Monstrous Pregnancy: Embodied Knowledge, Liminal Embodiment, and Transmasculine Reproduction

• In Event: 40451 - Hormones, Biology, and Embodied and Reproductive Justice

Abstract

In this paper, I use my own experience as a transmasculine, disabled, gestating person to theorize the liminal nature of embodiment. Shilling (2013) notes that the greatest weakness of interdisciplinary (and mostly non-empirical) theories of the body is that they tend to reify the body as either a distinct and static material object, or an infinitely malleable cultural phenomenon. To contribute to sociological scholarship that examines embodied experience, I offer an empirical account of changing embodiment and bodily experience that illustrates how bodies are non-distinct and non-static. To gestate a baby in one’s body is to undergo rapid, dramatic, continuous change—both physical and social. I use my experience navigating the pregnancy process to: a) viscerally illustrate an experience of embodied change through pregnancy, how pregnancy felt physically, and b) theorize my social experience of transmasculine gestational embodiment. I call it a monstrous pregnancy. By monstrous, I mean non-normative, unexpected, or unimaginable embodiment. Non-normative bodies, including trans and disabled bodies, have been framed and sensationalized as monstrous. I use the specter of monstrosity in a critical way: to mark the institutional cisnormativity I experienced, and to point to how I, with others, creatively resist this inequality. I illustrate four experiences of bodily change (conception, gestation, birth, and postpartum) to theorize monstrous, liminal embodiment.

Author

• Sonny M. Nordmarken, Georgia State University