Contemporary Literature and Reproductive Justice (NeMLA 2024)
Boston
Organization: NeMLA
Event: NeMLA 2024
The reversal of Dobbs V Jackson Women's Health Organization on June 24th, 2022 left pregnant people, potentially pregnant people, feminist theorists and activists grappling with the consequences. This panel will investigate the reverberations of the Dobbs decision while addressing the broader critical paradigm of reproductive justice. Papers will bring a literary focus to bear on contemporary reproductive issues, while allowing for a textured and complex attention to, for example, questions of maternal subjectivity and affect, aspects of care labour, and theories of morning and materiality. The panel will consider contemporary literary texts that might help us to delineate the maternal as an irreducibly liminal state with the potential to resituate our understanding of the relational more broadly. Papers might draw on a broad range of theoretical and literary scholarship (for example, the work of Lisa Baraiter, Alys Weinbaum, Dorothy Roberts, Lisa Guenther, Rosalyn Diprose and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek and others) as they attempt to answer distinct but related questions about the utopian and dystopian futures of reproduction post-Row. If neoliberal versions of post maternal thinking at once devalue maternal labour and inform the more general impoverishment of the public sphere, this panel asks how literary and theoretical interventions might help us to rethink and reclaim the maternal (and the post-maternal) for feminist politics. Please submit an abstract and short cv through the NeMLA portal by October 1, 2023.
https://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention.html
Naomi Morgenstern
