woman refocus on the task at hand. However, it is unproductive and can increase women’s sense of guilt if we overly expand this analysis. 230

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As we can see the process of birth, itself, challenges the mind/body dualism, not in the sense that the mind controls the body (which would still be Cartesian thinking), but in the constant feedback loop between mind and body. We could think of the connection between mind and body as being similar to a Möbius strip. Mind is one “side” of the paper and body is the other “side,” yet they are both also the same “side.” Similarly, during labor, a woman must adapt to many physical changes and challenges. At the same time, how she understands these changes will influence their progression. If she is anxious and frightened, it can slow the progression of labor. If she is able to accept and work with the physical demands of labor, this is likely to help the progression. Although I have not discussed it much here, Gaskin and others also discuss how a woman’s mental interpretation of the labor process shapes her experience of pain. Being more relaxed and less fearful of birth will not make labor pain-free, but it can make the pain seem more tolerable. In sum, I support proponents of the midwifery model in their attempts to overcome the mind/body dualism of Western culture by focusing on women’s emotional as well as physical health. However, we must be careful of our language and how we frame these issues. It is all too easy to slip back into thinking that the mind can control the body, and, this line of reasoning can only increase the possibility that women will blame themselves for poor birth outcomes. Ultimately, I think it is best to focus on the connection between emotions and hormones and on how these bodily processes are not under our rational control. In her discussion of sphincter law (and most of the rest of her discussion), Gaskin does an excellent job of this. Another good example is the work of Marsden Wagner. Trained as a physician, he explains the same phenomenon through the lens of anatomy and physiology: Childbirth is a complicated physiological process regulated by the woman’s ner vous system. Childbirth is not under the conscious control of the woman giving birth, but rather is directed by hormones and neurological feedback systems that neither the woman nor someone assisting her can control. Labor is controlled by the parasympathetic portion of the autonomic ner vous system, which is not under conscious control (intestinal mobility and sexual orgasm are other examples of physiological functions controlled by the parasympathetic ner vous system). Anything that causes fear or alarm shuts down the parasympathetic system and fires up the sympathetic nervous system (adrenalin). Fear and anxiety stop intestinal mobility, stop any chance of orgasm, Disempowered Women?

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and stop labor. Any intervention that increases a laboring woman’s fear or anxiety will interfere with, slow down, or even stop the birth process. A wise birth assistant, be it midwife, nurse, or doctor, knows how to facilitate these autonomic responses and not interfere with them. Wagner emphasizes that these processes are not under rational or willful control but can be hampered or facilitated by the environment and caregiver. Th is is a positive understanding of the body/mind that we must continue to support and reinforce, while avoiding language that seems to undermine the “lack of control” part of this equation. We need to focus on creating an environment that makes women feel safe and relaxed while avoiding language that implies women can use their conscious mind to influence the course of labor. Otherwise we imply it is the woman’s own fault (through, for example, the presence of unresolved issues) that medical interventions were necessary. If we reinforce the fact that childbirth is not under our conscious control, we lessen the possibility of unnecessary selfrecriminations due to women thinking they should have been able to control the outcome of labor. Attitudes Toward Interventions While nearly 90% of Bradley Method births are drug-free, most othermethod or non-method births are not births at all, but drugged deliveries. —Jay Hathaway

One goal of Gaskin and other supporters of the midwifery model is for women to have a renewed connection to their bodies and a sense of pride in their ability to labor with as few medical interventions as possible. Indeed, the stories discussed in the first section are meant to help women trust their own bodies and feel empowered by the abilities of the female body in childbirth. Still, we must be careful not to overstate the case. It seems that something that was originally meant to empower women and give them a sense of pride has now become a way to judge women. A review of the literature shows there are some supporters of the midwifery model who go beyond educating women and instead try to scare and manipulate them. The general attitude toward medical interventions portrayed in the midwifery literature also implies a paternalistic attitude toward women. In the natural childbirth literature, we find contradictory attitudes toward women and birth. On one hand, proponents of the midwifery model argue that women should be educated about birth options and allowed to decide for themselves. Women are also told to trust their bodies and take

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charge of their labors. On the other hand, there are judgmental attitudes and comments toward women who do not make the “correct” choices. For example, Gaskin’s Spiritual Midwifery includes comments such as: If all your life you never do anything heavy, there’s certain passages in life that are heavy. Having a baby, for instance is one. If you be a total paddy-ass all your life they’re going to have to knock you out when you have your kid, because you’re going to be too chicken to have it. And if you do something that builds character ahead of time, you’ll have enough character that you can have that kid, and it will be a beautiful and a spiritual experience for you. Here Stephen Gaskin (Ina May’s husband) seems to imply the need for medical intervention is a direct result of a weakness in character. Should a movement that aims to empower women by increasing their choices during labor really be taunting women who end up needing or wanting an epidural by calling them “chicken”? This sort of taunting and judgmental attitude can only encourage unnecessary self-recriminations. The implication is that if a woman has endured many hours of labor and needs an epidural or other intervention to help her rest and complete the laboring process then she must not have had “enough character” and as a consequence missed out on “a beautiful and spiritual experience.” Similarly, The Bradley Childbirth Workbook includes a section in the chapter about C-sections entitled “Are You Doing Everything You Can to Stay Healthy and Low Risk?” The implied message here is that if your pregnancy becomes “high-risk” you must not have been vigilant enough. More egregious is the discussion of epidural pain medication. Keep in mind this is a workbook marketed to couples who have signed up for a Bradley Method childbirth class. This means they already have some interest in, if not commitment to, unmedicated birth. Still, Jay Hathaway (one of the male leaders) felt compelled to include a section on the “myths” about drugs and birthing in which he discusses how epidural medications are similar to cocaine and often only silence women instead of providing real pain relief. He goes on to claim: A news (July 11, 1987, Associated Press) report linked teen-age drug addiction to the use of childbirth drugs by their mothers. Other reports have linked adolescent suicide to birth events. A news article from United Press International (January 17, 1979) reported an average loss of four IQ points per child, leading to a

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national loss of fourteen million IQ points a year is caused by painkilling drugs used in childbirth. Obviously, comments like this are meant to scare women into not using medication. As with Gaskin’s remark, this judgmental attitude is likely to encourage unnecessary self-recriminations. If a woman “caves” and gets an epidural or ends up needing a C-section, she will likely feel guilty for not doing enough to stay healthy and causing permanent damage to her child. Tactics like this should be called out and repudiated. However, I believe they are not (and do not have to be) a central part of the midwifery model. Indeed, I know women who have worked with pragmatic midwives who are supportive of unmedicated birth, but also realistic about situational needs and an individual woman’s limits. Tactics that use fear and guilt are not in keeping with a model that advocates education and agency. When the proponents of the midwifery model use these tactics, they are being just as paternalistic as obstetricians who try to scare women out of home births. We should call out and denounce these tactics and promote respect for all women’s choices. After all, women in the United States grow up in a medicalized culture. Not all can or will want to overcome that training. As Rebecca Kukla points out, being able to achieve the “ideal” birth experience is often tied to class or the ability to have continuous health care from a provider who is likely to be receptive to your requests. Considering the body/mind connection, many women (because of their socialization) are also likely to feel safer and better able to relax in a hospital setting (and with the help of an epidural). Even Ina May Gaskin cautions midwives that it is unwise to try to convince a woman to attempt a home birth if she is unreceptive. Given these examples, it is tempting to argue that the explicitly judgmental attitudes are simply the result of some overly zealous male supporters. Unfortunately, this is not the case. A review of the literature reveals other threads of paternalism and exclusion of women who need medical intervention. Earlier I discussed how the narrow focus on one particular type of birth story can increase women’s sense of failure and exclusion. Here I look at how the possibility of medical intervention is presented (or not) to women to show how a general judgmental and paternalistic attitude runs through the natural childbirth literature. Perhaps the most blatant instance of paternalism is seen by comparing Ina May Gaskin’s Spiritual Midwifery to Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth. The goals of Spiritual Midwifery are multiple including a history of The Farm midwifery practice, some discussion of their outcomes, and a sharing of “amazing birth stories.” Although it includes a short section addressed 234

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to parents-to-be, the bulk of the second half of the book is an instruction manual for midwives. It includes a frank discussion of various potential complications including indications that rule out home birth and a discussion of coping with pregnancy loss. In contrast, Gaskin’s Guide to Childbirth (which is specifically marketed to parents-to-be) includes neither of these things. Her chapter titled “What You Least Expect When You’re Expecting” is mostly a discussion of maternal mortality rates and some of the interventions that have likely led to an increase in maternal mortality rates in the United States. Her discussion of C-sections in particular is limited to a discussion of a problematic type of suture and how the increase in complications is downplayed (or not discussed at all) in the case of elective C-sections. There is no discussion of possible complications that would necessitate the need for a C-section or other types of medical intervention (except for a short section in the pros and cons of Rhogam and antibiotics for strep B colonization). Th is shift in emphasis and attention is both paternalistic and goes against midwives’ commitment to education and empowerment. More discussion about when certain medical interventions are necessary (especially C-sections) would be good for a number of reasons. First, a major goal of the midwifery model is to increase women’s agency by educating them on what to expect and what options are available. By not including frank, evidence-based discussions of possible pregnancy complications that might require medical intervention, the proponents of the midwifery model are working against women’s empowerment. This omission is even more problematic given all of the time that proponents of the midwifery model devote to discussing the overuse of medical interventions and how they often lead to unnecessary C-sections. A lack of explicit discussion of when C-sections might be necessary combined with the abundance of statistics on the overuse of C-sections in the United States can undermine the experience of those who truly need medical interventions. A woman who is well versed in this critique might question whether her C-section was “really” necessary. Did she fall victim to an overly zealous obstetrician? An explicit discussion of the evidence surrounding various complications and the need for C-sections would not only help empower women to avoid unnecessary C-sections, but it would also allow them to feel better about the decision to have a C-section when it is truly necessary (avoiding unnecessary self-recriminations). Second, and related, many proponents of the midwifery model spend a lot of time talking about the lack of evidence behind many medical interventions as a way to empower women to refuse them. They use these statistics to convince women that the midwifery model is safer and to help Disempowered Women?

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women seek out (when possible) less-high tech births. However, few are willing to talk about overly zealous practitioners within the midwifery movement. Better educating women on the possible complications that might require medical intervention can help women know when they might have an overly dogmatic midwife as well. For example, in his exposé on Cara Muhlhahn, the main homebirth midwife featured in The Business of Being Born, Andrew Goldman recounts the story of a woman who had been in labor for seventy-two hours after her water broke and had only dilated two centimeters. When the exhausted and anxious woman asked Muhlhahn how long was too long to be in labor, her response was “Never.” In other words, Muhlhahn was prepared to let the woman labor indefinitely despite her lack of progress and obvious distress. The couple later delivered at St. Vincent’s hospital—the mother developed a 103-degree fever and her son spent five days in the neonatal intensive care unit. Given the outcome, this couple felt guilty about not coming to the hospital sooner (instead of self-recriminations related to using medical intervention). Stories like this illustrate how evidence-based education about the possibility of various complications and the interventions that might be necessary could help women request necessary interventions without guilt. Finally, I want to reiterate my earlier point that more explicit discussion of the relationship between various complications and the possible need for medical intervention allows us to begin other necessary conversations. Specifically, it allows us to think about how a woman committed to the midwifery model might best adapt to the need for medical intervention. For example, women are encouraged to spend a lot of time thinking about (and given advice about how to negotiate over) their birth environment, but little time (usually one paragraph or section of a birth plan) thinking about how they might want to alter that if a C-section becomes necessary. How might a woman committed to the midwifery model approach a necessary C-section? For example, if the need for a C-section arises once the woman is in active labor, could she request that her midwife continue to help care for her during the surgery and in the immediate postpartum period? Many proponents of natural birth also put a lot of emphasis on bonding with your infant (including skin-to-skin contact) in the immediate postpartum period. Indeed, when I reviewed discussions of “bad” birth experiences on-line, many of the women were more upset about being separated from their newborns than about the fact that they had had a C-section. Given how supporters of the midwifery model promote bonding immediately after birth, it would be useful to give women more advice on how to negotiate keeping your newborn with you during your time in

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recovery. These are just a couple of examples of how a woman committed to the midwifery model might negotiate her C-section experience. Moving Forward In this essay, I have argued that some aspects of the midwifery model can disempower women who need medical interventions by directly or indirectly encouraging various types of undeserved self-recriminations. The uniformity of birth stories leaves some women without the interpretive tools to make sense of their experiences and isolates them from their home communities. Some of the language used to discuss the body/mind makes it sound as if women can use their minds to control their bodies (and, thereby, control the progression of labor). Finally, the overt judgmental attitudes and implicit paternalism in the way medical interventions are discussed in the literature can lead directly to a sense of failure and guilt when medical interventions are necessary. Fortunately, I believe all of these can be remedied in ways that are in keeping with the overall goals and philosophy of the midwifery model. Key components of the midwifery model are that it is woman-centered and emphasizes education and agency. These aspects are meant to empower women both by reconnecting them to the process of labor and by giving them the information they need to make autonomous decisions about where and how they will labor. My suggestions for how to reform problematic aspects of the midwifery model are in keeping with these larger goals. First, we need a greater diversity of birth stories to accommodate a greater range of birth experiences. Including a greater variety of birth stories would open women to the unpredictability of birth, give them greater tools for interpreting and understanding their birth experiences, and allow us to begin a larger discussion about how proponents of the midwifery model (including midwifes themselves) might adapt to the need for medical interventions when necessary. Second, while the basic understanding of the body/mind in the midwifery literature is a vast improvement over Western dualism, we need to be careful to avoid language that implies women can willfully control the progression of labor. We can do this by focusing on the general connection between emotions and bodily process or the need to attend to women’s emotional as well as physical needs. Third, and finally, we need to rid the midwifery literature of overtly judgmental and implicitly paternalistic attitudes toward women and the possible need for medical interventions. Providing women with frank, evidence-based discussions of potential problems that might arise during

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labor and what medical interventions might be necessary certainly promotes the goal of empowering women through education. To summarize, I believe the midwifery movement began as a way to empower women by critiquing the structural systems (that is, medicalized birth) that told women their bodies were inadequate and they needed the medical community to “protect” them from the dangers of childbirth. However, in their rush to paint a completely different picture, proponents of the midwifery movement have created a dichotomy of birth experiences that leave out too many women. If the goal of the midwifery movement is to empower women, then proponents need to work to empower all women—not just those that live up to one, narrow version of birth experience. If we focus on the other goals of education and increased agency in the birth process, then we can broaden the scope of the midwifery model to include women who need medical intervention.

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PA RT

Popular Culture

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Knock Me Up, Knock Me Down Images of Pregnancy in Hollywood Film and Popular Culture K E L LY O L I V E R

From the nineteenth century until the late twentieth century, pregnancy was considered a medical condition and/or something to hide from public view. In recent years, women’s pregnant bodies have been displayed in ways that could not have been imagined just a few decades ago. A wave of recent Hollywood films have pregnancy as a main theme, showing bare pregnant bellies, water breaking, and vaginal birth and discussing the experience of pregnancy as never before in popular film. Pregnancy has even become something of an obsession in popular culture, where paparazzi are constantly on the lookout for celebrities’ telltale “baby bumps” and heavily pregnant bellies. In this essay, I begin to interpret the meaning of changing representations of pregnant bodies. Here, I give an overview of recent trends regarding images of pregnancy in popu lar culture and fi lm, an analysis that I expand in my forthcoming book by the same name. I trace images of pregnant bodies from 1930s and 1940s Hollywood films through the present in relation to both their changing historical contexts and developments in feminist theory and the women’s movement. My aim is to explore shifting ideals of pregnancy and how they are shaped through complex interrelations between feminism, popular culture, medicine, science, and filmic discourses. While a developed theory of filmic representation is beyond the scope of this essay, my analysis challenges any simple attempts to answer the question of which comes first, the chicken or the egg, fi lmic representations or cultural attitudes. In the words of film theorist Frank Krutnik, “in general one can see generic forms 241

as a functional interface between the cinematic institution, audiences and the wider realm of culture. Films never spring magically from their cultural context, but they represent instead much more complex activities of negotiation, addressing cultural transformation in a highly compromised and displayed manner.” In the case of pregnancy, Hollywood films mediate between cultural norms and changing notions of the pregnant body influenced by political and technological developments in medicine, media, and feminism. Certainly my claim is not that films mirror “reality”— indeed, the relationship is much more productive— but they do tell us something about our values, norms, expectations, and dreams for the future. Situating Hollywood films within their cultural contexts, especially including advances in feminism, brings into stark relief a cultural ambivalence about pregnant bodies. What Is a Pregnant Woman? Simone de Beauvoir opens her 1949 treatise The Second Sex with the question “What is a woman?” She acknowledges that traditionally the answer has been “woman is a womb.” Yet, she insists that although biology cannot be denied, it never completely defines human beings for whom the meaning of even physical existence is a matter of interpretation. Discussing the fact that women give birth while men do not, she says, “the body of woman is one of the essential elements in her situation in the world. But that body is not enough to define her as woman. . . . It is not merely [as] a body, but rather [as] a body subject to taboos.” Even while emphasizing that women cannot be reduced to their capacity for reproduction, de Beauvoir repeatedly warns that women’s reproductive function limits them and prevents their true participation in the social and political spheres. At the extreme, her manifesto could be read as much one against childbirth and motherhood as it is against the patriarchal notions and institutions that circumscribe them. Even while acknowledging the taboos that stigmatize pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood, de Beauvoir does not suggest revaluing these activities as much as avoiding them altogether. Yet, de Beauvoir’s views on pregnancy and maternity are complex and have been the subject of ongoing feminist interpretation, including attempts to revalue motherhood. Sarah LaChance Adams’s thesis that de Beauvoir’s analysis of pregnancy and motherhood is characterized by conflict is an insightful addition to this growing literature, one that complements my observations about the deep-seated ambivalence in representations of pregnancy from the past continuing through the present. Today, some past taboos surrounding pregnancy discussed by de Beauvoir seem 242

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old-fashioned, even laughable. But, new taboos and changing recursions of old ones are not always easy to detect given their normalization within medical practice and popular culture. By looking to past conceptions of pregnancy and transformations in the meaning of the pregnant body, with luck we can begin to understand recent images in film and popular culture, images that define our era. In the mid–twentieth century, pregnancy was a private, even shameful, affair hidden from public view. At that time, although pregnant women could still smoke and drink, they were advised to discontinue exercise and physical activities in favor of bed rest. Even though pregnancy has “come out of the closet,” so to speak, today, doctors and myriad books prescribe various regimens for prenatal care, including abstinence from smoking, alcohol, and caffeine and moderate to vigorous exercise. While for centuries women have been held responsible for the detrimental effects of their imaginings on their developing fetuses, recently, they have been held criminally responsible for physical “abuse” to “unborn children,” and there are various pressures on pregnant women, including increasing concern for natural or home birth. It is curious that during the era when women were defined primarily in terms of their capacity to give birth, public images of the pregnant body were taboo, while now that women continue to break barriers in business and politics, images of pregnant women are regular staples of television, movies, and magazine covers at supermarket checkout stands. Indeed, the conflict between having a career and having children remains a concern for middleclass women; and popular culture reflects and informs the meaning of that relationship. Several recent films take up the theme of career women wanting babies, suffering from “baby hunger.” A central component of my argument is that recent representations of pregnancy are not coincidentally related to more liberal views of women, but rather promote a return to valuing women’s reproductive capacity as their best asset and promoting the view that for women having a baby is necessary for a worthwhile life. Just as the meaning of woman has changed, so has the meaning of pregnancy and the pregnant body. The history of pregnancy affects how we view, represent, and conceive of pregnancy, and how women experience it. In the words of Clare Hanson, whose book A Cultural History of Pregnancy examines the history of representations of pregnancy primarily in Britain, “the pregnant body . . . is doubly mutable. It is mutable in the obvious sense that it undergoes continuous physiological (and sometimes pathological) change, and mutable culturally, in that it is viewed through constantly shifting interpretative frameworks. These interpretive frameworks are constructed through the interrelation of medicine and culture.” Perhaps Knock Me Up, Knock Me Down

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more than any other human experience, pregnancy signals transformation and possibility, with their concomitant fears and anxieties. The pregnant body is capable of significant physical changes in a relatively short period of time. Moreover, pregnancy is a means to new life and the continuation of the human species. In this regard, the pregnant body may be a screen for our fantasies and fears about ourselves as people and as a people. At the movies, the screen metaphor becomes literal when cultural anxieties and hopes play themselves out on the bellies of pregnant characters. In Lasse Hallström’s film Once Around (1991), there is an especially poignant scene in which the older husband Sam Sharpe (Richard Dreyfus) of the pregnant protagonist Renata Bella (Holly Hunter) turns a 16mm projector playing home movies of her childhood from the wall on which she is watching them toward her pregnant belly. In this scene, Renata’s pregnancy literally becomes a screen for images of family life, while metaphorically it becomes a complex trigger for nostalgia of lost childhood and innocence, hopes for future children that combine the best of their genetic possibilities, and a means of reconciling the tensions not only between the struggling couple but also between their ways of life and cultural differences. In brief, this scene projects onto the pregnant belly all of the hopes and dreams of past and future that can bring people and peoples together. This moment of hope is short-lived when the imagined male dream child turns out to be a girl and the husband dies of heart failure soon after her birth. Certainly, the “realities” of pregnancy have not been as popular as our fantasies about it. And, while recent films give us a bit more “blood and guts,” so to speak, they continue to package pregnancy in particularly appealing, even glamorous ways, which promote a new type of family values. Pregnancy in the 1940s and 1950s: Modest Motherhood Just a few decades ago, it was not proper to use the word “pregnancy” in polite company. There were, and are, various euphemisms used instead, such as “expecting,” “with child,” “a bun in the oven,” “in the family way,” and cruder versions like “knocked-up.” Pregnancy was not only a private affair, but also somehow shameful. It signaled that a woman had sex and seemingly stimulated the public imagination in “unwholesome” ways. In the words of Robyn Longhurst, “Not only was the word ‘pregnant’ excluded from public discourse but so too were the bodies of pregnant women.” Other scholars examining the history of pregnancy echo this sentiment; for example, Robbie Davis-Floyd says “pregnant women were expected to remain secluded in their homes, as their presentation in public was somehow felt to be improper.”  Early advertising campaigns for maternity clothes 244

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also indicate that a woman’s pregnant body should be well covered; while she should be pretty, she also should be modest and pure, even childlike. Adrienne Rich recounts a telling tale of being invited and then uninvited to give a lecture when pregnant, which suggests that pregnancy was considered titillating, even pornographic, in its connection to sex: “When the [school]master responsible for inviting me realized that I was seven months pregnant he cancelled the invitation, saying that the fact of my pregnancy would make it impossible for the boys to listen to my poetry. This was in 1955.” Even fully clothed, showing the pregnant belly was immodest and indecent. During the 1940s and 1950s, Hollywood mostly avoided the issue of pregnancy, preferring instead to skip from romance and marriage to instant family. Women characters had children, but they were never seen giving birth to them. For example, in two of the popular Doris Day/Rock Hudson trilogy films, Jan (Doris Day) is pregnant at the end of the film: In Pillow Talk (1959), she remains off-screen, while Brad (Rock Hudson) announces that he is having a baby, a running joke in the film; In Lover Come Back (1961), Carole (Day) is seen being wheeled into a maternity ward covered in a white sheet, still not looking obviously pregnant. Given that the Hayes Production Code did not allow pregnancy to be shown on film— and required that pregnancy take place within marriage—it is not surprising that so few films dealt with the topic. There are, however, a few exceptions in which the depiction of pregnancy reveals cultural attitudes of the day. In Christopher Strong (1933), Leave Her to Heaven (1946), and A Place in the Sun (1951), pregnancy is soon followed by death. In People Will Talk (1951) Debra Higgins (Jeanne Crain) unsuccessfully tries to commit suicide by shooting herself after she learns that she is pregnant. In Christopher Strong, Katharine Hepburn’s character kills herself in a fiery plane crash while setting a flying record rather than make her pregnancy public and ruin the career of her lover. In A Place in the Sun, a supporting character played by Shelley Winter falls out of a boat manned by her ex-lover, who watches her drown rather than save her after making his angry and desperate feelings about her pregnancy perfectly clear. In Leave Her to Heaven, after her doctor has confined her to bed rest, Ellen (Gene Tierney) throws herself down a staircase to instigate a miscarriage so that her husband will find her attractive again; she is successful in terminating the pregnancy, but eventually she dies herself. She refuses to allow even her husband to see her in her pregnant state. She is insanely jealous of her husband’s attentions to her sister (Jeanne Crain again) during her confinement. Throughout the fi lm, although Tierney’s wardrobe goes from tailored suits, and even a Knock Me Up, Knock Me Down

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modestly cut swimming outfit at one point, to flowing robes and the sheer billowing negligee she dons for the staircase episode (after also applying lipstick and making sure her face is perfect), she never looks the least bit pregnant. Perhaps the most extensive treatment of pregnancy in an early Hollywood film is The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944), which walks the line at the border of the Hayes production code. Again, the pregnant protagonist’s pregnancy is never shown and neither is the birth. Rather, Trudy (Betty Hutton) is shown wrapped in all white clothing from head to toe, and she is referred to as “not well,” which is easily interpreted by other characters to mean pregnant. The word “pregnancy” is avoided throughout the film, as is any depiction of the pregnancy itself, in spite of the fact that Trudy is pregnant from early in the film. The film deals more with other’s reactions to Trudy’s pregnancy. Her father and family are so ashamed by it that they move to another town where no one knows them. Their friends visit them secretly. Although The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek can be seen as a parable of teenage pregnancy outside of marriage, in order to meet code standards, director Preston Sturges contrives to have Trudy drink spiked punch at a dance and marry a soldier who ships off to war the next morning, a soldier whom, in a sense, she—and the audience—has never met. This mystery husband is never found and, after many pratfalls, Trudy ends up marrying her longtime admirer Norval (Eddie Bracken). She gives birth to sextuplets— all boys— and Norval becomes a hero around the world for his virility. The birth scene is played for comedy as nurses run back and forth through the hallway where her family is waiting. Trudy’s off-screen birthing is also unseen by her as she does not know that she has given birth to six babies until Norval tells her well after the event has taken place. In Miracle, Trudy’s pregnancy is hidden and shameful; and even when she “miraculously” gives birth to sextuplets, the feat is credited to Norval, who had nothing to do with it. The pregnant body is literally banned by the production code, and although the birth scene is slapstick and action-packed (with no screaming woman in labor or mucous-covered newborns, which come later in Hollywood), still woman’s reproductive capacity threatens chaos and excess in the birth of not just one baby, but many. This birth scene— along with others we will discuss—represents the fecund body as out of control and outside of the law. For, throughout the film, the primary anxiety over Trudy’s pregnancy is one of circumscribing it legally. In the end, it takes the governor’s pardon and decree to legally sanction the marriage of Norval and Trudy, which also by implication establishes (or assumes) Norval’s paternity. 246

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Pregnancy in the 1960s and 1970s: Abject Pregnancy and Alien Birth The 1960s and 1970s saw many changes in reproductive technologies and attitudes toward women’s bodies. It was the time of the space-race and the civil rights movement. In the 1960s, ultrasound technology used in the navy was introduced into prenatal medicine, and for the first time, images of the developing fetus could be seen. DNA testing for paternity became possible, which could eliminate contestations about who fathered the baby. In 1971 the first issue of Our Bodies, Ourselves was published. In 1972 the first sperm bank opened. And, in 1973 Roe v. Wade legalized abortion. Lennart Nilsson’s images of fetuses on the covers of Look (1962) and Life (1965) magazines purported to give us the first view onto the beginnings of life. Nilsson gave us an image of a fetal spaceman floating freeform without any maternal encumbrance— or protection. These images have become icons around which right-to-life groups rally in the name of “unborn” babies. Yet, as we now know, most of the images are not of live fetuses as Nilsson claims. Moreover, the startling effect of these floating bodies was created by adding skin tones, through lighting effects, and by enlarging fetuses. Still, the confluence of these images with the space race, the introduction of ultrasound technology in prenatal medicine, and the fight to legalize abortions created a focus on the fetus apart from what became known as its “maternal environment.” The maternal body and the fetus were imagined at odds with each other in new and more dramatic ways. In the words of Rosalind Petchesky, “the fetus is not only ‘already a baby’, but more— a ‘baby man’, an autonomous, atomized minispace hero.” This image of fetus as space hero came to life on the big screen in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film ends with a fetus floating into space, completely unmoored from the seemingly obsolete maternal body. Kubrick’s film engages issues of evolution, progress, and human development; more specifically, it juxtaposes the human to apes, machines, and possible alien intelligence. It is noteworthy that other films from this period display similar anxieties about the human and humanity in relation to gestation and birth. Released the same year, Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby turns pregnancy into a nightmarish pact with the devil to gestate his spawn. The fetus in Rosemary’s (Mia Farrow) womb is making her ill. Unlike Kubrick’s floating fetus that signals a possible future for humanity, Polanski imagines the horror of the fetus as a hostile otherworldly invader that threatens humanity from inside women’s bodies. Rosemary’s abject pregnancy and monstrous birth resonate with Simone de Beauvoir’s description of pregnancy as possession, “as if she [the pregnant Knock Me Up, Knock Me Down

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woman] were possessed by foreign forces” and “the species gnawing at [her] vitals.” Pregnancy has long been associated with insanity, and Mia Farrow’s Rosemary manifests paranoia and craziness, which, as we find out, seems justified in the end. Rand Ravich’s homage to Rosemary’s Baby, The Astronaut’s Wife (1999), gives us another crazy pregnant woman, Jillian (Charlize Theron), this time gestating an extraterrestrial alien brought back to earth in the form of her husband (Johnny Depp). Both Jillian and Rosemary struggle with alien forces within themselves that threaten their sense of identity and their physical well-being. These films dramatize anxieties about women gestating the species, more precisely another species, and the splitting of identity during pregnancy. From Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986) to Species (1995) and beyond, women have been giving birth to aliens that threaten human life as we know it. Whether the fetus is imagined as an alien, as monster, as devil, as spaceman, it has become an icon that represents our fears of an abject other within that threatens our identity as human and at the same time has become definitive of human life, the most innocent and pure citizen in need of legal protection. That anxiety, as we will see, has resurfaced in discussions of infertility treatments that produce multiple offspring associated with animality and in the playful humor in the names given by women to the ultrasound images of their fetuses, names such as Thumper, Cletus-the-Fetus, Shrimp, and Squirrel, which suggest that women see something more animalesque than human in these images. For example, in the 2008 film Baby Mama it is a running joke that Angie (Amy Poehler) has passed off an ultrasound of a squirrel as one of a human fetus. While still modest and demure, Rosemary’s Baby and its successors give us representations of pregnancy as grotesque and threatening. It is noteworthy that in both Rosemary’s Baby and The Astronaut’s Wife, procreation is the result of a rape or violent sex by the husband against the wishes of the wife. The woman’s role in reproduction is rendered passive, if not unwilling, even in these science fiction tales of possession and space travel. If earlier representations of pregnancy such as the Doris Day films and Miracle insist on a pure, nearly virgin birth, these horror flicks also separate female sexuality from reproduction. The spawn inhabiting these women is clearly that of their husband/devil/alien and not of their own bodies; moreover, the act that initiates insemination is out of their control and not the product of their sexual desire (although Rosemary has a strong desire to have a baby). In the 1970s and 1980s, some feminist theorists argue, contra Simone de Beauvoir, that rather than give up or avoid motherhood, we should re248

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value it. Rather than accept that motherhood renders women docile or like animals merely reproducing the species (or other species), theorists such as Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, in various ways, argue that maternity is an activity of a desiring human speaking subject. Following these thinkers, Iris Marion Young develops a phenomenology of pregnant embodiment that not only challenges traditional theories of subjectivity but also articulates the subjectivity of pregnancy as unique and purposeful. She argues that pregnant embodiment enables a unique relationship to past and future, and to space and time. Pregnancy opens the body to otherness in ways that make the experience porous physically and mentally. This porosity, Young suggests, can be a model for more open relationships with others and a more porous notion of subjectivity than philosophers typically provide. Like Irigaray and Kristeva, Young proposes an active and resexualized conception of maternity that restores desire and subjectivity to the maternal body. While Young suggests that the desexualization of the pregnant body can open a space for “self-love” through a release from the “sexually objectifying gaze that alienates her,” she also insists that “patriarchy is founded on the border between motherhood and sexuality . . . Freedom for women involves dissolving this separation.” From our vantage point, seeing nude and bikini-clad pregnant bodies on magazine covers at the grocery store, Young’s proclamation seems prophetic. For, just one year after the publication of her influential book of essays, which includes “Pregnant Embodiment” and “Breasted Experience,” Demi Moore made history posing nude and heavily pregnant for the cover of Vanity Fair magazine in 1991. Moore’s glistening, tanned body, an outrage to many, transformed the pregnant body from desexualized and shameful into something glamorous, even sexy. Pregnancy in the 1980s and 1990s: Technologically Assisted Reproduction New reproductive technologies exploded onto the market in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1978 the first “test-tube baby” was born. In 1981 the first baby was born as a result of in vitro fertilization (IVF). “Baby M” was born in 1986, and surrogacy started making headlines. In 1997 Dolly the sheep was cloned, and that same year the oldest known pregnant woman gave birth at age sixty-three. In 1998 sperm banks were taking in $164 billion a year, and fertility clinics were growing industries. A new field of medicine, fetal surgery, opened up, which gave rise to the fetal patient and renewed discussions of the fetus as an autonomous person with legal rights. By the Knock Me Up, Knock Me Down

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early 1990s hundreds of women, mostly women of color, were arrested for endangering their “unborn children” through drug use and alcohol. Planned Parenthood featured advertisements in a series called “Mommy Don’t” that targeted women of color and warned against drugs, smoking and drinking while pregnant. While historically the pregnant body has been subject to various disciplinary standards and regimes, the ability to view and monitor fetal life apart from the mother’s experiential reports of fetal activity (the quickening) brought with it legal restrictions on pregnant women’s activities. Women could now be sued on behalf of their “unborn child” and criminal charges could be brought by the state against women considered threats to their fetuses. In 2001, Regina McKnight was sentenced to twelve years in prison in North Carolina for homicide by child abuse when her baby was stillborn. In Hollywood, the possibility of “test-tube babies” and viewing the fetus in utero gives rise to fantastic tales such as Junior (1994), in which muscle-bound Arnold Schwarzenegger is impregnated and gives birth via C-section, and Look Who’s Talking (1989), in which another macho celebrity, Bruce Willis, lends his voice to a talking fetus inhabiting Kirstie Alley’s womb. If the fetus is an autonomous person and the maternal body is merely a container, then we can imagine this little man living inside a woman’s body, waiting to be born. Or, we can imagine transplanting the fetus from its maternal container into another container, say a bodybuilder-turned-actor’s abdomen. The late 1980s and ’90s also saw an increase in attention to pregnancy as an acceptable theme for film, particularly, comedies where reluctant men mature into proper fathers during the course of the movie. This domestication of men into paternal figures comes at the expense of the pregnant woman, who is used primarily as a backdrop against which the men “find” themselves and learn the true meaning of love and family. For example, in She’s Having a Baby (1988), Kevin Bacon’s character imagines himself in a straightjacket crashing into a wall and bursting into flames when his wife, played by Elizabeth McGovern, tells him she stopped taking “the pill” and wants to have a baby. Eventually, he comes to terms with his newly formed family, but only after he nearly loses both in childbirth. In 9 Months (1995), Hugh Grant’s character crashes his sports car when his girlfriend, played by Julianne Moore, tells him she is pregnant. Thanks to warnings from his friend (Jeff Goldblum), he begins to suspect his wife of deceiving him and getting pregnant “on the sly”; he even imagines her turning into a praying mantis and devouring him. Once he gets over his fantasies of being eaten alive, and prompted by the “little heart

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beat” he sees in the fetal ultrasound image, he trades in his sports car for a family car and embraces marriage and fatherhood. In this era of pregnancy films about men, Lisa Krueger’s Manny & Lo (1996) remains exceptional among Hollywood’s pregnancy comedies in that Manny (Aleksa Palladino), a pregnant teenager, and her younger sister, Lo (Scarlett Johansson), who is narrating the film, develop an alternative all-female family unit with an eccentric spinster (Mary Kay Place), whom they have kidnapped to act as a midwife. Hollywood’s Baby Boom! Pregnancy Today Annie Lebowitz’s photograph of the pregnant Demi Moore on the 1991 Vanity Fair cover, sold in plastic wrapper to conceal her belly, outraged the public. But it also changed our image of the pregnant body. Lauren Berlant describes the change: “Once a transgressive revelation of a woman’s sacred and shameful carnality, the pictorial display of pregnancy is now an eroticized norm in American public culture.” Imogen Tyler argues that the Demi Moore image was a counterbalance to the emphasis on the fetus: “Through its deployment of reflective surfaces, this skin-tight image of pregnancy displaces the cultural imaging of the maternal as open, porous and undifferentiated. . . . The Moore photograph re-envelops the foetus within the pregnant body.” At the same time, however, the skin-tight reflective surfaces make her pregnant belly appear as yet another celebrity accessory to be glamorized and objectified. It is as if Demi Moore is wearing her pregnant body as the latest fashion. This sentiment is all the more poignant insofar as Moore appears on another Vanity Fair cover a year later, with her thin postpartum body covered in body paint that looks like she is wearing a man’s suit. In this later photo, in a strange sense echoing the first, she is literally wearing her skin. In addition to the objectification of the pregnant body as a sex object, another effect of making pregnancy glamorous and the stuff of celebrity have been to put more pressure on women. Now, women are not only responsible for the health of their babies but also they are expected to stay beautiful and fit while pregnant and to lose their “baby fat” as soon as possible in order to “get their bodies back,” as if the pregnancy is not really their body but an accessory they wear. Pregnant celebrities go from lack to excess and back again, from anorexically thin to sporting the tell-tale “baby bump” so popular in the media. They are expected to be healthy and beautiful and thin and successful. In the words of Wenda Morrone Wardell, “We can all recognize the successful pregnant working woman:

