Dear FEASTers,
I am grateful to everyone who responded to my friend's request for
readings on the aesthetics of pregnancy. By request, I have compiled
the recommendations and listed them below, along with some of the
comments I received, which may be helpful to others interested in this
topic.
Best,
Sophia
¨°¨¨¨¨¨°º°¨¨¨¨¨°º°¨¨¨¨¨¨
1. Sheila Lintott and Maureen Sander-Staudt recently co-edited a
volume on pregnancy. Lintott wrote one of the chapters which is on the
sublimity of pregnancy and birth. There are also a couple other
chapters on aesthetics that might be of interest. In part III the
phenomenological and aesthetic dimensions of pregnancy and childbirth
are addressed by various essayists. You can find info on the volume
here: http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415891875/
2. Motherhood - Philosophy for Everyone: The Birth of Wisdom, ed.
Sheila Lintott has a “Feminist Bibliography on Pregnancy and
Mothering” as its last entry. Most of the bibliography can be viewed
through the Amazon preview pages.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/book/10.1002/9781444324525/homepage/AuthorBiography.html
3. My favorite piece on pregnant embodiment, however, is still Iris
Marion Young's "Pregnant embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation" in
her _'Throwing Like a Girl' and other essays_ (and widely reprinted
elsewhere). This essay also has the advantage of being very
accessible to non-philosophers. It's not directly about aesthetics,
but there is that really lovely part where she notices that pregnant
women can feel good about their bodies while pregnant -- and that for
some women, it is the first and/or only time(s) that is so. One thing
she notices is that in Western culture, at least, pregnant women are
often removed from the realm of the sexual (hmmm?). So, for the first
time, they are able to look at and appraise their bodies according to
their own standards -- aesthetic and otherwise.
4. Rosemary Betterton’s article seems exactly on point. Promising
Monsters: Pregnant Bodies, Artistic Subjectivity, and Maternal
Imagination Hypatia, Vol. 21, No. 1, Maternal Bodies (Winter, 2006),
pp. 80-100.
5. An excellent book on pregnancy is Rebecca Kukla's Mass Hysteria.
It in no way argues for the beauty of pregnancy, but it does point out
many ways in which both historically and presently, the medical
profession has taken away many important aspects of pregnancy from
women.
6. Another article by Kukla on the same topic is Kukla, R. (2008).
"Measuring Motherhood." International Journal of Feminist Approaches
to Bioethics 1(1): 67-90.
7. There is an article by Robin Longhurst called 'corporeographies
of pregnancy: bikini babes'. There is a bit near the end about people
percieving the pregnant body as ugly.
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