Florian Lützelberger (University of Oxford)
Susen Halank (University of Bamberg)
Reproductive health is among the most contested and simultaneously most systematically silenced domains of human experience. Decisions about whether, when, and how to become pregnant, to carry a pregnancy to term, to parent, or to refuse motherhood (or parenthood) are neither simply personal nor simply medical: they constitute, as Ross and Solinger demonstrate in their foundational study, a field in which “nations, political parties, religious and ethnic groups, and other entities claim a stake” and in which “an intensely private human activity” is turned into “a matter of public concern, sometimes a public obsession” (2017, 168). The reproductive justice framework – originally developed by Black feminist activists in the United States and now applied globally – demands three interlinked rights: the right not to have a child, the right to have a child, and the right to parent in safe and healthy environments. These rights remain unequally distributed, unevenly narratable and deeply shaped by race, class, ability, legal regime and geography.
The past decade has seen a remarkable proliferation of literary and cinematic works that refuse to leave reproductive experience at the margins. Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs, Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, Annie Ernaux’s L’événement and Audrey Diwan’s film adaptation or Kornél Mundruczó’s Pieces of a Woman (to name only a few) negotiate experiences that public discourse tends either to overload with political meaning or to dismiss as merely private: illegal and legal abortion, stillbirth and perinatal loss, the ethics and logistics of donor conception, ambivalent and refused motherhood, the bodily upheavals of perimenopause, the long corridors of fertility treatment. In doing so, they raise urgent questions about shame, institutional language, the distribution of care, and the conditions under which reproductive experience becomes speakable at all.
We welcome papers that examine how literature (autofictional and life writing, novels, poetry, (auto-)biography, memoir, …) and film engage with the full range of reproductive health experiences – including those that receive least cultural attention. As Ross and Solinger argue, storytelling in the context of reproductive justice is “an act of subversion and resistance” that shifts the lens from abstract rights claims to the material and affective realities of individual lives (2017, 59). Papers may for example draw on approaches from Critical Medical Humanities, reproductive justice theory, feminist narratology, biopolitics and intersectionality. Topics may include but are not limited to: abortion narratives across different legal regimes; miscarriage and pregnancy loss; voluntary childlessness and regretting motherhood; IVF, egg donation and surrogacy; breastfeeding and lactation as biopolitical terrain; postnatal depression and maternal mental health; perimenopause and menopause; the figures of the midwife, wet nurse, and doula; contraception, amniocentesis and caesarean section as sites of consent and coercion etc.
Contributions from scholars in literary studies, comparative literature, film and media studies, gender studies, medical humanities and related fields are warmly encouraged. Papers engaging contemporary texts and films from any linguistic and cultural context as well as comparative and interdisciplinary approaches are welcome.
This panel explores how contemporary literature and film engage with reproductive health – from abortion and miscarriage to IVF, menopause and breastfeeding – through the lens of reproductive justice theory. We invite papers on narrative and cinematic strategies, the politics of silence and protest, obstetric violence, the biopolitical regulation of reproductive bodies etc.