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she is the one in the maternity jogging suit running a marathon on her way to chairing a business meeting; she’ll give birth in her lunch hour without even smudging her eye shadow. She is also a fantasy.” Pregnancy is no longer in the shadows. But, many of the emotions and stigmas attached to it still exist, sometimes in more subterranean forms. Moreover, the way that pregnancy has become a hot image for Hollywood and the tabloids continues a long tradition of objectifying and sexualizing women’s bodies. Iris Young and other feminists writing in the 1970s and ’80s may not have been able to predict what would happen when maternity and sexuality came together to create a sexy pregnancy, what one website calls “knocked-up knock-outs.” Discussing a bikini contest for pregnant women in New Zealand, a phenomenon that is popular around the industrial world, Robyn Longhurst identifies a paradox in the way that pregnancy has “come out of the closet”: “The ‘bikini babes’ both subverted and affirmed hegemonic constructions of gender for pregnant women. They subverted the construction of pregnant women as modest and inwardly focused by exposing their stomachs and making a claim for being pregnant, public and proud. Paradoxically, this claim was made by way of a ‘beauty’ pageant.” The reversal of the traditional separation between maternity and sex has exploded onto the scene in recent years as media is full of “hot mamas,” “MILFs,” “yummy mummies,” and “baby mamas.” One reality television show searched for “momshells,” while another, 16 and Pregnant, featured pregnant teenagers. It is noteworthy that “momshell” is a play on the notion of sexy women as “bombshells,” which suggests that female sexuality, like a bomb, is dangerous; maternity becomes associated with a deadly weapon. Moreover, “momshell” also connotes the idea that the maternal body is a shell, a container. MILF is an obvious sexual reference used in popu lar parlance by men about mothers who are hot. Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin was called a MILF and a GILF (“governor I’d like to fuck”), ignoring whatever qualifications she had for the job. There are even T-shirts and onesies that say “My Mother is a MILF”— what would Freud have to say about that! In the last presidential election, now first lady, Michelle Obama, was referred to as “Obama’s baby mama,” a term that is used in popu lar parlance to suggest an unmarried black woman whose only relationship with a man is as the father of his children. This term not only reduces her function to bearing a man’s children but also defines the woman herself as a baby as well as a mama. Hollywood bad girl become earth mother Angelina Jolie tops most lists of hot mamas and yummy mummies; her celebrity motherhood helped spark the MILF movement. 252

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Pregnant Romantic Comedies Hollywood is giving birth to new images of sexy, cute, and desirable pregnancies off screen and on. The last few years have seen a spate of pregnancy films, particularly romantic comedies in which the pregnancy is a vehicle for the man and woman to get together. This new subgenre of romantic comedy, the pregnant romcom, or what we might call “momcom,” has many of the traditional elements of romantic comedy, most especially transformation and reconciliation. Pregnancy is an obvious physical and emotional transformation that usually gives rise to other types of transformation in these films, changes and maturations that bring sparing or unlikely couples together. Romantic comedies in which pregnancy becomes a new form of romance that brings heterosexual couples together include Look Who’s Talking (1989), Junior (1994), Home Fries (1997), Fools Rush In (1997), Saved! (2004), Bella (2006), Juno (2007), Knocked-up (2007), and Miss Conception (2008). In many of these films, pregnancy is funny as the pregnantwoman-body out of control becomes the butt of the joke. But it is also a means through which both the male and female characters grow and mature as individuals, who become suitable partners and parents by dealing with what is usually an “accidental” pregnancy. In some of these films— Saved! (2004), Waitress (2007), and Juno (2007)—the baby is the solution to the woman’s problems. In Saved and Waitress, although the woman (or teenager in Saved) does not want to have a baby, upon its birth she falls in love with it. In Saved the baby resolves the protagonist’s crisis of faith and proves the existence of God; while in Waitress (along with her inheritance from her friend) the baby gives her a new love relationship that allows her to leave both her abusive husband and her doctor-lover. These happy endings in which the baby is the answer is not far from Freud’s seemingly outdated ideas that a woman needs a baby for fulfillment and to resolve what he calls “penis-envy” (even a successful career is not enough). Pregnancy as a “Choice” Although in most of these films the women become pregnant “by accident” and many of them do not want babies (yet), none of them seriously consider abortion (with notable exceptions such as Citizen Ruth, If These Walls Could Talk, and 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, none of which were major Hollywood films). Juno has a brief comic visit to the abortion clinic. But once her schoolmate tells her that her fetus already has fingernails, she can’t go through with it. For all of its candor and gross-out humor, Knocked-up can’t even say the word “abortion”; instead one of Ben’s (Seth Knock Me Up, Knock Me Down

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Rogen) friends asks why they don’t get a “shumushorshon.” In Bella, a coworker (played by Eduardo Verástegui, a handsome real-life pro-life activist) talks Tammy Blanchard’s character out of having an abortion and raises her child for her until she is ready for her. Abortion never comes up in Saved, Quinceañera (2006), or Waitress, even though these girls and women do not want to be pregnant. Although it has become more open about pregnancy, Hollywood remains relatively mute on the issue of abortion. While abortion is the “elephant in the room” in many of these films, the issue of choice is central. It is fascinating that the language of choice used by the pro-choice movement is co-opted in these films and put in the ser vice of justifying the woman’s right to choose to have “her baby” in spite of what others may think; even if conception was the result of a one-night stand with a stranger (Fools Rush In, Knocked up). Even Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character uses pro-choice rhetoric—“my body, my choice” when defending his right to have “his baby,” which started as merely an experiment. In Fools Rush In, when Isabel (Salma Hayek) returns a month after her one-night stand with Alex (Matthew Perry) to tell him she is pregnant, he assures her that he is in favor of a “woman’s right to choose” (obviously suggesting abortion), but she replies “good because I choose to have this baby.” In many of the other films (Saved, Bella, Waitress, Knocked-up) there is a choice after the fact, which seems to reassure us that although pregnancy may be an “accident,” babies are chosen. An interesting side effect of pro-choice rhetoric, then, is that if a woman does not choose abortion, then she has chosen pregnancy. Critically engaging Iris Young’s phenomenology of chosen pregnancy, Caroline Lundquist develops a phenomenology of “rejected and denied” pregnancies, which complicates the notion of choice. She concludes, “although the choice to carry an unintended pregnancy to term may always be socially conditioned, such conditioning doesn’t necessarily imply a lack of freedom; a constrained choice may yet be a morally significant one. Even so, to assume the autonomy of such decisions would ignore the powerful social forces, many of them internalized, that condition reproductive choices.” She argues that reproductive choice is not like other types of choices, since there is always an element of passivity that cannot be controlled by subjective agency. In addition, she points out that even when unwanted pregnancies become “chosen,” we should not underestimate “the socially overdetermined, potentially heart-wrenching process by which an unwanted pregnancy comes to be positively accepted.” In a strange and perhaps strained resonance with Lundquist’s article, recent pregnancy films both reflect and transform changing social contexts, 254

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expectations, and norms for pregnant women and girls. They also show women struggling with unwanted or at least unplanned pregnancies; and while they may not explore in significant ways the social determination of such decisions, they do complicate choice. Many of these films show how women both do and do not choose pregnancy and childbirth. In this sense, although they all embrace women having babies and do not consider that they will not have them, they also complicate the notion of choice. Playing off of pro-choice rhetoric about “owning” one’s body and having a right to decide for oneself, these films also take up the “accidental” and “unplanned” nature of many pregnancies. In this regard, they manifest an anxiety about the accidental and uncontrollable aspect of pregnancy. As the opening voiceover of Abigail Breslin tells us in My Sister’s Keeper (2009), most babies are accidents, the result of drinking and lack of birth control; the only people who plan to have babies are those who cannot. Films such as She’s Having a Baby, Juno, and Baby Mama, in which characters are trying to get pregnant but cannot, also show that pregnancy is not something that can be easily controlled. The anxiety over lack of control and “accidents,” is resolved in these films through women’s determination to have their babies, and in some cases, their transformations from reluctant to doting mothers. This anxiety runs deep in that no one wants to be an accident, which could amount to being unwanted. Everyone wants to be wanted. And these films reassure us that, in the end, everyone is wanted. As Juno’s schoolmate says at the abortion clinic, “every baby wants to be borned.” Films that do take up the issue of abortion, on the other hand, such as If These Walls Could Talk and 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days can be interpreted as scary morality tales about getting pregnant. In the first, there are three stories about pregnant women, two of whom get abortions, neither of which goes well. In one vignette, Demi Moore (eight years after her historic Vanity Fair cover) plays a woman who gets an illegal abortion and ends up hemorrhaging and desperately calling for help as she loses consciousness; and in another vignette, Anne Heche’s character gets an abortion in a clinic that is attacked and she watches the doctor (Cher) being gunned down in front of her while she is lying on the table in her hospital gown. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (2007) is a Romanian film by Christian Mungui whose title refers to the age of the fetus, even though the pregnant woman is not sure how long she has been pregnant. Here, as the tagline tells us, “two college roommates have 24 hours to make the ultimate choice as they finalize arrangements for a black market abortion.” This line suggests that the ultimate choice is whether or not to have an abortion, but it also makes it unclear in that both women are faced with the ultimate Knock Me Up, Knock Me Down

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choice and only one of them is pregnant. After the black market abortion, the camera lingers on a close-up of the fetus lying on the bathroom floor, highlighting its face. Although the narrative is a gripping tale of two women dealing with the trauma of pregnancy and illegal abortion, visually, the film pits the woman’s body against the fetus, which as we know from the title of the film is the true protagonist. It is telling that the nearly five-months-pregnant young woman does not look pregnant; in fact, when we see her naked from the waist down, she looks anorexic, if anything, with her concave stomach. Although not a Hollywood film, 4 Months is indicative of the separation, even opposition, between maternal body and fetus that seems to require that the camera or gaze focus on one or the other but not both. We can only see the pregnant body as a sexy body if we do not see the fetus growing inside it. In 4 Months, we simply do not see a pregnant body, there is never one shown; but we see the fetus bigger than life, filling the entire screen. It is noteworthy that the Hollywood film that makes the fetus the protagonist of its story, Look Who’s Talking, gives us a very unsexy pregnant Kristie Alley, who at one point says she looks like a giant pilgrim, wearing a black and white outfit, and who is seen in overalls or little girlish outfits with big bows. From Teen Pregnancy to Baby Hunger While grown women are made to look like little girls (think too of Rosemary’s Baby), teenage pregnancy looks cool in films like Saved and Juno and headlines about Jamie Lynn Spears and Bristol Palin, who was featured on the cover of People Magazine smiling, looking pretty, wearing her high school graduation gown and holding her infant son. The media blamed celebrity and Hollywood’s glorification of teen pregnancy for the “pregnancy pact” near Boston where teenage girls were trying to get pregnant, buying early home pregnancy tests in bulk, and showing disappointment when tests were negative. An advertisement in the New York Times sponsored by the Candie’s Foundation sports photos of Jamie Lynn, Bristol Palin, and the girls in Massachusetts and announces in big bold letters “America, Wake-Up! We Have An Epidemic,” playing on the long-standing association between pregnancy and disease. At the other end of the spectrum, the tabloids are also full of actresses and career women who have put off having families and are now desperately racing against their “biological clocks” to have babies, women who suffer from what Sylvia Ann Hewlett has called “baby hunger.” Turning the pro-choice rhetoric on its head, Hewlett argues that for career women not having babies becomes a “creeping nonchoice” and “unwanted choices,” 256

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where they “accidentally” have given up their right to choose by ignoring their biological clocks, which leaves them desperate and unhappy. Again, the language of pro-choice is co-opted for seemingly feminist arguments in favor of renewed family values. But Hewlett also warns against what she sees as the trauma of in vitro fertilization (IVF), which is increasing dramatically. In the United States in 2005, 135,000 IVF cycles were performed yielding 52,000 births, more than double the number in 1996. In 2006, a sixty-seven-year-old woman gave birth to twins. As we might expect, infertility and baby hunger have become subjects for recent Hollywood fi lms, most of them comedies. Films such as Juno (2007), Baby Mama (2008), Miss Conception (2008), Away We Go (2009), The Switch (2010), and Back Up Plan (2010) deal with career women who have put off finding partners or having babies until it may be “too late.” Characters in these films realize that their sacrifices may not have been worth it, and they long for a baby more than anything else. Many of them go to desperate lengths to have one. For example, Heather Graham’s character in Miss Conception stalks funerals hoping to snag a potential father to inseminate what doctors tell her is her last egg. After unsuccessful attempts at artificial insemination, Kate (Tina Fey) hires a surrogate in Baby Mama to carry her artificially inseminated egg. In The Back Up Plan (originally entitled Plan B), Jennifer Lopez’s character meets the man of her dreams the day after she is impregnated with sperm from a sperm bank, with the question, will she opt for the “Plan B” morning-after pill so that she can have a more romantic pregnancy? It is fascinating that Baby Mama and Miss Conception resolve anxieties about new reproductive technologies and “baby hunger” by assuring us that to spite the odds against it, good old-fashioned heterosexual sex is at the origin of life. In Baby Mama, both Kate and Angie get pregnant through good old-fashioned sex; even though Angie was supposed to have been artificially inseminated to act as Kate’s surrogate. And, in Miss Conception, Mia (Heather Graham), unbeknownst to her, is already pregnant from sex with her boyfriend. The Switch recuperates the biological nuclear family, even though Jennifer Aniston’s character believes she has used sperm from an anonymous donor. These films reassure us that men have not become obsolete in reproduction and that the nuclear family is still the ideal family. In addition, romance trumps technology as babies are conceived from passion, even as accidents, rather than scheduled medical procedures. These films assuage fears about the possibility of reproduction without sex raised by new technologies. Once again, the issue of the separation of reproduction and sex or sexuality is at the center of our notions of gender and family. Unlike the era of just a couple decades ago, when Iris Young Knock Me Up, Knock Me Down

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and others argued that dissociating pregnancy from sex made women into passive containers for reproduction, now the dissociation of pregnancy and sex threatens to make sex unnecessary for reproduction. While Beauvoir argued that women need to be free from reproduction (perhaps she would embrace new technologies that eventually could make reproduction possible without pregnancy), and Young argued that women’s liberation depends upon sexualizing pregnancy through an identification of reproduction with sex, recent Hollywood films manifest an anxiety over this separation, but for very different reasons. It is not that pregnancy cannot be sexy or that women’s role in reproduction is imagined as passive. To the contrary, in these films, women are actively seeking reproduction as a means of fulfillment to compliment career success and other achievements. New technologies bring new anxieties about both men and women becoming irrelevant for reproduction. In addition, if a few decades ago we could be certain about maternity but paternity was always in question (until the advent of DNA testing), now anxieties over paternity extend to maternity. If one woman can carry the biological child of another, motherhood becomes a question. Hollywood’s “who’s your daddy?” becomes “who’s your mommy,” evidenced by the end of the film Bella, where a mother meets her daughter for the first time since her birth and asks “Do you know who I am?” The daughter replies, “You are my momma”— and there is not a dry eye in the house. IVF and anonymous sperm donors also raise the question of paternity in new ways when the father of a child might be a “turkey baster,” which is the center of a running joke in Look Who’s Talking and a theme of The Switch (indeed, originally entitled The Baster). If IVF brings with it anxieties over the separation between sex and reproduction and the obsolescence of both heterosexual sex and the nuclear family, it also makes it possible to imagine extending choice to issues of DNA and genetic make-up of offspring. So-called designer babies become a possibility. There is a funny scene in Baby Mama where Kate is choosing a sperm donor based on a computer simulation of the baby that would result from a combination of donor DNA and hers; in one case the result looks like the cartoon face on the cover of Mad Magazine. In My Sister’s Keeper, Anna (Abigail Breslin), the eleven-year-old who is suing her parents for medical emancipation—using arguments about making her own decisions about her body familiar from pro-choice rhetoric—is genetically engineered specifically as a match for her older sister, who needs a kidney transplant. Anna is, as she says, a “designer baby” and, unlike most babies, not an accident. Unlike other pregnancy comedies I have mentioned, in this dramatic weeper, the accident cannot be redeemed through choice, in spite 258

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of desperate and forceful attempts by the girls’ mother played by Cameron Diaz, or the fact that Anna wins her lawsuit and the right to choose the medical fate of her own body. At the end of the film, Anna’s voiceover tells us that she thought that she was brought into the world to save her sister, but that was not possible. She muses that she doesn’t know why she lives and her sister dies. Accidents happen even in the world of genetic engineering—it is noteworthy in this context that the Greek symptoma means both symptom and accident. One lesson of this fi lm, then, is that genetic engineering and medical manipulation cannot stop the symptom from asserting itself. Still, genetic counseling makes women responsible for not only the choice of whether or not to have the baby, but also for what baby to have. This new form of eugenics caters to wealthy and middle-class women, who are mostly white. There have been lawsuits over the accidental insemination of a white woman with black sperm. And demand for black sperm is much lower than demand for white sperm. Another “symptom” of new reproductive technology is multiple births and older mothers as a result of IVF. In Baby Mama, Sigourney Weaver plays the powerful CEO of a surrogacy agency who, in her fifties, has an infant of her own and is pregnant again and gives birth to twins by the end of the film; her menopausal births are another running joke in the film. Tina Fey’s character calls the birth of the twins “gross.” A “New Species” of Motherhood As IVF makes motherhood possible for older women and increases the chances of twins and multiple births, popu lar culture reacts with both fascination and horror at these “abject” high-tech pregnancies. For example, tabloids had a heyday with Nadya Suleman giving birth to eight babies. One Internet magazine called her “a new species”: “The Nadya Suleman Octomom is a new species recently discovered in the Lost Angeles area. Her mating habit consists of visiting fertility clinics and impregnating herself with as many spawn as will fit into her capacious womb. She uses her well-manicured eight tentacles to juggle her 14 children . . .” Another Internet gossip column reads, “Octomom extends tentacles into reality television.” Certainly the nickname “Octomom” suggests a monstrous creature that gives birth not to babies, but to litters or broods. Like the animalesque and alien births of horror films, stories of multiple births spark traditional associations between pregnancy and animality. They bring to the surface anxieties over women’s central role in the continuation of the human species by invoking images of women giving birth to nonhuman Knock Me Up, Knock Me Down

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creatures or litters. These “unnatural” births seem to confirm long-standing conceptions of pregnancy, the maternal body, and childbirth as abject, which paradoxically put women closer to nature, not in the romantic sense sometimes employed in discourses about pregnancy, but in an inhuman way. The fear is that new reproductive technologies will produce nonhuman cyberbabies or animal litters that threaten humankind as we know it. (The 2009 science-fiction film Moon is interesting in this regard in that the Lunar company mining the moon for energy uses clones who don’t know they are clones rather than train new employees; the clone protagonist stays on mission through the strength he gets from prerecorded messages from what he takes to be his pregnant wife and eventually his baby.) Romantic Childbirth As a counterpoint to high-tech births, there is a renewed interest in home births and a revival of “natural” childbirth. This movement resists technological intervention in childbirth, which it contends both diminishes the true “experience” of birth and makes labor more difficult for the mother and is not healthy for the child. Since the release of The Business of Being Born (2008), home birth has increased dramatically, especially in urban areas. It is interesting that in The Business of Being Born low-tech home birth is not advocated just because it is more natural but also because it is less alienating than high-tech hospital birth. The message of the film is that women in hospitals do not have any choice about their birth experience, while women at home have more choice and control. Again, the issue of choice is emphasized and redeployed from familiar pro-choice discourse into the childbirth arena. As Janelle Taylor points out, however, “the ideological opposition between ‘wholistic’ and ‘technocratic’ models of pregnancy and childbirth plays itself out against the backdrop of a consumer culture and a class structure that remain fundamentally unchallenged.” At-home births are by far more accessible to middle-class women. And, women are held responsible for making the right choice for their babies. Throughout The Business of Being Born, various women who have given birth at home and doctors and midwives argue that low-tech birth promotes bonding between mother and child, bonding that is interrupted by technology and drugs in the hospital. The “love hormone” supposedly released during a drug-free birth is repeatedly invoked as the primary reason women should give birth at home. The film ends on a sad note when the filmmaker, a pregnant Abby Epstein, laments that complications during birth forced her to go to the hospital, and as a result she did not experience the bond produced by those “love hormones.” The film romanticizes home 260

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birth as a more loving and authentic experience for mother and child. While we watch various women begging for help, in agony, we are told that they must carry on for the sake of their baby and future bond with it. We might ask at what point this demand for bonding becomes bondage to an ideology of love born against technology and the medical establishment. Like the Hollywood films that romanticize conception and pregnancy, this documentary fi lm romanticizes birth and gives us a more “authentic love” born of pain and at-home designer births whose rhetoric harkens back to expectations of maternal sacrifice. The Business of Being Born presents a stark contrast between high-tech alienated births in hospitals and more authentic natural births at home. Whereas the natural childbirth movement of the late 1960s and ’70s evokes hippies and earth mothers rejecting “the establishment,” these new high-end if not high-tech urban births primarily are marketed to career women who are powerful consumers because they are financially independent. The argument is not just that home birth is more natural, but also that it makes labor and birth easier on mother and child and fosters bonding between them. Moreover, pregnant consumers are urged to choose home birth over hospital birth so that they will be more in control of their birthing process by refusing to relinquish their power to doctors and give in to drugs that numb them to the experience. In this film, the argument against hospital birth turns on the rhetoric of choice, which the film contends is taken away from women and given to doctors. Home birth, then, appears as yet another way for women to assert their right to choose to have babies in the face of threatening and alienating technologies. In sum, although pregnancy is a central theme in a new strand of Hollywood film and popular culture, the discourse of choice, a woman’s right to choose— so important to pro-choice arguments for abortion rights—is co-opted to conserve the family (even if it is an alternative family, as it is in some of these films, for example Manny & Lo, Saved, and Waitress). Recent films redeploy the discourse of choice to advocate for renewed family values. They suggest that a woman finds true fulfillment and finally satisfies her deepest desire (whether she is aware of it or not) by having a baby. In many of these fi lms, pregnancy and birthing babies appears as the means for romance, happiness, fulfillment, and the solution to what seem like intractable problems. And although new reproductive technologies and changing attitudes toward women and pregnancy have opened up possibilities that remained closed to women decades ago, through the lens of Hollywood, we continue to see women’s bodies represented as abject and/or sex objects and presented in the ser vice of romantic notions of family and motherhood. In these films, the pregnant body continues to be Knock Me Up, Knock Me Down

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pathologized, abjected, and made the butt of the joke, at the same time that it is romanticized and sexy. Pregnancy is represented as funny, even gross, but appealing and attractive to both men and women. What seem to be new representations of pregnancy and childbirth also work to conserve traditional conceptions of gender roles and ideals of family. Under the surface of these women-centered, seemingly progressive representations of pregnant bodies lies a deep-seated ambivalence toward pregnancy that makes most of these films both interesting and frustrating for feminist viewers. At the same time, changing representations of pregnancy and our continued cultural ambivalence toward it makes it all the more necessary to engage in critical feminist analysis of these pregnancy films and popular images of pregnant bodies more generally.

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12

Exposing the Breast The Animal and the Abject in American Attitudes Toward Breastfeeding REBECCA TUVEL

Current breastfeeding practices in the United States reveal a puzzling phenomenon. Despite a growing increase in the medical establishment’s recommendation that women breastfeed, many mothers who begin breastfeeding often decide to opt for the bottle shortly thereafter, and the women who do breastfeed overwhelmingly prefer to do so in private settings. It has been suggested that the reason for this behavior is at least partly accounted for by the fact that American mothers face cultural roadblocks to initiating and continuing the practice of breastfeeding. The reality of these barriers can be revealed in images of breastfeeding in Hollywood cinema, “that great mirror and maker of modern society.” The ways in which Hollywood films portray both the breast and breastfeeding shed light on what appears to be a shame associated with the mother’s breast in our cultural unconscious. In this essay, I discuss various ways in which our attitudes toward breastfeeding are revealed (primarily) through Hollywood cinema, and suggest that feelings of shame or embarrassment about breastfeeding can be located not only in our attitudes about the breast as a sexual object but, most centrally, in our fears about our relationship to the maternal body and our anthropocentric anxiety over the blurring lines between human and nonhuman animal selves. I turn to Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection to help diagnose the ways in which the maternal body is eclipsed in our culture. Our reactions to breastfeeding as gross or obscene attest to the Western construction of the maternal body as dangerous; a body that threatens the ostensible divide between nature and culture, animality and 263

humanity. I also discuss images connecting breastfeeding to animality, arguing that the animal likewise threatens the humanism to which we so strongly cling by further reminding us of our bodily nature. On this point, I note at the outset that this paper remains regrettably silent on the race and class dimensions of breastfeeding in the West. By focusing largely on animality, however, I aim to contribute to an under-theorized dimension of American breastfeeding practices today. With this discussion, I hope to accentuate how gravely we require a nonhumanist ethics if we wish to rescue the mother and the animal body from abjection. The Objectification of the Breast Various studies reveal nursing mothers’ discomfort over breastfeeding. According to one survey, one-quarter of mothers opt for bottle-feeding because “breastfeeding is ‘embarrassing’ ” and they fear the reactions of others when breastfeeding in public. These anxieties, however, are not without due cause. Indeed, in their book Breastfeeding Rights in the United States, Karen Kedrowski and Michael Lipscomb cite various outcries over the practice of public breastfeeding in recent years. These include a Burger King owner who requested that a mother cover herself up or go to the bathroom while breastfeeding; a Freedom Airline official’s request that mother Emily Gillette disembark from the aircraft while breastfeeding because she refused to “cover up”; the sending of seven hundred letters to Baby Talk magazine expressing “discomfort or revulsion” at a cover photograph of a baby being breastfed; the 2006 arrest of a man who assaulted another beachgoer, whom he accused of “ogling his wife while she breastfed in public”; Victoria’s Secret’s refusal to allow women to breastfeed in their stores in several states in 2006; and a photograph of actress CarrieAnn Moss breastfeeding in a celebrity magazine, under the caption “Not Normal.” In January 2009, controversy arose over Facebook’s ban on images of breastfeeding mothers, since they ostensibly fell under a “policy banning obscenity.” Finally, in May 2010, actress Julie Bowen of Modern Family caused a stir when she released a picture of herself breastfeeding her twins. Several sociocultural accounts attempt to explain the anxiety over public breastfeeding by reference to the representation of the breast as a sexual object. As Iris Young notes, in Western culture, the woman’s breast has been eroticized and figured as an important aspect of feminine sexuality, and women thus feel discomfort over exposing their breasts in public the same way they would feel discomfort over exposing their vaginas in public. Furthermore, many women express discomfort at the idea of having their breasts involved in any activity that they do not consider properly 264

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sexual. Rebecca Kukla cites one woman who said: “I’m just not comfortable with the idea of breastfeeding. This may sound silly, but I just can’t help thinking of my breast as being sexual. The idea of a baby manipulating them seems almost . . . incestuous.” This type of attitude suggests that it might be disturbing for women to engage in the act of breastfeeding because they see their breasts as reserved for sex. Hollywood film serves to reinforce this idea by positing breastfeeding women as objects of sexual desire. In her article “Reel Milk,” Sarah Rubenstein-Gillis discusses how breastfeeding is depicted in approximately sixty films that take place in the United States over the past few decades. She observes that most of the films that show breastfeeding are shot from a heterosexual male point of view that depicts the breast as a sexual object. For example, in The Betsy (1978), Katharine Ross’s character and her father-in-law (played by Laurence Olivier) have sex immediately following a scene in which Olivier watches Ross nurse his grandson. In The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992), Rebecca De Mornay plays an evil nanny who performs a striptease in a “button-down nightie” before nursing her employer’s baby. RubensteinGillis also notes that many of the films that depict women breastfeeding show them in sexually suggestive clothing, such as negligees or low-cut tops. She notes that although the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) branch responsible for classification and rating “does not consider breastfeeding to be sex-related nudity, it appears that many filmmakers do.” Some feminists rejoice in the sexualization of the breastfeeding practice, and suggest that it breaks from traditional representations of the breast as either sexual object or as reserved for the “sacred act of breastfeeding.” Rhonda Shaw refers to an image of Lucy Lawless breastfeeding her son and notes that the breastfeeding woman can also be sexy, suggesting that this might be empowering for women who often feel embarrassed about their breastfeeding practices. Sociologist Cindy Stearns states that the “good maternal body” cannot be sexual, and quoting Iris Young, that “breastfeeding and ‘(b)reasts are a scandal because they shatter the border between motherhood and sexuality.’ ” Virginia Schmied and Deborah Lupton further capture this point: Women who find breastfeeding a pleasurable and sensuous experience threaten the strict borders between motherhood and sexuality. Images of women in Western society persist with the dichotomy of Madonna and Whore. As Young states, Woman is either ‘sensual mother or sexualised beauty’ (1990:197). Motherhood is associated with one type of love and sexuality with the other. For a woman to enjoy or take sensual plea sure in her infant’s body is crossing the Exposing the Breast

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border of motherhood and sexuality, raising stirrings of the incest taboo (Young 1990). In line with these feminists’ sentiments, one might think that blurring the line between the Madonna/whore boundary can productively confound the attitudes that attempt to divorce motherhood from sexuality. On this account, sexualizing the breastfeeding mother might amount to liberating her from the oppressive notion that the mother is not a sexual being but an inert, asexual vessel for the child. Several cultural moments reveal, however, that we have yet to posit the sexualized breastfeeding mother in such a positive light. Overwhelmingly, the sexualization of the breastfeeding practice is still figured as one that is for the male gaze, and thus reinforces the cultural construct of the woman’s breast as primarily a sexual object for the man. In this context, one might suggest that the sexualization of the breast quickly becomes disempowering. Stearns refers to the 1991 case of Karen Carter who phoned a crisis line to receive advice on “feelings of sexual arousal” she was experiencing while breastfeeding and had her child taken away by the Department of Social Ser vices for over a year. That same year, mother Denise Perrigo also contacted a call center to discuss the feelings of sexual arousal she experienced while breastfeeding and was unknowingly transferred to a rape crisis hotline, ultimately losing custody of her child for nearly a year. These instances illustrate the way in which breastfeeding is not depicted as sexual for the woman herself. If the woman experiences breastfeeding as sexual without the presence of a male gaze, she is condemned and pitted as deviant. Hollywood films likewise serve to buttress this idea, as several of these capitalize on the ambiguous identity of the breast as a source of nourishment and, alternatively, an object of male sexual desire (that is, among the films that depict breastfeeding in the first place, as there are not many). The following movie moments are indicative: In Look Who’s Talking (1989), upon viewing an attractive young woman in a revealing shirt, John Travolta’s character asks the baby (narrated by Bruce Willis) if he’s “thinking what I’m thinking,” to which Willis replies, “Yeah, lunch.” In Flirting with Disaster (1996), mother Nancy (Patricia Arquette) finishes nursing on an airplane and, with a still-unbuttoned shirt, receives advances from the man sitting next to her, who comments on her nice breasts and gives her advice on how to breastfeed (as if the male knower is a better teacher than the mother herself ). Nancy’s husband (Ben Stiller) notices and yells, “Cover yourself up!” From that point forward she bottle-feeds the baby. 266

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In Me, Myself and Irene (2000), Jim Carrey’s character has a split personality and, as his Mr. Hyde side takes over, he approaches a mother nursing her baby on the street and proceeds to push the baby aside and suckle on the woman’s breast as she screams in “pseudo-orgasmic horror.” In a Meet the Fockers scene (2004), the young boy is shown “licking his lips, getting excited and frantically doing baby signs for ‘milk’ ” upon seeing women with cleavage wearing low tops. In Superbad (2007), a teenage boy comments to his friend, “Wow, your mom’s so hot. You’re so lucky you got to suck on her tits when you were a baby.” In the context of these film examples, it appears that even when the distinction between the maternal body and the sexual woman becomes problematized, the maternal body risks being sexualized in a way that disempowers her and sets her up as yet another object for the male gaze. The possibility of a productive, intimate, and pleasurable act of breastfeeding thus becomes concealed through the male sexual objectification of the breast. Indeed, Kedrowski and Lipscomb refer to one study that found that 36 percent of mothers choose bottle feeding because of negative attitudes about breastfeeding on the part of their babies’ fathers. Rebecca Kukla also cites a study that asked men how they feel about “double role of the breast,” and their response was to uncomfortably change the topic “to the erotic dimensions of the breast” and to tell “dirty jokes rather than answer the questions.” The objectification of the breast can further be revealed in its instrumentalization, or the privileged worth of what the breast creates. Kedrowski and Lipscomb note that “the media coverage tends to frame breast milk as a product, without focusing on the physical mechanics of how this product is delivered.” They argue that these studies parallel Linda Blum’s notion of “disembodied motherhood” with which she argues that there exists a separation between the act of nursing and the product of milk in breastfeeding discourse. They also note the medical establishment’s ambivalence over breastfeeding. They explain how newspaper articles like those in the New York Times are more likely to appeal to physicians than mothers and to focus on health problems related to breastfeeding. These articles further obscure the role of the mother, whose perspective on breastfeeding is absent from these “medicalized” accounts; she is rendered invisible. Kedrowski and Lipscomb elaborate on the implications of the newspapers’ medicalization of healthcare practices. As they state: This same finding further reinforces the message that “we want you to do it, but we don’t want to see it.” Thus, women who conform to the Exposing the Breast

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media’s norm of “good mothers”—well-educated, white, middle-class mothers, not employed outside the home—have fewer difficulties with the contradictory social expectations to breastfeed, but to do so in private. To further support their point, Kedrowski and Lipscomb refer to a study that found that 71 percent of fathers of breastfed infants do not think it is an act that should be performed in public. Rebecca Kukla further notes the injunction for women to breastfeed in private, and explains how “It has only been in the last twelve years that court rulings in the United States have begun to prohibit charging women who breastfeed in public (no matter how discretely) with indecent exposure . . . and such rulings do not yet have universal jurisdiction.” Here we see that the breast’s specific use as the medium through which milk is garnered for the child is enforced so strongly that the mother is encouraged to perform the act, but to remain hidden while doing so. This buttresses Sheila Kitzinger’s observation that “even where the unique value of human milk is recognized, it is treated as an exploitable natural product, with mere glancing reference to the lives of the women who are the ones who make it.” Indeed, the commercial sale of breast milk is on the rise, further emphasizing a split between the mother and her product. As its website states, the company Prolacta sells “the first and only commercially available human milk fortifier made from concentrated 100% human milk.” The Human Milk Banking Association of North America (HMBANA) is an example of a nonprofit group whose mission is to support donor milk banking to hospitals all around North America. Regardless of the intention, the message here seems clear: We want the product, not the person. This discussion suggests that there is a concerted effort in our culture to treat the breast primarily as a sexual object and, concomitantly, to privilege the breast’s product of milk in the name of health while eclipsing the mother’s role in the creation of that product. It thus appears that there is a desire in our culture to separate the mother from her (or, more appropriately in this context, “the”) breast. Precisely how are we to understand the objectification of the breast (both sexual and commoditized) in our culture? I wish to complicate the answer to this question by suggesting that the fear of being reduced to our animal bodies is key to understanding the cultural anxiety over breastfeeding. Breastfeeding and Animality In this section, I aim to show that witnessing the act of breastfeeding reminds us that, like the animal, we emerged as bodies through (m)other 268

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bodies. This analysis helps make sense of the cultural reluctance to see the breast as anything other than sexual object for the male gaze, since breastfeeding reminds us that we are not disembodied, pure, rational egos as the history of philosophy would have it, but beings firmly indebted to (m) other bodies for our existence. Importantly for my analysis, the treatment of the lactating breast on our cultural stage also illustrates how the breast becomes “gross” when revealed in its reproductive context. In American movies and television, breastfeeding has variously been depicted in several “gross-out scenes” in which the lactating breast or breast milk is seen as disgusting. The following scenes are illustrative: In the movie The Women (2008), a mother who is still breastfeeding spills some milk on the dashboard of the driver’s car. The driver then comments on this in a rather grossed-out tone. In another Meet the Fockers scene, Ben Stiller’s character spits out the “funky-tasting milk” he was drinking upon discovering that it was breast milk. Similarly, in another Look Who’s Talking scene, John Travolta accidentally pours breast milk in his coffee and spews it out immediately upon being told what it is. In a season two episode of Friends (1995), Ross’s ex-wife starts to breastfeed their son, and Joey and Chandler are immediately “grossed out” and have to leave the area. Ross admonishes them, saying, “Will you guys grow up? This is the most natural, beautiful thing in the world,” to which Joey replies “Yeah, we know, but there’s a baby sucking on it.” Ross is then challenged by Phoebe to taste the breast milk, but he too finds it “gross,” trying to excuse himself by saying, “I just don’t think breast milk is for adults,” to which Chandler responds, “Of course, the packaging does appeal to adults.” His friends try to persuade Ross to taste the breast milk, but ultimately he is unwilling to do so. In a cultural, yet nonmovie, moment, Katherine Dettwyler refers to the case of a ten-year-old boy who observed a classmate’s mother nursing her infant and remarked, “That’s disgusting,” a reaction I think many of us are familiar with. These and countless other cultural moments attest to the varying depictions of breastfeeding as something “gross” in our culture. What can account for the language of disgust in these scenes? The fact that the feeling here is disgust, and not simply shame or embarrassment, is significant according to psychologists Paul Rozin and April Fallon. They claim that “almost all disgusts are of animal origin, we believe that all animals or animal Exposing the Breast

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products are potentially disgusting. That is, at some basic level (and perhaps at some point in human evolution), animalness was a necessary and sufficient condition for disgust.” Their study reveals that objects people find disgusting are of animal origin. Interestingly, they also claim that disgust is absent in nonhuman primates, further supporting the idea that disgust arises from anxiety over relationality to animals. Rozin and Fallon suggest that part of the reason we have such intense reactions to animal products is that we prefer to see ourselves as distinct from animals and are fearful of any part of our humanity that confounds the animal-human boundary. Might our ties to animals, then, serve as an added explanation for the embarrassment that surrounds breastfeeding? Author Bernice Hausman notes that “many women express the sense that breastfeeding makes them feel like cows, and this comparison is not meant favorably.”  Rebecca Kukla likewise notes that many women “describe themselves as feeling cow-like and dehumanized by breastfeeding.” Hausman also states, quoting Katherine Dettwyler, that encouraging women to breastfeed because “human children, like their nonhuman primate relatives, are designed to expect all the benefits of breast milk and breastfeeding” is not an attractive reason to initiate the practice for the many women who experience feelings of “disgust” when “comparing themselves to great apes.” This reaction is expressed in an article discussing Kate Garraway’s promotion of her documentary series on breastfeeding. Author Tracy Clark-Flory remarks that Garraway depicts bottle-feeding “as interspecies suckling, as though allowing a baby to latch onto a rubber nipple is akin to— eww, gross—having the baby suckle at a cow’s teat.” In tandem with these points, images connecting mothers to cows in mainstream media and society and are often coupled by a sentiment of grossness. PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) launched an ad campaign entitled “Milk Gone Wild” in 2006, spoofing the “Girls Gone Wild” video series. Their ad depicts scantily clad young women in bars, lifting their tops to reveal udders full of milk. Their website notes that this video “was one of the most successful things we’ve ever done online, reaching a completely new audience with a message about why milk is cruel and unnatural, and totally grossing out literally hundreds of thousands of people in the process.” Katherine Dettwyler notes the reaction of one her students upon discovering that the biological function of women’s breasts is for feeding children, to which she exclaimed, “with obvious shock and disgust . . . ‘you mean women’s breasts are like a cow’s udder?’ ” Turning back to the movies, in Juno (2007), when Juno tells her

