Subjectivity Denied: Commodifying the Female (Body)

• In Event: Sex, Rights, and Reproduction

Abstract

US court-ordered cesarean sections and the forced maintenance of life support to pregnant brain-dead women reveal the continued reality of Beauvoir’s statement that “woman is a womb”, her body a penetrable object, an instrument of production, a resource to be exploited. Equally abhorrent is the manipulation of a “mother’s love” in these discourses; indeed, women forced to undergo these procedures are often told that to refuse would suggest she doesn’t “love” her unborn child. This paper seeks to unpack the objectification of the female body in biomedical and juridical discourses, and the exploitation of "maternal love" to perpetuate such objectification.

Presenter

• Rebecca Newmark, Princeton University