Reproductive Bodies Research Articles

Gendered administrative burden: regulating gendered bodies, labor, and identity

Abstract Gendered burdens are experiences of coercive and controlling state actions that directly regulate gendered bodies, labor, and identity. Burdens are not simply about preventing access to rights and benefits, they're about control and coercian. Gendered burdens generate gender inequality through four mechanisms. First, administrative burdens regulate reproductive bodies, legitimating the state’s direct control over reproductive health care, including abortions, with consequent implications for peoples’ health. Second, burdens require reproductive labor, shifting unpaid and underpaid reproductive labor onto women as the policies that support such labor tend to have high administrative burdens that impede access. Third, gendered burdens restrict reproductive labor, impeding the right to provide such care labor with dignity, by exerting control over how, and sometimes whether, care is performed, including in rights-granting venues, like redistributive benefits, and rights-depriving venues, like the supervision of families by child protective services. Fourth, burdens regulate gendered identities, reinforcing heteronormative and cis-normative constructions of gender, including by directly controlling gender identification. While gendered burdens are not only experienced by women, they are most strongly applied to poor and racially marginalized groups of women. These claims provide a basis for public administration scholarship to connect with feminist theory by illustrating the centrality of administrative processes and related experiences to structural patterns of inequality.

Gynaenoir: Reproductive Suffering in The Invisible Man, The Girl on the Train and Gone Girl

A domestic noir turns the home or workplace into an uncanny space of danger. A gynaehorror film depicts the reproductive body as monstrous. This essay analyses The Invisible Man, The Girl on the Train, and Gone Girl as gynaenoirs, an assemblage of domestic noir and gynaehorror, to show how women are terrorized through their reproductive bodies. By examining how characters in these narratives experience reproductive suffering, one can better understand women’s lives under pronatalist, neoliberal patriarchy.

Development and implementation of a novel mechanized planting method for ecological restoration of aquatic environments using degradable nutrition pots

Submerged plants play a significant role in the remediation and purification of polluted water bodies. Reconstruction of submerged plants has been considered as an important ecological method to restore aquatic ecosystems. However, large-scale and efficient plantation of submerged plants in water restoration is a huge challenge. This paper proposes a novel mechanized planting method for submerged plants utilizing nutrition pots as planting units. Firstly, the details of the mechanized planting method were introduced. The mechanized planting method involves pre-planting the reproductive bodies of submerged plants in degradable nutrition pots, and then implanting them into the underwater soil through a planting device. Secondly, the interaction force between the nutrition pot and the soil was measured. It was found that the implantation force of nutrition pots increases with planting velocity. The planting force shows a significant increase trend when the water content in the soil decreases. Thirdly, the deformation of the nutrition pot was studied through simulations. It was discovered that the deformation of the nutrition pot mainly occurs at the bottom and the side walls near the bottom, and the limited deformation ensures the integrity of the nutrition pot. Finally, a planting device with a linear motion mechanism was designed, and a typical submerged plant, Vallisneria natans was tested, using agricultural paper seedling containers as the nutrition pots. It was demonstrated that the mechanized device successfully planted submerged plant nutrition pots into the soil, and the submerged plants survived and showed a clear growth trend. The mechanized planting method of submerged plants proposed in this article is expected to provide a new and friendly technology for ecological restoration of water source.

The reckoning table, the periodoscope and the shaping of modern pregnancy in nineteenth-century print forms

How did Victorian print forms shape experiences of pregnancy? This article focuses on pregnancy calendars, a form that rose to prominence in nineteenth-century Britain and Europe. Such calendars appeared in...

Race, gender and corporeal resistance: reading settler territory through the scale of the body

The spatial architecture of settler colonialism in Africa has been subject to ample research, in geography and beyond. This paper offers an alternative reading of colonial settler territory at the scale of the body, showing how myriad colonial boundaries were displaced onto people’s bodies, and naturalized, negated and negotiated through bodily practice, performance and movement. Using Northern Rhodesia/Zambia as a case, my argument is organized around three sites of colonial spatial power: the ‘proper village’, the tribal ‘homeland’ and the colonial township. The analysis builds on historical literatures, archival research and ethnographic work to show how the construction of each of these spaces (territories) was contingent upon the making of African bodies as objects and subjects of colonial imaginary. Bodies – chiefs’ bodies, ‘ghost-like’ bodies, dirty bodies, unmanly bodies, malnourished bodies, reproductive bodies – became important bearers of symbolic value, subjected to racial and sexual regimes and power relations, all of which became sites of territorial inscription through which the construction and contestations of the colonial state and its territorial boundaries took place. The analysis makes visible the political work performed by these bodies, how their movement engendered administrative anxiety and became critical sites around which race, gender and territory were constructed and contested in intimate relation to each other. Through this conceptualization, the paper moves forward debates in geography on territory, showing how territory is not external to the body, not simply bodily experienced, but extend onto and out from the body as a critical site of subjugation and anticolonial resistance.