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friend she is going to have her baby, her friend responds, noticeably grossed out, “But then you’ll get huge. Your chest is going to milktate!” There have also been various movies relating women to animals in less “gross” ways, but which still provide the comparison between breastfeeding women and cows (specifically mother cows since all lactating cows are, of course, female). In Training Day (2001), Ethan Hawke’s character wakes up alone in bed as his wife breastfeeds their baby on the other side of the room. He asks her, “What are you doing?” to which she replies, “Moo.” In Children of Men (2006), the last pregnant woman on earth reveals her belly to Clive Owen’s character in a barn full of cows. Although not explicitly associating the act of breastfeeding with cows’ milk, this image clearly sets up an association between women’s bodies, their reproductive capacity, and cows. It seems, therefore, that at least part of the humiliation/shame associated with breastfeeding on the behalf of lactating mothers might have to do with their being compared to and feeling “like cows.” Interestingly, images of animal breastfeeding are entirely appropriate for children’s films, as evidenced by a “nursing Pegasus foal” in Disney’s Fantasia (1940) and “suckling pigs” in Charlotte’s Web (1973 and 2006). Images of breastfeeding humans, however, are nowhere to be found in children’s films. This reinforces the idea that breastfeeding images are not problematic in and of themselves but rather only when humans are performing the act, since animal breastfeeding is acceptable (even for children) to see. Abjecting the Mother Kristeva’s notion of maternal abjection can help make sense of the reactions of disgust and, by way of an extension of her account, its ties to animality discussed in my analysis so far. In Kristeva’s psychoanalytic framework, in order to gain a sense of identity in the world, the child must separate him/ herself from the primary object of relation, the original other-the mother. As Kristeva puts it, “For man and for woman the loss of the mother is a biological and psychic necessity, the first step on the way to becoming autonomous. Matricide is our vital necessity, the sine-qua-non condition of our individuation.” In line with our attempts at matricide, Kristeva explains how the mother has alternatively been trascendentalized or naturalized, as in the image of the Virgin Mary in religious discourse or that of the animal subject in science. Here, the role of the mother as active and creative reproductive agent becomes obscured, as the mother cannot be found anywhere in between

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these two polarities, where she actually exists, as a “subject-in-process.” It is the construction that woman operates nowhere in between these boundaries that enables subjects to operate as if they are not born of mother bodies, as if they are above animal beings. Feminist Moira Gatens appropriately notes that “our cultural unconscious is littered with examples that suggest that those not born of women have awesome powers . . . unmothered, such beings are autonomous, immortal and quintessentially masculine.” Gatens refers to Greek, medieval, and modern writings to prove her point, citing Macbeth’s murderer, the unbirthed Macduff, as one of her examples. Given our originary dependence on the maternal figure, however, our efforts to imagine that we are not born from (m)other bodies are not entirely successful. Kristeva’s theory of abjection alerts us to the fact that the borderline between mother and child is deeply unstable, and can never be fully overcome. The mother, in being necessary for our survival and first experiences of pleasure, cannot be fully rejected. Abjection thus represents the desire to unite with and reject the mother simultaneously, and the impossibility of ever fully doing so. In Kristeva’s own words, abjection is an extremely strong feeling which is at once somatic and symbolic, and which is above all a revolt of the person against an external menace from which one wants to keep oneself at a distance, but of which one has the impression that it is not only an external menace but that it may menace us from the inside. So it is a desire for separation, for becoming autonomous and also the feeling of an impossibility of doing so-whence the element of crisis which the notion of abjection carries with it. Our fundamental ambivalence toward that figure on whom we depend and from whom we must depart paves the way toward a concomitantly ambiguous relationship toward anything that represents the maternal, including fluids such as menstrual blood or, equally for our purposes, breast milk. Kristeva states, “When the eyes see or the lips touch that skin on the surface of the milk–harmless, thin as a sheet of cigarette paper, pitiful as a nail paring–I experience a gagging sensation and still, further down, spasms in the stomach, the belly.” She elaborates: “A dietary prohibition . . . in which there is no question of blood, but in which abomination seems to proceed from another flow that mingles two identities and connotes the bond between one and the other: milk.” Kristeva notes that any food we find disgusting or polluting threatens borders in some way, whether on the level of the social or the subjective. “Food becomes abject only if it is a border between two distinct entities or territories. A boundary between nature and culture, between the human and the non-human.”  For 272

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Kristeva, the abject always harks back to the primary ambivalence toward the border between mother and child. It is thus that she states, “If it is a jettisoned object, it is so from the mother.” For Kristeva, all food sanctions emerge out of a fundamental ban against incest with the mother-the first source of food but that whom we cannot consume. Kristeva’s use of the example of milk in her explanation of abjection is appropriate in the context of my discussion on breastfeeding and further attests to Kristeva’s insistence on the elementary role of the mother in all abjection. Our reaction to the maternal body fluids that threaten the rigid border between subject and object trigger a strong, visceral reaction in us, one that can be properly identified with feelings of disgust. Indeed, in speaking of abjection in an interview, Kristeva states, “L’abjection is something that disgusts you.”  We might be inclined to think that we are disgusted by these fluids because they are unclean, but Kristeva notes that an explanation that appeals to cleanliness or health does not tell the full story. Rather, it is because certain objects repel us that we find them dirty. And that which repels us, according to Kristeva, is that which “disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules.”  In principle, then, anything that threatens clean and easy border drawing can be considered abject for Kristeva. Therefore, although we might apprehend the menstrual blood or breast milk as unclean, we do so because these fluids threaten the divide between mother and child; subject and object; dependent and independent, since without these fluids we could not emerge as fully human. The recognition of how easily we could traverse these “clean” borders strikes a visceral reaction in us, an acknowledgment that the borderline might become messy, dirty, disgusting. As Michelle Meagher puts it, “As a gut reaction, disgust is an attempt to render oneself distinct from that which disgusts— disgust is that embodied practice of cringing, backing away, highlighting one’s separation from an object.”  Kristeva’s theory of abjection helps tie together the objectification of the breast and the feelings of disgust discussed in my analysis. From a psychoanalytic perspective, we react with disgust upon witnessing the act of breastfeeding because it reminds us that we came from the mother, the being that threatens our autonomous and fixed identities. In turn, we treat the breast primarily as an object. That is, we reject the mother’s central importance for our emergence as subjects by instrumentalizing her breast, or making it into an object for us, an object we can master. Seeing the breast in a context of breastfeeding, however, is a reminder that the mother is more than just an object, that she gave us life, sustenance, and was the first source of food. This further explains the disgusted reaction many have upon seeing the breast in a context that reminds us of the very thing we Exposing the Breast

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try to repress, namely the fact that we are not unmothered, but are fundamentally relational beings. In an effort to expand her theory of abjection to account for our relations to animals, Kristeva maintains that our anxieties over animal bodies echo our fears over the original relationship with the mother. In her book Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human, Kelly Oliver explains how, overwhelmingly for Kristeva, “the animals in animal phobias are either representatives of or stand-ins for, parental threats.”  According to Kristeva, we develop fears of certain objects as a response to our failure to successfully incorporate the maternal object. In Oliver’s words, for Kristeva, “lurking behind the relation between the father and the animal is the maternal body and all the sensations associated with separation from it, that is, all the sensations associated with becoming a subject over and against the world and others as objects.” Oliver explains, however, that in Kristeva’s suggestion that animal bodies symbolize the maternal body, Kristeva risks renouncing the role animals themselves have played in erecting our notions of humanity. Oliver notes, “The very notions of maternity or paternity, mother or father, that drive psychoanalytic theory are based on the displacement or condensation of these figures and animals.” In other words, as we explore what constitutes our radical humanism, we must take care to ensure that we do not reconstitute that very humanism by positioning animals merely as “stand-ins for the mother and the maternal body.” As noted, Kristeva herself admits that abjection arises from that which disturbs identity and order, and in a nonpsychoanalytic framework we might suppose that animals too disturb human identity without needing to imply that they hark back to the “original” maternal relation. And although it should be noted that Kristeva emphasizes this at times, her tendency to treat the animal as a mere substitute for the mother weakens her claim. Despite this oversight, Kristeva’s discussion of blurred boundary lines and their threat to selfhood can still be taken to suggest that both maternal and animal bodies threaten the ostensible divide between subject and object insofar as they challenge our autonomous ideals of humanity. By expanding Kristeva’s account, we can note that the problem is not that the animal narrowly represents the maternal body only, but simply the body, and thus we can accommodate her theory to align with non-psychoanalytic feminist accounts of female embodiment. Many feminists have noted the myriad attempts throughout the history of philosophy to privilege that which makes us uniquely human, namely our rationality, and subsequently to subvert that which reminds us of our bodies, including our mothers or,

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equally, our animal nature. The body has variously been figured as “a ‘prison’, a ‘swamp’, a ‘cage’, a ‘fog’-all images that occur in Plato, Descartes and Augustine-from which the soul, will, or mind struggles to escape.” And as feminists have long argued, the desired disconnection from the body has in turn served as an instrumental tool for women’s oppression. By connecting women to their bodies, philosophers have been able to privilege the male, disembodied, and purely rational “I” that inhabits the container body, which has been identified with woman. Catharine MacKinnon further explains how the denigration of women and their bodies has been linked to animals: “Women are called animal names— bunny, beaver, bitch, chick, and cow—usually to mark their categorically lesser humanity.” Indeed, when Mary Wollstonecraft first published her Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, Thomas Taylor, a Cambridge philosopher, pointed out, “If the argument for equality was sound when applied to women, why should it not be applied to dogs, cats and horses?” In light of this analysis, it is no wonder that women (feminist and nonfeminist alike) have desperately tried to deny their connection to bodies (both animal and maternal) as a way to gain equal status to men. Their response to being denigrated by their connection to animals has been to erase their ties to animal or bodily nature in an effort to regain a sense of worth. In a New York Times piece entitled “Ban the Breast Pump,” Judith Warner asks, “Is it at long last possible— on this side of the Atlantic—to suggest that we’ve maybe taken ‘breast is best’ a bit too far? That a mother’s need for some semblance of physical dignity is perhaps a right worth respecting?” Warner’s questions strongly suggest that a woman’s physical dignity depends on a transcendentalized disconnection from her body for its actualization. In this formulation, “physical dignity” is oxymoronic insofar as it is the erasure of woman’s ties to her body or her breast that provides the very condition for her claim to “physical” dignity. Conclusion Kristeva suggests that we need to reconceive the mother in a way that constitutes her role in social formation more positively. As discussed, however, Oliver notes that despite Kristeva’s desire to liberate the abject mother from her oppressive image in our cultural unconscious, Kristeva risks disavowing the way in which our conceptions of humanity have also emerged in opposition to animals. Oliver explains how, in addition to abjecting the mother, we also “abject the animal and expel it from the realm of humanity in order to ensure ourselves of our own clean and proper boundaries.” If,

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as Oliver shows, our conceptions of humanity depend on a disavowal of our relation to animals as well as a rejection of our relation to the mother, then reconceiving maternity alone will not be enough to address the radical humanism implicit in our attitudes toward breastfeeding. As Oliver puts it, “Without interrogating the man/animal opposition on the symbolic and imaginary levels, we can only scratch the surface in understanding exploitation and genocide of people and animals.” In order for our ethics to get beyond humanism, then, we must ensure that our attempts to rescue the mother from abjection do not simultaneously resubjugate the animal and therefore blind us to other ways in which our humanity is propped up in an oppositional framework. Indeed, as feminist animal theorists argue, the same way we renounce the mother, and objectify her breast for either sexual purposes or for its product is much the same way we disavow our relation to the animal, and exploit it for our company, entertainment, science or food. Indeed, it is no coincidence that we instrumentalize both women’s breasts and cows’ udders for their resulting milk, and try to keep the practice of breastfeeding hidden in the home and to remain ignorant about the dairy industry’s practices. Harriet Schleifer notes the disturbing fact that “a large percentage of intelligent, educated adults do not associate cow’s milk with the animal’s pregnancy,” and many do not readily link the veal and dairy industries. Employing the mother or the animal in the ser vice of maintaining strict boundary lines between “rational humanity” and “bodily other” proves how urgently we require a new system of ethics if we wish to appreciate not only oppressed others on their own terms but also we who depend on those oppressed others for our existence and the way we understand ourselves. Oliver states, “We must attend to the relationships that nourish and sustain us, to the relationships that we disavow and to the relationships in whose name we kill.” Oliver proposes an ethics of “response-ability” that encourages us to affirm, rather than resist, the radical dependency inherent in all of us. Th is means recognizing not only how our conceptions of humanity have emerged in relation to the mother, but also in relation to the animal. In a different vein, Rebecca Kukla discusses the risks posed by affirming the radical dependency or the blurred boundary lines implicit in the relations between mother and child, self and other, or human and animal. Kukla describes the figure of the “Fetish Mother” in our culture. As she puts it, the Fetish Mother is “the maternal body construed as an inarticulate, extended union of mother and infant, joined at the breast and through the milk.” The Fetish Mother is “seamlessly sutured to the body of the infant,” and we bear witness to her in our scientific discourse’s naming of 276

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“the ‘nursing dyad’ and the ‘mother-child nursing couple,’ ” as if these were “singular nouns.” Kukla explains how real mothers’ bodies do not match up to this oppressive ideal of the Fetish Mother, who is normatively expected at all times to take joy in the unification with her child. Kukla differs from my account in her suggestion that women’s response to the oppressive figure of the Fetish Mother should not follow the postmodern trend of embracing boundary lines, but rather should firmly establish certain boundaries in order to fi x an independent, agentic maternal identity that is separate from, not necessarily proximate to, child. It seems, then, that Kukla thinks we are going to first require fi xed boundaries in order to be able to later negotiate said boundaries in productive ways. She states, Women (like men) are indeed leaky and permeable, and our boundaries are complex and shifting. Our need to continuously negotiate the boundaries between others and ourselves shows that these boundaries are not given or absolute. But these facts call for the ongoing establishment and resolution of boundaries, not their erasure or fragmentation. Only once mothers have access to secure and appropriate boundaries will it be safe to engage in the kind of carefree boundary-play that Irigaray, Cixous, Shildrick, Haraway, and others so alluringly inscribe. Kukla indeed appreciates the socially constructed nature of all boundary formations and identities, but suggests that maintaining certain boundary lines is important for positive and productive maternal experiences. Kukla worries that postmodernist injunctions to blur boundary lines, although appropriate for an intellectual endeavor, is not practically useful for mothers on the ground who try to live up to the oppressive ideal of the Fetish Mother. She thus criticizes writers like Margrit Shildrick who, in Leaky Bodies and Boundaries, is wary of the “humanist presupposition of an integrated subjectivity,” insisting on “instability” and “above all leakiness as the very ground for a post modern feminist ethic.” Although I appreciate Kukla’s point and its importance for a practical ethics, I worry that a desire to fix identities and boundary lines both reinstates the oppressive constructs we are trying to overcome in the first place (for example, the distinction between self and other, animal and human) and assumes that fi xed boundary lines are necessary for agentic selfdetermination. Kukla is indeed aware of the historical reasons we might want to insist on blurred boundary lines (as opposed to masculine, disembodied Cartesian selves), and although I share her concern that revaluing embodied life risks stripping the mother of her independence and agency, I wonder why we cannot have it both ways. That is, is there not a way in Exposing the Breast

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which we can embrace our embodied, leaky, permeable, animal selves while maintaining a notion of agency that need not be divorced in any way from these features? Kukla seems to say as much, but ultimately still thinks we require the fixed boundary line in order to later blur it, and I am not sure why this needs to be the case. Permeable need not be opposed to impermeable in order to conceive independent-yet-permeable agentic selves. Indeed, auditorily the word independence itself sounds the fact that we are always already and inextricably in-dependence with other beings in fundamental ways. And although erasing boundary lines can sometimes prove violating for women, it seems to me that responding to the potential violation that could arise from blurring boundary lines by reestablishing them addresses a symptom, not the cause, of the problem-the symptom being the belief in the necessity of maintaining boundary lines in the first place in order for agentic selves to emerge. Eva Simms’s essay “Milk and Flesh” provides an example of just one way in which we might approach breastfeeding and embodied relationality more productively. Simms’s essay points to ways in which we can celebrate rather than reject our ties to the animal body. Instead of reacting to the comparison between breastfeeding women and animals with disgust or revulsion, Simms states: Nursing a baby is such a primal event. It is the miracle of becoming food for another being, of sustaining life out of oneself. We share this with all other mammals: wolves, dolphins, cats, but, above all, I felt connected to cows. The stillness and earthiness of the cow spoke to me most during those early days on the bed with my new baby. Milk, milk, everything was milk. And I felt heavy and complacent, bovine and earthy, content to empty myself out in an infinite stream. . . . I was all body and almost soil again, my own mother taking care of me and standing sentinel against the world adumbrating my primal, undifferentiated and indifferent being. Despite its overly utopian picture of the cow’s breastfeeding experience (which is anything but pleasant in the US dairy industry), the maternal relationship to the “bovine” experience of breastfeeding displayed here is one of positivity and acceptance. Simms suggests that “milk is the glory of our animal being,” and she offers a conception of maternity and breastfeeding that does not shy away from bodily, animal being. Simms reimagines the maternal in a way that troubles our radically humanist commitments. Her account honors the earthy and the bovine, and, instead of reacting with disgust, Simms rejoices in the fact that we share the act of breastfeeding with nonhuman mammals. Simms thus provides just one example of 278

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how we might embrace our ties to that which disgusts us, and one way in which we can think our relationship to the breast and breastfeeding more positively. Although we must take care not to equate the cows’ breastfeeding experience with that of human mothers too closely (indeed, the vast majority of cows do not even get to nurse their young), Simms’s words remain instructive insofar as they encourage us to affirm and embrace the connections we have, but try to deny, to animals as beings who, under ideal, non-oppressive conditions, likewise breastfeed their young. It is possible that if we affirm instead of shy away from the basic bodily connections we share with animals, the oppressive treatment of both human and nonhuman animals, many of whom we see as entirely other from us and therefore as exploitable, could change. In this type of acknowledgment lies the hope for dismantling the erroneous conceptions of humanity that indeed depend on and perpetuate the oppression of our mothers, our animal kin, and ultimately ourselves.

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The Order of Life How Phenomenologies of Pregnancy Revise and Reject Theories of the Subject TA L I A W E L S H

Phenomenologies of pregnancy offer important contributions to feminist scholarship surrounding pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering. Feminists explore how traditional philosophical accounts of a “universal” or “generic” human experience are at minimum complicated and at maximum refuted by theoretical attention to the creation and care of children. A universal account argues that, while not inclusive of the obvious diversity of human experience, a generic description of the subject as autonomous, rational, genderless, unified, and discrete from other subjects is philosophically sufficient. On the face of it, this does not deny difference but merely denies the philosophical import of our all-too-human differences. Working against this tradition, feminist theories about pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering are both descriptive and prescriptive; they point out lacunae in universal theories of the subject as well as the political dangers of consciously or unconsciously ignoring our experiences of birth and dependence. Feminist thought continues to explain how a lack of attention to traditionally female concerns has shaped theories that go far beyond the direct discussion about the creation and care of children. This essay explores the challenges to universal accounts of the subject raised by phenomenologies of pregnancy. It outlines how phenomenologies of pregnancy indicate a need to rethink classical theories where human experience is considered to be commonly defined as autonomous, rational, genderless, unified, and discrete. It asks if these phenomenologies are a critical expansion upon generic accounts of human experience or if they indicate 283

the impossibility of any such account. Do phenomenologies of pregnancy illustrate the need for a more complex philosophical understanding of the human subject or do they highlight the futility of any such account? Phenomenology asks for careful descriptions of experience while bracketing other philosophical investments. Thus, it is an ideal method for considering the possible relevance of an unexplored territory of human experience. Existential phenomenological accounts are particularly open to exploration without limiting the kind of truth that must be discovered. For many existential accounts, the philosophical subject is always already the human subject, and as such, human concerns are at least potentially relevant. MerleauPonty’s existentialist embodiment theory provides a phenomenological method for exploring uncharted territory in lived experience. A careful description of pregnancy brings to our attention the depth of the philosophical potency of pregnant embodiment. Merleau-Pontian–inspired phenomenologies of pregnancy reveal that pregnancy is a significant subject matter for philosophy. Phenomenologies of pregnancy challenge the validity of a theory that suggests a universal account will suffice. We ask here: what does the critical approach in phenomenologies of pregnancy call upon us to do? Are we to reject the subject altogether as central? Or are we to revise our traditional descriptions of the subject? We examine these two options and argue for the latter. Pregnancy can be seen to operate as a kind of Foucauldian limit-experience that rejects the centrality of the subject. But the exploration of pregnancy in feminist theory upholds the value of working from the subject’s lived experience, rather than from the subject as a disembodied universal monad. Such an approach does not isolate pregnancy as supplementary to phenomenology. Phenomenologies of pregnancy show us how the diversity of experience is a conclusion of phenomenological reflection and not, as some critics suggest, an indication of the failure of phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty and Feminist Phenomenology While the father of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, spent little time discussing gendered experiences, much less pregnancy, he did say that I experience pregnancy through the teleology of all monads. In this fragment, Husserl acknowledges the difficulty he has as a man understanding birth. However, he concludes that since teleology encompasses all monads, pregnancy would also necessarily be brought into the fold of phenomenology. As Johanna Oksala notes, such a cursory view upholds the universalizing tendency in Husserl’s phenomenology: phenomenology as a study that does not take into account the contingencies of history, class, race, or gender. 284

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Importantly, such a tendency fails to adequately reflect upon the lived body. Since pregnancy is very much an embodied matter, phenomenologies of pregnancy draw inspiration from the more embodied philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty’s masterpiece, Phenomenology of Perception (1945), is often read as an existentialist revision of Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. Alongside Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943), and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), Phenomenology of Perception explores how a careful phenomenology tells us that phenomenology’s point of departure has not only methodological implications but also philosophical ones. MerleauPonty famously indicates in the preface that Husserl too realized that “The most important lesson which the reduction teaches us is the impossibility of a complete reduction.” Since I must always start from my located, historical, cultural, and embodied experience, I find that while a phenomenological exploration can clarify my experience, it cannot transcend it. Thus, phenomenology can provide us with generalizations but not with universal truths that stand outside the human, embodied condition. However, despite Merleau-Ponty’s appeal to phenomenologists who wish to address pregnancy as one of the important lacunae in Western philosophy, Merleau-Ponty has been critiqued for having a gender-neutral phenomenology. His account is seen to pass over important differences in embodied experience and thus to fail to capture our lived experience fully. Linda Fisher summarizes this critique: An account that fails to recognize that its descriptions omit particularities of women’s experience, such as pregnant embodiment, betrays the underlying (masculinist) assumption that the generic (male) account sets the standard and encompasses all possibilities, and in this manner functions to diminish and marginalize the experience and perspectives of women. Feminist works that highlight differences in female embodiment illustrate how Merleau-Ponty’s work seems devoid of considering diverse gendered experiences. It is true that his most famous works do not contain careful comparison of gendered experience. But I have argued elsewhere that his lectures in child psychology and pedagogy do explore the experience of pregnancy seriously and carefully. In a critical vein, Shannon Sullivan argues that Merleau-Ponty and other phenomenologists fail to accurately portray our true existential condition since they describe the body in “neutral” terms. Unless MerleauPonty is describing a pathological embodied condition, such as Schneider’s, The Order of Life

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the body in the Phenomenology has no distinguishing gender traits. Th is reflects a continuation of the Western philosophical tradition of assuming a universal experience lies at the core of all diverse human embodiments and thus eliminates the philosophical need for careful discussions of difference. Sullivan claims that Merleau-Ponty’s body passes over the determining effects of “gender, sexuality, class, race, age, culture, nationality, individual experiences and upbringing, and more” and hence his body becomes a “solipsistic subject’s monologue.” Fisher makes the same argument, saying that: As such, it is argued that lived experience, especially bodily lived experience, cannot be treated in a generic analysis: bodies are sexed, and individuals are gendered, to follow the well-known feminist distinction of sex and gender. This points then to the irreducible particularity of women’s experience that, it is argued, phenomenology has ignored. Merleau-Ponty’s work in The Phenomenology of Perception does concern itself most famously with embodiment rather than the effects of history, class, language, race, and gender. Does a feminist who is concerned with lack of attention to female experience in Merleau-Ponty’s most famous works find herself with the task of correcting this problem by continuing the spirit, if not the practice, of Merleau-Ponty’s work, or is she now required to call into question phenomenology in its entirety? One conclusion is that there is not a problem in principle with a MerleauPontian phenomenology, but rather a problem with Merleau-Ponty’s execution. What Merleau-Ponty outlines in the Phenomenology of Perception is a valuable method to explore gendered experience, even if he failed to accomplish such an undertaking. Gail Weiss and Silvia Stoller additionally point out that Sullivan’s critique of Merleau-Ponty is based in a serious misreading. Sullivan equates Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of “anonymous” with “neutral” and then critiques Merleau-Ponty as offering a gender-neutral, and hence insensitive, analysis of embodiment. Stoller and Weiss point out that Merleau-Ponty does provide room for considering race, class, and gender. His entire approach is deeply defined by the necessity of taking into account the complexities of the situation and not seeing bodies as “neutral” entities that float above their environmental contexts. “To say that an experience operates anonymously, then, is not equivalent to saying that it is universal or that it is trans-historical.” The promise of Merleau-Ponty’s work has naturally inspired feminist phenomenologists because his approach to lived experience works against the disembodied, universalizing tendencies in Husserl. Oksala notes that 286

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most feminist appropriations of phenomenology have opted for the Merleau-Pontian version, which builds upon the premise that complete reduction to transcendental consciousness is impossible. This is generally interpreted to mean that the phenomenological investigation must focus on the lived body as opposed to transcendental consciousness. Attention toward the lived body in feminist theory shows that a “one size fits all” phenomenology fails to live up to its very promise of truly starting from experience. Indeed, careful attention to our experience would reveal the manner in which our gender, for instance, impacts our cognition, our intersubjective life, and our encounters with the world. One of the most famous pieces in feminist scholarship that arises from and reacts to Merleau-Ponty is Iris Marion Young’s “Throwing Like a Girl.” Therein, Young notes that due to the ways in which women are raised, valued, and situated in society, feminine embodiment “exhibits an ambiguous transcendence, an inhibited intentionality, and a discontinuous unity with its surroundings.” We have not been socialized to take the world as our theater, to extend our bodies without question into the world, to take up space. Instead, we question our actions before we accomplish them; we worry about how we look, if it is acceptable, and thus become stilted and uncomfortable in our very embodied existence. Young’s work shows us a way to engage in a culturally, historically, and socially sensitive phenomenological analysis of our embodiment. Phenomenologies of Pregnancy Within the lectures on child psychology and pedagogy that he gave from 1949 to 1952 at the Sorbonne, Maurice Merleau-Ponty discusses the experiential transformation that occurs during pregnancy. Heavily influenced by the psychoanalyst Hélène Deutsch’s two-volume text The Psychology of Women: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation (1944– 45), Merleau-Ponty sees pregnancy as a time of extreme ambivalence for the mother. Pregnancy evokes the pregnant woman’s pre-existing conflicts with her mother, her husband, her other children, and her situation in a sexist society. While the sources of conflict are seen largely through the psychoanalytic lens of Deutsch’s psychology of women, Merleau-Ponty also draws some general existential themes from pregnant embodiment. In the lecture “The Adult’s View of the Child,” Merleau-Ponty argues that pregnancy is a “major mystery” that brings the pregnant woman to “the order of life,” adding, “During the entirety of her pregnancy, the The Order of Life

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woman is living a major mystery which is neither the order of matter nor the order of the mind, but, rather, the order of life.” Pregnancy disrupts the woman’s existence as a self-enclosed individual and thus threatens phenomenology, which sees the ground of philosophy as a philosophy of the subject. The “order of life” brings her both an expanded experience as well as being the source of extreme ambivalence due to the loss of the unity of selfhood. The idea of an order of life that stands in the background of the subjective perceptual experience foreshadows Merleau-Ponty’s later work on flesh. While most feminist embodiment theorists that draw upon pregnant experience do not appeal to his Sorbonne lectures in child psychology, most do draw attention to the themes of flesh and intertwining in Merleau-Ponty’s late work. One of the most celebrated discussions regarding Merleau-Ponty and pregnancy comes not from his own work, but from Luce Irigaray’s discussion in The Ethics of Sexual Difference. Therein, Irigaray ties her thought on the history of philosophy to Merleau-Ponty and argues that he did not realize the real significance of his phenomenology. His oculocentrism can be seen to “blind” Merleau-Ponty to “interuterine life.” What MerleauPonty refers to as “the order of life” could be understood in Irigaray’s language as the need for philosophy to go back and reconsider its roots in prediscursive experience: My reading and my interpretation of the history of philosophy agree with Merleau-Ponty: we must go back to a moment of prediscursive experience, recommence everything, all the categories by which we understand things, the world, subject-object divisions, recommence everything and pause at the “mystery, as familiar as it is unexplained, of a light which, illuminating the rest, remains at its source in obscurity.” Grosz discusses how Irigaray presents us with a model where MerleauPonty is in debt to femininity and maternity because the tactile underlines the visual. Merleau-Ponty’s very conceptual foundations are based in “femininity and maternity, a debt whose symptoms reside in the kind of language of pregnancy he continually invokes to articulate the emergence of that torsion within the flesh that constitutes and unites the seer and the visible.” Thus it is not just that pregnancy is a subject area that can and should be discussed by phenomenology, but that pregnancy is at the heart of the phenomenological project. By focusing upon prediscursive experience, “maternalizing flesh,” Irigaray calls to our imaginations the experience of being in utero. This common ground to all our experiences can be seen as a critical expansion upon 288

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phenomenological themes outlined in Merleau-Ponty. Such a psychoanalysis of our lived experience broadens phenomenology since it demands that we take into account not only a discussion of the historical, cultural, social, and political milieu in which the pregnant woman is situated, but also a developmental account of her experience including conflicts that cannot be exposed by traditional phenomenological methods. In Irigaray and in other feminist adoptions of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, we find a common theme that inherent within Merleau-Ponty’s work the seeds of a more nuanced philosophy of experience exist. He failed to see or did not live long enough to fulfill the promise of his own ideas. Irigaray addresses Merleau-Ponty’s refusal to see how flesh is situated in “a maternal, maternalizing flesh, reproduction, subsistence there of the amniotic, placental tissue, which enveloped subject and things prior to birth, or of tenderness and the milieu that constituted the atmosphere of the nursling, the infant, still of the adult.” Thus, we return to the subject not as an embodied being living with other such beings, but as part of a continuum of existence that is behind the categories of subject, perception, visibility, and invisibility. We find here the first revision to a traditional account of the subject. A phenomenology of pregnancy exposes how the historical fact of our prenatal life is philosophically significant. Our life in utero is not autonomous or discrete. This is not merely a historical fact, but such primary experience remains also primary in adult life. Thus, any account of the human subject would have to reconsider its designation of human life as an independent monad. When we turn to the pregnant woman’s experience, we find additional critiques of the traditional conception of the subject. Iris Marion Young’s piece “Pregnant Embodiment” departs “from the pregnant subject’s viewpoint.” Therein she finds a split in her subjectivity: her inner movements belong to another being, her bodily boundaries shift during the manifold transformations. What this splitting causes is a disruption in the transparent unity of the self. From this description, Young returns to the theory of Merleau-Ponty in the Phenomenology of Perception, where Merleau-Ponty admittedly provides us with an embodied, rather than a dualist, vision, however as Young points out, this embodied self is still a unified self. Young stresses how pregnancy disrupts the “integrity of my body” because “in pregnancy I do not have a firm sense of where my body ends and the world begins.” When her pregnant belly bumps up against her legs, Young is aware of this body and is aware it is not all hers anymore. She argues against Merleau-Ponty’s suggestions that such objectification of one’s body is negative. Instead, she argues that in such a moment it is not that her The Order of Life

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body has become an object, but she is rather “conscious of the physicality of my body not as an object, but as the material weight that I am in movement.” Young appeals to the work of Kristeva, Lacan, and Derrida as better models to explain the split subject. Importantly, Young’s account, while in parts consistent with such deconstructive and psychoanalytic accounts of a split subject, is derived not from a rejection of phenomenology as being able to accept a split subject, but from a phenomenological description itself. Instead of seeing phenomenology as inherently tied to a model of the subject as self-enclosed, self-conscious, and unified, as many poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theorists are likely to do, Young finds within pregnant experience a subject who is not just a subject. She writes that the pregnant woman is both “source and participant in a creative process.” Young’s work thus draws her to the “order of life” in Merleau-Ponty’s terms, or in Irigaray’s our “prediscursive experience.” Rosalyn Diaprose argues that Young’s work shows that “pregnancy, to return to the body in question, involves profound changes to bodily capacities, shape and texture with attendant shifts in the awareness of the body. Yet, as Young argues, pregnancy can be better understood as an expansion in the borders of the self than a collapse of its structure.” Th is is similar to the idea in Merleau-Ponty that the “order of life” is not something opposed to the self, as the body as object (or Körper) is, but instead the place in which the self finds itself located. Other phenomenologies of pregnancy have tended to minimize the language of splitting seeing it as too reductive and negative, in favor of a positive view of the collapse of the boundaries of self and other as well as self and world. For instance, Gail Weiss writes of her own pregnancy as an experience that is defined not by ambivalence but rather by expansion: “Fluidity and expansiveness, rather than the myths of wholeness and closure (which I don’t believe any of us, male or female, ever truly experience) were the tangible signs of this newly discovered bodily integrity.” Likewise, in her discussion of her pregnancy, Carol Bigwood argues that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body recovers a “noncultural, nonlinguistic body.” She calls for a “world-earth-home” as the site of this nonpersonal body. Bigwood, like many feminist theorists influenced by Merleau-Ponty, disagrees with Judith Butler’s characterization in Gender Trouble of bodies as cultural signs. With such a view, we reinforce the notion that we are alienated from nature, and that culture stands prior to, over, or against nature. Bigwood acknowledges that Butler is right to “argue that there is no ‘pure’ body or untouched nature prior to culture.” But Bigwood criti290

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cizes Butler for making the opposite mistake, for asserting some kind of “pure” culture that would always be present. “The female experience of pregnancy, childbirth, and breast-feeding perspicaciously shows up a female bodily wisdom and fleshly openness that intertwines with a mother’s personal and cultural life.” Turning our attention toward our everyday experience, we find the “nonpersonal perceptual existence that underlies and intertwines with our personal cultural and intellectual lives.” Our second revision of traditional accounts of the human subject is that a phenomenology of pregnancy from the pregnant woman’s experience indicates that the human subject is not necessarily genderless or unified. Instead, we find a subject that is either characterized as “split,” as in Young, or as continuous with a larger continuum of life, as in Bigwood and Weiss. As summarized briefly before, these descriptions appear to develop the idea that a characterization of the human subject as autonomous, autonomous, rational, genderless, unified, and discrete is not philosophically sufficient. Instead our experience is grounded upon a continuous, indeterminate, prediscursive experience that subtends all individual experience. Many see the work in feminist embodiment theory on pregnant phenomenology as fulfilling Merleau-Ponty’s late promise of “flesh” and “wild being.” In explaining the importance of these ideas, Grosz writes that we can find in Merleau-Ponty “a ‘wild being,’ and uncultivated or raw sensibility” and this is found in prediscursive experience “before the overlay of reflection, before the imposition of metaexperiential orga nization and its codification by reason.” Yet, it seems that Irigaray’s prediscursive life, Young’s split subject, Weiss’s expansiveness, Bigwood’s nonpersonal, and Merleau-Ponty’s order of life are all descriptions that could be universally true for all human experience. Thus we return to the three questions we brought up in the introduction. What is the relevance of these accounts for our philosophy? Do they revise a general account of the human subject, but leave in place the centrality an existential phenomenology? Do they call upon us to replace our phenomenology with another kind of analysis of experience? The Subject Rejected Even if we start with a more sensitive interpretation of the manifold ways in which our embodiment is constituted by social, political, and historical forces, we still seem to be providing a general theory that would apply to all human experience and thus appear to be returning again to a generic account. Thus, gender becomes a kind of additional concern that we add onto our previous philosophical conceptions, such as the idea that the way The Order of Life

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to overcome dualism is to add the body to our preexisting qualifications of what a subject is. If this is the contribution of gender-sensitive scholarship to phenomenology, it is not a slight one. After all, providing complete phenomenological accounts of gendered experience is no small task. However, it appears clearly that the desire of feminist phenomenologists and phenomenologies of pregnancy is to indicate the specificity of experience against the tendency of generic phenomenologists account to absorb all criticisms as merely suggestions of additional areas for phenomenology to explore (but the idea remains that such criticisms do not threaten the phenomenological project’s universalizing tendencies). While the fact that one common experience is being in utero, pregnancy is a particularly difficult experience to absorb into a universalizing account, since the experience is foreclosed for men and not a part of every woman’s life. Oksala argues that pregnancy gives us “a need to rethink such fundamental phenomenological questions as the possibility of a purely eidetic phenomenology and the limits of egological senseconstitution.” The provocative idea of an “order of life” was obviously not revealed to Merleau-Ponty through his own pregnant embodiment. When discussing the condition of women, Beauvoir wrote that “the most sympathetic of men never fully comprehend woman’s concrete situation.” Can a person who has never been pregnant understand the concrete reality of pregnant embodiment? Many experiences are difficult, if not impossible, to convey to others who have not shared in them. Experiencing the death of a loved one, flying an airplane, hallucinating, having religious conversion, and fighting a chronic illness appear to demand having had the experience to be truly understood. A sufficient number of parallels to common experience do not seem available to draw a sketch of what hallucination is “like” to someone who has not had one. Pregnancy might be a kind of limit-experience that refutes the subject, embodied or not, as a universal concept with which to explore our human condition. The idea of a limit-experience is taken from Michel Foucault. His discussion of limit experience is often tied to his own personal stories of taking acid in the Mohave and engaging in sadomasochism. In James Miller’s controversial biography of Foucault, he explores how central such experiences were to understanding the development of Foucault’s thought. Foucault discussed limit experiences as contrasted with phenomenology, noting that phenomenology tried to “organize perception” and “grasp the significance of daily experience in order to reaffirm the fundamental character of the subject.” Instead of this limited, unimaginative, Cartesian approach, Foucault celebrates the philosophies of Nietzsche, Bataille, and 292

