Disruptive pregnancy

Abstract

This chapter examines what happens when the pregnant body in public space is perceived to be troublesome, or, because of its ambiguous position, disruptive. This chapter focuses on the pregnant body in public space as a sexualized body. Running through this chapter are snippets of sex advice given to pregnant women in specialist magazines. The first part examines representation of sexualised pregnant bodies in mainstream discourses; notably ‘sexy’ pregnancy photoshoots and advertising. The concept of herethical sexual ethics is analysed in dialogue with these representations of motherhood-to-come (Kristeva, 1985). The second part of the chapter draws on data from women in the USA and UK to examine sexual harassment of pregnant women. Sexual harassment is a mode of gender exclusion, in any case. When women who are pregnant experience sexual harassment in pregnancy, it becomes a further technique of control, fuelled by rape culture, which codes public spaces as places in which pregnant women do not belongThis chapter establishes how norms of pregnancy uphold heteropatriarchal performances of, and interactions with, gender and sexuality in public space. It argues that mobilising becoming-minoritarian politics established by Deleuze and Guattari and the herethical approaches of Kristeva, we start to set the scene for a guerrilla war machine to emerge.