Re-producing ‘woman’s' body: reflections on the (dis)place(ments) of ‘reproduction’ for (post)modern women

Abstract

Across scientific and everyday discourses, ‘reproduction’ has long been a defining feature of the category of ‘woman’ as well as being a highly significant aspect of women's lived experiences (Sayers, 1982; Phoenix et al., 1991; Nicolson & Ussher, 1992; Katrak, 1996). The ‘reproductive body’ has figured as a mainstay of positivistic and universalistic construction of ‘woman’ as a ‘biologically real,’ quasi-homogeneous category of persons. Because of this, it seems important for ‘reproduction’ to remain central to feminist research and theorising. However, it can be argued that in these allegedly ‘post-feminist’, ‘gender-egalitarian’ times in Western and Westernised societies, ‘reproduction’ now occupies a less central, all-encompassing place in (some) women's lives than it once did. At the same time, recent feminist theorising (Poovey, 1988; Riley 1988; Butler, 1993) has disrupted modernist notions that the femininity of women's identities, experiences or perspectives could be guaranteed by ‘the female body’ or by the reproductive capacities that have been central in defining that body. What then should be the place of ‘reproduction’ in feminist theory and research? The aim of this paper is to revisit this question in the contexts, first, of postmodern feminist theorising of ‘women’ and, second, of the allegedly ‘post-feminist realities’ of women's lives. In doing so we seek to briefly explore the key issues we see arising from the places and displacements of ‘reproduction’ both in women's lives and in feminist theory and research.