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Blanchot, who “try through experience to reach that point of life which lies as close as possible to the impossibility of living, which lies at the limit or extreme.” In so doing, we can see a path to “ ‘tearing’ the subject from itself in such a way that it is no longer the subject as such, or that it is completely ‘other’ than itself so that it may arrive at its annihilation, its dissociation.” In Foucault, the idea of limit-experience is one that is “internal” insofar as it is an experience a subject has that includes the taste, if not reality, of the subject’s own dissolution. The splitting that Young speaks about, or the expansiveness in Weiss, or Irigaray’s maternalizing flesh could be seen as pointing toward a dissolution of the self-other distinction and hence could be a limit-experience for the pregnant woman. While it is true that the metaphor of death and annihilation is present in Foucault, Bataille, and Blanchot’s discussions of limit-experience, rather that birth and creation, limit-experience captures the idea of pregnancy being both a rootedly lived experience, something accessible only through a consideration of that experience, but yet something that defies the traditional knowledge that experience is something “owned” or “had” by a subject “about” or “directed toward” an object. Thus, a limit-experience can be viewed as very much a lived “experience” but not the experience of traditional phenomenology. If we are to reject the subject as the center of our phenomenological inquiries, it seems difficult to know what the place of a descriptive philosophy such as phenomenology now is. As a philosopher, I can meaningfully capture the sense of Descartes in his dressing gown or Husserl considering trees and birds in the garden. But Bataille’s discussion of taking eroticism to its ends in sadomasochistic practices is less approachable. One is the standard armchair philosophy and the other transgressive, but it is more critical not that one is more or less socially acceptable, but that armchair philosophy is accessible. Leaving aside the important critiques of the phenomenological tradition’s oculocentrism, most persons can consider the key lessons in a static phenomenology. While it is feasible to consider the celebration of intense, forbidden, and transgressive behaviors in Bataille and Foucault as kind of a pop psychology of living life to its fullest, the limitexperiences push the boundaries of access to philosophy and are not just narratives of radical behavior. They are indications of what cannot be open to all and indications of the limits of traditional phenomenological inquiry. Unlike an argument that presents us with a theory of why we should reject the idea of the unity of the subject, a limit-experience provides us with a concrete test of those limits. It communicates without abstract intellectual theory. It is possible that the content of any experience is always-already The Order of Life

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lost in the abstract philosophizing experience. The idea that pregnancy is a limit-experience might help to highlight the potential relevance of an experience that cannot be circumscribed by a traditional phenomenological inquiry, but that appears in its heart deeply wedded to lived-experience. As such, we can see the idea of pregnancy as a limit-experience as continuous with the spirit, if not the execution, of a Merleau-Pontian inspired embodiment theory and harmonious with the challenging descriptions of split-subject, earth-world-home, maternal flesh, and an expanded self outlined in phenomenologies of pregnancy. Limit-experiences can function as way in which to consider an experience that tests the boundaries of our subject-centered philosophy. But at the same time, unlike a descriptive phenomenology of perception, a limitexperience seems to require a kind of initiation that can appear impossible to enter. We can consider Descartes’s writing desk quite clearly and follow the line of his argument through his description. But we cannot follow Foucault’s Mojave Desert experience in the same fashion. Going the desert and taking acid will not necessarily provide us with Foucault’s insights whereas reflecting upon whether or not we are dreaming does provide us with Descartes’s. If we adopt this idea that pregnancy is a kind of limitexperience that indicates the limits of a general phenomenological approach, it might appear that we have lost phenomenology, a claim to which Foucault presents a sympathetic defense. Would we then be left with truths accessible only to pregnant women? Or is the point that pregnant experience simply destroys the subject, embodied or not, as the place from which phenomenology should depart? The Subject Revised The idea that pregnancy might call upon us to reject the subject and its centrality in phenomenology allows phenomenologists to think outside some of our traditional language and possibly to incorporate more of the variety of experience in our descriptions. However, the idea of a limitexperience outside of the subject paradoxically creates a greater isolation of experience within the subject instead of freeing our discussion from subjectcentered philosophies. Feminist thought about revising the idea of the subject in considering gendered-experience is far more fruitful than jettisoning the project of phenomenology in its entirety. We should be careful to not throw the baby out with the bathwater. If limit-experiences are not accessible to a phenomenological analysis, they operate without possibility of questioning, without the possibility of analysis, and without the possibility of suggesting political change. I 294

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cannot access the other’s limit-experience if she refuses any validity to any of my tentative attempts at understanding. The more she rejects the idea of her experience being accessible through any kind of phenomenology, the more tightly she restricts it to herself. But even within herself, she is also excluded from knowing her experience. It operates like a peculiar kind of internal God whose mysteries are in principle unknown to the very person engaged in a limit-experience and certainly foreclosed to any “outsiders.” Given this mysterious veil, it seems impossible to consider such experiences as revealing things as concrete and immediate as our social and political world, our personal histories, or our cultural norms. While pregnant embodiment pushes the limits of traditional phenomenological language, this tension does not require us to adopt an even more inaccessible language that further separates us from concrete engagement with our lived experience. We find a richer language in phenomenologies of pregnancy themselves that call upon us to revise, rather than reject, our theories of the subject. Weiss points out that the expansiveness she feels in pregnancy is a sense of “fluidity and expansiveness” rather than “wholeness and closure.” She also parenthetically comments that she does not believe that any of us, male or female, experience wholeness and closure. Thus perhaps the truth of pregnancy is a deeper, all-too-human truth that is obscured by our linguistic and historical tendency to consider human experience at base a subjective, unified, self-enclosed sphere. The revised subject fits well within the embodiment tradition. The myths of wholeness and closure could stem from an overinvestment in the separateness or at least the primacy of a disembodied mind. But once dualism is left behind us, attention to our everyday experience will reveal that we are unable to extricate our “mind” as something distinct from the living body. Turning toward our embodied existence, we fi nd a basic experience that is much more continuous with the rest of the world and the rest of other human beings. We can revise a traditional conception of the human subject as being defined through mental characteristics— autonomous, rational, genderless, unified, and discrete—and explore a subject defined through its existential, embodied, and all-too-human experience. Merleau-Ponty writes that viewing any experience as a combination of a machine-like physical body and a soul-like mind is thoroughly discredited by both our philosophy and science. The argument that substance dualism is wrong is hardly novel or rarely appreciated. Most philosophers willing to consider the relevance of phenomenology would almost surely agree that the mind and body are not two metaphysically distinct substances. But beyond noting their necessary connection, Merleau-Ponty’s embodiment theory points out that what moving beyond dualism means The Order of Life

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is returning to existence and not seeing the body as added onto the mental. “The union of soul and body is not an amalgamation between two mutually external terms, subject and object, brought about by arbitrary decree. It is enacted at every instant in the movement of existence.” If the point of overcoming dualism was merely to suggest that we need to say the mind and body are connected, we would need to go no farther than Descartes, since he noted the complexity of their connection in the sixth Meditation. The idea of embodiment theory is not just to add “having a body” onto our list of essential characteristics of the human subject, but to suggest that embodiment is prior to all of the other characteristics. It is not an addition but a revision of the philosophical account of the human subject. Pregnancy is a clear manner in which to bring this truth to the forefront by noting that phenomenologies of pregnancy indicate the primacy of embodiment over a self-enclosed mental experience and also remind us that our first experiences are ones of inseparableness from our mothers in utero. Yet, while the idea of revising the concept of the subject toward a more embodied, inclusive one fits well within the tradition outlined by MerleauPonty in the Phenomenology of Perception, it seems to not quite capture the uniqueness of pregnant embodiment. After all, it appears that we could come to this conclusion of interconnectedness via a wide array of experiences. We can ask along with Oksala if from such a perspective feminist phenomenologies of pregnancy and birth just “add some missing descriptions of embodiment to the phenomenological project” but they fail to “change the core of it in any essential way.” Thus, they fail to live up to the challenges of feminist philosophy to the tradition. Fisher writes that feminist phenomenology searches to go beyond the “generic human experience.” “To the extent that the objective is to provide an account of essences or essential structures, phenomenology tends to the generic description, treating experience generically, as pertaining to a generic human individual.”  Fisher goes on to point out that this is often taken as problematic by feminists who want to engage with difference, inequality, and oppression. When pregnancy’s specificity is removed and one draws out general phenomenological conclusions about our connection to the world and others, then it seems we have returned to a generic phenomenology simply through a different source. Thus, thinkers such as Elizabeth Grosz and Rosalyn Diaprose employ embodiment theory not as a “natural” place outside of the contingencies of social, historical, political, and cultural forces, but as a site wherein we can see how female subordination plays out in female (and male) embodiment. Sensitive to such concerns, Oksala cautions us against the dangers of a certain brand of Merleau-Pontian embodiment theory in feminist 296

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theory, what she calls the “corporeal reading,” because it reduces phenomenology down to a kind of essentialism. It threatens “to push us back into defending a form of corporeal essentialism that potentially precludes political changes in the situation of women.” In the corporeal reading, the focus on the body removes it from a more complex social-political understanding of gender—“the fact that the focus on the body is simply too limited a framework to support a philosophical understanding of gender.” We can ask if such discussions of a continuum of life revealed by examining pregnancy or all of our prenatal life falls into a type of corporeal reading where we do explore the embodied condition more fully and certainly more gendered experiences, but now they pass over important social, cultural, and historical differences and fall into an almost romantic, “naturalist” reading of the human subject. Feminist phenomenology provides us a way to acknowledge the relevance of experience in political discussions, but the question has been raised if it is sufficient to full address the social, political, cultural, and linguistic context. Does a focus on embodiment encourage a lack of serious engagement with these issues? There are two possible aspects to this concern. One is to suggest that without phenomenology, one cannot diagnose the ways in which women’s bodies have become constituted. Without an appeal to how gender and power relations draw around ideologies of gender shape our experience, we cannot properly understand our embodiment. The other aspect is to suggest that without phenomenology, we cannot cure gender imbalances. In Volatile Bodies, Elizabeth Grosz explores this tension. An exhaustive exploration of embodiment would, at least in part if not in full, reveal political, cultural, and social tensions. It is impossible to discuss female embodiment without considering how women’s bodies are modified, disciplined, celebrated, and blamed. As a wealth of literature including famously Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight, has documented, in the West, contemporary women’s bodies are objectified and controlled through a micropolicing of size. Grosz also explores the notion that not only are discussions of bodies inevitably discussions of power, politics, and knowledges, so too is the phenomenological project of working from experience. “But it is clear that experience cannot be taken as an unproblematic given, a position through which one can judge knowledges, for experience is of course implicated in and produced by various knowledges and social practices.” But Grosz continues to point out that a phenomenology of experience is needed to provide the point of departure for challenging any given knowledge or institution: “Nevertheless, I would contend that without some acknowledgement of the formative role of experience in the establishment of The Order of Life

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knowledges, feminism has no grounds from which to dispute patriarchal norms.” We can see a famous and clear example of how we can explore embodiment without ignoring the social, political, cultural world by reading Iris Marion Young’s “Throwing Like a Girl” in conjunction with “Throwing Like a Girl Twenty Years Later.” Feminist embodiment theory is not doomed to be essentialist and incapable of discussing the way in which social and political changes affect experience. Young’s “Throwing Like a Girl” demonstrates that a phenomenological exploration of gendered embodiment is not necessarily essentialist, if by essentialist one means conditioned by biologically given differences. Indeed, the piece would not be sensible without understanding the larger cultural world and how it shapes and molds female embodiment. Young’s latter piece, “Throwing Like a Girl: Twenty Years Later,” provides examples of how social progress has positively changed female embodiment. Young notes that much has changed in her bodily comportment and that of her daughter, born two years after “Throwing Like A Girl” first appeared. “It seems to me that she and her friends move and carry themselves with much more openness, more reach, more active confidence, than many of my generation did.” The hesitation of Young in throwing a ball versus her daughter’s active enjoyment of sports illustrates that a phenomenology of embodiment is by no means static. Young comments that her original piece might see women as too oppressed, too objectified, as “inhibited, hesitant, constrained, gazed at, and positioned.” Young accepts that her depiction in “Throwing Like a Girl” emphasized the ways in which women are restricted and judged according to a universal masculine standard, and she writes that one might “also look for specifically valuable aspects of women’s experience.” It would be these valuable aspects of women’s experience that could provide the political grounds to reject limiting structures. While Young does acknowledge that the exploration of women’s experience might aid our political goals, she also emphasizes that “a primary feminist task must continue to be exposing and criticizing the violence, overwork, and sexual exploitation that many women suffer as women.” This brings to light that we cannot approach our existence from a disembodied, nonphenomenological approach where one looks as bodies and how they are treated from the outside, understanding embodiment is required to right certain wrongs. Many have argued that the focus on embodiment in a more MerleauPontian phenomenology better lives up to the promise of phenomenology as a descriptive philosophy. Thus, the argument that one needs to account for class, history, gender, and race is not a political principle that is imposed 298

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from without on phenomenology, but that a careful phenomenological discussion shows that phenomenology is ideally disposed toward a more historical, and politically progressive, analysis. The preceding discussion has illustrated that a feminist embodiment theory is attuned to differences in phenomenological descriptions and seeks to avoid condensing embodied experience into a naturalist, nonpolitical mold.

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The Vision of the Artist/Mother The Strange Creativity of Painting and Pregnancy F LO R E N T I E N V E R H A G E The dominant culture projects pregnancy as a time of quiet waiting. We refer to the woman as “expecting,” as though this new life were flying in from another planet. . . . The pregnant woman experiences herself as a source and participant in a creative process. Though she does not plan and direct it, neither does it merely wash over her; rather, she is this process, this change. —Iris Marion Young The painter’s vision is a continued birth. —Maurice Merleau-Ponty

I am expecting, and thus one might say that I am waiting. In Dutch (my mother tongue) one would say that I am “in a waiting condition,” in verwachting, which even more clearly expresses the waiting (wachten) aspect of being pregnant. Merleau-Ponty draws attention to the waiting pregnant body when he writes: “[in] this difficult situation, a situation over which [the pregnant woman] has no control, she must passively await its development.” The emphasis on waiting interests me. It assumes that pregnancy is a period of passing time while one’s body prepares itself for that moment of intense uncontrollable activity that brings a new life in the world. This new life will introduce to one’s own life a new order and plenty of lively chaos, but before this outburst of activity there is a pause in which the pregnant woman remains, keeps still, takes extra care, withdraws from too much activity and waits. At least that is what seems generally expected of her. The woman who is “in a waiting condition” is marked by a curious passivity of letting her body do ever more work while she relinquishes control. This notion of the waiting woman without control is strengthened by the ever more present and expansive materiality of her body that will impede her movement and cloud her mind. Traditionally, woman is more 300

easily associated with the body, but she is thought to become even fleshier in pregnancy and less able to think. This view, so prevalent in Western culture, is present also in the thought of prominent feminist thinkers. Simone de Beauvoir, notably among them, is known for negatively evaluating pregnancy in The Second Sex, speaking about the woman-incubator, “plant and animal” who has become “a passive instrument of life,” while “the transcendence of an artisan or a man of action is driven by a subjectivity.”  Concerning the expectant woman’s own active involvement, she writes: “Life is usually just a condition of existence; in gestation it is creation; but it is a strange creation that takes place in contingence and facticity . . . because she does not really make the child: it is made within her.” De Beauvoir’s claim suggests that one should not use the metaphors of pregnancy and birthing to describe productivity and creativity. “Pregnant” minds might be creative, but pregnant bodies are merely procreative, and thus being “pregnant in body” seems to be significantly different from being “pregnant in soul.” The poet Cynthia Ozick puts it strongly: “Woman through her reproductive system alone is no more a creative artist than was Joyce by virtue of his kidneys alone, or James by virtue of his teeth,” because creativity arises from an active subject (or mind), while pregnancy is a function of the body that does not require active participation. I find this emphasis on the passivity of the pregnant body problematic. What worries me most in the preceding statements is that the birthing metaphor for creativity is rejected because pregnancy and birthing are mere animal functions of a “mindless” and subjectless body. It is assumed that bodies are not creative and that pregnant women (those “Poor Animal[s]” ) are primarily defined by their bodies. Consequently, pregnancy and birthing could not possibly be creative. In opposition to this negative view and with help of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh, in this essay I go beyond the mere metaphorical use of pregnancy as creativity. Instead, I reveal the actual creative force of the pregnant and birthing body as lived body. The pregnant woman’s body, I contend, is more than an instrument of passivity; it is a lived-body of an engaged and strangely creative subject and this “strange creativity” she has indeed in common with the artist. In order to make this claim, I first show how in our philosophical, medical, and everyday imaginings and discourse we are often forgetful of the subjectivity of the pregnant and birthing woman. As the lived body of the woman disappears, her body-container comes into focus as the only relevant aspect of her existence. Second, I find in Merleau-Ponty’s writings a promising foundation for a feminist rethinking of the creative process. By reading Merleau-Ponty’s texts in conjunction with feminist phenomenological The Vision of the Artist/Mother

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scholarship on pregnancy and birth, I aim to make Merleau-Ponty’s notion of creativity strange. Finally, I reclaim the lived subjectivity of the pregnant and birthing woman by discovering in her precisely this strange creativity. The Forgotten Labor of the Pregnant Woman Imogen Tyler reminds us that the use of maternal metaphors is nothing new in the history of Western philosophy. She writes, “Philosophy has thrived upon using metaphors of gestation for the renewal of masculine models of being and creativity, while simultaneously and repeatedly disavowing maternal origin in its theories and models of subjectivity.” Tyler’s critique of the masculine appropriation of pregnancy and birth reveals a problematic forgetting of the pregnant subject and the labor of birth. While birth introduces the subject into a world in which there is always already another person present, that is, the mother who just gave birth, the philosophical tradition has generally neglected to address her, or at best has reduced her to the abstract category of (m)Otherness. Merleau-Ponty’s most direct discussion of birth is vulnerable to Tyler’s criticism when he writes that “[the woman’s] own pregnancy is not an act. . . . Pregnancy is more an anonymous process which happens through her and of which she is only the seat” and “birth . . . rises from nothing.” As a result, Merleau-Ponty aligns himself with other Continental philosophers who erase the origin of one’s birth: I have in mind here Heidegger’s emphasis on Dasein’s thrownness into the world, thrown from no specific position or person, and Sartre’s account of being responsible for one’s own birth. Lisa Guenther rightly worries that by erasing the original maternal body, these philosophers give the one who is born a fictitious “self-possession by imagining his birth as an autochthonous miracle.” Notwithstanding her feminist rereading of Heidegger’s “being-with,” even Christina Schües overlooks the pregnant subject when discussing the being-with of prenatal existence in “The Birth of Difference.” Showing how the individual is natal [gebürtlich], she presents the child in the womb as living in an undifferentiated “symbiosis with the mother.” From this undifferentiated life, she claims, one is born through a leap into differentiation, and thus birth is the “first difference” which grounds all difference. Identity (the subject as an individual) is formed through this leap, and difference is precisely this tearing apart of the individual from the initial fusion. By being concerned only with the perspective of the child, Schües turns the being-with of woman and fetus into a life of undifferentiation and, consequently, she forgets the pregnant subject who experiences

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the being-with of her pregnancy neither as a complete loss of her subjective self  nor as an undifferentiated fusion with another body. In addition to these philosophical perspectives, the erasure of the pregnant subject is also inherent in modern fetal imaging methods and the discourse used to interpret these images. It is no longer the pregnant woman’s experience that is of interest (after all she merely contains the fetus and waits for its birth), but rather it is primarily the unknown prenatal life developing within her that needs to be understood, monitored, imagined and reflected upon by doctors, nurses, and sonographers. This unborn life is already anthropomorphized into being a subject: the “baby” is swimming, playing, and waving; she or he is shy or assertive, modest or cooperative while living inside this empty black “space” that is the woman’s body. Barbara Katz Rothman points out that ultrasound technology presents the fetus as an “entirely separated image, floating free on the screen, tethered only by the umbilical cord. The woman is erased, an empty surround in which the fetus floats.” The free-floating fetus also makes its way into the imaginings of our society’s gaze. Instead of being herself, the woman now “contains a baby” and becomes the very manifestation of the prenatal union with that “baby,” most notably through her expanding waist. Thus, strangely enough, that which makes the woman more noticeable (her swollen belly) at the same time makes her disappear from sight. For example, the woman has so much become her unborn child that the uninvited touching of her belly is no longer considered inappropriate but instead one touches her belly as if one already caresses the baby. This rounded sphere protruding from her body is no longer her body but a publicly accessible symbol of another life. And thus the future grandmother can caress and kiss the belly of her daughterin-law because she comfortably kisses her grandchild-to-be and not, uncomfortably, her daughter-in-law. The pregnant subject is erased from our discourse by replacing her either with her animal body, or with nothing, undifferentiation, or the fetal image. Young interprets the general overlooking of the pregnant subject in the larger context of our cultural discourse: “We should not be surprised to learn that discourse on pregnancy omits subjectivity, for the specific experience of women has been absent from most of our cultures’ discourse about human experience and history.” The pregnant woman’s experience is of no interest because women’s experience in general is of no interest. Critical of this misogynist tradition, I argue that the pregnant woman as subject should be given back the perceptual and discursive agency of a creative lived body.

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Reclaiming Maternal Creativity Carol Bigwood argues that the pregnant woman herself is already importantly creative. She writes, “It is not, however, that the laboring mother merely “lets nature take its course,” for her manner of giving birth is codetermined, for example, by her individual strength and attitude, the medical institution and/or midwife, and her labor coaches.” Furthermore, Bigwood explains: The female experience of pregnancy, childbirth and breast-feeding perspicaciously shows up a female bodily wisdom and fleshy openness that intertwines with a mother’s personal and cultural life. In pregnancy, a woman actively and continually responds to the fresh “phusical” (from the Greek phusis, commonly translated as “nature”) upsurge that independently runs through her body with a life of its own. She creatively takes up the profound changes of her body, constantly readjusting her body image and weaving subtle relations to a phusical pulse that has emerged from elsewhere. Motivated by her new mothering body, she makes dramatic changes in her cultural, social, and personal life. For example, a modern Western middleclass woman may educate herself on the details of pregnancy, childcare, and breast-feeding, make adjustments in her career and home to accommodate the newborn, change her eating and sleeping habits, wear different clothes, and make new friends with other mothers. These descriptions are helpful for realizing that the pregnant woman is very much active and responsive to her own condition. Rather than merely waiting for the child to be born, she actively anticipates birth and adjusts her life with respect to her new bodily dimensions. Th is challenges the preconception that a pregnant woman has “nothing to do” while she is waiting for the child to make itself within her. However, Bigwood does not fully capture how far the woman is creatively and directly involved with respect to the life that is developing within her. The natural pulse she mentions comes “from elsewhere,” has a life of its own, independent from the pregnant woman. It is as if she were encountering a natural obstacle in her life, to which she merely responds, making it work for herself in the best way she can, but further having nothing to do with this obstacle. Is the creativity that we are willing to grant the pregnant woman no more than creatively responding to a natural situation? Seen in this light, the pregnant woman would still be a “passive instrument of life,” though at least now she could be indirectly involved with the process by, for example, buying a pregnancy pillow and arranging maternity leave if that option is open to 304

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her. To be sure, what worries me about Bigwood’s description is that de Beauvoir’s remark still rings true. While the pregnant woman might creatively adjust her own environment and behavior, it is nonetheless the case that “she does not really make the baby, it makes itself within her.” The problem is that when we speak about the response of the pregnant woman to her situation, we are separating the natural, independent, general process coming from “elsewhere,” from her own cultural, individual response to it. The pregnant woman’s mind remains divided from what is happening inside her body. In an attempt to overcome this divide, Bigwood uses Merleau-Ponty’s account of the body as flesh, commenting that “this fresh model of the body helps us realize, then, that we exist simultaneously in cultural and natural ways that are inextricably tangled. We are always already situated in an intersubjective (and thereby already cultural), spatiotemporal, fleshy (and thereby already natural) world before we creatively adopt a personal position in it.” Thus she indicates that the subject is creative in her response to a situation in which the flesh intertwines with the intersubjective world. First the subject finds herself embodied in natural flesh and embedded in a culture and then she responds creatively to the embedded embodied existence. Accordingly, Bigwood splits existence into three worlds: the cultural intersubjective, the fleshy natural, and the personal. Our social intersubjective relations constitute our culture, the flesh is the natural body, and creativity, Bigwood seems to say, belongs to the personal—that is, it belongs to the individual subject. I worry that this leaves the separation between culture, body and subject intact and does not yet give the pregnant lived body creative power. Bigwood’s comment falls short because irrespective of her claim about entanglement, she has not taken up MerleauPonty’s notion of the intertwining of the flesh in its more radical form. Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the flesh is not limited to the body or the natural world, for on his view the flesh is an element of Being and concerns the relation between nature and culture, self and other, body and world, the intersubjective and the personal. Bigwood is right: We are “inextricably tangled,” but the flesh is this tangle or intertwining between the cultural intersubjective, the natural and the personal. Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh offers us a different perspective on creativity that is no longer in opposition to the woman’s embodied labor. Creative Flesh, Creative Subjectivity Notwithstanding my critique of Merleau-Ponty’s presentation of the maternal body, a more promising account of pregnant and birthing creativity The Vision of the Artist/Mother

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can be found precisely in Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh when read in conjunction with feminist scholarship of pregnant experience. I argue that understanding creativity as a creativity of the flesh is to make creativity “strange,” that is, to introduce passivity, generativity, and intercorporeality into the creative act. I will now discuss three different birthing themes in Merleau-Ponty’s work that help construct this strange notion of creativity. First, I will consider the passive and active birthing vision of the painter through a careful reading and reinterpretation of a passage in “Eye and Mind.” Second, I will uncover the creative and generative [maternal] discourse that is “world constituting.” Third, I will discuss the intercorporeal adhesion of pregnancy as an ambiguous and creative tactile engagement with the fetus. Finally, bringing these three themes together, I will consider how this strangely creative process is helpful for understanding the actual processes of pregnancy and birth. The Artist’s Vision as Birth In Merleau-Ponty’s essay “Eye and Mind,” the mother’s body becomes a metaphor for painterly perception. Merleau-Ponty’s appropriation of the birth metaphor for artistic creativity is the conclusion of a lengthy description of the (male) artist’s creative process. He writes: Inevitably the roles between [the painter] and the visible are reversed. That is why so many painters have said that the things look at them. André Marchand says, after Klee: “In a forest, I have felt many times that it was not I who looked at the forest. Some days I have felt that the trees were looking at me, were speaking to me . . . I was there, listening . . . I think that the painter must be pierced [transpercé ] by the universe and not want to pierce [transpercer] it . . . I expect to be inwardly submerged, buried. Perhaps I paint to break out.” We speak of “inspiration,” and the word should be taken literally. There really is inspiration and expiration of Being, breathing [respiration] in Being, action and passion so slightly discernible that it becomes impossible to distinguish between what sees and what is seen, what paints and what is painted. It can be said that a human is born at the instant when something that was only virtually visible, in the depth of the mother’s body, becomes at one and the same time visible for itself and for us. The painter’s vision is a continued birth. This excerpt gives rise to two questions: How is one to understand the creative process that is so poetically described here? And how should this be understood as a process of birth? 306

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The passage begins with an expression of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “reversibility”: the trees to be painted “look at” and “speak to” the painter. That is because, on Merleau-Ponty’s view, the subject is embodied and embedded in the world and cannot perceive the world with a purely active and detached perception (a view from nowhere). The subject needs a body to perceive, which means that this body itself can be perceived in return by other bodies. I as a seer am reversible because to my activity as a perceiver belongs a passivity of being visible; I can see only by virtue of being able to be seen. The subject experiences this reversible connection between the world and the self most strongly through the phenomenon of “double touching,”  which describes how the body that can touch the things is itself touchable from the outside. The reversibility of touch is immediate: at the moment I am touching an object, that object touches me in return. My kinship with the world is based on this double touching, because through it I find that between myself and things there is an overlap. While I touch, I am touched by them: “such that, simultaneously, as tangible [my body] descends among them, as touching it dominates them all.”  Essential to understanding the concept of reversibility is the decentralization of the subject who descends among the things in the world and, consequently, who is part of the world as just any other object. The individual is no longer the central subject who solely possesses and dominates the world in perception because simultaneously he is also subject to the world. That is, a perceiver cannot possess the world unless he himself is also “possessed by it, unless he is of it.” According to Merleau-Ponty, the painter’s perception exemplifies this reversible relation between individual and world. The painter, like any other perceiver, is located in the world, that is, he “brings his body with him”; however, the painter’s creative vision is exceptional because he does not “appropriate what he sees; he approaches it by looking, he opens himself to the world,” which requires a certain kind of non-intrusive attentiveness. Instead of bringing to his vision preconceptions about what he sees, the painter opens himself to the world to listen to it and to let it speak to him. The painter is a true phenomenologist who withdraws in wonder and “steps back in order to see transcendences spring forth.” Later MerleauPonty describes a similar withdrawal into openness to the world when he writes that one should describe things by “letting them be.” This peculiar moment of withdrawal is explained further in “Eye and Mind”: “ ‘I think that the painter must be pierced by the universe and not want to pierce it . . . I expect to be inwardly submerged, buried . . .’ We speak of ‘inspiration,’ and the word should be taken literally.”  In order to paint, the painter does not first dominate the world by shaping it according to his The Vision of the Artist/Mother

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wishes. It is rather the opposite: the painter first needs to be inspired and shaped by the world. To be inspired is an essential element of being creative. Merleau-Ponty asks us to take the word literally and he continues: “There really is inspiration and expiration of Being, action and passion so slightly discernible that it becomes impossible to distinguish between what sees and what is seen.” It is helpful to understand Merleau-Ponty’s play of words in this passage. To be “inspired” generally means to be actively and creatively aroused, but etymologically it also refers to the act of breathing in (in-spirare). The analogy comparing inspiration with breathing is interesting because, on one hand, it connects creativity to an embodied process and, on the other hand, it explains the action of creativity by referring to a process that is both active and passive. Breathing is an active and passive operation of the body over which one does not have full control. One can hasten or slow down one’s breathing but one cannot stop it or activate it by oneself. Breathing is a demand put upon us, that is, one could say that the urge to breathe possesses us. A long inhalation will at one point demand an exhalation and after emptying our lungs we will have to take another breath. Importantly, when we understand artistic inspiration as breath, as inspiration, it refers both to an intense and life-giving activity of our body and to a passivity that is beyond our control. Thus, to be inspired by the world means that the painter is overcome by it, and his subjectivity is submerged by it such that it is no longer possible fully to distinguish his activity from the world’s. As I later argue, by introducing inspiration in this manner, Merleau-Ponty provides a fertile ground from which better to understand the creativity of the pregnant body. The passivity of inspiration is further explained when we read elsewhere in Merleau-Ponty’s work: “What is this prepossession of the visible, this art of interrogating it according to its own wishes, this inspired exegesis?” The term “inspired exegesis” is helpful in the context of the creative work of the painter. The painter provides us with an inspired vision of the world, but this world was not first the static passive object of his dominating vision. Instead, what is painted was demanded or wished for, inspired, by the visible world. The painter “breathes in the world” not only because he is open to it, but also because the world actively demands that openness, that is, the world demands the exchange of breath. Considering this analysis, what notion of creativity does Merleau-Ponty develop for us? First his notion of creativity is founded on reversibility, which means that creativity is embodied and embedded in the world. Second, creativity is not pure activity but instead is an interplay between activity and passivity. This also means that the creative subject is not the “man of 308

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action” mentioned by de Beauvoir. Instead creativity is a double movement of passivity and activity that requires that one be open to the world, ready to be inspired and to respond to the inspirational demand of the world. Third, because creativity is this passive-active exchange between the subject and his world, one can no longer claim that the artist is the center of creativity. Instead the interplay between the artist and the world is creative; the artist has been submerged and decentered from his world. Thus, Merleau-Ponty introduces a kind of creativity that goes beyond the subject and takes into account the intricate intermingling between subject and world. Having presented this inspired vision of the painter, Merleau-Ponty introduces his birth metaphor: “It can be said that a human is born at the instant when something that was only virtually visible, in the depth of the mother’s body, becomes at one and the same time visible for itself and for us. The painter’s vision is a continued birth.” At this point the poetic images of the painter, who is being “inwardly submerged,” inspired and punctured by the world, become laden with a reproductive and pregnant urgency that culminates in the birth of a new vision that is the work of art. It is implied that creating art is a birthing process because it is first essentially hidden from view, germinating in the passive-active interplay between painter and world. This fecund relation becomes manifest in the world through the delivery of the work of art to our, the spectator’s, vision. After having so well described the creative process, Merleau-Ponty here overlooks the true significance of birth. The birthing process is not primarily about making visible something that first was hidden. After all, as the pregnancy progresses the pregnant woman can hardly hide her body from the world, she is visually overdetermined as “with child.” In addition, the fetus is not completely hidden from her, inhabiting this growing and moving body into her own bodily movements, the pregnant woman develops a close tactile and kinesthetic relation with it. What is needed for discussing birth more genuinely is no longer to hide or erase the pregnant subject but to focus instead on the creative passive-active exchange between subject and fetus. Rethinking Birth as Creative Vision and Discourse Notwithstanding Merleau-Ponty’s inclusion of a “maternal body” in his discussion of artistic creativity, I worry that the same visionary creativity that Merleau-Ponty grants the painter is denied of the actual pregnant and birthing woman. Referring to the all important notion of reversibility, The Vision of the Artist/Mother

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Merleau-Ponty claims that after having been born from the maternal body the perceiving child becomes at once visible for us and for the child herself. From the passage in “Eye and Mind,” it is not immediately evident that Merleau-Ponty includes the maternal gaze in this gaze of the “us.” While the man of action is described as creatively giving birth to his work, the labor of the pregnant and birthing woman is overlooked and instead the visual labor of the child and other perceivers is emphasized. Elsewhere and more promisingly, Merleau-Ponty writes: “Consciousness is not conscious of being born. Birth: [it is] the passage from a moment where nothing was for X to a moment where all is also for X.”  Here Merleau-Ponty opens the intersubjective horizon of the world when he writes that after birth “all is also for X.” At the moment of birth there is another subject present who already has a world in which the newborn now will be involved. “Having a world” means that one is embedded in an environment: It means that one is rooted in the world and takes up a position and has a perspective. Merleau-Ponty expresses a similar thought when he writes that intersubjectivity is an Urgemein Stiftung. Adopting this Husserlian expression, he indicates that the original (Ur) foundation (Stiftung) of our being in the world is shared (gemeinsam) because it is structured and given sense through others who are always already there before us. Thus, my birth always already embeds me in a world that I share with others who have perspectives and positions that shape my world and me. Connecting this promising insight to the previous passage from “Eye and Mind,” I worry that in the latter work Merleau-Ponty fails to grasp the full implication of being born from a mother by mentioning only her pregnant body that produces a child while overlooking her creative subjectivity as a seer which makes of this child a subject in the world. Thus it is suggested that the pregnant woman is merely given over to her laboring body, while the creative work of “becoming a subject” is left to the child and the intersubjective gaze of the child’s social world. Thus, Merleau-Ponty presents himself in the problematic philosophical tradition of depicting the mother as passively subject to the maternal body that is the carrier of human life, while “we,” the cultural intersubjective (masculine) gaze, turn the newborn into a human subject. The more general language of the institution lectures (“all is also for X”) suggests that at least some of the perceiving others might be our mothers. As a corrective to Merleau-Ponty’s still problematic vision on birth, I suggest that, like the painter, the perception and discourse of the pregnant and birthing subject is exceptional and that the creative vision and discourse that makes a subject of the child is exemplified in the presence of the perceiving mother who has just given birth. The fact that we are not 310

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conscious of our own birth is helpful for drawing attention to the mother’s discursive agency. While one’s being born marks the beginning of one’s own existence, this birth is not in one’s power, not even in one’s consciousness. Contrary to the Sartrean freedom to possess and appropriate one’s own birth, Guenther writes that “birth contests any absolute possession of one’s own existence” because it has already happened and was never a moment for me other than being “before me.” Slipping away, my birth brings passivity into my existence. Because we are forgetful of our birth, the genetic questions about our own life can only be addressed through questioning the person(s) who came in the generations before us. And thus our birth is revealed as a narrative of another person’s experience. I draw here on Schües’s interesting claim that “my birth is conscious for me just as historical incident through another” and that through this recourse to another a “narratively conveyed generativity of my existence” is shaped. This also means that being born includes a social, cultural, and historical dimension in which our existence is always already revealed, narrated, and shaped as being in relation to other human beings. In this sense birth is a “slipping away of presence through which everything comes to presence” as mediated through generative discourse. While this discourse is not exclusively maternal (fathers, othermothers, adoptive parents, grandparents, and so on can and do tell important “generative” stories), I suggest that the mother (the previously pregnant and birthing woman), is uniquely situated to constitute for the child a generative background (a world), through which the child’s birth, her world, and the child herself receive a particular meaning. This creative response is a postnatal response that draws on (pre) natal experiences. By drawing attention to the discursive agency of the pregnant, birthing and maternal woman, I present this discourse as “world constituting” to the child. This is one way in which the woman creatively gives shape to the life that is growing in her. Merleau-Ponty is usually sensitive to including a historico-temporal dimension in his discussion of lived experience. However there is a curious omission from his discussion in “Eye and Mind.” Possibly due to his desire to make the painter an exemplar of one who looks without preconceptions and appropriation, Merleau-Ponty turns the look of the painter into a look that learns only from itself and is not connected to its own historical and cultural past. The birthing painter is isolated in a visible world. In another work on painting, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” written just prior to “Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty writes that artwork is never a metamorphosis of the world “in the fairytale sense of miracle, magic, and absolute creation in an aggressive solitude. It is also a response to what the world, the past, and the completed work demanded.” The painter is located The Vision of the Artist/Mother

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in the world and in history and thus is never completely alone; instead he creates in response to the world and the past which means that he is never involved in absolute creation but finds in the present a fecundity that gives the past a “new life.” Here the demand of the inspiring world lies not only in the reversibility of vision but also in one’s cultural-historical, gendered, racial, and class existence. Following this line of argument, I suggest that both the painterly birth and the birth of a child never take place in isolation from the intersubjective, cultural-historical world. Consequently, when the mother as a discursive agent engages with the child through perception and discourse, she also creatively embeds her in a particular world. Thus, having been born from a maternal subject means, among other things, having a relation with a generative past through the creative narratives of maternal others (the “tongues” of mothers) who share with us the very specific practices and traditions of the world we live in. Shirley Geok-lin Lim helpfully reminds us that such creative mother tongues are heterogeneous, multiple, and often conflicting. Recounting her childhood in the Nonya-Baba society of Malaysia and her later “diasporic motherhood” in the United States, Lim provides an example of a creative mother tongue (a genealogical “maternal imagination”) that is “capable of bringing into convergence complex particularities in which instantiations of race, nation, class, history and so forth are present.” Lim describes how her particu lar maternal eye “gazes into the future in her new-born, even as she is traced over by sensations coming from pre-western, pre-feminist social organizations; by beliefs tastes and desires that lie, not beyond, but before and within Asian-American subject formation.” She suggests that these formative imaginations are rooted in her body, manifested in visceral desires such as food cravings, and not in her full control. Her child has her history and is shaped by it precisely by not having it, because it is opened up to him “in a society in which her past has no material existence.” Lim’s example brings to the foreground how a mother’s tongue is constructed in relation to a specific past, present and future, is embedded in her encultured body and speech, and bridges a remembered home and a rupturing future. Lim’s use of the word “imagination” is especially interesting because it both refers to a memory that is not in her control and suggests that the embodied and culturally specific experience of motherhood involves having a creative vision. To locate this generative, world-constituting, discursive, and intersubjective power in the woman might open new avenues of critique. Am I presenting just another version of the argument: “blame it on the mother”? It is an example of a curious philosophical double bind that in order to reinsert the woman in a story about pregnancy and birth, one risks portraying 312

