ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Representing Pregnancy: Science and Culture in the 20th Century 1

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

• Agata Ignaciuk, University of Granada

Commentator

• Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska, University of Warsaw

Individual Presentations

• Anti-abortion visuals in Spain (1975-1985) - José Luis Aguilar López-Barajas, Institute of History, Czech Academy of Sciences; Agata Ignaciuk, University of Granada

• ‘To inform, not frighten’: Visual cultures of anti-abortion activism in 1980s and early 1990s Ireland - Laura Kelly, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow

• The Fetus as Blueprint? Secularism, Science, and Abortion Law Reform in Canada, 1967-1969 - Christabelle Sethna, University of Ottawa

Session Organizers

• Agata Ignaciuk, University of Granada

• Sylwia Kuźma-Markowska, University of Warsaw