“THE PARADOX OF HEGEMONIC VULNERABILITY IN REPRODUCTIVE NARRATIVES
Paper Abstract:
Disability and animality are new concerns with respect to the reproductive body, which have been explored in bioethical as well as critical posthuman theories. Ultrasound imaging and other biomedical practices in prenatal care have increasingly fostered a reproductive imaginary which pictures the fetus simultaneously as “person” and as prone to human deviation – the alien, the animal, the monstrous. The fetal figure has thus come to play a crucial role in the construction of a fragile human future, in which the attention to individual bodies and fetuses as sites of vulnerability and precarity blinds us to the cultural sources of anxiety, distress, risk, and loss bound up with embodiment. Such reproductive discourses and practices make effective use of concepts like vulnerability, care, and empathy in ways that sentimentalize and moralize the relation between expectant parent and unborn life.
In my paper I aim to expose and counter the construction of fetal vulnerability in the dominant cultural imaginary; an imaginary that is reinforced by the visualization of fetal life through ultrasound imaging, and is likely to reproduce an ableist, heteronormative, and moralizing discourse of the as yet “unavailable” life. With the help of queer, posthuman literary narratives of reproduction, I hope to draw out the possibilities for alternative reproductive imaginaries which not only offer new ways of imagining unborn life beyond visuality, but which also critically reflect about the potentially dangerous effects of a discourse of vulnerability in the figure of what Donna Haraway has called the “biomedical public fetus” (“The Virtual Speculum”, 1997).
Biography: Jules Sturm, Dr.
Jules is an independent researcher based in Amsterdam and teaches at the Art Academy the “Sandberg Instituut” on critical theories of the body. Her background is in philosophy and gender studies, literary and cultural analysis. In Jules’ work, she has always close-read art and literature as interlocutors for theory. Jules’ interdisciplinary approaches to societal problems of difference and embodiment are informed by posthuman theories, disability studies, and queer theory. In 2014, Jules published a book called “Bodies We Fail: Productive Embodiments of Imperfection”, which explores the productive effects of bodily ›failure‹ in the sphere of visuality. By analyzing artistic literary and visual representations of imperfect, disabled, aging, queer, and monstrous bodies, this book exposes the »handicaps« of normative vision and opens up new ways of recognizing a multitude of corporeal existences and practices outside the norm.
Jules Sturm’s lecture can be found here
Further information to Jules Sturm’s research areas, publications and teaching: http://www.julessturm.org/research/