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her as the “one at fault” for her child’s problems and, by extension, for the problems of a society. I resist having to choose either to disregard maternal agency or to elevate that agency to an absolute determiner of a child’s life. To be clear, when I consider the pregnant, birthing or maternal woman as a creative agent who shapes her child’s world, I am not claiming that she is the sole constitutor of this world. Like the painter, the pregnant, birthing, and maternal woman does not create “absolutely” and in “aggressive solitude.” She is also an intersubjective cultural-historical subject. Her child becomes a subject through the child’s embodied being-in-the-world, which includes having a relation with other subjects, with culture, race, gender, history, and so on. It is as important not to exclude the mother from these complicated relations as it is not to scapegoat her as the sole subject of blame when things go wrong. Pregnancy and Intercorporeal Adhesion I have mentioned how birth is essentially an intersubjective phenomenon, that is, one is born into a world where there is always already someone else present. That Merleau-Ponty thinks that we share this foundation in even closer proximity is evident when he writes about “the Urgemeinshaftung of our intentional life, the Ineinander of the others in us and of us in them.” Haftung means “adhesion,” and thus Merleau-Ponty refers here to our relation as the original (Ur) shared (gemein) adhesion between myself and another, that is, that moment that we are in-one-another (Ineinander). This last comment shows the importance of unpacking the intersubjective relation not only in terms of birth but also in terms of pregnancy because, gestated in a pregnant other, the child literally adhered to her. From the very first preparation of life a fetus is in relationship with a lived body that is the “moving, tactile and sonorous body” of a creative subject. Pregnancy is the most fundamental moment of being in-one-another that founds intersubjectivity in intercorporeality. Lanei Rodemeyer explains how in the touching exchange between the pregnant woman and the fetus a most intricate crossing-over takes place: [The pregnant subject] is involved in the creative process of a possible sentience. . . . It is only with her that the growing fetus communicates, and her relationship with it is privileged. . . . Here, then, we have a case of an authentic subject who cannot be essentially alone/ lonely/in solitude. And this applies to the pregnant subject as well as the potential subject developing within her. There can be no solitude in the case of a blurring, a decentering of subjects. The Vision of the Artist/Mother

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During pregnancy the intercorporeal contact between a self and something other takes place most intensely and directly. As Young recalls, it starts with a realization that one’s pregnant body now has become a space for another body while it still remains one’s own. The fetus takes up bodily space, but this space does not erase the pregnant woman (as an ultrasound might imply). Instead the body of the fetus interrupts and disrupts her being by literally stretching her boundaries. Young recounts how, trying to tie her shoelace, she suddenly feels a belly where she did not expect it. But, she emphasizes, the feeling of this unexpected double touch between knee and a strange belly is still a feeling of ownership. Trying to understand what is mine and what is other, Young expresses the fundamental ambiguity that is part of being pregnant. Young describes pregnancy as the ambiguous splitting of her body in which she witnesses exclusively the movements in her body that are both hers and belong to another body. This, she concludes, challenges the boundaries between what is “within, myself, and what is outside, separate.” This also means that the splitting of the pregnant body is not a clearly delineated and frontal dividing of the body between what is self and other. It is instead a truly ambiguous split where self and other have started to flow into one another without ever being completely fused with the other because between them is a dynamic surface of contact. Merleau-Ponty writes that the relation between the body and the world is not frontal: “there is not a frontier, but a contact surface.”  I use this comment to understand better the nonfrontal intercorporeal contact between the pregnant subject and the fetus. When we speak of a frontier we speak of a frontal encounter with someone or something; it suggests that it is the outer limit to which we can go but beyond which is obscurity. A frontier separates by opposition. If our relation with something is frontal, then we would be set apart from it, and the question would become how we could ever be in contact with something that is so wholly divided from us. The word “surface” has much less antagonistic connotations, since it is a place where contact is possible. A surface still separates but also speaks of connectivity; surfaces are in no way impermeable: Water has a surface, my body has a surface and both are porous and pliable in their own way. Surfaces are separations that are still open and allow for an exchange between that which they keep apart. Pregnancy is a prime example of the possibility of the nonfrontal embrace between two separate but connected entities. While after birth the mother might for the first time really see her child that was first only “virtually visible,”  before birth the pregnant woman already interacts with the growing fetus, most prominently through touch. 314

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What was said above about double touching is even more evident in the case of pregnancy because to be pregnant means continually to be touching and being touched. This touching body has size and weight and the willingly pregnant subject adapts to this weight by changing the way she moves, sits, and sleeps. In this manner the body of the fetus is incorporated into a new dynamic habit body. In addition to the continual weighty touching of the fetal body, the pregnant woman is at times interrupted by a tickle and a kick and these disruptive touches respond to the position of her body and the way she touches the fetus that is wrapped tightly in her womb. She touches the fetus by touching her belly there where the kick comes, and by moving her body in response to that internal activity. More often now, my own concentration is broken by a well positioned kicking inside, which again draws back my thought to this life growing inside of me, part of me and other to me. In response I might either shift my body to give better space or to avoid an uncomfortable feeling, or I do not move in order to elicit another kick, or I resist this interruption and demand a good night’s sleep. Wynn recounts the experiences of other pregnant women who write about the different ways they are responding and communicating with the living bodies inside of them: So I am often awake these days in the hours before dawn, full of joy, full of fear. The first birds begin to sing at quarter to five, and when Sam moves around in my stomach, kicking, it feels like there is a trout inside me leaping, and I go in and out of aloneness, in and out of that sacred place. In a few minutes I’ll be swimming in Crystal Pool. Breast stroke is my favorite: arms out, back to the side, together like a heart: breathe, pull, kick, glide. You weigh almost nothing, salt water holds you up, two salt waters, the one you’re in and the one I’m in. When we’re at the pool ends, I turn slowly, if I don’t, you slam my side. This corporeal movement in the pregnant body is not just any internal movement (for example, a stomach rumble), but instead it is the spontaneous and responsive movement of a sensing body that is the fetus. I emphasize that the pregnant woman and the fetus are participants in a strangely creative process. The tactile surface between the fetus and the pregnant woman is open and inspiring. That is, there is a demand to this exchange that the pregnant woman cannot fully control. Nonetheless as a subject she actively engages with the subject and in this passive-active exchange she creatively gives shape to an intercorporeal relation out of which a subject can be born. The Vision of the Artist/Mother

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Voices of Ambivalence Notwithstanding my initial critical reading of Bigwood’s descriptions of pregnant creativity, her examples are helpful for understanding the actual daily strangely creative responses of the pregnant woman. Bigwood mentions how this woman responds to her situation by choosing her laboring preferences, educating herself, adjusting her lifestyle, changing her habits. Bigwood’s examples refer in particular to a “modern, Western middle-class woman” who desires her pregnancy and motherhood. But not all pregnancies are experienced with such affirmative motivation. When I speak about a strange creativity that challenges us to rethink the pregnant woman’s experience as an active-passive process over which she has no full control but in which she is genuinely implicated as a creative subject, I do not mean to say that these creative responses and implications of the pregnant subject are always and necessarily affirmative. Pregnancy is not always wanted and celebrated. Here I present several voices that are not simply celebratory and bring to the foreground the passive element in pregnancy, but are strangely creative nonetheless. The first voice is Caroline Lundquist’s. In her important phenomenological account of rejected and denied pregnancies, Lundquist cautions about generalizing the intra- and intercorporeal experiences to be necessarily lived-through as positive and harmonious. I quote her at length: For the pregnant subject who never positively accepts her pregnancy, the sense of splitting subjectivity can be radically unlike the experiential mother-child differentiation of chosen pregnancy Young describes; a chiasm not of two subjects, but rather of a subject and some unwanted or menacing object, some less than human, perhaps monstrous creature, or the embodiment of the aggressor, in pregnancies resulting from rape. Women whose unwanted pregnancies must be carried to term may undergo the same basic biological processes as willing mothers, but these processes are yet perceived or interpreted in substantially different ways. While the sense and the interpretation of the splitting might be importantly different, my point remains: that in pregnancy there is a passive-active nonfrontal and ambiguous encounter between two corporealities. One might say that it is precisely the ambiguity of the splitting body that makes an unwanted pregnancy so very threatening to the pregnant subject. The second voice is the voice of a teenage single mother, Felicita Garcia, who struggles with her relationships with the baby’s abusive father, her mother and her sister. Her story of pregnancy, birth, and mothering is 316

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everything but passive and even in moments in which she is least in control she emerges as a strong voice, a subject acting in a complex and difficult world. She concludes: “I like my freedom . . . I like my life now. I do what I want. I don’t need to do anything for nobody but my child. I try my best for her. I want a future for myself . . . I want for her to be free . . . Be somebody. That’s all. Just be somebody.”  And there is a third voice of a Nepalese woman saying: “It’s a personal plague, this illness, this childbearing . . . You think about it and only anguish comes into your mind. It’s your own personal anguish. It’s very hard.”  Here we hear the voice of a subject who endures her pregnancy with dread. But this fear is not a resignation into passive instrumentality. Instead this fear is lived and personal; it is her own manner of engaging with her pregnancy as a truly intercorporeal and therefore also precarious and possibly dangerous situation. Finally, documenting the diverse ambiguous voices of African American mothers, Patricia Hill Collins comments that pregnancy and mothering under oppressive conditions is often “a fundamentally contradictory institution” that frequently forces women to give up their own creative potential. These women might not have time and opportunity to, as Bigwood describes, educate themselves, to arrange maternity leave, and to buy new clothes. Nonetheless, Collins argues that even in face of such obstacles, the “special relationship that black mothers have with their children can also foster a creativity” and a possibility for hope and empowerment: “To me having a baby inside me is the only time I’m really alive. I know I can make something . . . Now I belonged to me . . . I accepted mama as my name. Realized that it did not melt down any other designation. Discovered that it expanded them—and me.” All these struggling, defeated, angry, and hopeful voices are the mother tongues of pregnant subjects that need to be heard more often, they are clear examples of subjects that do not just wait, passively as instruments of nature, but rather they are embodied and engaged (that is, strangely creative) subjects who navigate troubling worlds. Tess Cosslett expresses this sentiment concisely: “Thus the consciousness of a birthing woman . . . involves a process of negotiation with prevailing ideologies . . . whose aim is, I would argue, power: in terms of writing, the power to take over the story, in terms of childbirth, the power to control the experience; or in both cases, the power to protest, or celebrate, lack of control.” The Strange Creativity of Pregnancy and Painting Simone de Beauvoir’s disparaging comments on the strange creation of pregnancy, which she indicates is no pure creation, need not lead to rejecting The Vision of the Artist/Mother

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all creativity from the pregnant subject. Instead we need to reclaim for the pregnant woman this strange creativity, which I suggest, is a kind of creativity after all. Making a similar point, Fredrika Scarth defends de Beauvoir and writes: “gestation is a strange kind of creativity that is undertaken without full control of the process or the outcome.” I agree: It is precisely de Beauvoir’s mention of the strangeness of pregnant creation that is helpful for rethinking the pregnant woman’s creative subjectivity. But that also means that she can no longer be a mere instrument of passivity or, conversely, that the “artisan or man of action” is ‘pure’ creative subjectivity. To make creativity strange, in the manner that I have done here, means that the creating subject is essentially embodied and inhabits a culturalhistorical world; that she is no longer in full control of that which she creates; that the creative act is always already also passive (but not solely passive); that to be creative requires an openness to being affected; that the creative subject is no longer the absolute center of her world; and that she is always already in relation with other subjects and bodies. This creativity is “strange” for several reasons. First, it is strange insofar as it challenges our general conception of creativity as the “absolute” creation of an agent. Strange creativity is not just an exception to otherwise “pure” creative acts. Instead, I suggest that all genuine creativity is strange. Thus it is strange only insofar as it requires us to reconceive what creativity is and to question the “inherent binary nature of agency in modern philosophy— either an agent or not an agent.” In this respect the creativity of the pregnant woman is not any stranger than the creativity of the artist. Second, the creativity of the pregnant woman in particular is strange because she challenges our common and philosophical preconceptions about pregnancy as a “waiting condition.” In this respect the pregnant woman’s creativity is stranger, that is, more unheard of, than the artist’s. Because this is so “unheard of,” it is necessary to listen more and better to the great manifold of voices from pregnant, birthing, and mothering women. Th ird, this rethinking of creativity is strange because it takes as exemplary the concrete intertwining of bodies in the pregnant woman in order to make a more general point about creativity. In this respect the embodied creativity of the pregnant woman is more exemplary of strange creativity than the creativity of the artist. Epilogue Three months ago I gave birth to an extraordinary child. While the pregnancy and birth are over, the narrative of this strangely creative process that took place with(in) and without me continues to take shape and is 318

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being shared with others if not yet with my child. But this ever-changing story (the continuing development of my own mother tongue) already involves him in a world. Now, while breastfeeding, we are settling into another intercorporeal and intersubjective relation. And rather than quietly settling into a purely natural process, I am again creatively engaged in and struggling with an action over which I do not have full control.

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Notes

Introduction 1. Simon Critchley, The Book of Dead Philosophers (New York: Vintage, 2009) xxx, xvi. 2. This conference was generously funded by The University of Oregon Graduate School, the Center for the Study of Women in Society, the Oregon Humanities Center, The University of Oregon Department of Philosophy, and the Graduate Student Philosophy Club at The University of Oregon. We extend our gratitude to the faculty, staff and graduate students of the UO Philosophy Department, who offered their time, skills, and good will to make this conference happen. Our special thanks to Bonnie Mann, who suggested that the four of us get together and “do something” about our collective interests. 3. Th is is not to say that there are no philosophical considerations of these phenomena, as we will demonstrate. 4. Conference contributions were submitted by scholars from around the world. The conference also attracted scholars from outside the discipline of philosophy who nonetheless valued our philosophical approach. We were pleased to include work by sociologists, anthropologists, social workers, educators, community activists, historians, clinical and research psychologists, nurses, and obstetricians. 5. Linda Bell, Visions of Women (Clifton, N.J.: Humana Press, 1983), 50. 6. Ibid., 421. 7. Ibid., 422. 8. Claudia Card, “Against Marriage and Motherhood,” Hypatia 11, no. 3 (Summer 1996): 1–23; bell hooks, Feminist Theory from Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1984). 321

9. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1991). 10. Jeff ner Allen, “Motherhood: The Annihilation of Women.” In Marilyn Pearsall, ed., Women and Values (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1986), 315. 11. In Theaetetus, for example, Socrates appoints himself the midwife to assist Theaetetus in his labor, but he privileges his own craft above that of actual midwives. See Plato, Theaetetus, trans. Joe Sachs (Newburyport, Conn.: Focus Publishing, 2004), 149E. 12. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis, (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 104. 13. Some feminist philosophers, Cynthia Freeland among them, have raised concerns over feminism’s tendency to be overly dismissive of canonical work; we mean only to show that that attitude is by no means univocal and can be challenged from both within and outside the realm of feminism. Conventional philosophers’ best defense against those feminists who reject the canon outright would be, we believe, to reassess canonical theory from a feminist perspective for themselves, then make a case for salvaging theory where appropriate. 14. Cynthia Freeland, Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 2. 15. Andrea Nye, Philosophy and Feminism: At the Border (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995), xi. 16. Ibid. 17. We use the term “situation,” in the sense elaborated on by Beauvoir in The Second Sex. 18. Linda Martin Alcoff, “Phenomenology, Post-Structuralism, and Feminist Theory on the Concept of Experience,” in Feminist Phenomenology, ed. Linda Fisher and Lester Embree (Boston: Kluwer Academic, 2000), 45. 19. Joan Scott, “Experience,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 25. 20. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 1963), 11–32. 21. Ibid., 20–21. 22. Ibid., 30. 23. Scott, “Experience,” 25. 24. S. Kay Toombs, “Disability and the Self,” in Changing the Self: Philosophies, Techniques, and Experiences, ed. Thomas M. Brinthaupt and Richard P. Lipka (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 337–356. 25. Susan Bordo, “Are Mothers Persons? Reproductive Rights and the Politics of Subjectivity,” in Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 71–97. 26. Ibid., 77; emphasis in the original. 27. Ibid., 91, 96. 28. Iris Marion Young, “Gender as Seriality: Th inking About Women as a Social Collective,” in Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Paul Sartre, ed. Julien S. Murphy (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 337–357. 322

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29. Ibid., 213. 30. Ibid., 216. 31. Ibid., 217. 32. Ibid., 219, 226. 33. This is especially in contrast to Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, although his influence is recognized in all of phenomenology. 34. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York, Knopf, 1953), 519–524. 35. “If [morning sickness], unknown in other mammals, is an important one in woman, the cause of it is psychic; it expresses the sharpness that at this time marks the conflict, in the human female, between the species and the individual. Even if the woman deeply desires to have a child, her body revolts when obliged to undergo the reproductive process. Stekel says that ‘in states of ner vous anxiety’ the vomiting of a pregnant woman always expresses a certain refusal of the infant; and if the woman is hostile—for reasons often unavowed—the digestive troubles are exaggerated” (ibid., 524). 36. Margery Collins and Christine Pierce, “Holes and Slime: Sexism in Sartre’s Psychoanalysis,” in Women and Philosophy: Toward a Theory of Liberation, ed. Carol Gould and M. Wartofsky 112–127 (New York: Putnam, 1976); Moira Gatens, Feminism and Philosophy: Perspectives on Diff erence and Equality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), and “Toward a Feminist Philosophy of the Body,” in Crossing Boundaries: Feminisms and the Critique of Knowledges, ed. E. Caine, E. Grosz, and M. de Lepervanche, 59–70 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988); Naomi Greens, “Sartre, Sexuality and The Second Sex,” Philosophy and Literature 4, no. 2 (1980): 199–211; Genevieve Lloyd, Man of Reason: Male and Female in Western Philosophy, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1993); Elizabeth Spelman, “Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary Views,” Feminist Studies 8, no. 1 (1982): 109–132, and Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988); Susan Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in Western Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986); Bonelle Strickling, “Simone de Beauvoir and the Value of Immanence,” Atlantis 13, no. 2, (1988): 36– 43. 37. Simons, Margaret. “Two Interviews with Simone de Beauvoir,” Hypatia 3, no. 3 (1989): 11–27. 38. Ibid., 18. 39. Simone de Beauvoir, “Pyrrhus and Cineas,” in Simone de Beauvoir: Philosophical Writings, ed. Margaret Simons (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 77–149. 40. Ibid., 123. 41. Carol Bigwood, “Renaturalizing the Body (With the Help of MerleauPonty),” Hypatia 6, no. 3 (1991): 54–73. 42. Ibid., 68. 43. Iris Marion Young, Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Th eory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 160, 150. Notes to pages 11–15

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44. Eva-Maria Simms, “Milk and Flesh: A Phenomenological Reflection on Infancy and Coexistence,” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 32, no. 1 (2001): 24. 45. Julia Kristeva, “Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini,” in The Portable Kristeva, ed. Kelly Oliver (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 303. 46. Ibid., 316, 324. 47. Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” in Oliver, The Portable Kristeva, 310–331. 48. Kelly Oliver, Womanizing Nietzsche: Philosophy’s Relation to the “Feminine” (New York: Routledge, 1995). 49. Ibid., 166, 165. 50. Kelly Oliver, Subjectivity Without Subjects: From Abject Fathers to Desiring Mothers (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998). 51. Lisa Guenther, The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006). 52. Ibid., 4. 53. Cynthia Willett, Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities (New York: Routledge, 1995). 54. Ibid., 16. 55. Virginia Held, Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 112. 56. Ibid., 196. 57. Ibid., 195. 58. Eva Feder Kittay, Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependence (New York: Routledge, 1998). 59. Ibid., 69. 60. Ibid., 25. 1. Plato, Maternity, and Power: Can We Get a Different Midwife? Cynthia D. Coe Matt Altman has helped me think through these issues both practically and philosophically; my thanks to him for being my partner in parenting and much else. I would like to thank John Lysaker, Caroline Rebecca Lundquist, and the participants at the Philosophical Inquiry into Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Mothering conference at the University of Oregon in May 2009 for their insights on the ideas in this paper. And thanks also to my own mother, Jane Meleney Coe, for consistently violating many of the rules that define the dominant institution of motherhood. 1. Plato, Symposium, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), 215b. 2. In Oedipus at Colonus, Sophocles has the chorus impart “the Wisdom of Silenus”: “Not to be born is best, when all is reckoned in, but once a man has seen the light, the next best thing, by far, is to go back where he came from.” Sophocles, “Oedipus at Colonus,” in Three Theban Plays, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1984), ll. 1388–1391. 324

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3. Plato, Symposium, 212a. 4. , Ibid., 208e–209a. 5. Ibid., 209c– d. 6. Luce Irigaray, “How to Conceive (of) A Girl,” in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 162. 7. John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Together with Death’s Duel (New York: Cosimo, 2007), 169–70. 8. Plato, “Theaetetus,” trans. F. M. Cornford, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 150b– e. 9. Adriana Cavarero, In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1995), 92. 10. Plato, Symposium, 211e. 11. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967), III:§11. 12. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), §340. 13. Kelly Oliver, Family Values: Subjects Between Nature and Culture (New York: Routledge, 1997), 130. 14. Rebecca Kukla, Mass Hysteria: Medicine, Culture, and Mothers’ Bodies (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 3. 15. Oxford English Dictionary (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971). 16. Ibid. 17. Iris Marion Young, “Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation,” in On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 57. 18. Kukla’s Mass Hysteria documents the historical continuity between the perceptions of pregnancy in the early modern period (when medical texts were just beginning to document and interpret the human body in a methodical and publicized way) and contemporary notions of the vulnerable pregnant body: more specifically, the idea that the maternal body and the fetal body need “to be governed and ordered” by medical professionals and by mothers themselves (Kukla, Mass Hysteria, 20). See especially chapters 1–3. 19. Ibid., 81. 20. In several states, immigration status and the ability to speak English have been used to determine a parent’s fitness to care for a child— a policy that has been used to remove children from the care of undocumented workers. Although these removals are generally overturned on appeal, many undocumented workers are deported before they have a chance to appeal the decisions (Gross). 21. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Carol H. Poston, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1987), 62. 22. Heidi Murkoff, Arlene Eisenberg and Sandee Hathaway, What to Expect When You’re Expecting (New York: Workman, 2002), 21– 47, 56–79. Kukla comments about What to Expect, “the questions in the text have definite performative Notes to pages 32–37

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force, in the sense that their very articulation not only suggests what questions and concerns are appropriate for pregnant women to have but also creates, shapes, and reshapes readers’ prior concerns.” Kukla, Mass Hysteria, 122. 23. Oliver, Family Values, xii. 24. Young, “Pregnant Embodiment,” 54. 25. Young, “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Female Bodily Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality,” in On Female Body Experience, 150. 26. Ibid. 27. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Knopf, 1971), 150. 28. This awkward language itself reflects the conceptual rigidity separating persons from objects, which has fueled debates around reproduction and also paralyzed them: given our philosophical, cultural, and political investment in individual rights, and in the line between human and nonhuman, it is unsurprising that the process by which a person comes into being (from and through another) creates moral confusion. 29. I refer throughout this chapter to mothers as caregivers of children, not because fathers cannot serve in the same role, but because men tend not to be socialized toward anxiety in the same way. 30. See Sharon Hays, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). 31. Allison Weir, “Identification with the Divided Mother: Kristeva’s Ambivalence,” in Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva’s Writing, ed. Kelly Oliver (New York: Routledge, 1993), 80. 32. Luce Irigaray, “And the One Doesn’t Stir without the Other,” trans. Hélène Vivienne Wenzel, Signs 7, no. 1 (1981): 60. 33. See Andrea O’Reilly, “ ‘That Is What Feminism Is—The Acting and Living and Not Just the Told’: Modeling and Mentoring Feminism,” in Feminist Mothering, ed. Andrea O’Reilly (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008) pp. 191–202 34. Hays, Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, 48. 35. Aristotle, The Politics, ed. and trans. Stephen Everson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1260a12. 36. Erika Horwitz and Bonita C. Long, “Mothering and Stress Discourses: A Deconstruction of the Interrelationship of Discourses of Mothering and Stress,” in Motherhood: Power and Oppression, ed. Marie Porter, Patricia Short, and Andrea O’Reilly (Toronto: Women’s Press, 2005), 101. 37. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born (New York: Norton, 1986), 246. 38. Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 31. 39. Patrice DiQuinzio’s work in The Impossibility of Motherhood traces the tensions between Ruddick and Kristeva on the issue of how the tradition of psychoanalysis reinscribes what DiQuinzio names “essential motherhood,” the norm of the good mother (Patrice DiQuinzio, The Impossibility of Motherhood: 326

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Feminism, Individualism, and the Problem of Mothering [New York: Routledge, 1999]). 40. D. W. Winnicott, Babies and Their Mothers, ed. Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepherd, and Madeleine Davis (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1987), 7. 41. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: Basic Books, 1971), 10. Despite Winnicott’s attempts to revise the image of the good mother, the very language of the “good enough mother” perpetuates that maternal behavior needs to be regulated and judged carefully by professionals. See Oliver, Family Values, 58. 42. Julia Kristeva, “Julia Kristeva in Conversation with Rosalind Coward,” in The Portable Kristeva, ed. Kelly Oliver (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 336. 43. Oliver, Subjectivity Without Subjects: From Abject Fathers to Desiring Mothers (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 63. 44. Irigaray, “And the One Doesn’t Stir Without the Other,” 67. 45. Winnicott, Mother and Child: A Primer of First Relationships (New York: Basic Books, 1957), 71. 46. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 47. 47. Winnicott, Mother and Child, 72. 48. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 47. 49. Jonathan Lear, Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 129. 50. Ruddick, Maternal Thinking, 72. 51. Ibid., 112, 23. 52. Ibid., 120–122. 53. Ibid., 120. 54. Ibid., 89, 75. 55. O’Reilly, “That Is What Feminism Is,” 193. 56. Irigaray, “How to Conceive (of) A Girl,” 165. 57. DiQuinzio, The Impossibility of Motherhood, 245. 58. Kukla, Mass Hysteria, 231. 59. Kristeva, “A Question of Subjectivity— An Interview,” Modern Literary Theory: A Reader, ed. Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh (London: Edward Arnold, 1989), 129. 2. Of Courage Born: Reflections on Childbirth and Manly Courage Kayley Vernallis 1. The nature and meaning of women’s reproductive lives varies by class, race, location, and so forth. It is important to acknowledge that my perspective is that of a middle-class white woman, and my focus is primarily on the legacy of the Western tradition and current attitudes regarding childbirth in the United States. 2. Lindsay E. Rankin and Alice H. Eagly, “Is His Heroism Hailed and Hers Hidden? Women, Men, and the Social Construction of Heroism,” Psychology of Women Quarterly 32 (2008): 414– 422. Notes to pages 41–48

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3. The authors do not tease out whether respondents distinguish between acts that aim to benefit individual human beings and those motivated by wider ideals within the public sphere, such as protecting one’s country or serving the state. The cultural view that women’s concerns are private leads us to downgrade women’s courage. 4. Annette Baier argues that morale but not morality is present in war, terrorist situations, and so on. See Annette Baier, “Demoralization, Trust, and the Virtues,” in Setting the Moral Compass: Essays by Women Philosophers, ed. Cheshire Calhoun (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 176–188. However, some historical research suggests otherwise. See Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (New York: Viking Press, 2009) 5. Carnegie Hero Fund Commission, 2002, Requirements section, p. 1) http:// carnegiehero.org/nominate.php. Accessed on January 1, 2010. 6. Ibid., 1. 7. Selwyn W. Becker and Alice H. Eagley, “The Heroism of Women and Men,” American Psychologist 59 (3) (April 2004) 163–178. 8. Ea gley identifies three further characteristics of the actions of Carnegie medalists: the acts take place in public, they require immediate action, and they involve emotional control (having a cool head under fire). Eagley’s bibliography cites studies on men’s tendency toward impulsive action and their socialized emotional stoicism, which may be linked to the discrepancy between men’s and women’s displays of courage. 9. Eagley, XXX, 174. Eagley’s examples counter the claim by some sociobiologists that males have a natural propensity to take risks and females to avoid them. For the conservative view, see M. Wilson and M. Daly, “Competitiveness, Risktaking, and Violence: The Young Male Syndrome,” Ethology and Sociobiology 6 (1985): 59–73. 10. See Julia Miller, “Miraculous Childbirth and the Portinari Altar Piece,” Art Bulletin 77 (1995): 249–261. 11. There may be rare exceptions. Perhaps John Brown did deserve to be executed, yet he revealed a courage, dignity, and self-control at his execution that all recognized. I owe this example to Mark Balaguer. 12. In Conrad’s Lord Jim, the French lieutenant who rescues nine hundred passengers after Jim disgracefully abandons ship declares, “Man is born a coward.” Jacques Berthoud, in commenting on the novel, describes the “threat of cowardice” as “the original sin from which honour derives its lustre.” Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim: A Tale, trans. Jacques Berthoud (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), xix. 13. http://en .wikisource .org /wiki /Ante -Nicene _Fathers /Volume _IV/Title _ Pages. The Writings of the Fathers Down to A.D. 325, ANTE- NICENE FATHERS, VOLUME 4. Accessed February 1, 2010. 14. See Joan Gibson, “The Logic of Chastity: Women, Sex, and the History of Philosophy in the Early Modern Period,” Hypatia 21, no. 4 (Fall 2006): 1–19. Gibson focuses on Luisa Sigea and Sor Juana, who accept the ideal of female 328

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chastity but hold men accountable for women’s sexual vulnerability and seek to expand the list of female virtues. 15. See Kathryn A. Smith, “Inventing Marital Chastity: The Iconography of Susanna and the Elders in Early Christian Art,” Oxford Art Journal 16, no. 1 (1993): 3–24. 16. Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978 (New York: Norton, 1979). 17. Early theologians believed that because Jesus’ conception was immaculate, the Virgin Mary experienced no pain childbirth. In some crucifi xion paintings of the late Middle Ages, Mary’s unusual swooning posture may symbolize her pain in giving birth to the Church. Her suffering parallels the action of the innocent Jesus, who does not deserve to suffer, but chooses to suffer for our sins. Her pain is not due to shame and God’s punishment, but to the genesis of the pro-social end of building the Christian community. This recognition of feminine power is extraordinary, yet it also highlights the gap between the Virgin and all of Eve’s descendants. 18. http://incharacter.org /pro -con /is-courage-a-masculine-virtue. Accessed November 10, 2011. 19. A. J. Rongy, Childbirth, Yesterday and Today (New York: Emerson, 1937), 62– 64. 20. Michelle E. Brady, “The Fearlessness of Courage,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 45, no. 2 (2005): 189–211. Additional commentaries on Aristotle include D. F. Pears. “Courage as a Mean,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. A. O. Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). See also N. J. H. Dent, “The Value of Courage,” Philosophy 56 (1984): 574–577. Excellent substantial discussions of Aristotelian courage can be found in Angela Hobbs’s Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness, and the Impersonal Good (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) and in Barbara Koziak’s Retrieving Political Emotion: Thumos, Aristotle, and Gender (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). 21. Nicomachean Ethics 1115a:25–1115b:6. 22. It is Brady’s view that only the citizen warrior can exhibit andreia, and that andreia is exhibited only in battle, but there is much disagreement in the literature about this. Joe Sachs, for instance, argues that courage in battle is the paradigm of courage, but courage can occur in other contexts. I will take the paradigm approach here. I thank Caroline Lundquist for suggesting this route, as well as offering a considerable number of suggestions that have much improved this essay. 23. It is now common to distinguish between two models of courage. The substantive model treats courage as a robust virtue in its own right or containing its end within itself, as Aristotle does when he defines courage as protecting the polis. In the executive model, courage enables agents to execute moral acts, essentially providing the motivation for other virtues to come into play. Yet this model obscures our current valorization of courage: “be manly” means “be courageous” and that doesn’t just refer to courage as a motivator, but to substantive traits such as virility, power, competence, self-assurance, confidence, and ser vice Notes to pages 52–55

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to a larger end. It is a powerful gender-inflected ideal of selfhood. Amelia Rorty argues for the executive model because the dispositions associated with the traditional model of courage are “addictive,” “expansionist,” and “oppositional.” She proposes that we first ask what is to be done and then ask what virtues we need to get that thing done. But will the masculinist ideal not partly determine what goes on the list? I propose keeping courage as a substantive virtue while modifying and extending it for feminist purposes. See Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, “The Two Faces of Courage,” Philosophy 61, no. 236 (1986): 151–171, esp. 169. 24. Politics 1278a:17–35. 25. Brady, “Fearlessness of Courage,” 200. 26. See esp. Nicomachean Ethics 116–1117. 27. Politics 1269a:13–24. 28. See especially Angela Hobbs, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness, and the Impersonal Good (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Hobbes poses the question: “Was it ever open to an ancient author to use andreia to mean ‘courage’ alone, with no appeals to manliness?” (69) She proposes that in the Republic Plato sought to create an audience that could hear the term andreia in a gender-neutral way, while at the same time appealing to a readership who regarded the warrior values as predominant over the philosophical. When needed, he characterized philosophy as manly (246–247). 29. I do not know what examples of women’s courage might have been in Aristotle’s mind. Remember that deliberative authority in women comes from the outside—namely from men. He does say in the Poetics that “it is not appropriate in a female Character to be manly (andreos), or clever” (Poetics 1454a:23). Did he have a specific play in mind? 30. More fully: “The man, then, who faces and who fears the right things and from the right motive, in the right way and at the right time, and who feels confidence under the corresponding conditions, is brave; for the right man feels and acts according to the merits of the case and in whatever way the rule directs” (1115b:17–19). 31. Politics 1117a:18–21. 32. Exceptions include family members who are seriously injured or die while trying to save another family member. The idea, I take it, is that if the risk to the rescuer is high enough, it is possible to dampen the concern that the rescuer’s action was motivated by self-interest and so not deserving of public honor. 33. I am indebted to Ann Garry for first suggesting to me that what we call courage in men, we call love in women. Much of Kelly Oliver’s work on pregnancy and mothering is relevant to this paper, and to the public law/private love distinction discussed above. Of particular note is “Conflicted Love,” Hypatia, 15, no. 3 (2000): 1–18. 34. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: Old and Young Girls, trans. T. Common (London: William Reeves, 1902). 35. Plato proposes in Chapter Three of the Republic that members of the polis should be told their upbringing was a dream and that “in reality at that time they 330

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were down within the earth being molded and fostered themselves . . . . And when they were quite finished the earth as being their mother delivered them.” The lie is designed to decrease one’s attachment to one’s biological mother and family in favor of attachment to the polis. Republic, in Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, The Collected Dialogues of Plato (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 414d– e. 36. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), paragraph 475, p. 288. 37. Modern technology contributes to the sense that volition and choice are not part of childbirth: doctors act on passive patients. 38. Volition is not sufficient. Someone who cannot swim but jumps in deep water to save a drowning child is not courageous; he is rash and stupid. The desertion and court-martial rates in World War I were extraordinarily high, due both to mustard gas and lack of training. The British Parliament recently pardoned deserters in World War I. For contemporary techniques in fostering courage in the U.S. military, see the Battlemind Training System in Denis McGurk and Carl Andrew Castro, “Courage in Combat,” in The Psychology of Courage: Modern Research on an Ancient Virtue, edited by Cynthia L.S. Pury and Shane J. Lopez (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2010), 167–185. 39. Charles G. Roland, Courage Under Siege: Disease, Starvation and Death in the Warsaw Ghetto (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 184. This example shows that courage is a “burdened virtue,” In acting virtuously (courageously engaging in procreation to preserve the Jewish people) one may harm one’s own flourishing. An extreme example of the moral costs of courage directed toward a liberatory end is the pregnant Tamil Tiger suicide bomber Anoja Kugenthirasah, who blew up herself and her fetus in an attempt to kill a Sri Lankan general in 2006. What would we think of her if she got pregnant in order to carry out a suicide mission, essentially turning her fetus into a bomb detection avoidance device? See Rorty, “The Two Faces of Courage,” and Lisa Tessman, Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), esp. 25–128. 40. Linda Reid Chassiakos, “In Practice; The Choice: Her Life or Her Unborn Child’s?” Los Angeles Times, May 11, 2009. 41. Here is MacIntyre’s characterization: “By a ‘practice’ I mean any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.” Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study of Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 187. For a far more feminist orientation to birthing and mothering as a practice, see Sara Ruddick, “Maternal Th inking,” Feminist Studies 6 (1980): 342–367. MacIntyre’s wider frame enables me to compare the practices of childbirth and military defense more readily. Notes to pages 58–60

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42. Ibid., p. 191. 43. See Virginia Held, Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) especially Chapter 6, “Preconditions of Birth and Death.” There she observes, “Men often imagine themselves to have come into existence full-blown, as rationally self-interested entities in a ‘state of nature.’ But they rarely imagine the women who gave them existence being in a position to determine whether to give them existence or not and to do so for reasons of which women can be conscious. To imagine childbirth from the point of view of women requires a shift of perspective that seems highly unusual” (116). 44. Ibid., 192. 45. Earlier, I ignored the Catholic Church’s view that fertility is a moral/social responsibility. Aquinas says, “Now it is an excellent good deed to preserve the nature of the human species.” St. Thomas Aquinas, Sancti Thomae Summa II-II: q. 157, a.2, quoted in Popular Attitudes toward Birth Control in Pre-Industrial France and England, ed. Orest and Patricia Ranum (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 38. 46. The invisibility of women’s courage is subtly illustrated in MacIntrye’s observation that courage is the willingness to risk harm to oneself on behalf of oneself or others whom one cares about. A quote from MacIntyre a few pages ago speaks of a man who cares yet is a coward. (MacIntyre, After Virtue, 192). Why not speak of a person here? Are women so far below the bar that their actions do not merit even the attribution of cowardice? 47. How does this approach to courage fit in an action explanation framework? Do we have action explanation schemes for how we do things? Is this still PPS courage? Does this approach reinforce the view that men are moral actors but women are not—that the passive acceptance of suffering is the lot of women? 48. Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Knopf, 2007). 49. Ibid., 754. 50. Ibid., 944. 51. Ibid, 1096. 52. Ibid., 805. 53. It probably matters to Kutuzov’s men, and perhaps to us as readers, that Kutuzov once fit the description of a bold and decisive warrior. 54. See a moving interview with a child bride named Taj-ul-Nessa in Afganistan, where one in eight women die in childbirth. Taj-ul-Nessa’s first five children are stillborn or die in infancy. She almost dies delivering her sixth child. Consult the Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN) part of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Veil of Tears: Afghans’ Stories of Loss in Childbirth (Nairobi: Publishing Ser vices Section, IRIN, 2009), 52–53. 55. For an extensive overview, see Sheryl Nestel, “ ‘Other’ Mothers: Race and Representation in Natural Childbirth Discourse,” Resources for Feminist Research 23, no. 4 (1995): 5. 332

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56. For illustration, consider John Westly’s astute remark “(Buffon) substitutes for the plain word Generation, a quaint word of his own, Reproduction, in order to level man not only with the beasts that perish, but with nettles or onions” (XIII: 669) quoted in Ludmilla Jordanova, “Interrogating the Concept of Reproduction in the Eighteenth Century,” in Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction, ed. Faye D. Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 372. The phrase “courageous reproduction” sounds ridiculous. 57. H. Rika Houston, “Through Pain and Perserverance: Liminality, Ritual Consumption, and the Social Construction of Gender in Contemporary Japan,” Advances in Consumer Research 26 (1999): 544. 58. See J. A. Hatfield, letter section, British Medical Journal, June 12 (1948): 1155. 59. It would be interesting to know if Japanese “natural childbirth” advocates tend, like many American theorists, to fi xate on “primitive” cultures and their “natural” birth practices as a way to bolster support for its current practices. 60. Heather Dillaway and Sarah Jane Brubaker “Intersectionality and Childbirth: How Women from Different Social Locations Discuss Epidural Use,” Race, Gender, and Class, 13, nos. 3– 4 (2006): 16– 41. To some degree, both Americans (African American and White) and Japanese women frame “natural” versus “unnatural” childbirth in terms of the use epidurals. In the United States, whites had far less negative views about epidurals (5 percent) in comparison to African American teens (41 percent). Both groups were concerned about pain, but African Americans were far more worried about the danger posed to themselves in the use of epidurals. The authors of the study noted serious limitations in the study, which combines data from two separate studies. They note that there are few empirical studies comparing women’s experience in childbirth across differently situated groups. But see a comparative study of women who raised their children in the 1930s and 1940s, Jacquelyn S. Litt’s Medicalized Motherhood: Perspectives from the Lives of African-American and Jewish Women (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000). 61. Euripides, Medea 248–252. 62. Quoted in Claudia Bergmann, “We have Seen the Enemy, and He Is Only a ‘She’: The Portrayal of Warriors as Women,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 69, no. 7 (2007): 56. 63. Ibid. p. 657. Plutarch’s note is at Lyc. 27.3 64. Rich, “On Lies, Secrets, and Silence.” 3. Original Habitation: Pregnant Flesh as Absolute Hospitality Frances Gray 1. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1989), 303–304. 2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 139. Notes to pages 68–72

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3. See Caroline Lundquist, “Being Torn: Toward a Phenomenology of Unwanted Pregnancy,” Hypatia 23, no. 3 (2008): 136–155. 4. Julia Kristeva, Desire In Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 237. 5. Ibid., 250. 6. Ibid., 251. 7. Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, 21. 8. Ibid. 9. Merleau-Ponty’s claim that before all else there is the flesh is not inconsistent with Husserl’s elaboration of the transcendental ego. In my view, MerleauPonty’s is an ontological claim, Husserl’s a cognitive or epistemological one. 10. I explore this fully in my Cartesian Philosophy and the Flesh: Reflections on Incarnation in Analytical Psychology (New York: Routledge, 2012). Included in my analysis is a genealogy of the cogito from Descartes onward and its importance to philosophy, especially to phenomenology. 11. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Routledge, 1962), 254. 12. In Meditation VI Descartes argues that he (his soul) and his body form a unit and that he is a union formed from an intermingling of his soul and body (§81). John Cottingham argues that this union is a third kind of being (a human being) and refers to this theory as “Descartes’s trialism,” in which sentience or sense perception is primary. Cottingham, “Cartesian Trialism,” Mind 94, no. 374 (1985): 218–230. This does not entail that no other being can be flesh, but my dealings here are specifically with flesh that is human. 13. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 138. 14. See, for example, for example, Luce Irigaray “The Fecundity of the Caress: A Reading of Levinas, Totality and Infinity, ‘Phenomenology of Eros,’ ” in An Ethics of Sexual Diff erence, trans. C. Burke and G.C. Gill (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993). 15. Statistics reveal that across cultures women do most of the domestic chores and most childcare. In countries devastated by natural disasters, women want to have babies, to begin their lives and the lives of their families and thus reinitiate their homes. See, for example, the discussion document “Who Does What?” (www .soliology.org/as4fm2.doc), which suggests that income, education, and age play a significant role in the division of labor within the domestic sphere. It does not immediately follow from this that women are primary in the home and in the offering and making of hospitality. But with some elaboration of detail, it would not be hard to establish the case, but there is no room for this in this essay. See also recent UNICEF reports on the plight of women in Asia after the effects of tsunamis in, for example, Malaysia, Aceh, and the Maldives. Very clearly, the home is central to the lives of these women and children, and women are the responsible agents. 16. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 152. 17. Ibid., 155. 334

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18. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 139. 19. IVF represents a change since fertilization takes place in vitro. Nevertheless, ova and sperm are not artificially produced but are collected from the bodies of biological parents. 20. See Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas and Of Hospitality in particular. 21. Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 77. 22. Ibid., 25. 23. Ibid., 135. 24. Ibid., 77. Derrida’s exposition is, in part an interchange with Kant’s account of hospitality in “Perpetual Peace,” where Kant argues that “hospitality means the right of a stranger not to be treated as enemy when he arrives in the land of another” (http://www.mtholyoke.edu /acad /intrel /kant /kant1.htm) and which Kant also had taken to be universal. Host (hôte) and guest are the actors in the hospitality relationship. 25. Ibid., 79. 26. Ibid., 123. 27. Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 51. 28. Derrida, Of Hospitality, 125. 29. Unlike Lisa Guenther, I eschew talk of birth as giftness: the uniqueness of the relationships implicit in pregnant flesh, while one of host and guest does not arise within the framework of gift-giving. 30. Perhaps the two most well-known are the famous violinist example, in which we are asked to imagine ourselves waking one morning to find that we have been kidnapped and are now hooked up to the violinist’s circulatory system in order to save his life; and the people-seeds example, in which we are asked to imagine that, despite taking all precautions to prevent people-seeds that float about outside from getting in to our houses and growing in the carpet, one does. 31. Judith Jarvis Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy and Public Aff airs (1971): 41– 66. 32. Ibid. 33. See Kristeva’s reference to the process “becoming-a-mother.” 34. Julia Hanigsberg, “Homologizing Pregnancy and Motherhood: A Consideration of Abortion,” Michigan Law Review 94, no 2 (1995): 371– 418. 35. Lisa Guenther, The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 111. 36. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 75. 4. The Birth of Sexual Difference: A Feminist Response to Merleau-Ponty Lisa Guenther 1. See Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 57–76, and Ann Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Notes to pages 79–88

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Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 30–77, for a detailed discussion of historical responses to intersex infants, as well as contemporary movements against surgical intervention at birth. 2. Iris Marion Young, On Female Body Experience: Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 54. 3. For a stronger emphasis on the experience of the pregnant woman, see ibid.; Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Norton, 1986); Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” in Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 234–263; and Lisa Guenther, The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006). 4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 181. 5. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Dialogue and the Perception of the Other,” in The Prose of the World, trans. John O’Neill (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 135. 6. For Husserl, the experience of others is constituted on the basis of a coordination or “pairing” that always begins on the side of consciousness. See Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (New York: Springer, 1977), 108–120. 7. Merleau-Ponty, Signs, 134. 8. See Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), and Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998). 9. Merleau-Ponty, Signs, 33. 10. Merleau-Ponty, “Dialogue and the Perception of the Other,” 134. 11. Merleau-Ponty writes: “Do a psychoanalysis of Nature: it is the flesh, the mother.” The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 267. The quotations in this paragraph are at pages 136, 146, and 250. 12. Ibid., 82 n. 14, 84. 13. Luce Irigaray, “The Invisible of the Flesh: A Reading of Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ‘The Intertwining—The Chiasm,’ ” in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (New York: Continuum, 2004), 127–153. 14. See Lisa Guenther, “Other Fecundities: Proust and Irigaray on Sexual Difference,” diff erences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 21, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 24– 45 15. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 220–221. 16. Ibid., 228. 17. There may be a more generous way of reading this phrase in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s image of a mutually defining surface between self and other. Later in The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty calls this “surface of separation and 336

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of union . . . the invisible hinge upon which my life and the life of the others turn to rock into one another, the inner framework of intersubjectivity” (234). But even this image implies a duality— self and other or, in our context, male and female—where the only “between” is the hinge of their mutual relation. For this reason, its promise remains limited for the project of opening up the logic of sexual difference to a plurality—unless the hinge is conceived as a zone of mutual divergence rather than a simple point. 18. Ibid., 147. 19. Cited in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France (1954–1955), trans. Leonard Lawlor and Heath Massey (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 8. 20. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 233–234. 21. Merleau-Ponty, Institution, 77. 22. Ibid., 7. 23. Merleau-Ponty The Visible and the Invisible, 250. 24. Merleau-Ponty, Institution, 8. 25. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France, trans. Robert Vallier (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 234. 26. For a more detailed discussion, see David Morris, “The Time and Place of the Organism: Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy in Embryo,” Alter: Revue de Phenomenologie 16 (2008): 71–75. 27. Morris, “Time and Place,” 82. 28. Ibid., 83– 84. 29. For a fuller account of this process, see Ann Fausto-Sterling, Myths of Gender: Biological Th eories about Women and Men (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 77– 85. 30. Ann Fausto-Sterling, “The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough,” The Sciences (March–April 1993): 20–24. Later, in Sexing the Body, she complicates this model of the continuum into a multidimensional map that takes into account differences at the chromosomal, hormonal, and anatomical level, not to mention differences in gender and sexuality. However, the concept of sexual differences in degree rather than kind remains in this expanded version of the model. 31. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 84, 82 n. 14. 32. Ibid., 228. I insist on plurality here, and not just a duality of man and woman, both in order to recognize the continuum of spontaneously occurring sexuate forms noted by Fausto-Sterling, and also in order to emphasize the openness of sexed bodies to resignification and, in recent decades, to resexuation through surgical and hormonal therapies. 33. See also Young, On Female Body Experience, 49–55, for a richly detailed phenomenology of pregnant self-divergence. 34. Rich, Of Woman Born, 36. 35. Ibid., 63. 36. Ibid., 36. Notes to pages 94–103

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37. Barbara Duden, The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in EighteenthCentury Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 159–170. 38. Young, On Female Body Experience, 55– 60. 5. Birthing Responsibility: A Phenomenological Perspective on the Moral Significance of Birth Gail Weiss 1. I will be using the terms “gestational mother” or “birth mother” throughout this essay in acknowledgment of the fact that the person carrying a baby is not necessarily the person who ends up being that baby’s mother. 2. It is important to distinguish the moral status of the birthing process from the moral status of the infant. Regarding the former, I will be concentrating in particular on the ethical obligations that are entailed by a live birth, obligations that certainly include both the moral status of the infant and that of the birth mother, but that ultimately extend beyond both of them to encompass many other people and institutions that are responsible for the health and well-being of the postpartum woman and newborn child. 3. The question of what counts as “human flourishing” is very complex, and there is an extensive literature on this topic that goes all the way back to the preSocratics. See Martha Nussbaum’s extended discussion of capabilities in The Frontiers of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006) and Eva Feder Kittay’s account of her daughter Sesha’s flourishing in Love’s Labor (New York: Routledge, 1999) as especially promising efforts to define what counts and what does not count as genuine human flourishing as opposed to just meeting a person’s basic needs for food, clothing, and shelter. 4. Please note that I am not claiming that there are only two ways in which the birth of a child generates responsibility; neither am I claiming that the transition from embryo to fetus doesn’t generate any responsibilities of its own. I am instead focusing on the two forms of “birthing responsibility” that I believe are central to any account of the unique moral significance of childbirth. 5. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out that breastfeeding can also be seen as a mediated responsibility insofar as the mother’s diet affects her milk, which in turn affects the quality of nourishment she provides the nursing infant. While this is undeniably true, I nonetheless would identify breastfeeding as an unmediated responsibility because, although it can understood as a mediated way of caring for the infant through another person’s body (whether birth-mother or wet-nurse), in breastfeeding the interaction takes place directly between the woman’s body and the infant’s body rather than within the woman’s own body. Thus, I am calling this responsibility unmediated because, as I will go on to show, once the infant is born, our responsibility to her must be fulfi lled directly by attending to the infant herself, whereas caring for a fetus during pregnancy can only occur through the mediation of the birth mother’s body. It is this latter contrast between feeding the infant through direct interaction with her 338

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own body and nourishing the fetus indirectly through the mother’s body that I am claiming is morally significant. 6. Despite Kristeva’s acknowledgment of this problem, I do think that Kristeva and Irigaray are more subject to this risk than Young. This is due, in large part, to the strong psychoanalytic orientations of Kristeva and Irigaray. 7. Kristeva “Stabat Mater.” Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. (New York: Columbia U. Press, 1986), 236. 8. It is crucial to note that by claiming that we have direct access to the infant’s face for the first time at birth, I am not arguing that our view of the infant’s face is unmediated by cultural assumptions and expectations. Indeed, Judith Butler’s entire corpus, from the early essays that preceded the publication of Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990) through her own recent ethics, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), offers example after example of this latter point. As Butler argues in “Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia,” seeing is always a “reading,” an interpretation that takes place against the backdrop provided by established and accepted cultural scripts; see Butler, “Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia,” in Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising, ed. Robert Gooding-Williams (London: Routledge, 1993), 15–22. My point, however, is that only at the moment of birth is the newborn infant directly there, in a Heideggerian sense, as Dasein, a being-in-the-world we can immediately observe and with whom we can interact. 9. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 200. 10. Ibid., 203. 11. Cynthia Willett, Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities (New York: Routledge, 1995), 82. 12. Ibid., 56. 13. Ibid., 47. 14. For additional discussion of how she accomplishes this, see my introduction to Simone de Beauvoir’s “Introduction to an Ethics of Ambiguity” in Simone de Beauvoir: Philosophical Writings, ed. Margaret A. Simons (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004). 15. Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity. Trans. Bernard Frechtman. (New York: Citadel Books, 1976), 119. 16. Ibid., 73. 17. This suggests that the temporality of the birthing process is radically different for the gestational mother and child which would be an extremely interesting topic to explore in more depth, albeit one that requires a separate study. 18. Kittay, Love’s Labor, 148. 19. Lisa Guenther, The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 2. I am grateful to Sarah La Chance Adams and Caroline Lundquist for suggesting that I bring Lisa Guenther’s rich analysis of the gift(s) of birth into this discussion. Notes to pages 111–117

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20. While Levinas focuses on the face as the source of the ethical imperative issued to us by the other, Merleau-Ponty would likely argue that our responsibility to the other derives from our encounter with the other’s mobile, expressive body. That is, Merleau-Ponty would not privilege the face as the site of other’s alterity, although he might well grant that it is an especially poignant expression of it. One of the advantages of not privileging the face, and of not privileging vision as the primary mode of access to it, is that blind people may hear the appeal of the other without ever seeing the other’s face; they can also touch the other and so be exposed to the other’s alterity in a primordial way, revealing that this latter experience need not involve sight to be fully efficacious. 21. Although we often talk of “discharging” our responsibilities to others, I will refrain from using this terminology because I think it presents a misleading picture of responsibility to others as something that can be fulfilled once and for all rather than as an ongoing ethical imperative that, as Levinas powerfully suggests, marks our relations with others as long as we are alive. 22. See Chapter 7, “Bodily Imperatives: Toward an Embodied Ethics,” in my Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality (London: Routledge, 1999) for a fuller account of what a bodily imperative is and what kinds of demands it makes upon other people’s bodies in our daily encounters with others. 6. Birthmothers and Maternal Identity: The Terms of Relinquishment Dorothy Rogers 1. Lorraine Dusky, Birthmark (New York: Evans and Company, 1979), 75. 2. Merry Bloch Jones, Birthmothers (New York: Authors Guild Back in Print, 2000), 45, 60, 102–103. 3. Ann Fessler, The Girls Who Went Away (New York: Penguin, 2006). For accounts of feeling a sense of shame or sinfulness, see 97, 103–104, 109, 122; for an illustrative discussion of what life was like in homes for unwed mothers, see 131–154. 4. Jones, Birthmothers, 55–56. 5. Ibid., 48. 6. Both Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush made statements on behalf of adoption over abortion during the height of the abortion debates in the 1980s and ’90s. 7. Jones, Birthmothers, 90. 8. Dusky, Birthmark, 112. 9. 1 Kings 3:16–28 (RSV). 10. Jones, Birthmothers, 27–29, 36–37, 47– 48, 60, 85. 11. The passages in this paragraph are at ibid., 84, 86, 101–102, and 169–178. 12. Ibid., 126. 13. Dusky, Birthmark, 107, 110. 14. Jones, Birthmothers, 88, 90; Fessler, The Girls Who Went Away, 83. 15. Jones, Birthmothers, 272. 340

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16. Ibid., 90–91. 17. See E. Wayne Carp, Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 3–7. 18. Janet Farrell Smith, “A Child of One’s Own: A Moral Assessment of Property Concepts in Adoption,” in Adoption Matters, ed. Sally Haslanger and Charlotte Witt (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), 113. 19. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, sections 164 and 166. 20. Sarah J. Hale was editor of the most influential and widely circulated women’s magazine in the nineteenth century, Godey’s Lady’s Book. Catharine Beecher was a champion of women’s education who is best known as the founder of “domestic science,” later to become “home economics,” though she also wrote important essays on philosophy and religion. Elizabeth Cady Stanton saw their efforts to undermine the women’s movement, such as the antisuff rage petition that Beecher authored and Hale published for circulation in 1871, as foolish and shortsighted. She recalled once pointing out to Beecher the contradictions in her stance, “It is rather paradoxical, [Miss Beecher] . . . but when you get the women all thoroughly educated, they will step off to the polls and vote in spite of you.” See Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences, 1815–1897 (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2002), 264. 21. Though there is a degree of variation among babies regarding inhibition and curiosity, at six months old, babies demonstrate attachment and greater levels of comfort with adults who are close to them. See Lise Eliot, What’s Going on in There? How the Mind and Brain Develop in the First Five Years of Life (New York: Bantam, 1999), 304–308. 22. Anita Allen, “Open Adoption Is Not for Everyone,” in Haslanger and Witt, Adoption Matters, 51. 23. See Charles Henry Pope and Thomas Hooper, Hooper Genealogy (Boston: Charles Henry Pope, 1908) 4–5. Eliakim Wardwell, who was five years old at the time of his father’s execution, is also my seventh great-grandfather. 24. See Ellen Herman, Kinship by Design (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 64–72; 202–204. See also Carp, Family Matters, 21–27. 25. Jones, Birthmothers, 60, 67, 281, 286–287. 26. Ibid., 62, 103. 27. Drucilla Cornell, “Adoption and Its Progeny: Rethinking Family Law, Gender, and Sexual Difference,” in Haslanger and Witt, Adoption Matters, 22, 29. 28. Allen, “Open Adoption,” in ibid., 49–51. 29. Ibid., 54, 59. 7. What’s an Adoptive Mother to Do? When Your Child’s Desires Are a Problem Melissa Burchard 1. For a very helpful discussion of the range of understandings of the term “queer” in contemporary queer theory and activism, see Nikki Sullivan, A Critical Notes to pages 128–139

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Introduction to Queer Th eory (New York: New York University Press, 2003), chapter 3. 2. Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 38. 3. Martin F. Malanson IV, “Queer Love in the Time of War and Shopping,” in A Companion to LGBTQ Studies, ed. Molly McGarry and George Haggerty (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2007), 78. 4. Sullivan, Queer Theory, 44. 5. Dennis Flannery, On Sibling Love, Queer Attachment and American Writing, (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2007), 3. 6. Of course, children who simply have same-sex desires, or “more queer” desires that are not the result of sexual abuse, are also often perceived as a problem. Regarding the former, I hope for their sakes that their parents or caretakers will learn that they themselves are the ones who have the problem. As to the latter, perhaps some things in my account may also be useful for them. 7. Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 11. 8. Ibid., 17. 9. Robert Karen, “Becoming Attached,” www.psychology.sunysb.edu/attachment /online/karen.pdf (accessed October 12, 2008). 10. Ruddick tells a moving story of a woman left alone with a newborn infant with croup (Maternal Thinking, 65– 67). The baby’s incessant crying over a couple of days gradually drives her to the point that she fears she will harm the baby in her desperation. To avoid doing so, the only thing she can think of is to get on a public bus and ride the route over and over again, knowing that in public she will be able to use the social pressure of observation to keep her baby safe from herself. 11. In her articulation of PTSD, Judith Herman includes under the category “alterations in relations with others” the symptom “persistent distrust” (121). This problem affects all our efforts. Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992). 12. See, for example, Alan Rushton and Helen Minnis, “Annotation: Transracial Family Placements” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 38, no. 2 (1997): 147–159. Also helpful are chapters by Sally Haslanger, Hawley FoggDavis, and Dorothy Roberts in Adoption Matters: Philosophical and Feminist Essays (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005). 13. International Child Abuse Network, “Child Abuse Statistics,” www.yesican .org/stats.html (accessed June 2008). 14. There are many sources on the effects of sexual abuse on children, and they are largely in agreement with regard to the fact that such children are likely to have unusually high levels of sexual knowledge and desires, and likely to act sexually. See, for example, Toni Cavanaugh Johnson’s Understanding Children’s Sexual Behaviors and web sources such as the North American Council on Adoptable Children’s article “Beyond Sexual Abuse: Families Can Promote Healing,,” as 342

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well as Barbara E. Bogorad, article “Sexual Abuse: Surviving the Pain,” www .aaets.org/arts/art31.htm (accessed January 25, 2010). 15. There are, however, analyses that argue against this general view of children’s development that children are fully or highly sexual beings and that there should be no, or very few, restrictions on children’s sexual activity either among themselves or with adults. Although some of these seem exaggerated and not careful in their scholarship, such as Ralph Underwager and Hollida Wakefield’s article “Antisexuality and Child Sexual Abuse,,” others are careful and thoughtful presentations of the idea that the discourse of and fear of child sexual abuse must not be allowed to erase the fact of, and the importance of our understanding, children’s sexuality. One such is Steven Angelides, “Feminism, Child Sexual Abuse, and the Erasure of Child Sexuality,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10, no. 2 (2004). 16. Hugh Silverman, ed., Philosophy and Desire (New York: Routledge, 2000), 1–17. 17. Alan D. Schrift, “Spinoza, Nietz sche, Deleuze: An Other Discourse of Desire,” in ibid., 173–185. 18. Robert Solomon, “Sexual Paradigms,” in The Philosophy of Sex, ed. Alan Soble (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991), 24. Solomon sees the requirement for consensuality as a consequence of the liberal claims that sex be treated as essentially private and that persons cannot dictate sexual pleasures to others. He sees this as entailing that “any sexual activity is as valid as any other” and that “private and mutually consented activity between adults, no matter how distasteful it might be to others and no matter how we [sic] may think its enthusiasts to be depraved, is ‘their own business.’ ” Solomon also uses the phrase “between adults,” which presumably indicates his position with regard to the problem of child consent. 19. Some believe that children can be legitimately consenting participants in sexual activity, even with adults or children much older than they. On the other hand, most theorists and therapists in the field of child sexual abuse are probably in agreement that children are not capable of appropriate or legitimate consent. David Finkelhor seems to represent many of these views in arguing that “true consent” requires both a real understanding of what is being consented to, and a real freedom in consenting. He believes that adults simply have more power than children, and because of this are not fully free to deny them. It seems to me that the issue of consent would need to be considered on the basis of the dynamics of each situation, but that the burden of proof would lie with those who claim that their sex with children was consensual. See David Finkelhor, “What’s Wrong with Sex Between Adults and Children: Ethics and the Problem of Sexual Abuse,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 49 (1979): 692– 697. 20. Mortimer Kadish, “The Possibility of Perversion,” in Soble, The Philosophy of Sex, 96. 21. Diane Hodson and Patsy Skeen, “Child Sexual Abuse: A Review of Research and Theory with Implications for Family Life Educators,” Family Relations 36 (1987): 216. Notes to pages 145–148

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22. Elaine Scarry explains a more complex appropriation of the experience and worth of another through torture. While she is working in a more overtly political context, there are aspects of that appropriation that are similar to the kinds of experience I am describing here. See Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 13–15. 23. Flannery, Sibling Love, 6. 24. Sandra Bartky, “Feminine Masochism and the Politics of Personal Transformation,” Women’s Studies International Forum 7, no. 5 (1984): 324. 25. Bartky, “Masochism,,” 334. 26. Judith Herman’s claim that abused children are “formed and re-formed through abuse” has helped us make sense of the intransigence of many feelings, beliefs, and behaviors. When children’s formative years are spent in a situation of chronic abuse, of chaos and insecurity, of violation and utter helplessness, they can do nothing but construct a self in response to those conditions. 27. Borgorad, “Sexual Abuse: Surviving the Pain.” 28. The National Center for PTSD, as reported on the US Department of Veterans Affairs website, says that this is particularly likely if the child’s basic needs for nurture were not met, or not met well or consistently, by caretakers. Research in attachment theory indicates that an understanding of and competence in appropriate bonding generally is damaged by an early lack of nurture. 29. Herman, Trauma, 96, 99–100. 30. Karen, “Becoming Attached,” 12. 31. H. K. Buchsbaum et al. cite studies that conclude that “abused preschoolers were found to respond with aggression to the distress of a peer, in contrast to the empathic responses evidenced by their nonmaltreated peers.” Buchsbaum and his colleagues argue in generally that abused children have difficulty with empathy. They tend to be “more sensitive to the effects of moral transgressions in hypothetical situations . . . [and] less sensitive to the effects of transgressions in real-life situations.” See Helen K. Buchsbaum et al., “The Use of a Narrative Story Stem Technique with Maltreated Children: Implications for Theory and Practice,” Development and Psychopathology 4 (1992): 608. 32. The examples here are extreme partly because they are real, but also because it is difficult to convey the level of subtlety in manipulation and control that some children can desire and achieve. Of course, I recognize that it is the case that children might develop a significant level of manipulation for other reasons than abuse. 33. Seiriol Morgan, “Dark Desires,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 6 (2003): 378. 34. Ibid., 384. 35. The quotations in this paragraph are from ibid., 384, 385. 36. Devin Henry, “Aristotle on Plea sure and the Worst Form of Akrasia,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 5 (2002): 259. 37. Ibid., 257. 38. The quotations in this paragraph are from ibid., 262, 266.

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39. Herman, Trauma, 175–196. See also Roberta Culbertson, “Embodied Memory, Transcendence, and Telling: Recounting Trauma, Re-establishing the Self,” New Literary History 26, no. 1 (1995): 171. 40. Buchsbaum et al., “The Use of a Narrative Story Stem Technique,” 609. 41. Ibid., 605. 42. Angelides, “Feminism, Child Sexual Abuse, and the Erasure of Child Sexuality,” 145–147. 8. The Pro-Choice Pro-Lifer: Battling the False Dichotomy Bertha Alvarez Manninen 1. Julia Hanigsberg, “Homologizing Pregnancy and Motherhood: A Consideration of Abortion,” Michigan Law Review 94, no. 2 (1995): 408. 2. I will continue to use the terms in the traditional sense throughout this essay. with “pro-choice” used to denote those who are in favor of abortion rights and “pro-life” used to denote those who are against abortion rights (except, perhaps, in cases of rape, incest, or threat to maternal life). 3. Hanigsberg, “Homologizing Pregnancy and Motherhood,” 407. 4. Michael Lim Tan, “Fetal Discourses and the Politics of the Womb,” Reproductive Health Matters 12, no. 24 (2004): 159. 5. www.jimfeeney.org/pro-life.html. 6. www.blogher.com/why-im-pro-life. 7. www.nationalpost.com/opinion/story.html?id=1121520. 8. Mary Anne Warren, “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion,” The Monist 57, no. 4 (1973): 43– 61. Indeed, Warren does refer to those who are in favor of abortion rights as being “pro-abortionists.” 9. See Jeff McMahan, “The Metaphysics of Brain Death,” Bioethics 9 (1995): 91–126. 10. John Robertson, “Ethics and Policy in Embryonic Stem Cell Research,” Kennedy Institute of Ethics 9, no. 2 (1999): 131. 11. Rosalind Hursthouse, “Virtue Theory and Abortion,” Philosophy & Public Aff airs 20, no. 3 (1991): 236–237. 12. David Boonin, A Defense of Abortion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 7– 8. 13. Hursthouse, “Virtue Theory and Abortion,” 239. 14. Ibid., 241–242. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Christine Overall, Human Reproduction: Principles, Practices, Policies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 1–2. 18. Hanigsberg, “Homologizing Pregnancy and Motherhood,” 398. 19. Margaret Olivia Little, “Abortion and the Margins of Personhood,” Rutgers Law Journal 39 (2008): 332, 342.

Notes to pages 159–180

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20. Ronald Dworkin, Life’s Dominion: An Argument About Abortion, Euthanasia, and Individual Freedom (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 60, 80. Dworkin does argue in favor of abortion rights; however, he maintains that although fetal life has value, fetuses cannot be rights-bearers until they attain sentience and consciousness, since that is then when fetuses begin to acquire interests. 21. Caroline Lundquist, “Being Torn: Toward a Phenomenology of Unwanted Pregnancy,” Hypatia 23, no. 3 (2008): 143. 22. Slavenka Drakulic, S.: A Novel About the Balkans (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 1–2, 143–144, 178. 23. Hursthouse “Virtue Theory and Abortion,” 240. 24. Drakulic, S., 189. 25. Ibid., 9. 26. Additional cases that have supported the primacy of bodily integrity when in conflict with other rights or interests include Union Pacific Railway Company v. Botsford (1891), Schloendorff v Society of New York Hospital (1914), Doe v. Doe (1994), and Stamford Hospital vs. Vega (1996). 27. Judith Jarvis Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy and Public Aff airs (1971): 56. 28. Donald Regan, “Rewriting Roe v. Wade,” Michigan Law Review 77, no. 7 (1979): 1569. 29. Supreme Court of Canada, 1998. R v. Morgentaler. www.law.ualberta.ca /centres/ccs/rulings/rvmorgentaler.php (accessed October 12, 2011). 30. Robin West, “Concurring with the Judgment,” in What Roe v. Wade Should Have Said, ed. Jack Balkin (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 133. 31. See John T. Wilcox, “Nature as Demonic in Thomson’s Defense of Abortion,” The New Scholasticism 63 (1989): 463– 484. 32. www.catholicsforchoice.org /conscience /archives/c2004win _lifeafterroe .asp. 33. www.personhood.net/coalition.html. 34. www.coloradoforequalrights.com. 35. Bobbie Kennedy, “I’m Sorry Baby,” American Journal of Nursing 88, no. 8 (1988): 1067–1068. 36. Stacey Kalish, “Lingering Thoughts About Abortion: Male Grief Is Hidden,” Psychology Today 37, no. 3 (2004): 14–15. 37. Priscilla K. Coleman and Eileen S. Nelson, “Abortion Attitudes as Determinates of Perceptions Regarding Male Involvement in Abortion Decisions,” Journal of the American College of Health 47, no. 4 (1999): 164. 38. Arthur Shostak, “Abortions as Fatherhood Lost,” Family Coordinator 28, no. 4 (1979): 570. 39. Linda Francke, The Ambivalence of Abortion (New York: Random House, 1978), 60. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 346

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42. Ibid. 43. Kathleen McDonnell, Not an Easy Choice: A Feminist Re-Examines Abortion (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1984), 34. 44. Eve Kushner, Experiencing Abortion: A Weaving of Women’s Words (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1997), 148. 45. Tan, “Fetal Discourses and the Politics of the Womb,” 160. 46. William LaFleur, “Contestation and Consensus: The Morality of Abortion in Japan,” Philosophy East and West 40, no. 4 (1990): 534–537. 47. Meredith Underwood, “Strategies of Survival: Women, Abortion, and Popular Religion in Contemporary Japan,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 67, no. 4 (1999): 742, 745. 48. Hanigsberg, “Homologizing Pregnancy and Motherhood,” 410– 411. 49. Ibid., 372. 50. See the 2007 Children’s Defense Fund scorecard at www.childrensdefense .org/child-research-data-publications/data/2007-cdfac-congressional-scorecard.pdf. 51. Joseph Wright, “Reducing Abortion in America: The Effect of Economic and Social Supports,” Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, November 2008, http://www.catholicsinalliance.org/files/CACG _Final.pdf. 52. www.realabortionsolutions.org. 9. The Political “Nature” of Pregnancy and Childbirth Candace Johnson This essay originally appeared, in somewhat different form, in The Canadian Journal of Political Science 41, no. 4 (2008), 889–913. 1. L Fountain and C. J. Krulewitch, “Trends in Assisted Reproductive Technology,” Journal of Midwifery and Women’s Health 47, no. 5 (2002) 384–385as cited in CIHI, Giving Birth in Canada: A Regional Profile (Ottawa: Canadian Institute of Health Information, 2004). See also CIHI, Giving Birth in Canada: Regional Trends From 2001–2002 to 2005–2006 (Ottawa: Canadian Institute of Health Information, 2007). 2. Francesca Scale, Eric Montpetit, and Isabelle Fortier, “The NAC’s Organizational Practices and the Politics of Assisted Reproductive Technologies in Canada,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 38, no. 3 (2005) pp. 581– 604; See also “Genetics and Reproduction in Depth: Regulating ‘assisted human reproduction,’ ” CBC, CBC official website, 2007 www.cbc.ca /news/background/genetics _reproduction/rgtech.html (accessed January 28, 2008). 3. See Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002) and Margaret Somerville, The Ethical Canary: Science, and Society and the Human Spirit (Toronto: Viking Press, 2000). 4. CIHI, Giving Birth in Canada: A Regional Profile (Ottawa: Canadian Institute of Health Information, 2004), 3; “The Daily,” Statistics Canada, 2006, www .statcan.ca/Daily/English/060731/d060731b.htm (accessed January 29, 2008). Notes to pages 188–193

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5. See Somerville, The Ethical Canary, and Susan Sherwin, “Introduction,” in The Politics of Women’s Health: Exploring Agency and Autonomy, ed. Susan Sherwin (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998). 6. Laura Purdy, “Medicalization, Medical Necessity and Feminist Medicine,” Bioethics 15, no. 3 (2001): 254. 7. CIHI, Giving Birth in Canada: A Regional Profile (Ottawa: Canadian Institute of Health Information, 2004), 12. 8. It should be noted that it is possible that women are choosing the ser vices of midwives with greater frequency precisely because midwifery has been recognized as a legitimate health profession in many provinces and is regulated by provincial governments. Therefore, midwives’ ser vices are not necessarily institutionally distinct from medical ser vices, and they might be conceptually and practically positioned as part of a range of medical ser vices. However, it does appear that these ser vices are offered, and embraced, as fundamentally different options, which are purported to be more “natural” and/or “normal” than their medical counterparts. 9. Rebecca G. Martinez, “What’s Wrong with Me? Cervical Cancer in Venezuela: Living in Borderlands of Health, Disease, and Illness,” Social Science and Medicine 61 (2004): 798. 10. Task Force on Child and Maternal Health, Who’s Got the Power? Transforming Health Systems for Women and Children (London: Earthscan, 2005), 79. As a region, Latin America and the Ca ribbean have lower maternal mortality rates than Africa and Asia. The global average maternal mortality rate is 400 per 100,000 live births. 11. Alicia E. Yamin and Deborah P. Maine, “Maternal Mortality as a Human Rights Issues: Measuring Compliance with International Treaty Obligation,” in Perspectives on Health and Human Rights, ed. Sofia Gruskin (New York: Routledge, 2005), 430. 12. Ibid., 432. 13. Task Force on Child and Maternal Health, Who’s Got the Power? 81. 14. Ibid. 15. In this article, I use the terms “medical intervention” and “medical care” interchangeably to indicate the provision of care or ser vices by medical doctors (general practitioners and obstetricians). In the literature, the only difference in the use of the terms is that the former, “medical intervention” seems pejorative, and as such tends to imply unnecessary medical surveillance or procedures. 16. PAHO, Gender, Health and Development in the Americas: Basic Indicators (Washington D.C.: Pan-American Health Organization, 2005), 10; Department of Reproductive Health and Research, Maternal Mortality in 2000: Estimates Developed by WHO, UNICEF, UNFPA (Geneva: World Health Orga nization, 2004), 22–26. 17. Public Health Agency of Canada, Make Every Mother and Child Count: Report on Maternal and Child Health in Canada (Ottawa: Public Health Agency of Canada, 2005), 4. 348

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18. Kathryn Pauly Morgan, “Contested Bodies, Contested Knowledge: Women, Health, and the Politics of Medicalization,” in Sherwin, The Politics of Women’s Health 83–121;Maria De Koninck, “Reflections on the Transfer of ‘Progress’: The Case of Reproduction,” in ibid., 150–177. 19. Lisa Mitchell and Eugenia George, “Cross-Cultural Cyborgs: Greek and Canadian Women’s Discourses on Fetal Ultrasounds,” Feminist Studies 23, no. 2 (1997) 373Janelle S. Taylor, “Of Sonograms and Baby Prams: Prenatal Diagnosis, Pregnancy and Consumption,” Feminist Studies 26, 2 (2000) 391– 418. 20. See Marion Iris Young, “Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation,” Th e Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 9, (1984) 45– 62 ; Gilian M Goslinga-Roy, “Body Boundaries, Fiction of the Female Self,” Feminist Studies 26, 1(2000) 113–140 ; Janelle S. Taylor, “Of Sonograms and Baby Prams: Prenatal Diagnosis, Pregnancy and Consumption,” Feminist Studies 26, 2 (2000) 391– 418 ; Lisa Mitchell and Eugenia George, “Cross-Cultural Cyborgs: Greek and Canadian Women’s Discourses on Fetal Ultrasounds,” Feminist Studies 23, 2 (1997) 373 . 21. Marion Iris Young, “Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation,” The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 9, (1984): 46. 22. Ibid. 23. Kevin White, “Feminist Approaches to the Sociology of Health,” Current Sociology 39, 2 (1991): 50. 24. Peter Conrad, The Medicalization of Society (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2007): 158. 25. Kathryn Pauly Morgan, “Contested Bodies, Contested Knowledge: Women, Health, and the Politics of Medicalization,” in Sherwin, The Politics of Women’s Health, 86; see also Irving Kenneth Zola, “Medicine as an Institution of Social Control,” Sociological Review 20 (1972) 487–504. 26. Heather A Cahill, “Male Appropriation and Medicalization of Child Birth: An Historical Analysis: Philosophical and Ethical Issues,” Journal of Advanced Nursing 33, no. 3 (2000): 334, 338, 340. 27. Ann Garry, “Medicine and Medicalization: A Response to Purdy,” Bioethics 15, no. 3 (2001): 262. 28. Laura Purdy, “Medicalization, Medical Necessity and Feminist Medicine,” Bioethics 15, no. 3 (2001): 250. 29. Rebecca G. Martinez, “ ‘What’s Wrong with Me?’ Cervical Cancer in Venezuela: Living in Borderlands of Health, Disease, and Illness,” Social Science and Medicine 61 (2004), 799. 30. Lorna Weir, Pregnancy, Risk and Biopolitics: On the Threshold of the Living Subject (New York: Routledge, 2006), 79. 31. Ann Garry, “Medicine and Medicalization: A Response to Purdy,” Bioethics 15, 3 (2001): 264. 32. Ibid. 33. Maria De Koninck, “Reflections on the Transfer of ‘Progress’: The Case of Reproduction,” in Sherwin, The Politics of Women’s Health, 150–177; Donna L. Notes to pages 197–200

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Hoyert, Isabella Danel, and Patricia Tulley, “Maternal Mortality: United States and Canada 1982–1997,” Birth 27, 1 (2000): 4–11. 34. See Donna Stewart, “Analysis: A Broader Context for Maternal Mortality,” Canadian Medical Association Journal 174, no. 3 (2006): 302; Annette J Browne and Joanne Fiske, “First Nation’s Women’s Encounters with Mainstream Health Care Ser vices,” Western Journal of Nursing Research 23, no. 2 (2001): 128; Patricia Jasen, “Race, Culture, and the Colonization of Childbirth in Northern Canada,” Social History of Medicine 10, 3 (1997): 399; Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada, Shortage of Ob/Gyn, Aboriginal Health Top SOGC President’s Agenda, news release (Vancouver: SOGC Annual Clinical Meeting, June 22–27, 2006); Wanda M. Wenman, Michel R. Joffres, Ivanna V. Tataryn, and the Edmonton Perinatal Infectious Group, “A Prospective Cohort Study of Pregnancy Risk Factors and Birth Outcomes in Aboriginal Women,” Canadian Medical Association Journal 171, no. 6 (2004) 585–589; ITK, Evaluation Models of Health Delivery in Inuit Regions (Ottawa: Inuit Tapririit Kantami, 2004); CIHI, Giving Birth in Canada: A Regional Profile (Ottawa: Canadian Institute of Health Information, 2004); CIHI, Improving the Health of Canadians (Ottawa: Canadian Institute of Health Information, 2004). 35. Diana C. Parry, “Women’s Lived Experience with Pregnancy and Midwifery in a Medicalized and Fetocentric Context,” Qualitative Inquiry 12 (2006): 459. 36. Naomi Wolf, Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood (New York: Anchor Books, 2003), 6. 37. Margaret Lock, “Situating Women in the Politics of Health,” in Sherwin, The Politics of Women’s Health, 48– 63. 38. De Koninck, “Reflections on the Transfer of ‘Progress,’ ” 153. 39. Ibid., 160. 40. Peter Conrad, The Medicalization of Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 158. 41. See CIHI, Giving Birth in Canada, 12. This document provides evidence of the increase in number of births attended by midwives. To be explained subsequently in this article, midwives’ associations in Canada describe their approach to pregnancy and childbirth as “natural,” “normal,” and “woman-centered.” See also Liz Newnham, “The Midwife’s Role: Challenges and Changes in the Postmedical Movement towards Woman-centred Care,” Australian Journal of Midwifery 14, no. 4 (2006): 12–15; and Jane Gunn et al., “Putting Woman-Centered Care into Practice: A New Approach to Psychosocial Risk Assessment During Pregnancy,” Birth 33, no. 1 (2006): 46–55. 42. Margaret MacDonald, “Tradition as a Political System in the New Midwifery in Canada,” in Reconceiving Midwifery, ed. Ivy Lynn Bourgeault, Cecilia Benoit, and Robbie Davis-Floyd (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), 50–51. 43. Weir, Pregnancy, Risk and Biopolitics, 1.

