two - Disruptive pregnancy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 April 2022
Summary
Years ago, as a college student, I spent a semester abroad in a beautiful, historic city where the two sentences I heard most in English, usually conjoined, were “You want to go for coffee?” and “You want to have sex with me, baby?” I lived near a huge public garden where I wished I could walk or study, but couldn’t, without being followed, threatened and subjected to jarring revelations of some creep's penis among the foliage. One day in a fit of weird defiance I tied a sofa cushion to my belly under a loose dress and discovered this was the magic charm: I could walk anywhere, unmolested. I carried my after-class false pregnancy to the end of the term, happily ignored by predators. As a lissom 20-yearold I resented my waddly disguise, but came around to a riveting truth: being attractive was less useful to me than being free. (Kingsolver, 2018)
As we saw in Chapter One, the striation of public space fosters an ordering in which certain practices, people, or discourses, are normalised, and others are not. We saw that the intervention of a disruptive body harbours the capacity to trouble this striation. Woman – of the domestic, excluded from the public realm – is discursively outof- place in public space (Wilson, 1991; Solnit, 2000; Elkin, 2016). As Rebecca Solnit (2000: 234) tells us, phrases such as ‘public man’, ‘man about town’, and ‘man of the streets’ mean something quite different when attached to a feminine noun.
Consider, then, the trouble posed by the pregnant body in public space. The penetration of the pregnant body into public space could be considered something quite banal – pregnancy is rather common, after all – but it is nonetheless a site of antagonism. Sex, which usually, although not always, is how pregnancies occur, is private, but pregnancy itself is not. Historically pregnancy, maternity, childbirth and childrearing have been discursively associated with the private realm of women. Confinement, also associated with the sequestering of a peri-natal woman in darkened and quiet rooms before and after the birth, takes its etymological origins from the Old French confins, and describes a boundary or border.
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- Information
- Disrupting Rape CulturePublic Space, Sexuality and Revolt, pp. 31 - 70Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2019