The Insubordination Of The Gaze: Marian Icon And Performance In The Mujeres Creando Collective

The presence of the Marian icon and the ensuing encoding and disruption of its regime of visibility is a constant presence within the contemporary Latin American cultural scene. This is particularly true vis-a-vis the depatriarchalization of bodies undertaken by feminist and queer collectives in the region. This essay addresses precisely the performative practice of Mujeres Creando, a Bolivian collective that puts forward performances based on disidentification with the Marian icon. More specifically, this piece analyzes how Mujeres Creando displaces both the virginal maternal body and the categorical imperatives of heterosexuality on reproductive bodies. This movement exposes the historical sediment that shapes the becoming of bodies with reproductive potential into feminized bodies. The analysis includes two performances: La Virgen Barbie (The Barbie Virgin, 2010b) and La Virgen del Cerro (The Virgin of the Mount, 2011), both directed by María Galindo. On a methodological level, the essay draws on the theoretical underpinnings of performance studies, visual and image studies, feminist and queer theory, and Latin American decolonizing thought.

Domestic values: gendered labor and the uncanniness of critique in marketing life insurance for women

ABSTRACT While term life insurance has historically been sold to income-earning men to secure the financial futures of their families, in India there is a growing number of life insurance products targeting women, particularly unwaged housewives. In marketing these financial products to Indian women, I show how life insurance companies incorporate the feminist critique of devalued domestic labor. Drawing on analysis of insurance policies, marketing and promotional materials, as well as personal advice articles, it goes on to show how there is, something uncanny or unsettling about the way life insurance not only commodifies and financializes domestic labor, but also focuses on the reproductive bodies of women through health riders. The article situates contemporary discourses of life insurance for women within a longer history of women’s property and of mobilizing capital through rather than for women in India.

A fetus in the world: Physiology, epidemiology, and the making of fetal origins of adult disease

Since the late 1980s, the fetal origins of adult disease, from 2003 developmental origins of health and disease (DOHaD), has stimulated significant interest in and an efflorescence of research on the long-term effects of the intrauterine environment. From the start, this field has been interdisciplinary, using experimental animal, clinical and epidemiological tools. As the influence of DOHaD on public health and policy expanded, it has drawn criticism for reducing the complex social and physical world of early life to women’s reproductive bodies as drivers of intergenerational ills. This paper explains this narrowing of focus in terms of a formative and consequential exchange between David Barker, the British epidemiologist whose work is credited with establishing the field, and the discipline of fetal physiology. We suggest that fetal physiologists were a crucial constituency of support for Barker’s hypothesis about early life origins of disease. Their collaborations with Barker helped secure and sustain the theory amid considerable controversy. The trajectory of DOHaD and its focus on the maternal body can be understood, we argue, as a consequence of this alliance, which brought together two distinct conceptualizations of the intrauterine environment, one from epidemiology and the other from fetal physiology. Along the way, we trace the histories of these conceptualizations, both of which were products of mid-to-late twentieth century British science, and show how Barker’s early emphasis on social and economic conditions was superseded by a narrower focus on physiological mechanisms acting upon the autonomous fetus.

Pregnant Bodies in Transit: Maternity, Migration, and the 1962 Sino-Indian War in Rita Chowdhury’s Chinatown Days

Signed as a response to the Sino-Indian war in 1962, the Defence of India Act facilitated the mass incarceration of Indians having Chinese ethnicity, not even sparing children and pregnant women. Rita Chowdhury’s historical fiction Chinatown Days (2018), translated from the Assamese novel Makam (2010), rescues this systematic elimination of the Assamese-Chinese narrative that is otherwise absent in the dominant paradigms of this war history. Chowdhury conducts a rare historiography tracing the origin of the community in colonial India, their internment at the Deoli camp following the war of 1962, and ultimately their deportation to China. Chowdhury’s novel illustrates that the worst victims of this forced migration were the women who had to bear the burden of their reproductive bodies. By borrowing specific contexts from Chowdhury’s fiction that illuminates the challenges faced by pregnant Assamese-Chinese women, this paper conducts a gendered investigation into the events of this state-sanctioned forced displacement and deportation. It interrogates the idea of constructive nation-building through state-sanctioned banishment of the unborn racially undesirable Assamese-Chinese children. It examines how the displaced pregnant female bodies are doubly marginalized in internment camps, having no access to proper sanitation or nutrition, and how they are treated as mere tools to stage political dissent.