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Notes to pages 200–202

44. Canadian Association of Midwives, 2008, www.canadianmidwives.org /home.htm (accessed January 21, 2008); College of Midwives of Manitoba, 2007, www.midwives.mb.ca (accessed December 18, 2007); College of Midwives of Ontario, 2008, http://www.cmo.on .ca /midwifery.asp (accessed January 28, 2008); College of Midwives of British Columbia, 2008 http://www.cmbc.bc.ca (accessed Jan 28, 2008); Midwives Association of British Columbia, 2007, www .bcmidwives.com/midwiferymodel.htm (accessed December 18, 2008); Alberta Association of Midwives, 2007, www.albertamidwives .com /philosophy.htm (accessed December 18, 2007). 45. “Midwives Alliance of North America,” Midwives Alliance of North America, 2007 (Accesses June 22, 2007), http://www.mana.org/about.html 46. “Ten Tips for a Natural Birth,” Canadian Living Magazine, www.canadianliving .com /family/pregnancy/10 _tips _for _a _natural _birth .php (accessed January 21, 2008). 47. D. S. Walker, J. M. Visger, and D Rossie, “Contemporary Childbirth Education Models,” Journal of Midwifery & Women’s Health, 54 (2009): 474. 48. Jared Jacang Maher, “Baby’s Day Out: Child Birth Goes Solo,” Westword, May 5, 2007. 49. “Freebirthers Dismiss Fear and Bring Babies Home,” www.reuters.com /article/healthNews/idUSL2148514320070522 (accessed June 22, 2007). 50. See Laura Shanley, “Bornfree!” www.unassistedchildbirth.com (accessed Jan 28, 2008). 51. See Sherwin, “Introduction,” The Politics of Women’s Health; Somerville, The Ethical Canary. 52. Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 3. 53. Sheryl Nestel, Obstructed Labour: Race and Gender in the Re-emergence of Mid-wifery (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006), 83. 54. Ibid., 73. 55. Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 193. 56. bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2000), 15. 57. Nestel, Obstructed Labour, 17–36. 58. One notable exception is the recently completed documentation of Inuit midwifery and birthing practices. Pauktuutit, an organization representing Inuit women of Canada, has produced a database of “seventy-seven historical interviews, describing 516 births, conducted in the early 1990s with Inuit about their birthing experiences over the last several generations” (Pauktuutit Media Advisory, www.pauktuutit.ca /pdf/MediaRelease-16Oct2006 _e.pdf. 59. See Patricia Jasen, “Race, Culture, and the Colonization of Childbirth in Northern Canada,” Social History of Medicine 10, no. 3 (1997): 383– 400. 60. Ibid., 384.

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61. Ibid., 386. 62. Ibid., 388. 63. Young, “Pregnant Embodiment,” 46. 64. Julia Kristeva as quoted in ibid., 48. 65. Naomi Wolf, Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood (New York: Anchor Books, 2003), 7. 66. Ibid., 60. 67. Young, “Pregnant Embodiment,” 51. 68. Robert M. Strozier, Foucault, Subjectivity, and Identity: Historical Constructions of Subject and Self (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002), 236. 69. Robin Root and C. H. Browner, “Practices of the Pregnant Self: Compliance with and Resistance to Prenatal Norms,” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 25 (2001): 196. The quotations in this paragraph are at 196, 197, 217, and 220.Ibid. 70. Deborah Lupton, “ ‘A Love/Hate Relationship’: The Ideals and Experiences of First-time Mothers,” Journal of Sociology 36, 1 (2000): 50– 63. The quotations in this paragraph are at 50, 60, and 51. 71. Nestel, Obstructed Labour, 17–18. 72. Laura Purdy, “Medicalization, Medical Necessity and Feminist Medicine,” Bioethics 15, no. 3 (2001): 256. 73. Cited in Michael C. Klein, “Quick Fix Culture: The Cesarean-Section-onDemand Debate,” Birth 31, no. 1 (2004): 161. 74. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for encouraging an elaboration of this issue. 75. Th is chapter is part of a larger study that considers the theoretical and empirical dimensions of the politics of pregnancy and childbirth in North-South comparative perspective. Interviews and analysis are in various stages of completion for Canada, the United States, Cuba, and Honduras. 76. Young, “Pregnant Embodiment,” 59. 10. Disempowered Women? The Midwifery Model and Medical Intervention Sonya Charles 1. Others have argued that both the medical model and the midwifery model imply a sense of control that is in keeping with a liberal individualist society, but antithetical to childbirth. Lealle Ruhl, “Dilemmas of the Will: Uncertainty, Reproduction, and the Rhetoric of Control,” Signs 27, no. 3 (Spring, 2002): 641– 663; Linda L. Layne, “Unhappy Endings: A Feminist Reappraisal of the Women’s Health Movement from the Vantage of Pregnancy Loss,” Social Science & Medicine 56 (2003): 1881–1891. My critique has some similarities to this argument, but it takes a different approach. 2. There has been some philosophical work that looks at the midwifery model. See, for example, Anne Drapkin Lyerly, “Shame, Gender, Birth,” Hypatia 21, no. 1

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Notes to pages 206–215

(Winter 2006): 101–118. There has also been a significant amount of analysis of the midwifery model done by anthropologists. 3. Layne also argues for a greater diversity of birth stories. Her interest is in women who have miscarriages, stillborns, or children born with disabilities. In this section, I complement Layne’s anthropological analysis by giving a philosophical analysis of why stories are so important. 4. Richard Nisbett and Lee Ross, “Judgmental Heuristics and Knowledge Structures,” in Naturalizing Epistemology, ed. Hilary Kornblith (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 204. 5. Ibid., 206. 6. Ibid., 206. 7. Hilde Lindemann Nelson, Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), 75; emphasis added. 8. I realize that there is also much debate over what counts as a medically justified cesarean section. However, since any reasonable provider would admit cesareans are sometimes necessary, I do not believe we need to fully articulate what may or may not count as justified. In fact, I think one positive outcome to including more of these stories is that it would encourage open debate about what is and is not medically justified (which would effectively make women more educated about possible childbirth decisions). 9. Robbie E. Davis-Floyd, Birth as an American Rite of Passage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 243. 10. Again, this part of my argument shares much in common with Layne’s discussion of the need to incorporate a broader diversity of experiences (especially negative outcomes) into the feminist literature on birth. 11. Abby Epstein, The Business of Being Born (Los Angeles: New Line Home Entertainment, 2007). 12. Ina May Gaskin, Spiritual Midwifery, Fourth ed. (Summertown, Tenn.: Book Publishing Company, 2002), 77–78; emphasis added. 13. For example, there are many stories of women who attempt home birth and are then chastised when they have to transfer to a medical setting. See DavisFloyd, Birth as an American Rite of Passage; Marsden Wagner, Born in the USA: How a Broken Maternity System Must Be Fixed to Put Women and Children First (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 14. For example, feminists have focused on how dualistic thinking has influenced the practice of science, the destruction of nature, the conception of the body, and feminist theories that attempt to overcome these dualisms. See Evelyn Fox Keller, Refl ection on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1993); Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); and Alison M. Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheld, 1983).

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15. For a particularly illuminating feminist analysis of this, see Maria Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). 16. See Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 31. 17. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women (New York: Anchor Books Doubleday, 1978). 18. Gray, John. (1992). Men Are from Mars—Women Are from Venus. New York, Harper Collins. 19. Republic 441e– 42b. Plato, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, trans. Paul Shorey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961). 20. Feminist philosophers such as Val Plumwood and María Lugones have argued that dualistic thinking was central to the philosophy of colonization and oppression. 21. Many writers have documented the historical split between obstetrics and midwifery and its conceptual differences. See, for example, Davis-Floyd, Birth as an American Rite of Passage. 22. Even today it is argued that homebirth is too dangerous because if an emergency were to occur the midwife would not be able to help. The truth is that midwives are skilled practitioners that are capable of responding to most emergencies. In this way, midwives are no less “scientific” or “civilized” than physicians. However, midwives manage to use this knowledge without contributing to historical dualisms that value mind/reason over body/emotion. 23. However, if the woman is not fully dilated, they may suggest she not push too strenuously. This early pushing can sometimes help complete the process of dilation. Forcing a woman to push as soon as she is dilated can also be counterproductive. Many women have a “resting period” before the baby fully moves into position and is ready to complete the process. 24. For example, see Plato’s discussion of the cave, the divided line, and discussions of the soul in The Republic. 25. Again, see Descartes’s discussion of mind, body, and knowledge in Meditations on First Philosophy. 26. For an example of one feminist theory that tries to reconceptualize how we think about the interconnectedness of body and mind, see Grosz, Volatile Bodies. 27. The “whole woman” phrasing is mine, but the idea is that the midwifery model is a more holistic approach. Davis-Floyd, Birth as an American Rite of Passage; Gaskin, Spiritual Midwifery; Wagner, Born in the USA. 28. Ina May Gaskin, Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth (New York: Bantam Books, 2003), 50, 61, 102. 29. Ibid., 102. 30. Ibid., 167–168. 31. I thank Allison Wolf for helping me make this connection. 32. Gaskin, Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth, 170. 354

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Notes to pages 223–229

33. Ibid., 136. 34. Ibid., 139; emphasis added. 35. Ibid., 342. 36. It also challenges the dualism of inside/outside and metaphysical conceptions of personhood (that is, one person per body). For some other feminist analyses of these issues, see Grosz, Volatile Bodies; Iris Marion Young, On Female Body Experience: Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Margaret Olivia Little, “Abortion, Intimacy, and the Duty to Gestate,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 2 (1999): 295–312; and Tabor Fisher, “The Birth of Personhood,” in Philosophy and Everyday Life, ed. Laura Duhan Kaplan (New York: Seven Bridges Press, 2001), 33– 45. 37. Gaskin and others do discuss the possibility of orgasmic birth, but even Gaskin does not promise this as a possibility for all women. 38. Wagner, Born in the USA, 104–105; emphasis added. 39. Gaskin, Spiritual Midwifery, 87. 40. Marjie Hathaway et al., The Bradley Method: Student Workbook (Menlo Park, Calif.: American Academy of Husband-Coached Childbirth, 2007). 41. Ibid., 31, 33. 42. Rebecca Kukla, “Measuring Mothering,” International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 1, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 82. For example, historically women of color and poor women have had to fight simply for their right to procreate at all, let alone having caregivers that would work as partners to help them achieve an ideal birth experience. For an example of some of the obstacles faced by women of color and poor women, see Dorothy E. Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997). Even for white, middle-class women who generally have a more amicable relationship with their healthcare providers, many insurance companies will not pay for midwives or homebirths. (Thanks to Allison Wolf for reminding me of this second point.) 43. Goldman, Andrew. (March 30, 2009). Extreme Birth: The Fearless— Some Say Too Fearless—New Leader of the Home-Birth Movement. New York Magazine. New York. 44. While I do not have time to discuss it here, I believe frank, evidence-based discussion of complications will also open the space to discuss what “counts” as a necessary or unnecessary intervention. Some—like routine IV or denial of food and drink— seem obviously unnecessary, based on statistical evidence showing that it is safe for low-risk women to labor at home. Other interventions seem less clear, such as how long it is safe to labor once a woman’s water has broken or if it is always necessary to have a C-section with a breech birth. 45. I do not mean to trivialize the sometimes real dangers that women face in childbirth. I gratefully acknowledge that appropriately used medical interventions have saved many women’s lives.

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11. Knock Me Up, Knock Me Down: Images of Pregnancy in Hollywood Film and Popu lar Culture Kelly Oliver 1. Frank Krutnik. “The Faint Aroma of Performing Seals: The ‘Ner vous’ Romance and the Comedy of the Sexes,” The Velevt Trap no 26 (1990): 57–72 2. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage, 1949), xxv. 3. Ibid., 36–37; my emphasis. 4. Sarah LaChance Adams, “Becoming with Child: Pregnancy as Provocation to Authenticity,” in New Perspectives on Sartre, ed. Adrian Mirvish and Adrian van den Hoven (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press), 25–36. 5. See Clare Hanson, A Cultural History of Pregnancy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), especially chapter 1; Alan Bewell, “An Issue of Monstrous Desire,” Yale Journal of Criticism 2, no. 1 (1988): 105–128; Niles Newton, “Emotions of Pregnancy,” in Diseases of Pregnancy and Childbirth, ed. Philip K. Wilson (New York: Garland, 1996), 349–369. 6. Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Baby Hunger: The New Battle for Motherhood (London: Atlanta Books, 2002). 7. Hanson, A Cultural History of Pregnancy, 3. 8. Robyn Longhurst, “ ‘Corporeographies’ of Pregnancy: ‘Bikini Babes,’ ” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18 (2000): 453– 472. 9. Robbie Davis-Floyd, American Birth as a Rite of Passage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 46. 10. Cf. Sandra Matthews and Laura Wexler, Pregnant Pictures (New York: Routledge, 2000), 31. 11. Quoted in ibid., 7. 12. Rosalind Petchesky, “Fetal Images: The Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction,” in Reproductive Technologies: Gender, Motherhood and Medicine, ed. Michelle Stanworth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 64. 13. De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 30. 14. Hanson, A Cultural History of Pregnancy, especially chapter 2; Lucy Fischer, “Birth Trauma: Parturition and Horror in Rosemary’s Baby,” Cinema Journal 31, no. 3 (1992): 3–19. 15. Lauren Berlant, “America, ‘Fat,’ the Fetus,” boundary 2, 21, no. 3(1994): 145–195. 16. See Julia Kristeva: Powers of Horror, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980); Tales of Love, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Luce Irigaray: An Ethics of Sexual Diff erence, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian Gill (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993); and Luce Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). See also Cynthia Willett, Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities (New York: Routledge, 1995); Kelly Oliver: Womanizing 356

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Notes to pages 242–249

Nietz sche: Philosophy’s Relation to “the Feminine” (New York: Routledge Press, 1995); Oliver, Family Values: Subjects Between Nature and Culture (New York: Routledge Press, 1997); Oliver, Subjectivity Without Subjects: From Desiring Mothers to Abject Fathers (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998). 17. Iris Marion Young, Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). 18. Ibid., 166. 19. Berlant, “America, ‘Fat,’ the Fetus,” 146. 20. Imogen Tyler, “Skin-Tight: Celebrity, Pregnancy and Subjectivity,” in Thinking Through the Skin, ed. Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey (New York: Routledge, 2001), 76. 21. Ibid. 22. Wenda Morrone Wardell, Pregnant While You Work (New York: Macmillan, 1984), 1. 23. Longhurst, “ ‘Corporeographies’ of Pregnancy,” 469. 24. Caroline Lundquist, “Being Torn: Toward a Phenomenology of Unwanted Pregnancy,” Hypatia 23, no. 3 (July– September 2008): 152. 25. Lundquist, “Being Torn,” 151. 26. Hewlett, Baby Hunger, 21, 26, 84, 254, 262. 27. Janelle Taylor, “Of Sonograms and Baby Prams: Prenatal Diagnosis, Pregnancy, and Consumption,” Feminist Studies 2 (Summer 2000): 406. 12. Exposing the Breast: The Animal and the Abject in American Attitudes Toward Breastfeeding Rebecca Tuvel 1. Although definitions vary, for the purposes of this essay, I define breastfeeding as the practice of nursing directly at the breast. 2. Virginia Schmied and Deborah Lupton, “Blurring the Boundaries: Breastfeeding and Maternal Subjectivity,” Sociology of Health & Illness 23, no. 2 (2001): 232; Rebecca Kukla, Mass Hysteria: Medicine, Culture and Mothers’ Bodies (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 192, 196. Rebecca Kukla notes, “In the United States, 65% of new mothers initiate breastfeeding, while only 27% are giving their children any breast milk at all by six months old, and only 12% are doing so at one year old.” Ibid., 192. She further notes, “the original Health and Human Ser vices press release acknowledges, ‘The United States has one of the lowest rates of breastfeeding in the developed world. . . . Research has shown that many women know that breastfeeding is the best nutrition for their babies.’ ” Ibid., 193. 3. Sarah Rubenstein-Gillis, “Reel Milk,” Mothering, September/October 2008: 66– 67. 4. See Schmied and Lupton, “Blurring the Boundaries,” 237; Kukla, Mass Hysteria, 190, 194–196; Karen Kedrowski and Michael Lipscomb, Breastfeeding Rights in the United States (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2008), 37. I focus on women’s Notes to pages 249–264

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experiences with breastfeeding in public because most of the literature on breastfeeding concerns the public setting. Theorists of psychological oppression might suggest that my discussion of public breastfeeding could extend to the private sphere. See Sandra Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (New York: Routledge, 1990), and and Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993). 5. Kedrowski and Lipscomb, Breastfeeding Rights in the United States, 37. There is reason to suppose that it is specifically white Americans who have anxiety over the public act of breastfeeding. A 2003 study found that white people were “more likely to report they would be ‘offended’ or ‘highly offended’ by seeing a woman breastfeed a toddler in public.” Ibid., 45. 6. Ibid., 35–36. 7. K. C. Jones, “Facebook Draws Criticism for Policy on Breastfeeding Photos,” Information Week, January 2, 2009. Although Kedrowski and Lipscomb cite various instances of public outcries against breastfeeding, they take the whole of their research to prove that “there is no uniform hostility to breastfeeding” (Breastfeeding Rights, 61). In this respect, my analysis differs from theirs, since I seek to show that American attitudes toward public breastfeeding are overwhelmingly negative. 8. Susanna Schrobsdorff, “Julie Bowen’s Revealing Photo,” Time Magazine, February 23, 2011. 9. See Gabrielle Palmer, The Politics of Breastfeeding (London: Pandora Press, 1988); Penny van Esterik, Beyond the Breast-Bottle Controversy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989); Rosalia Rodriguez-Garcia and Lara Frazier, “Cultural Paradoxes Relating to Sexuality and Breastfeeding,” Journal of Human Lactation 11, no. 2 (1995): 111–115; Katherine Dettwyler, “Beauty and the Breast: The Cultural Context of Breastfeeding in the United States,” in Breastfeeding: Biocultural Perspectives, ed. Katherine A. Dettwyler and Patricia Stuart-Macadam (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1995), 167–215; Dia L. Michels and Naomi Baumslag, Milk, Money, and Madness: The Culture and Politics of Breastfeeding (Westport, Conn.: Bergin & Garvey, 1995); Kedrowski and Lipscomb, Breastfeeding Rights in the United States. 10. Schmied and Lupton, “Blurring the Boundaries,” 237. 11. Kukla, Mass Hysteria, 206. 12. Rubenstein-Gillis, “Reel Milk,” 67– 68. 13. Rhonda Shaw, “Performing Breastfeeding: Embodiment, Ethics and the Maternal Subject,” Feminist Review 78, no. 1 (2004): 106. 14. Ibid., 112. 15. Cindy Stearns, “Breastfeeding and the Good Maternal Body,” Gender and Society 13, no. 3 (1999): 309. Indeed, in fall 2008, controversy arose over photos of Angelina Jolie breastfeeding. The complaints included that Jolie was “sexualizing” the breastfeeding act, and that this was “inappropriate.” Rachel Campos Duff y, “Angelia Jolie Breastfeeding Photo Stirs Controversy,” www.parentdish.com, October 17, 2008. 358

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Notes to pages 264–265

16. Schmied and Lupton, “Blurring the Boundaries,” 246. 17. Stearns, “Breastfeeding and the Good Maternal Body,” 309. 18. Kukla, Mass Hysteria, 205–206. Relatedly, in 2003, mother Jacqueline Mercado also lost temporary custody of her children due to a Child Protective Ser vices report fi led by an Eckerd Drugstore clerk who processed pictures of Mercado breastfeeding her son. Thomas Korosec, “1-Hour Arrest: When Does a Snapshot of a Mother Breast-feeding her Child Become Kiddie Porn? Ask the Richardson Police,” Dallas Observer, April 17, 2003. 19. Rubenstein-Gillis, “Reel Milk,” 70–71. 20. Kedrowski and Lipscomb, Breastfeeding Rights in the United States, 36. 21. Kukla, Mass Hysteria, 197. 22. Kedrowski and Lipscomb, Breastfeeding Rights in the United States, 57–58. 23. Ibid., 57. Speaking of Linda Blum’s notion of “disembodied motherhood,” Rebecca Kukla voices her concern that treating the separation of the mother from her breast milk as problematic, insofar as this divorces the mother from the process involved in making the milk, might also reinstate oppressive notions of embodied motherhood, where the maternal is historically tied to the “breast-mouth relation.” Kukla, Mass Hysteria, 159. 24. Kedrowski and Lipscomb, Breastfeeding Rights in the United States, 60. 25. Ibid. Breastfeeding advocacy by the medical community is also briefly depicted in the independent yet mainstream popularized film Juno (2007). In this movie, the poster “Babies Were Born to Breastfeed” with the caption “Breastfeed for six months-help reduce your child’s risk of respiratory illness” hangs in the delivery room. Rubenstein-Gillis, “Reel Milk,” 73. 26. Kedrowski and Lipscomb, Breastfeeding Rights in the United States, 37. 27. Kukla, Mass Hysteria, 196–197. 28. Quoted in Dettwyler and Stuart-Macadam, Breastfeeding, 386. 29. See www.prolacta.com for more information. 30. See Human Milk Banking Association of North America website at www .HMBANA.org. HMBANA sees itself as at odds with Prolacta’s mission insofar as “it does not condone, and in fact, questions the practice of buying and selling human milk as a commodity.” 31. Rubenstein- Gillis, “Reel Milk,” 72; Dettwyler and Stuart-Macadam, Breastfeeding, 188. Interestingly, Rubenstein-Gillis (75) observes that many international fi lms depict nursing moms as ordinary in public settings. Dettwyler (181) also notes that the eroticization of the breast in Western culture does not extend to other cultures around the globe, pointing to studies that found that “only 13 out of 190 cultures report that men view women’s breasts as being related to sexual attractiveness, and only 13 out of 190 cultures report male manipulation of female breasts as a precursor or accompaniment of sexual intercourse.” These findings substantiate the idea that the way breastfeeding is sexualized in Hollywood films represents a uniquely American phenomenon. This is not to suggest, however, that problematic attitudes toward breastfeeding do not exist in other Notes to pages 266–269

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countries as well. For instance, some say a stigma against breastfeeding exists in Africa, where “men often think women can’t have sex if they’re still nursing.” Ada Calhoun, “Salma Hayek, Breast-Feeding and One Very Public Ser vice,” Time, February 12, 2009. 32. In the United States, disgust over breastfeeding is widely expressed. Many people also feel disgust over women who nurse older children as well. In the TV show Little Britain, a grown man is shown nursing from his mother and grandmother in a comedic sketch that recurs throughout the series. Many people also suggest that children old enough to ask for it shouldn’t get it. A psychoanalytic interpretation of this attitude is of interest here, since the “problem” of individuating oneself from the mother clearly arises. This will be more fully explored in my discussion on Kristeva. Thanks to Sarah LaChance Adams for this point. 33. Paul Rozin and April E. Fallon, “A Perspective on Disgust,” Psychological Review 94, no. 2 (1987): 28–29. Michelle Meagher further notes that in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles Darwin contends that “disgust in its most basic form arises in connection with the acts of eating and tasting.” Michelle Meagher, “Jenny Saville and a Feminist Aesthetics of Disgust,” Hypatia 18, no. 4 (2003): 31. 34. Bernice Hausman, Mother’s Milk: Breastfeeding Controversies in American Culture, (New York: Routledge, 2003): 130. 35. Kukla, Mass Hysteria, 195. 36. Hausman, Mother’s Milk, 130. 37. Tracy Clark-Flory, “Bottle feeding baby = Breast-feeding bovine?” www .salon.com/life/broadsheet/2008/08/25/milk. 38. “Milk Gone Wild 2: At the Carwash!” http://blog.peta.org/archives/2008 /03/milk _gone _wild.php. 39. Dettwyler and Stuart-Macadam, Breastfeeding, 198. 40. Sarah Rubenstein-Gillis, personal communication, April 19, 2009. I thank her for recommending movies in which mothers are depicted as embarrassed about breastfeeding or as likening themselves to animals when discussing or performing the act. 41. See Carol Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (New York: Continuum International, 2006) for a fascinating discussion on the connections between the oppression of women and female animals or what Adams calls “feminized protein” (61). 42. Rubenstein-Gillis, personal communication, April 19, 2009. 43. The acronym “MILF” (mom-I’d-like-to-fuck) is referred to in American Pie and other movies and clearly insinuates a relationship between mothers and their milk (although not with cows’ milk). Thanks to Kelly Oliver for this point. 44. Rubenstein-Gillis, “Reel Milk,” 68. 45. Julia Kristeva, “Psychoanalysis—A Counter Depressant,” in The Portable Kristeva, ed. Kelly Oliver (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 197. 46. Julia Kristeva, “Individual and National Identity,” in ibid., 259. 47. Ibid., 298. 360

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Notes to pages 269–272

48. Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality (New York: Routledge, 1996), 53. 49. Julia Kristeva, “Interview with Elaine Hoffman Baruch on Feminism in the United States and France,” in Oliver, The Portable Kristeva, 374. 50. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 2–3. 51. Ibid., 105. 52. Ibid., 75. 53. Ibid., 73. 54. Ibid., 105. 55. Julia Kristeva, “Interview with Elaine Hoffman Baruch,” 374. 56. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4. Michelle Meagher cites anthropologist Douglas’s similar interpretation of disgust. Meagher, “Jenny Saville and a Feminist Aesthetics of Disgust,” 31. As she explains, “For Douglas, disgust is framed in terms of the concept of pollution. Those things that cannot be controlled, those things that refuse to be bounded, are anomalies that cause profound cultural anxieties” (ibid., 31–32). Meagher takes Douglas’s account to be in opposition to that of Rozin and Fallon (discussed earlier) because it is social constructionist, and Rozin and Fallon’s theory is “founded upon instincts and physiological necessities” (ibid., 32). But although Rozin and Fallon’s diagnosis of disgust as related to animalness might appear to be a “fact” of our biology in their account, I share Meagher’s reading and want to be careful not to reduce the fear of our animal status to a “fact of our nature” or a necessary part of our humanity, as this seems to risk essentializing certain characteristic “traits” of being human, where, on my and other accounts (like that of Kelly Oliver discussed below), “humanity” is never a clearly defined category that emerges in stark contrast to the animal or anything else. That is, it is not at all convincing to me to think that there is a “fact” of our nature that deems that we will be necessarily afraid of the animal that menaces from within us, on some physiological level. 57. Meagher, “Jenny Saville and a Feminist Aesthetics of Disgust,” 33. 58. Kelly Oliver, Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 290. 59. Ibid., 291. 60. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 40. 61. Kelly Oliver, Animal Lessons, 287. 62. Ibid., 297, my emphasis. 63. Ibid., 278. 64. Ibid., 300–301. 65. Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 144. 66. Ibid., 73. 67. Catharine Mackinnon, “Of Mice and Men: A Feminist Fragment on Animal Rights,” in Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, ed. Cass R. Sunstein and Martha C Nussbaum (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 266. 68. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: Random House, 1990): 1. Notes to pages 272–275

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69. Judith Warner, “Ban the Breast Pump,” New York Times, April 2, 2009. The language of dignity is interesting here. As Rozin and Fallon note, “moral disgust in the US is triggered most strongly by acts of brutality, or acts in which someone strips others of their dignity.” Rozin and Fallon, “A Perspective on Disgust,” 11. 70. Fear of women’s embodiment can perhaps also serve to explain certain feminist hesitations about breastfeeding. Susan Bordo explains how the second wave of feminism was characterized by women’s resistance to disciplining their bodies, including their breasts, which were culturally constituted as being “ ‘for’ the other-whether as instrument and symbol of nurturing love, or as erotic flesh.” Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 20. Liberal feminist discourse proclaims equal rights and treatment for men and women, and bottle feeding is something that can be performed by either sex, while breastfeeding is not (although, Jared Diamond argues that “Some combination of manual nipple stimulation and hormone injections may soon develop the latent potential of the expectant father-his confidence in paternity buttressed by DNA testing-to make milk, without the need to await genetic changes.” Jared Diamond, Why Sex Is Fun: The Evolution of Human Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 1997): 61.) Breastfeeding has thus been figured as a practice that reduces woman’s status by relegating her to the home and having to meet the demands of yet another person, the child. Kedrowski and Lipscomb, Breastfeeding Rights in the United States, 6. 71. Oliver, The Portable Kristeva, 297. 72. Oliver, Animal Lessons, 296. 73. Ibid., 306, 19. 74. Harriet Schleifer, “Images of Life and Death: Food Animal Production and the Vegetarian Option,” in In Defense of Animals, ed. Peter Singer (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985): 69. 75. Ibid., 304. 76. Kukla, Mass Hysteria, 146, 191. 77. Ibid., 232. 78. Ibid., 226, 224. 79. This is not to suggest that we ought always to embrace (or, more strongly) to practice the act of breastfeeding. Rather, my account remains silent on the question as to whether or not women should breastfeed as this is a personal decision and there are compelling cultural reasons both for and against. I disagree with Kukla in her suggestion that we ought to maintain boundary lines for our politics to succeed, but I agree with her belief that “mothers, health care providers, and others have a moral and social responsibility to work to orient ourselves in such a way that breastfeeding becomes less threatening and more sustainable.” Ibid, 212. 80. Eva-Maria Simms, “Milk and Flesh: A Phenomenological Reflection on Infancy and Coexistence,” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 32, no. 1 (2001): 25. For an image to complement Eva Simms’s discussion on embracing the animalness of breastfeeding, see artist Janine Antoni’s picture of herself posed 362

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to look like she is breastfeeding a cow at http://cathieskinner.wordpress.com/2009 /09/13/janine-antoni/. Thanks to Sarah LaChance Adams for this reference. 81. Ibid., 26, 31. 13. The Order of Life: How Phenomenologies of Pregnancy Revise and Reject Theories of the Subject Talia Welsh 1. Edmund Husserl, “Universal Teleology,” in Husserl: Shorter Works, trans. M. Biemel (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 337. 2. Johana Oksala, “What is Feminist Phenomenology? Thinking Birth Philosophically.” Radical Philosophy 26 (July–August 2004): 16–22. 3. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Routledge, 1962), xiv. 4. Linda Fisher, “Phenomenology and Feminism: Perspectives of their Relation,” in Feminist Phenomenology, ed. Linda Fisher and Lester Embree (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000), 24. 5. Talia Welsh, “The Developing Body: A Reading of Merleau-Ponty’s Conception of Women in the Sorbonne Lectures,” in Intertwinings: Interdisciplinary Encounters with Merleau- Ponty, ed. Gail Weiss (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008), 45–58.; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949–1952, trans Talia Welsh (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2010). 6. Shannon Sullivan, “Domination and Dialogue in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception,” Hypatia 12, no. 1 (1997): 1. 7. Fisher, “Phenomenology and Feminism,” 21. 8. Gail Weiss, “The Anonymous Intentions of Transactional Bodies,” Hypatia 17, no. 4 (2002): 187–200; Silvia Stoller, “Reflections on Feminist MerleauPontian Skepticism,” Hypatia 15, no. 1 (2000): 175–182. 9. Weiss, “The Anonymous Intentions,” 194. It is especially puzzling to understand how Sullivan could think the author of so many texts on politics, such as Humanism and Terror and Adventures of Dialectic, does not seriously consider the historical situation in his analyses. 10. Johana Oksala, “A Phenomenology of Gender,” Continental Philosophy Review 39 (2006): 231. 11. Iris Marion Young, “ ‘Throwing Like a Girl’: Twenty Years Later,” in Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader, ed. Donn Welton (London: Blackwell, 1998), 147. 12. Hélène Deutsch’s The Psychology of Women was translated into French in 1949. Merleau-Ponty refers heavily to this text in the Sorbonne lectures, citing it at length. Despite being an obvious influence, Merleau-Ponty directly refers to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex much less frequently. 13. Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 101. 14. Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Diff erence, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993),, 152. Notes to pages 278–288

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15. Ibid., 151. 16. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 107 17. Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Diff erence, 159. 18. Iris Marion Young, On Female Body Experience: Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 274. 19. Ibid., 275–278. 20. Ibid., 280. 21. Rosalyn Diaprose, The Bodies of Women: Ethics, Embodiment and Sexual Diff erence (London: Routledge, 1994), 115. 22. Gail Weiss, Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality (London: Routledge, 1999),, 53. 23. Carol Bigwood, “Renaturalizing the Body (With the Help of MerleauPonty),” Hypatia 6, no. 3 (1991):57. 24. Ibid., 105–110. 25. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 30. 26. Oksala, “What Is Feminist Phenomenology?” 17. 27. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, xxxii. 1971 edition. 28. James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993). 29. Michel Foucault, “How an ‘Experience-Book’ Is Born,” in Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori, trans. R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), 31. 30. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 2:1– 62; Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (New York: Collier Books, 1962). 31. Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death & Sensuality (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986). 32. Weiss, Body Images, 53. 33. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 89. 34. Oksala, “What Is Feminist Phenomenology?” 17. 35. Fisher, “Phenomenology and Feminism,” 20. 36. Oksala, “A Phenomenology of Gender,” 232. 37. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 94. 38. Young, “Throwing Like a Girl: Twenty Years Later,” 286, 298. 14. The Vision of the Artist/Mother: The Strange Creativity of Painting and Pregnancy Florentien Verhage I am grateful for the generous support from the Lenfest Summer Grant from Washington and Lee University. An earlier version of this paper was delivered at 364

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Notes to pages 288–300

the conference on the “Philosophical Inquiry into Pregnancy, Childbirth and Mothering” organized by the Feminist Philosophy Research Interest Group, University of Oregon, Eugene, May 14–16, 2009. For valuable comments on a later draft, I am grateful to my colleagues at the Philosophy Department of Washington and Lee University, Sarah LaChance Adams, and an anonymous reviewer. 1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1945–1952, trans. Talia Welsh (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 79. 2. See Elizabeth Spelman, “Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary Views,” Feminist Studies 8, no. 1 (1982): 109–131. 3. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany- Chevalier (New York: Knopf, 2010), 538 (my emphases). De Beauvoir’s harsh comments on pregnancy are importantly related to the expectations and possibilities of the French society in which she was living. She writes: “If this burden is a heavy one, it is because, inversely, social norms do not allow the woman to procreate as she pleases. . . . It must be added that given the lack of well-organized day nurseries and kindergartens, even one child is enough to entirely paralyze a woman’s activity” (ibid., 735). 4. Ibid., 539. De Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty both draw on Hélène Deutsch’s The Psychology of Women: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation (New York: Grune and Stratton, 1944– 45). 5. Susan Stanford Friedman mentions, among others William Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, and Mary Shelley, who use the metaphor of childbirth and pregnancy to discuss an artist’s creativity. Friedman, “Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor: Gender Difference in Literary Discourse,” Feminist Studies 13, no. 1 (1987): 49– 82. 6. Ibid., 52. 7. Plato famously compares “pregnancy in body” and “pregnancy in soul” in the Symposium, in Plato: Complete Work, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 491. 8. Cynthia Ozick in Nina Auerbach, Romantic Imprisonment: Women and Other Glorified Outcasts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 173. 9. Auerbach quotes Jane Austen: “ ‘Poor Animal, she will be worn out before she is thirty.—I am very sorry for her’ (March 23, 1817, 2:488). Austen’s dismissal suggests an unpassable abyss between writer and mother, human and animal, the dancing creativity of the mind and the monotonous attrition of the womb. In motherhood, Anna has relinquished life rather than created it” (ibid., 174). 10. Imogen Tyler, “Reframing Pregnant Embodiment,” in Transformations: Thinking Through Feminism, ed. Sarah Ahmed et al. (London: Routledge, 2000), 291. 11. Child Psychology and Pedagogy, 78. “La naissance . . . surgit de rien” Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L‘ institution dans l‘ histoire personnelle et publique: Notes du course au Collège de France, 1954–1955 (Paris: Belin, 2003), 37. All translations are my own. Notes to pages 300–302

