ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Representing Pregnancy: Science and Culture in the 20th Century 2

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This symposium explores how 20th-century science, biomedicine and culture represented pregnancy. As Barbara Duden, Rosalind Petchesky, Maria Jesús Santesmases and others have shown, the scientific, visual, and political construction of embryonic and fetal bodies as abstract and universal have had lasting impact on the healthcare cultures and everyday experiences of pregnancy. Building and contributing to recent scholarship on the history of reproductive medicine, health and activism, this symposium foregrounds the gestational process and pregnant bodies. We draw from diverse European and transnational case studies to explore ways the pregnant body has been represented, experienced, conceptualized and erased during the second half of the 20th century. Collectively, it explores ways medical and activist cultures have competed to define, visualize, and control the meanings of pregnancy. By focusing on pregnant people—and purposefully contextualizing the embryo and fetus—the symposium examines narratives and practices that have often rendered women’s bodies invisible within the histories of reproductive science. The session thus provides new perspectives on the intersections of gender, politics of representation, and scientific authority in the history of reproductive biomedicine and health.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Maria J Santesmases, CSIC, Spain

Commentator

• Agata Ignaciuk, University of Granada

Individual Presentations

• Bringing “pro-life” message to the parish and the street: Visual anti-abortion materials in late communist and early democratic Poland (1970s-1990s) - Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska, University of Warsaw

• ‘Abortion is a tragedy, not a crime’: pro-abortion visual discourse in Italy (1956-1981) - Azzurra Tafuro, University of Padua

• Embodied expertise and contested authority: feminist knowledge production in Spanish abortion trials (1970s-1980s) - Elisa Roncone, University of Granada

Session Organizers

• Agata Ignaciuk, University of Granada

• Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska, University of Warsaw