A systematic review and future research agenda on detection of polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) with computer-aided techniques

Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) is among the most prevalent endocrinological abnormalities seen in reproductive female bodies posing serious health hazards. The correctness of interpreting this condition depends heavily on the wide spectrum of associated symptoms and the doctor's expertise, making real-time clinical detection quite challenging. Thus, investigations on computer-aided PCOS detection systems have recently been explored by several researchers worldwide as a potential replacement for manual assessment. This review study's objective is to analyze the relevant research works on computer-assisted methods for automatically identifying PCOS through a systematic literature review (SLR) methodology as well as investigate the research limitations and explore potential future research scopes in this domain. 28 articles have been selected using the PRISMA approach based on a set of inclusion-exclusion criteria for conducting the review. The data synthesis of the selected articles has been conducted using six data exploration themes. As outcomes, the SLR explored the topical association between the studies; their research profiles; objectives; data size, type, and sources; methodologies applied for the detection of PCOS; and lastly the research outcomes along with their evaluation measures and performances. The study also highlights areas for future research directions examining the study gaps to enhance the current efforts for autonomous PCOS identification; such as integrating advanced techniques with the current methods; developing interactive software systems; exploring deep learning and unsupervised machine learning techniques; enhancing datasets and country context; and investigating more unknown factors behind PCOS. Thus, this SLR provides a state-of-the-art paradigm of autonomous PCOS detection which will support significantly efficient clinical assessment, diagnosis and treatment of PCOS.

Fertile Ground

Fears of immigration and demographic change have fueled nativist, pro-natalist movements that support the reproductive, heteronormative family as a vital political project shaping their rhetoric and politics. This paper argues that right-wing populist movements can be situated within heteroactivsm, as reactionary movements positioning themselves against challenges to the heteronormative family. I suggest that understanding the populist character of these movements can help theorize why so many right-wing populists echo specific claims about gender and race. By situating their political claims in biological claims about sex, gender and race, these movements contrast themselves with abstract ideals of universal human rights, neoliberal rationality, and cosmopolitan globalism, embracing the traditional family, gender norms, and heterosexual reproduction. They encourage normative family promoted through state policy of rewarding proper families and punishing improper social reproduction—whether literal reproduction or the cultural reproduction of values. Tracing the broad outlines of a political project anchored in the reproductive bodies of women, I argue for greater attention to the ways the heteroactivist project is central to right-wing populism and its multi-scalar manifestations.

Maternal microbis: How kinship composes reproductive relations for a human‐bovine maternal microbiome

AbstractReading across a burgeoning scientific literature that conflates microbial dynamics between mother:child bodies with normative mothering practices, we offer a model of maternal microbis that troubles the distinctions between productive and reproductive relations. We ground this argument in a systematic analysis of the content and circulation of descriptive maternal microbiome research between 2007 and 2021 along with the proliferation of lay narratives about the maternal microbiome inspired by such research. Following this research across the species line between human and bovine bodies, we trace the gendered effects of using humans as model animals and tie current microbiome hype to a much longer history of entangling reproductive and productive labors. More than a microbial retread of a familiar story within a history of distributing reproductive labor to other bodies, our focus on the maternal microbis as a gendered model of microbial relations enables us to ask specific questions about the effects of centering microbes into models of reproductive bodies (both Homo and Bos), leading us to consider how expectations of gendered care and gendered bodies make certain paradigms possible and foreclose others.

How did the female fetus speak? Abortion, sex selection, and national futures in India

AbstractThe debate around abortion is often constituted in terms of a tension between fetal personhood on the one hand and the right to bodily autonomy on the other. The supposed personhood of the fetus is widely invoked to restrict the right to abortion. In India however, one sees a paradoxical situation. Not only is there wide legal access to abortion, but this also exists simultaneously with an active legal imperative to protect the female fetus. How did the Indian state allow access to abortion while protecting a unique fetus? This paper argues that the question of reproduction and abortion in India is intimately tied to imaginations of national futures and risks and reproductive bodies have been entangled in those futures. The discourse around the legalization of abortion and the criminalization of sex‐selection offered differing but stark visions of national endangerment which played a critical role in authorizing different state actions targeting reproductive bodies while sustaining this paradox. This paper expands the anthropological understanding of the different grounds of abortion debates globally.

A new red alga preserved with possible reproductive bodies from the 518‐million‐year‐old Qingjiang biota

AbstractMacroalgae have been a key ecological component of marine ecosystems since the Proterozoic period and are common fossil forms in Cambrian Burgess Shale‐type Lagerstätten. However, in most cases, it is difficult to place these early fossil algae into modern groups because little distinctive morphology is preserved. Here, we describe a new form of macroalgae, Qingjiangthallus cystocarpium gen. & sp. nov., from the Qingjiang biota of South China. The new taxon is represented by 546 specimens remarkably preserved with characteristics that allow a phylogenetic placement into crown groups of red algae. Centimeter‐sized thalli resemble members of the extant Rhodymeniophycidae (a subclass of the class Florideophyceae), and hence suggest a florideophycean affinity, which indicates that ahnfeltiophycidaen and rhodymeniophycidaen algae may have diverged at least 518 Ma, accordant with estimations of molecular studies. The presence of possible cystocarps on Qingjiangthallus thalli suggests that evolutionary innovation of a triphasic life cycle in red algae may have occurred no later than the Early Cambrian. The branching patterns and branch width of Qingjiangthallus are consistent with the coarsely dichotomously branched morphogroup, which was previously present in the Ediacaran, Ordovician, and afterward, but absent in the Cambrian.

Inception of Life on the Pendulum of Death: Common Paradigms and Uncommon Narratives on the Polemics between Birthers and Abortionists

Obvious crevices of digression are discernible in the ongoing discourses on conception, women and reproductive rights, and abortion. Against this backdrop, this paper sets out to explore existing thoughts on the bio-physiological processes of conception and pregnancy, epigenetics, and the impact of trauma on the continuum of human psychological development with a view to accentuating the critical intersection of the emerging discourses. By dissecting the conflated and intricate leanings on the opposite sides of the treatise, the paper goes beyond the current paradigm that merely proffers a time frame at which it might be appropriate to legitimize termination of pregnancy (in other words, abort a baby without attracting punitive attention of the state) and advance more creative theorizing, which raises the question of power balance and discipline. Ours is a discussion paper, covering a methodical synopsis of discourses, definitions, aims, philosophical leanings and content analysis of major postulations, and highlights of their operational intricacies. The paper hypothesized that a single-cell blastocyst is a developing human being and engaging discourses on power and discipline, it further explored the influences of epigenetics on lifespan development, and how this impinges on women’s right over their reproductive bodies. The paper adopts the Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), and black feminist thought to deconstruct and trouble the essentialized notion of women’s reproductive rights, which are fundamentally colonial, and western in nature. Using qualitative content analysis of existing secondary materials, we foreground the paradigm shifts on the contended topic. By so doing, the paper mapped out a more flexible direction for understanding the disequilibrium of power on the core premises of the argument divides. Our paper provides uncluttered lenses for scrutinizing the socio-medical procedures involving women’s right to their procreative bodies on one hand, and the unborn babies’ choice of life on the other, thus creating a broader and more objective rostrum for further discussion and scholarly contribution on the concepts.

Enacting National Trauma on the Female Body in Aubigné's Misères : An Epic Motif

Abstract: The French Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century coincided with a literary desire to validate French cultural dominance through poetry. As part of this goal, a traditional epic would establish a Virgil for France and a heroic story to equal Rome's. Though the civil wars prevented the composition of such an epic, they opened the path for Agrippa d'Aubigné's Les Tragiques , an epic account of the Wars themselves. As a Protestant poet on the losing side of national conflict, Aubigné rests upon epic traditions while using them to garner support for his faction and to blame Catholic leadership vehemently for the national crisis. This article examines the epic tradition (seen in Helen, Dido, Bramimonde, and others) by which national trauma and epic conflict are enacted upon female bodies. Aubigné uses this epic motif to specific rhetorical ends: gaining sympathy for the Protestant cause and lamenting Catholic oppression. He adapts the epic tradition to emphasize mothering bodies (pregnant or nursing) to heighten the horror of the war and win the audience to the poet's side. This adaptation of epic tradition takes two forms: the anthropomorphization of France herself and the presentation of victims of civil war. The Misères of the nation, lamented in the poem's first book, resonate in female reproductive bodies to universalize the trauma, thereby aligning the reader with Aubigné's outrage and grief. Though female embodiment of national trauma is traditional to epic, Les Tragiques finds a new angle that serves its rhetorical goals.

Reproductive governance and the affective economy

The governance of reproductive practices, processes, decision-making, experiences, desires, subjectivities, and bodies has received and continues to receive significant attention in feminist efforts to name and resist reproductive oppression. And over the last 30 years, articles published in Feminism & Psychology have made significant contributions to the visibilisation and critique of this form of oppression. In this Virtual Special Issue on Reproductive Governance and the Affective Economy, we apply repronormativity and affect to our reading of 20 articles published in Feminism & Psychology. Collectively, these articles provide a glimpse of the wide-ranging scope of reproductive regulation (including that which is re-produced by/within feminism itself), and the various work that repronormativity and affect do in this governance. The challenging of reproductive governance notwithstanding, we conclude by arguing that the centring and circulation of certain reproductive subjects and their experiences within feminist knowledge production is itself a part of and upholds repronormativity and forecloses the possibility of reproductive freedom for all.

Structural variation in sexual reproductive bodies in the members of oömycetes

Structural variation in sexual reproductive bodies in the members of oömycetes

Dalla parte di Eva: Female Alliances and Genealogies in Maria Rosa Cutrufelli’s Writing Practice

ABSTRACT My contribution examines the creation of female collective memory and legacy in the works of Sicilian-born feminist writer Maria Rosa Cutrufelli. I analyse this aspect as both a literary and a political strategy aimed at retrieving a ‘sisterhood’, well-known to second-wave American feminism. Cutrufelli’s novels are filled with female protagonists, or personagge, who rarely act on their own. In fact, at the basis of each character’s struggle to achieve an individual agency one can identify various forms of relationships (friendship, love, political alliance, family bonds). Moreover, as is the case with her dystopian novel L’isola delle madri, unexpected connections among extremely diverse women become decisive in challenging social and symbolic paradigms, such as biological motherhood and its bond with a capitalist exploitation of reproductive bodies. Cutrufelli’s reinvention of female memories corresponds to the construction of a collective legacy that reads against the grain of the Italian literary canon, in which individual heroism – along with gendered asymmetries and power relationships – has often implied an automatic identification with a strong, self-centred masculinity. On the contrary, Cutrufelli’s stories insist on female relationships that go through different phases of negotiation and forms of losses and appropriation, thus calling for substantially different notions of non-hierarchical femininity. This is also confirmed by Cutrufelli’s own filiations and active collaborations with fellow women writers belonging to different generations. In the light of the above, my chapter explores various forms of female bonds in Cutrufelli’s writings, while also taking into consideration the significance of extra-textual elements in the writer’s biography and current engagement, in order to argue for her originality in pursuing a specific, ‘hybrid’ approach to 21st-century feminism.

IUD counseling and the gynecological gaze: the biopolitics of clinical shared decision-making in the US

The intrauterine device (IUD) as a long-acting reversible contraceptive technology is increasingly being marketed to younger women for whom hormonal therapies are deemed problematic. Focusing on the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) training materials for clinicians, we examine the biopolitics of reproductive counseling for the IUD among this population. Specifically, we interrogate how American clinicians are trained to engage young patients in the coproduction of reproductive biographies to determine their suitability for the IUD. Ostensibly recognizing the importance women’s autonomy to reproductive justice, ACOG stresses the importance of ‘shared decision-making’. However, we argue that ACOG’s approach to shared decision-making still enrolls patients in processes that delineate forms to reproductive differences to be controlled. Specifically, obstetricians and gynecologists are instructed to categorize certain reproductive bodies as risky, differentiating them from those classified as timely and responsible. These categories, underpinned by constructions of normative readiness, reproduce forms of ‘colorblind’ difference under the rubric of reproductive risk. Our findings suggest clinicians are still trained to employ a gynecological gaze that differentiates patient populations based on perceived reproductive responsibility. Thus, we argue that beneath the surface of collaborative reproductive counseling, the gynecological gaze continues to differentiate treatment for those bodies classified as irresponsible. Our analysis highlights the enduring power relations that link the production of reproductive health knowledge and deeply gendered and implicitly racialized systems of categorizing populations.