Toward a situated knowledge of embodiment: Theorizing Pregnant Time

• In Event: Powered Perceptions: Technologies of Sensation and the Female Body

Abstract

This paper aims to think pregnancy as an embodied experience that is mediated first and foremost by temporality. Throughout the nine months of pregnancy, there is a temporal relation between body and fetus that is static across different kinds of bodies. While this temporal experience is shared across and among pregnant bodies, the way that pregnant time is lived is wholly dependent upon a variety of contextual factors like socio-economic status, religion, and sexuality. Following Donna Haraway, this paper theorizes the temporal identity of pregnant bodies in terms of sensation in order to produce a situated knowledge of the pregnant body: What are the discourses/modes/sensory apparatuses that mediate a pregnant body’s experience of time? To that end, this paper looks at popular media representations of pregnant bodies, reading them as reflective of the ideological assumptions of mainstream American culture. Particularly, I look at two common assumptions made in these films (that birth stands in for pregnancy and that one can control time in her life), arguing that both of these assumptions obscure the conditions under which real bodies live in the world. Ultimately, I argue that the “time-crisis” induced by the conditions of post-feminist, post-modern life in America does not have to last forever, as there are surely other ways of imagining the way that bodies experience time.

Author

• Erin Arizzi, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill