Hostname: page-component-f554764f5-rj9fg Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-04-08T16:24:08.275Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Motherhood, Sexuality, and Pregnant Embodiment: Twenty-Five Years of Gestation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

Kelly Oliver
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

My essay is framed by Hypatia's first special issue on Motherhood and Sexuality at one end, and by the most recent special issue (as of this writing) on the work of Iris Young, whose work on pregnant embodiment has become canonical, at the other. The questions driving this essay are: When we look back over the last twenty-five years, what has changed in our conceptions of pregnancy and maternity, both in feminist theory and in popular culture? What aspects of feminist debates from the 1970s and 1980s are still relevant today? And, how might what appear to be radical shifts in popular perceptions of pregnancy actually continue traditional values that objectify and “abjectify” the maternal body?

Here, I will focus on three central elements of the revaluation of pregnancy and maternity as they show up in feminist philosophy and in popular culture: 1. The relationship between pregnancy and sexuality, both in terms of pregnant sexuality and in terms of the pregnant body as sexual object; 2. The “choice” to become a mother as a “feminist choice”; 3. The temporality of pregnancy and birth as marking something like “women's time.”

Type
Invited Papers
Information
Hypatia , Volume 25 , Issue 4: Special Issue: Feminist Legacies/Feminist Futures: The 25th Anniversary Issue , Summer 2010 , pp. 760 - 777
Copyright
Copyright © 2010 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Beauvoir, Simone de. 1949. The second sex. Trans. H. M. Parshley. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1989. The body politics of Julia Kristeva. Hypatia 3 (3): 104–18.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Card, Claudia. 1996. Against marriage and motherhood. Hypatia 11 (3): 1–23.10.1111/j.1527-2001.1996.tb01013.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Diquinzio, Patrice. 1993. Exclusion and essentialism in feminist theory: The problem of mothering. Hypatia 8 (3): 1–20.10.1111/j.1527-2001.1993.tb00033.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferguson, Ann. 1986. Motherhood and sexuality: Some feminist questions. Hypatia 1 (2): 3–22.10.1111/j.1527-2001.1986.tb00834.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Firestone, Shulamith. 1970. The dialectic of sex. New York: William Morrow.Google Scholar
Fraser, Nancy. 1989. Introduction. Hypatia 3 (3): 1–9.10.1111/j.1527-2001.1988.tb00184.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fuss, Diana. 1989. “Essentially speaking”: Luce Irigaray's language of essence. Hypatia 3 (3): 62–80.10.1111/j.1527-2001.1988.tb00189.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grosz, Elizabeth. 1989. Sexual subversions: Three French feminists. Sydney: Allen and Unwin.Google Scholar
Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism. Sydney: Allen and Unwin.Google Scholar
Guenther, Lisa. 2006. Like a maternal body: Emmanuel Levinas and the motherhood of Moses. Hypatia 21 (1): 119–36.10.1353/hyp.2005.0140CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hewlett, Sylvia Ann. 2002. Baby hunger: The new battle for motherhood. London: Atlanta Books.Google Scholar
Kristeva, Julia. 1980. Powers of horror. Trans. Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Kristeva, Julia. 2002. The portable Kristeva, ed. Kelly, Oliver. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Kristeva, Julia. 2010. Hatred and forgiveness. Trans. Janine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Lundquist, Caroline. 2008. Being torn: Toward a phenomenology of unwanted pregnancy. Hypatia 23 (3): 136–55.10.1111/j.1527-2001.2008.tb01209.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mann, Bonnie. 2007. The lesbian June Cleaver: Heterosexism and lesbian mothering. Hypatia 22 (1): 149–65.10.1111/j.1527-2001.2007.tb01154.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Michaels, Meredith W. 1996. Other mothers: Toward an ethic of postmaternal practice. Hypatia 11 (2): 49–70.10.1111/j.1527-2001.1996.tb00664.xCrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mullin, Amy. 2006. Parents and children: An alternative to selfless and unconditional love. Hypatia 21 (1): 181–200.10.1111/j.1527-2001.2006.tb00971.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nye, Andrea. 1989. The hidden host: Irigaray and Diotima at Plato's Symposium. Hypatia 3 (3): 45–61.10.1111/j.1527-2001.1988.tb00188.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oliver, Kelly. 1993a. Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the double‐bind. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Oliver, Kelly. 1993b. Julia Kristeva's feminist revolution. Hypatia 8 (3): 94–114.10.1111/j.1527-2001.1993.tb00038.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oliver, Kelly. 1995. Womanizing Nietzsche: Philosophy's relation to “the feminine.” New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Oliver, Kelly. 1997. Family values: Subjects between nature and culture. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Oliver, Kelly. 2000. Conflicted love. Hypatia 15 (3): 1–18.10.1111/j.1527-2001.2000.tb00328.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oliver, Kelly. 2010. Enhancing Evolution: Whose Body? Whose Choice? Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol 48, Fall.10.1111/j.2041-6962.2010.00022.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oliver, Kelly. Forthcoming. Knock me up, Knock me down: Images of pregnancy in Hollywood Film.Google Scholar
Park, Shelley M. 2006. Adoptive maternal bodies: A queer paradigm for rethinking mothering? Hypatia 21 (1): 201–26.10.1111/j.1527-2001.2006.tb00972.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Simons, Margaret. 1984. Motherhood, feminism, and identity. Women's Studies International Forum 2:349–59.Google Scholar
Simons, Margaret. 1989. Two interviews with Simone de Beauvoir. Hypatia 3 (3) pp. 11–27.10.1111/j.1527-2001.1988.tb00185.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sundstrom, Ronald. 2008. The browning of American and the evasion of social justice. Albany: SUNY.Google Scholar
Young, Iris Marion. 1985. Humanism, gynocentrism, and feminist politics. Women's Studies International Forum 8 (3): 173–83.10.1016/0277-5395(85)90040-8CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Throwing like a girl and other essays in feminist philosophy and social theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar