Is Daddy Having a Baby? Labor, Speculation, and Race-Making in 20th Century Histories of Male Pregnancy

• In Event: Science, Knowledge & Technology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 2: Distinguishing difference: classification, standardization, and racialization

Abstract

This article examines the social visibility of trans reproduction in the years surrounding the popularization of in vitro fertilization (IVF) after the 1978 birth of Louise Brown. Rather than centering medical institutions, I turn to newspapers, magazines, and newsletters to show how popular media staged reproductive innovation as a drama about which bodies properly bear life. Media narratives cast reproductive science as a cultural arena for idealizing certain bodies—imagined as stable, sexually dimorphic, white, and naturally suited to reproductive labor—while treating others as aberrant or speculative. As embryos appeared to move outside the body, speculation intensified about which bodies should remain central to gestation and what it would mean to detach pregnancy from feminized and racialized forms of embodied work.

Drawing on the concept of the speculative present (Radin 2019), I organize this analysis around three affective genres: scientific enchantment, sensationalism, and miracle. Each illuminates how reproductive technologies were invested with fantasies of bodily futurity. I situate these fantasies in relation to 1960s sexological and social scientific discourses on transsexualism and family pathology, including racist texts such as the Moynihan Report, which bound reproductive normalcy to racial hierarchy and heteronormative sexual dimorphism. The “healthy” family depended on properly sexed bodies performing differentiated reproductive roles, with white middle-class femininity positioned as the exemplary site of gestational labor.

Media coverage crystallized around two figures: “male pregnancy,” pathologized as psychosomatic disturbance, and the pregnant man, who emerged after IVF as a speculative corporeal possibility. This pregnant man functioned as a counterfigure to feminized reproductive labor. Framed as spectacle—sensational and miraculous—he appeared to transcend the devalued labor historically assigned to women. Rather than undoing sexual difference, the figure reoriented reproductive fantasy around an idealized masculine body newly capable of gestation, even as racialized and gendered bodies remained the unmarked ground of reproductive work.

Author

• Carlo Sariego, Yale University