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12. Christine Battersby, The Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and the Patterns of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1998), 18. 13. Lisa Guenther, The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), 10. 14. Christina Schües, “The Birth of Difference,” Human Studies 20 (1997): 246. 15. Ibid., 147. “Birth thought as the fundamental leap from the undiff erentiated in to the differentiated world of objects, gives the human the possibility of being confronted with the differences of the world of objects for the first time and to direct her senses to it” (ibid., my emphases). 16. Although she might experience a significant change in self. 17. As sonographers attempt to photograph the image, they may comment: “He moves away when I try to take the picture,” or “He’s shy. He doesn’t want his picture taken.” They also refer to fetal shyness and modesty when visualizing the genitalia is difficult. Conversely, a clear, easily attained fetal image may be offered as evidence that the fetus is “being good” or “very cooperative.” Lisa M. Mitchell and Eugenia Georges, “Cross-Cultural Cyborgs: Greek and Canadian Women’s Discourses on Fetal Ultrasound,” Feminist Studies 23, no. 2 (1997): 373– 401. 18. Barbara Katz Rothman, “Laboring Now: Current Cultural Constructions of Pregnancy, Birth and Mothering,” in The Body Reader: Essential Social and Cultural Readings, ed. Lisa Jean Moore and Mary Kout (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 48. Katz Rothman continues: “we have truly changed pregnancy: from a time of expecting a baby to a time of containing a fetus” (ibid., 49). 19. A persistent, recurring complaint of pregnant women is the uninvited touching of their pregnant bellies by acquaintances and strangers alike. 20. The friend who related this story to me said that this situation was resolved when the father-to-be told his mother that her behavior was not welcomed by her daughter-in-law. 21. Iris Marion Young, “Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation,” in On Female Body Experience: Throwing like a Girl and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 46. 22. Carol Bigwood, “Renaturalizing the Body (With the Help of MerleauPonty),” Hypatia 6, no. 3 (1991): 68. In addition, one could hardly say that the woman in labor just needs to let nature do its own work. Rather what is asked of her in this first laboring stage of birth is to participate in it and work for it as it does not come easy to relax in response to an intense contraction. This first stage of childbirth is called “labor” for a reason. 23. Ibid., 68. 24. De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 538. 25. Ibid. 26. Bigwood, “Renaturalizing the Body,” 66, first emphasis mine. 27. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2000), 147. 366

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28. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” trans. Carleton Dallery, in The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 167–168. 29. Merleau-Ponty asks, “Is being kosmotheoros my ultimate reality? Am I . . . a pure look. . . . Am I this ray of knowing that would have to arise from nowhere? But even while I am installing myself at this zero point of being, I know very well that it has a mysterious tie with locality and temporality. . . . The visible can thus fill me and occupy me only because I who see it do not see it from the depths of nothingness, but from the midst of itself; I the seer am also visible.” Ibid., 113. 30. Throughout his writing life Merleau-Ponty is concerned with the double touching of the body, this appealing Husserlian example of the sensing-sensible body. See, for example, Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, second book, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1989), §§ 36–7. 31. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 146. 32. Ibid., 134–135. 33. Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 162, 164. 34. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald Landes (London: Routledge, 2012), lxxvii. 35. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 102. 36. Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 167. 37. Ibid. 38. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 133; my emphasis. 39. De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 538. 40. Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 168. 41. As Drew Leder argues, the phenomenon of viscerality (Merleau-Ponty’s discussions of pregnancy, birth and embryonic life) functions primarily to explicate something about perception, not about the visceral body per se, in “Flesh and Blood: A Proposed Supplement to Merleau-Ponty,” Human Studies 13 (1990): 218. 42. “La conscience n’a pas conscience d’être née. Naissance: [c’est] passage du moment où rien n’était pour X au moment où tout est aussi pour X”: Institution and Passivity, 37. 43. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 182. 44. Guenther, Gift of the Other, 3. 45. “Narrativ vermittelten Generativität meiner Existenz.” Christina Schües, “Generative Phänomenologie in feministischer Perspektive,” in Feministische Phänomenologie und Hermeneutik, ed. Silvia Stoller, Veronica Vasterling, and Linda Fischer (Wurzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2005), 56. 46. Ibid., 63. 47. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence, trans. Bryan Holmes et al. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), 4. 48. Th is term was coined by Patricia Hill Collins to describe the “womencentered networks of community-based child care” in African-American Notes to pages 306–311

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communities in Black Feminist Thought (New York: Routledge, 1990), 179. Othermothers “assist bloodmothers by sharing mothering responsibilities” (ibid., 178). 49. He writes: “precocious or belated, spontaneous or cultivated in museums, [the painter’s] vision in any event learns only by seeing and learns only from itself. ” “Eye and Mind,” 165. However, as early as the Phenomenology Merleau-Ponty realizes that the complete phenomenological reduction is impossible because the phenomenologist belongs to the world. In other works he makes room for a disinterested vision that is always already caught up in its own interests. The phenomenologist is both an interested ‘incomparable monster’ and a disinterested spectator and thus the phenomenologist lives in a paradox: “when it engulfs me truly (interests), it does not engulf me truly (monster). When it does not engulf me truly since I conceive it and me in it (I escape), then I autoposit myself in it. Antihumanistic humanism.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Course Notes: Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology,” trans. Leonard Lawlor, in Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, ed. Leonard Lawlor and Bettina Bergo (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 37. 50. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” in Signs, trans. Richard McLeary (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 59. 51. Ibid. In “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” Merleau-Ponty writes that the painter brings forward a line that was an “already opened furrow” (ibid., 58), a trace from an earlier time, and consequently the painter himself will not be able to tell what in the line was his own and what was already there waiting to be traced again. The link to the past means that nothing is created in absolute isolation but as a response to the horizon of the perceived, historical, and social world. It is in the Husserlian term of Stiftung that Merleau-Ponty finds the best expression of this “unlimited fecundity of each present” (ibid., 59). The horizon of the world together with the painter’s own style create “a tradition to the painter—that is, Husserl remarks, the power to forget origins and to give the past not a survival, which is the hypocritical form of forgetfulness, but a new life, which is the noble form of memory” (ibid.). 52. Shirley Geok-lin Lim, “Memory and the New-Born: The Maternal Imagination in Diaspora,” in This Bridge We Call Home, ed. Gloria E. Anzaldúa and Analouise Keating (New York: Routledge, 2002), 209. See also Hélène Cixous: “There is, at this time, no general woman, no one typical woman. What they have in common I will say. But what strikes me is the infinite richness of their individual constitutions: you can’t talk about a female sexuality, uniform, homogeneous, classifiable into codes—any more than you can talk about one unconscious resembling another. Women’s imaginary is inexhaustible, like music, painting, writing: their stream of phantasms is incredible.” In “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1, no. 4 (1976): 876. 53. Lim, “Memory and the New-Born,” 214. 54. Ibid., 218, 222. 55. The Visible and the Invisible, 180. 368

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56. Francine Wynn, “The Early Relationship of Mother and Pre-Infant: Merleau-Ponty and Pregnancy,” Nursing Philosophy 3 (2002): 10. 57. Lanei Rodemeyer, “Dasein Gets Pregnant,” Philosophy Today 42 (1998): 80. 58. Young, “Pregnant Embodiment,” 49–50. 59. “Then I feel a tickle, a little gurgle in my belly. It is my feeling, my insides, and it feels somewhat like a gas bubble, but it is not; it is different, in another place, belonging to another, another that is nevertheless my body. The first movements of the fetus produce this sense of the splitting subject” (ibid., 49). 60. Ibid. 61. The Visible and the Invisible, 271. Merleau-Ponty writes that the “reality of the inter-human world” is that there is a “surface of separation and of union . . . [which] is the geometrical locus of the projections and introjections, it is the invisible hinge upon which my life and the life of others turn to rock into another, the inner framework of intersubjectivity.” Ibid., 234. 62. Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 168. 63. Wynn, “Merleau-Ponty and Pregnancy,” 12. 64. Ibid., 13. 65. Bigwood, “Renaturalizing the Body,” 68. 66. For a review of pregnancy, choice and the notion of control, see also Kelly Oliver, “Motherhood, Sexuality, and Pregnant Embodiment: Twenty-Five Years of Gestation,” Hypatia 25, no. 4 (2010): 760–777. 67. Caroline Lundquist, “Being Torn: Toward a Phenomenology of Unwanted Pregnancy,” Hypatia 23, no. 3 (2008): 141. 68. Felicita Garcia, “I Just Came Out Pregnant,” in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, 236– 244 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 237, 243–244. 69. Kathryn March, “Childbirth with Fear,” in Mothers and Children: Feminist Analyses and Personal Narratives, ed. Susan E. Chase and Mary F. Rogers (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 170. Important is also March’s own story of pregnancy and miscarriage: “We—feminists and not, alike— are encouraged to think of childbearing as the most natural thing in the world. Childbirth without fear is the idiom of our generation. It is not mine: my births and non-births have all been wrong; mine is very much childbearing with fear” (169). 70. Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 195. 71. Ibid., 198. 72. Tess Cosslett, Women Writing Childbirth: Modern Discourses of Motherhood (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 3. 73. Fredrika Scarth, The Other Within: Ethics, Politics, and the Body in Simone de Beauvoir (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 153. Wynn writes similarly: “Pregnancy is not a possession of either mother or baby-to-be but a ‘dispossession’ that is not a grasping, controlling or owning but an intertwining that overlaps and spreads away.” Wynn, “Merleau-Ponty and Pregnancy,” 5. 74. De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 538. 75. Rodemeyer, “Dasein Gets Pregnant,” 79. Notes to pages 313–318

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391

Contributors

Melissa Burchard is associate professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Asheville. She has published articles on entertainment media and violence, sexual identity, and feminist jurisprudence. Her interests include trauma theory, representations of trauma in children’s stories, problematic sexual desires, and epistemological and ethical implications of trauma. She also cannot resist opportunities to present papers on Buff y the Vampire Slayer. Sonya Charles specializes in reproductive ethics and feminist philosophy. She has written on articles on multiple birth, illicit drug use during pregnancy, vaginal birth after a cesarean section, the role of obstetricians in combating violence against women, and trustworthiness as a parental virtue. She teaches philosophy at Cleveland State University. Cynthia Coe is an associate professor of philosophy and director of the women’s and gender studies program at Central Washington University. She specializes in continental ethics and feminist theory, with particu lar interest in Michel Foucault, Emmanuel Levinas, and Luce Irigaray. Frances Gray is an honorary research advisor in the School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics at the University of Queensland, Australia. She is the author of two books, Jung, Irigaray, Individuation: Philosophy, Analytical Psychology and the Question of the Feminine (2007) and Cartesian Philosophy and the Flesh: Reflections on Incarnation in Analytical Psychology (2012). She is a registered mediator, and in her work, she focuses on philosophy as embodied practice.

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Lisa Guenther is assistant professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction (2006) and Social Death and Its Afterlives: A Phenomenological Critique of Solitary Confinement (in press), as well as several articles in feminist and continental philosophy. Candace Johnson is associate professor of political science at the University of Guelph, where she teaches public policy and political theory. Her current work examines the politics of maternal health preferences in North-South comparative perspective, which entails analysis of narratives from women in Canada, the United States, Cuba, and Honduras. She has two children, Miranda and Máxcimo, who inspire her in everything she does. Eva Feder Kittay is distinguished professor of philosophy at Stony Brook University/SUNY. She is the author or editor of Women and Moral Theory (1987), Metaphor: Its Cognitive Force and Linguistic Structure (1989), Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency (1999),Theoretical Perspectives on Dependency and Women (2002), and The Subject of Care (2003). Sarah LaChance Adams is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Superior. She has published several articles and chapters on pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering and is the author of a forthcoming book on maternal ambivalence and ethics. Caroline R. Lundquist is a doctoral candidate in the philosophy department at the University of Oregon and the recent recipient of a Charlotte Newcombe Ethics Dissertation Fellowship. Her research and teaching interests include ethics, ancient philosophy, and feminist phenomenology. Her most recent work explores the interplay between moral luck and the virtue of kindness. Bertha Alvarez Manninen has published articles in applied ethics in journals such as Hypatia, International Journal of Applied Philosophy, Journal of Medical Ethics, and American Journal of Bioethics. She is an associate professor in philosophy at Arizona State University’s West campus. In her “spare” time she enjoys being with her young daughter, her husband, their five cats, and their two dogs. She also spends a lot of time vacuuming. Kelly Oliver is W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. She has published more than articles and twenty books, including Women as Weapons of War: Iraq, Sex and the Media (2007), Animal Lessons: How They Teach us to Be Human (2009), and Knock Me Up, Knock Me Down: Images of Pregnancy in Hollywood Film (2012).

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Dorothy Rogers is associate professor of philosophy and chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Montclair State University. She has published a number of articles and books on women in the history of philosophy. Her current research focuses on the connections between altruism, pacifism, and feminist thought. Rebecca Tuvel is completing her doctorate in philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Her areas of focus are animal and environmental ethics, feminism, twentiethcentury continental philosophy, and ecofeminism. She is the author of “ ‘ “Veil of Shame’: Derrida, Sarah Bartmann and Animality” (2011) and other scholarly articles. Florentien Verhage is assistant professor of philosophy at Washington and Lee University. She is working on a project broadly conceived as “Phenomenology in and of the Margins.” This project addresses a double crisis: the crisis of the subject in the margin and the crisis of phenomenology trying to heed her call. Kayley Vernallis is professor and chair of the Philosophy Department at California State University, Los Angeles. Her areas of specialty include aesthetics, ethics, LBGT issues, feminism, and nineteenth-century philosophy. She is the author of several articles, including “Gay Marriage and Bisexuality” (2004), “Tedium, Aesthetic Form, and Moral Insight in Silverlake Life” (2008), and “Still Life and Aesthetic Theory: The Gendered-Genre Hierarchy in Mark Tansey’s and Vija Celmins’ Realist Monochromes” (2009). Gail Weiss is chair of the Department of Philosophy and professor of philosophy and human sciences at George Washington University. She is the author of Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality (1999) and Refiguring the Ordinary (2008). She coedited the summer 2011 special issue of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, on the ethics of embodiment. Talia Welsh is U.C. Foundation Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. She is the translator of Maurice MerleauPonty’s Child Psychology & Pedagogy: Maurice Merleau-Ponty at the Sorbonne (2010) and author of the forthcoming The Child as Natural Phenomenologist: Primal and Primary Experience in Merleau-Ponty’s Psychology (2013).

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395

Index

abject/abjection, 17–18, 26–27, 263–79 abortion, 12, 24, 27, 51, 61, 72, 83–87, 122–23, 171–92, 210–11, 247, 253–56, 261. See also pro-choice; pro-life abuse/abusive, 62, 115, 138–67, 241–62, 316 abuse, sexual. See abuse/abusive accountability, 20 adoption, 2, 12, 21–24, 102, 118, 120–37, 138–67, 191 agent/agency, 19, 22, 31–46, 47–70, 77, 110–13, 140, 162–67, 172, 271–78, 313–18 Alcoff, Linda, 8 alienation, 14–16, 37, 104, 188, 197, 213 Allen, Jeffner, 4 animal, 17, 26–27, 47, 52–62, 148, 174–76, 225, 248–49, 259–60, 263–79, 301–3 andréa. See courage anxiety, 22, 31–46, 228–32, 248, 255–58, 263–70 Aristotle, 5, 22, 27, 39, 43, 47–70, 140, 154–58 art, 18, 26, 58, 60, 63, 203, 300–19 autonomy, 18–19, 45–46, 69, 147–55, 185, 191, 195, 254

Beauvoir, Simone de, 2, 13–14, 21, 26, 38, 75, 114–15, 206, 241–62, 285, 292, 301–18 Bigwood, Carol, 14, 290–91, 304–5, 316–17 birth, 1–28, 32–33, 38, 45–46, 47–70, 83, 85, 88–105, 109–19, 120–36, 142, 150, 166, 172–82, 193–214, 215–38, 241–62, 283–84, 289–296, 300–319 birth mother, 109–11, 116–19, 120–37 birth, premature, 222 body, 1–28, 31–46, 47–70, 71–78, 82–87, 88–104, 110–13, 116–19, 123, 143–49, 156–57, 163–64, 171–92, 195–99, 207–13, 217–38, 241–62, 263–79, 284–99, 300–319 Bordo, Susan, 10–11, 297 bottlefeeding, 26, 263–70 breast(s), 26, 102, 181, 263–79 breastfeeding, 2, 8, 14, 25–27, 68, 116, 125, 211–212, 221, 263–79, 303–4, 319 Canada, 49, 183, 193–214, Card, Claudia, 4 care ethics, 19–20 Caesarian section, 38, 68, 117 397

childbirth. See birth; vaginal childbirth Christianity, 17, 22, 47, 51–52, 74 class, 4, 27, 35, 67–69, 134–35, 193–214, 234, 243, 259–60, 264–68, 284–86, 298, 312, 316 Collins, Patricia Hill, 4, 317 complications, childbirth, 196, 204, 211, 215–38, 260 courage, 22, 28, 47–70, creative/creativity, 13, 17–18, 26, 37, 60–61, 271, 290, 300–319 death, 1, 19–22, 31–39, 47–70, 73, 84, 121–30, 171–91, 196–212, 292–93 dependence/dependency, 19–20, 34–35, 117–18, 124, 197, 272, 278, 283 depression, 2, 8, 127, 189, 219 Derrida, Jacques, 71, 80–82, 290 desire, 17, 26, 37–43, 52–57, 122, 138–167, 179, 195, 248–61, 265–77, 292, 311 dichotomy/dualism/dualistic, 14, 18–27, 31, 70, 75, 171–72, 207, 223–38, 289–96 Diotima, 32–33 empathy, 43, 68, 141, 153 embodiment. See body Engels, Frederick, 4 essentialism, 3, 7, 11–12, 297–98 ethics, 5, 15–28, 71–87, 109–19, 146–47, 154, 193–204, 276–77 experience, 1–28, 31–45, 50–68, 72–79, 89–95, 101–4, 109–19, 121–36, 138–67, 172–87,193–214, 215–38, 241–49, 260–61, 265–79, 283–99, 300–319 family name, 17, 80–81 Fausto-Sterling, Anne, 23, 98, 105 feminist ethics/feminist morality, 19, 44, 150, 277 feminist philosophy/feminist theory, 1–28, 105, 121, 140, 194, 205–13, 215, 223, 227, 241, 248, 276, 283–99 fetus, 10–16, 22–27, 36–39, 59, 62, 76, 85–86, 94–104, 109–19, 122, 171–92, 398

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Index

197, 202, 208–9, 227, 243, 247–56, 302–15 film, 241–62, 263 flesh, 15, 22, 71–87, 278, 305 fragile/fragility, 22, 31–46, 163, 213 Friedan, Betty, 8 Freud, Sigmund, 17, 103, 145, 252–53 gender, 1–28, 35, 38, 45, 47–56, 96, 110, 138–39, 196, 201, 223, 252, 257, 262, 283–99, 312–13 generosity, 18, 84 gift, the, 18, 71–87, 117 good enough mother, 41–42, good mother, 37–44, 121–36, 178, 208, 268, Guenther, Lisa, 18, 22–23, 27, 85, 88–105, 117, 302, 311 Hanigsberg, Julia, 24, 85, 171, 180, 188–91 Hays, Sharon, 39 Held, Virginia, 19–20 Hollywood, 25, 241–62, 263–66 hormone/hormonal, 34, 36, 225, 231, 260 hospitality, 22, 71–87 hooks, bell, 4, 205 identity, 11–23, 44. 57, 120–37, 139, 147–50, 179, 186, 194–99, 207–13, 218–20, 248, 271–77, 302 immanence, 38 infant, 15, 19, 51, 88, 94, 98, 101, 103, 109–19, 129, 180–82, 192, 201–2, 212, 236, 256, 259, 269, 276, 289 intersubjective/intersubjectivity, 15, 22, 71–72, 89, 91–105, 110–11, 115, 287, 305, 310, 312–13, 319 intertwining, 14–17, 71, 78, 94, 288, 305, 318 intrauterine. See fetus Irigaray, Luce, 15–23, 33, 39, 42, 72, 91–94, 100, 105, 109, 113, 249, 277, 288–93 Kittay, Eva Feder, 20, 111, 117 Kristeva, Julia, 2, 15–27, 41–44, 74–75, 110–11, 207, 249, 263, 271–75

language, 8, 16–17, 28, 64, 70, 73–84, 95, 100, 104, 162, 165, 167, 194, 205, 227–32, 237, 254, 257, 269, 286, 288, 294–95, 310–11 law, 10, 12, 24, 52, 80–85, 129, 161, 182–185, 191, 198, 225, 228, 231, 246 Levinas, Emmanuel, 5, 18, 71, 79–82, 86, 89, 111–19 love, 14, 20, 32, 42–43, 52, 58, 67, 75, 122–25, 129, 134, 141, 143, 149–50, 160–64, 172, 176, 187, 203, 209, 216, 222, 250, 253, 260–65 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 60–63 manliness, 49, 54 Marx, Karl/Marxist, 41 materiality, 7, 11–12, 17, 37, 40, 45–46, 73–78, 84–86, 95, 97, 101, 124, 133, 135, 193, 197, 206, 214, 226, 290, 300, 312 maternal, 8, 14–26, 18–29, 22–13, 26, 33–45, 68–69, 74, 80, 85–86, 92, 110–16, 120–37, 140–41, 195–201, 211–13, 235, 247–56, 260–61, 263–79, 288–94, 302–13 maternal body, the, 15–18, 26, 34, 37, 69, 85–86, 113, 247, 249–50, 256, 260, 263, 265–67, 272, 276, 302, 305, 309–10 maternal ethics, 20, 85, 324n53, 339n11, 356n16 maternal identity, 23, 120, 126, 277 maternal love, 14, 124 maternal mortality, 195–97, 200, 113, 235, 348n10, 348n11, 349–50n33, 350n34 maternal practice, 20, 140–41 maternal, pre-, 74, 80, 85 maternal thinking, 34, 141 matricide, 17–18, 271 media, 12, 40, 121, 242, 251–56, 267, 270 medicalization/medical model/medical intervention/medical technology, 10, 12, 24–27, 31, 36–38, 45, 59, 61, 93, 104, 116–19, 179, 188–91, 193–214, 215–38, 243, 257–63, 267, 301, 304 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 14–15, 22–27, 71–79, 88–105, 115, 284–96, 300–14

metaphor, 75 metaphysics, 3, 15–17, 66 midwifery, 21, 25, 27, 31–46, 54, 62, 68, 104, 116–117, 194–206, 210, 212, 214, 215–38, 251, 260, 304 miscarriage, 51, 245 morality, 1, 31–33, 38, 46, 195–201, 213, 235, 272 Motherhood Institute for Research and Community Involvement, 2 mothering, 1–28, 40, 44, 51, 70, 138, 140, 206, 209, 283, 304, 316–18 myth, 58, 205–6 natural childbirth. See vaginal childbirth Nietzsche, Friedrich, 18 nursing. See breastfeeding Nye, Andrea, 6–7 obligation, 18, 85, 110–11, 118, 120–23, 131–36, 154, 182, 210 obstetrics, 10, 38, 195–201, 207, 210–14, 217–18, 221, 225–28, 234–35 Oedipus complex, 17 Oliver, Kelly, 18–19, 25, 34, 37, 241–62, 274–76 parenting, 4, 21, 27, 44–45, 127, 129, 133, 136, 138, 141–44, 152, 160–67, 191 parenting, cooperative, 130 132 parenting, property model of, 128, 131, 135 parenting, queer, 24, 140, 150, 158, 162, 164–65 parental rights, 21, 128, 131, 133, 136 patriarchal/patriarchy, 4, 8, 13, 17, 36, 40, 128, 198, 210, 240, 242, 298. See also sexist phenomenology, 3, 7 12, 27, 77, 92, 179, 181, 254, 284–99 phenomenology, feminist, 13, 15, 26, 281, 284, 287, 296–97 phenomenology of pregnancy, 26–27, 179, 180, 283–87, 290–92, 294–96 philosophy, history of, 2, 269, 274, 288, placenta, 16–17, 38, 109, 117, 289 placenta previa, 38 Index

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399

Plato, 3–5, 12, 21–22, 31, 33, 36, 38–39, 43, 45–46, 56, 58, 129, 146, 224, 226, 275 play, 21, 42–48, 124, 146, 148, 207, 208, 277, 303 pregnancy, 1–7, 10–16, 21–23, 25–28, 31–32, 35–39, 44–46, 51–52, 59, 61–67, 72–74, 79–92, 94, 96, 101–4, 109, 116, 121–24, 137, 172–77, 179–213, 218, 225–26, 230, 233, 235, 241–62, 276, 283–97, 300–304, 306, 309, 312–18 pregnancy, teen, 246, 256 pregnancy, unplanned, 121–24, 190 pregnancy, unwanted 22, 72, 74, 83, 254, 316 Polis, 54–58, 61 politics, 2, 10, 18–20, 24, 36, 39, 140, 213, 243, 297 policy, 20, 62, 165, 264 popular culture, 25, 203, 241, 243, 259, 261 poverty, 2, 40, 53, 62, 134, 190, 197 private, 4, 19, 22, 25, 26, 47, 57, 58, 67, 128, 194, 196, 207, 209, 210–13, 243–44, 263, 268 privilege, 13, 25, 35, 74, 79, 110, 117, 133, 165–66, 179, 194–204, 209–14, 227, 267–68, 274–75, 313 pro-choice, 12, 24, 27, 171–74, 184–86, 188–91, 254–58, 260, 261 pro-life, 24, 27, 122, 171–74, 180, 185, 188, 190, 191, 254, 345n2 Psychoanalysis, 15–16, 19, 39, 42, 110, 208, 211, 273–74, 287, 289–90 public, 3, 22, 25, 28, 39, 47–50, 56, 128, 144, 149, 160, 173, 185, 188, 194–96, 200–201, 205, 207, 209–13, 241–45, 251–52, 264, 268, 303 queer, 24, 138–45, 149–53, 158–67 race, 2, 35, 37, 190, 203, 204–8, 264, 284–86, 298, 312–13 Rich, Adrienne, 23, 40, 51–52, 62, 70, 111, 206, 245 reproduction, 7, 10, 17, 18, 22, 27, 31–38, 43, 47, 50–51, 59–64, 78, 98, 400

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Index

102–104, 121, 188–89, 193–94, 197–98, 201–2, 206, 211, 242–43, 246–49, 254–61, 269–71, 289, 301, 309 responsibility, 3–4, 18–19, 23, 38, 40, 49, 64–67, 81–82, 85–86, 109–23, 129, 140, 150–52, 166, 198, 201, 243–51, 259–60, 265, 302 Ruddick, Sara, 20, 41–44, 140–42, 206 Russell, Bertrand, 4 science, 17, 60–62, 74, 126, 154, 207, 225–26, 241, 248, 260, 271, 276, 295 Scott, Joan, 8–11 septicemia, 38 sex, 24, 27, 53, 62, 88, 93–94, 98–100, 104–5, 121, 139–40, 144–46, 149–54, 161–66, 217, 242–45, 248, 251–52, 257–58, 261, 265, 285–86, 301 sexist, 22, 44, 47, 51–53, 63, 287. See also patriarchal/patriarchy sexuality, 37, 51, 53, 57, 69–70, 138–39, 144–45, 149, 160–61, 176, 248–49, 252, 257, 264–66, 286 sexual, 40, 53, 62, 98, 101, 122, 139, 144–54, 161–64, 178, 187, 231, 252, 265–67, 276, 288–98 sexualized, 37, 249, 252, 258, 265–66 sexual abuse, 24, 62, 139–44, 149, 153, 155–56, 161–64, 166 sexual activity, 144–45, 151–54, 161 sexual difference, 23, 88–89, 92–94, 98–104 sexual desire, 144–51, 154, 160–61, 248 sexual development, 99, 144 sex education, 24, 191 sexual ethics, 146–47, 154 sexual identity, 139 sexual objectification/sexual object, 26, 37, 151, 265, 264–69 sexual orientation, 32 sexual sin, 22, 47, 51, 58 Simms, Eva, 15, 278–79 Simons, Margaret, 13 Socrates, 3–5, 31–33, 42, 56 soul, 19, 32, 78, 122, 137–38, 224, 275, 295–96, 301 Spock, Benjamin, 39

Stabat Mater, 17, 111. subject, 19–22, 26–27, 30, 33–34, 37, 44–46, 71–72, 77–78, 82–84, 92–93, 101–5, 146, 155, 180,193–99, 204–8, 213, 224–50, 257, 271–74, 283–86, 288–97, 301–18 subject-object dichotomy, 14, 18 subjective, 37, 42, 73–74, 83–87, 128, 254, 272, 288, 295, 303 subjectivity, 19, 22, 34, 38, 45, 81–84, 89, 101–2, 148–49, 94–196, 205–13, 249, 277, 289, 301–5, 308–10, 316, 318 taboo, 17, 242–43, 266 Toombs, S. Kay, 10–11 Transcendence, 34, 38, 41–42, 45–46, 79–80, 112, 287, 301, 307 umbilical cord, 17, 116, 303 unconscious, 17–18, 26, 116, 163, 189, 263, 272, 275, 283

vaginal childbirth, 24, 38, 68–69, 193–214, 215–38, 241–43, 260–62 virility, 22, 31–34, 246 virtue, 22, 28, 32, 43, 48–57, 60–63, 67, 70, 75, 78–80, 141, 174–77, 184, 201, 301, 307 vulnerable/vulnerability, 20–22, 31, 34–38, 40–46, 64–66, 112–16, 134–35, 194, 197, 209, 213–14, 302 What to Expect (When You’re Expecting), 36, 39 Willett, Cynthia, 19, 12, 113–15 Winnicott, D.W, 41–44 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 35, 38, 275 womb, 17–18, 33, 39, 59, 99, 179–82, 242, 247, 250, 259, 302, 315 Young, Iris, 3, 9, 11–14, 21–23, 35–37, 88, 104–5, 110, 197, 207–8, 213, 249–54, 257–58, 264–266, 287–93, 298–303, 314–16

Index

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401

Perspectives in Continental Philosophy John D. Caputo, series editor

John D. Caputo, ed., Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. Michael Strawser, Both/And: Reading Kierkegaard— From Irony to Edification. Michael D. Barber, Ethical Hermeneutics: Rationality in Enrique Dussel’s Philosophy of Liberation. James H. Olthuis, ed., Knowing Other- wise: Philosophy at the Th reshold of Spirituality. James Swindal, Reflection Revisited: Jürgen Habermas’s Discursive Theory of Truth. Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining: Modern and Postmodern. Second edition. Thomas W. Busch, Circulating Being: From Embodiment to Incorporation— Essays on Late Existentialism. Edith Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics. Second edition. Francis J. Ambrosio, ed., The Question of Christian Philosophy Today. Jeffrey Bloechl, ed., The Face of the Other and the Trace of God: Essays on the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Ilse N. Bulhof and Laurens ten Kate, eds., Flight of the Gods: Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Theology. Trish Glazebrook, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science. Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology, and Philosophy. Mark C. Taylor, Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard. Second edition. Dominique Janicaud, Jean-François Courtine, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, and Paul Ricoeur, Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate.

Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt. Introduction by Joseph W. Koterski, S.J. Jean-Luc Marion, The Idol and Distance: Five Studies. Translated with an introduction by Thomas A. Carlson. Jeff rey Dudiak, The Intrigue of Ethics: A Reading of the Idea of Discourse in the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas. Robyn Horner, Rethinking God as Gift: Marion, Derrida, and the Limits of Phenomenology. Mark Dooley, The Politics of Exodus: Søren Kierkegaard’s Ethics of Responsibility. Merold Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology: Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith. Edith Wyschogrod, Jean-Joseph Goux, and Eric Boynton, eds., The Enigma of Gift and Sacrifice. Stanislas Breton, The Word and the Cross. Translated with an introduction by Jacquelyn Porter. Jean-Luc Marion, Prolegomena to Charity. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. Peter H. Spader, Scheler’s Ethical Personalism: Its Logic, Development, and Promise. Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For. Translated by Jeffrey Bloechl. Don Cupitt, Is Nothing Sacred? The Non-Realist Philosophy of Religion: Selected Essays. Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena. Translated by Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud. Phillip Goodchild, Rethinking Philosophy of Religion: Approaches from Continental Philosophy. William J. Richardson, S.J., Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought. Jeffrey Andrew Barash, Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning. Jean-Louis Chrétien, Hand to Hand: Listening to the Work of Art. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Call and the Response. Translated with an introduction by Anne Davenport. D. C. Schindler, Han Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth: A Philosophical Investigation. Julian Wolfreys, ed., Thinking Diff erence: Critics in Conversation. Allen Scult, Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger: An Ontological Encounter. Richard Kearney, Debates in Continental Philosophy: Conversations with Contemporary Thinkers. Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language: Toward a New Poetics of Dasein. Jolita Pons, Stealing a Gift: Kierkegaard’s Pseudonyms and the Bible. Jean-Yves Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man. Translated by Mark Raftery-Skehan. Charles P. Bigger, Between Chora and the Good: Metaphor’s Metaphysical Neighborhood.

Dominique Janicaud, Phenomenology “Wide Open”: After the French Debate. Translated by Charles N. Cabral. Ian Leask and Eoin Cassidy, eds., Givenness and God: Questions of Jean-Luc Marion. Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan. Edited by Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen. William Desmond, Is There a Sabbath for Thought? Between Religion and Philosophy. Bruce Ellis Benson and Norman Wirzba, eds., The Phenomenology of Prayer. S. Clark Buckner and Matthew Statler, eds., Styles of Piety: Practicing Philosophy after the Death of God. Kevin Hart and Barbara Wall, eds., The Experience of God: A Postmodern Response. John Panteleimon Manoussakis, After God: Richard Kearney and the Religious Turn in Continental Philosophy. John Martis, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe: Representation and the Loss of the Subject. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image. Edith Wyschogrod, Crossover Queries: Dwelling with Negatives, Embodying Philosophy’s Others. Gerald Bruns, On the Anarchy of Poetry and Philosophy: A Guide for the Unruly. Brian Treanor, Aspects of Alterity: Levinas, Marcel, and the Contemporary Debate. Simon Morgan Wortham, Counter-Institutions: Jacques Derrida and the Question of the University. Leonard Lawlor, The Implications of Immanence: Toward a New Concept of Life. Clayton Crockett, Interstices of the Sublime: Theology and Psychoanalytic Theory. Bettina Bergo, Joseph Cohen, and Raphael Zagury-Orly, eds., Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida. Translated by Bettina Bergo and Michael B. Smith. Jean-Luc Marion, On the Ego and on God: Further Cartesian Questions. Translated by Christina M. Gschwandtner. Jean-Luc Nancy, Philosophical Chronicles. Translated by Franson Manjali. Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity. Translated by Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith. Andrea Hurst, Derrida Vis-à- vis Lacan: Interweaving Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis. Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli me tangere: On the Raising of the Body. Translated by Sarah Clift, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am. Edited by Marie-Louise Mallet, translated by David Wills. Jean-Luc Marion, Th e Visible and the Revealed. Translated by Christina M. Gschwandtner and others. Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology. Translated by Scott Davidson. Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus. Translated by Richard A. Rand. Joshua Kates, Fielding Derrida. Michael Naas, Derrida From Now On. Shannon Sullivan and Dennis J. Schmidt, eds., Difficulties of Ethical Life.

Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain? Translated by Sebastian Rand, Introduction by Marc Jeannerod. Claude Romano, Event and World. Translated by Shane Mackinlay. Vanessa Lemm, Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy: Culture, Politics, and the Animality of the Human Being. B. Keith Putt, ed., Gazing Through a Prism Darkly: Reflections on Merold Westphal’s Hermeneutical Epistemology. Eric Boynton and Martin Kavka, eds., Saintly Influence: Edith Wyschogrod and the Possibilities of Philosophy of Religion. Shane Mackinlay, Interpreting Excess: Jean-Luc Marion, Saturated Phenomena, and Hermeneutics. Kevin Hart and Michael A. Signer, eds., The Exorbitant: Emmanuel Levinas Between Jews and Christians. Bruce Ellis Benson and Norman Wirzba, eds., Words of Life: New Theological Turns in French Phenomenology. William Robert, Trials: Of Antigone and Jesus. Brian Treanor and Henry Isaac Venema, eds., A Passion for the Possible: Thinking with Paul Ricoeur. Kas Saghafi, Apparitions— Of Derrida’s Other. Nick Mansfield, The God Who Deconstructs Himself: Sovereignty and Subjectivity Between Freud, Bataille, and Derrida. Don Ihde, Heidegger’s Technologies: Postphenomenological Perspectives. Françoise Dastur, Questioning Phenomenology. Translated by Robert Vallier. Suzi Adams, Castoriadis’s Ontology: Being and Creation. Richard Kearney and Kascha Semonovitch, eds., Phenomenologies of the Stranger: Between Hostility and Hospitality. Michael Naas, Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources of Religion, Science, and the Media. Alena Alexandrova, Ignaas Devisch, Laurens ten Kate, and Aukje van Rooden, Re-treating Religion: Deconstructing Christianity with Jean-Luc Nancy. Preamble by Jean-Luc Nancy. Emmanuel Falque, The Metamorphosis of Finitude: An Essay on Birth and Resurrection. Translated by George Hughes. Scott M. Campbell, The Early Heidegger’s Philosophy of Life: Facticity, Being, and Language. Françoise Dastur, How Are We to Confront Death? An Introduction to Philosophy. Translated by Robert Vallier. Foreword by David Farrell Krell. Christina M. Gschwandtner, Postmodern Apologetics? Arguments for God in Contemporary Philosophy. Ben Morgan, On Becoming God: Late Medieval Mysticism and the Modern Western Self. Neal DeRoo, Futurity in Phenomenology: Promise and Method in Husserl, Levinas, and Derrida. Sarah LaChance Adams and Caroline R. Lundquist, eds., Coming to Life: Philosophies of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Mothering.