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. ############################ To unsubscribe from the FEAST-L list: write to: mailto:[log in to unmask] or click the following link: https://listserv.jmu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=FEAST-L&A=1