Material Maternities: Representing Reproduction

Jennifer S. Henke
University of Greifswald
Germany
__________

How dangerous are pregnancy and childbirth? Are these medical conditions in need of constant supervision? When, why and how was pregnancy pathologized? Can maternal subjects be made responsible for birth defects? And are foetuses little individuals with a right to personhood? Instead of addressing these politically charged questions from an ethical or judicial viewpoint, this talk rather asks about the history of reproduction by turning to verbal and visual representations of pregnancy and birth. The lecture concentrates on the Age of Reason and discusses actual medical practices, anatomical illustrations as well as obstetric machines that were used for medical training. It also deals with maternal myths that rendered the female reproductive body suspect. Together, these material discourses can be understood as feedback loops: They ‘re-present’ the power shift from traditional female connoted midwifery to male dominated obstetrics which had far-reaching consequences with regards to how we regard pregnancy and birth until today. The talk then takes a leap forward into our present and sheds light on modern media representations of reproduction. Methodologically, it takes its cue from the fields of posthumanism and material cultures and is situated in the medical humanities. I argue that one cannot think representations of reproduction without considering their material conditions that mutually define on one another. In Karen Barad’s words, I contend that both sides of the coin – meaning and matter – are inextricably entangled with one another in a non-causal and non-linear manner. It is thus possible to ‘intralink’ representations of the reproductive body with the actual, material dissection table. Both material-discursive practices figuratively and literally fragment female corporeality with the effect that pregnancy is rendered a medical condition in need of control by rational science. One of the lecture’s aims is thus to raise awareness not only for the importance of representation but also for their entanglement with matter.

Bio.
Dr. phil. Jennifer S. Henke currently holds the position of stand-in professor for Anglophone Gender Studies at the University of Greifswald, Germany. Prior to this appointment she represented the Chair of English Literature at the University of Freiburg. Dr. Henke received her PhD in English literature and culture from the University of Bremen for a thesis on gender and space in Shakespeare films. She has also conducted research in the scope of the interdisciplinary and international research group Fiction Meets Science. In 2019 and 2020 she was invited to Mexico and Canada as a visiting scholar. Dr. Henke has taught at universities in Bremen, Hamburg, San Luis Potosi, Guelph, Halle, Freiburg and Greifswald. She has published on a variety of topics ranging from literature to film to science and stereotypes to cyborgs and gender to Ireland and abortion. Her most recent research project is situated in the field of the medical humanities and traces the history of reproduction in literature and culture during the Enlightenment in Britain.

__________
Dr. phil. Jennifer S. Henke
Stand-in professor for Anglophone Gender Studies. University of Greifswald