Feminism and the Pregnant Body: A Complex Relationship

Feminism has a complex relationship to pregnancy and the pregnant body. On the one hand, protection of the pregnant body on the workplace, criticism of medical surveillance and control of pregnant women and claims for financial support related to pregnancy have been sites of political struggle for feminists in Europe and in the US since the 1970s. On the other hand, the pregnant body has remained rather under-theorized by contemporary feminist thinkers. This absence reveals feminists’ uneasiness regarding pregnancy, which seems to bring to the fore the biological difference between sexes and hence bears the suspicion of essentialist thought. In this Paper, first I wish to review feminist engagements and disengagements with the pregnant body, between marginalization and fetishization. In the 1970s, radical feminists like Delphy or Firestone framed maternity as a site of oppression for women. At the same time, so-called “French feminists” Kristeva, Cixous or Irigaray framed pregnancy and maternity as a source of female power, a theory that relies on the biological difference between sexes. Women’s and gender studies focused on subjective experiences of pregnant women with the medicalization of their body. Second, I will draw on an ethnographic fieldwork in a psychosocial pregnancy counselling unit in Switzerland to articulate some questions on the definition of the pregnant body. What is pregnancy? When does it start, when does it end? Can we straightforwardly qualify pregnancy as a feminine experience? By exploring these questions on the ontology of pregnancy, I wish to assess if the pregnant body can constitute a relevant political object for feminists today.