This special session addresses a gap in queer readings of early modern literature: the pregnant body. The topic of "queer pregnancy" is not only timely, but necessary. When it comes to feminist ethics—pregnancy, reproduction, and maternity often guide questions concerning the liberation of women. While feminist scholars in the field have illuminated images of pregnancy in innovative ways, these readings usually address pregnancy as a sign of maternity instead of considering the ways in which pregnant people might engage in non-heterosexual forms of intimacy and eroticism (Sacks 1980; Moncrief and McPherson 2007; Laoutaris 2008). Scholars who explore homoerotic desire in the period, alternatively, have attended to queer attractions, cohabitations, and alliances. To date, however, these scholars tend to read representations of pregnancy as commensurate with heterosexual sex, desire, and partnership (Guy-Bray 2009; Menon et. al 2011). This perception is due, in large part, to queer theory’s “antisocial thesis”—most notably articulated by Lee Edelman in No Future (2004). For Edelman, pregnancy is part of a heteronormative life that queer people must resist. The understudied nature of the pregnant body in queer studies of literature across fields, however, is due to a set of false assumptions: that only heterosexual women get pregnant; that every pregnancy ends in the birth of a child or “mother”; and that pregnancy always reproduces the family in a recognizable form. These assumptions not only dull the transgressive force of pregnancy in the early modern period, but erase so many lived experiences of pregnancy today. This panel, consequently, aims to articulate the relationship between pregnancy and queer theory in early modern literature, as well as to gesture to the cultural implications of how pregnancy is imagined and understood more broadly. Queer people can and do get pregnant, then and now.

The papers on this panel represent a range of early modern literature, authors, and critical theorists, and all of the panelists work to address the increasing divide between feminist and queer studies in our field (Kahn 2006). Beginning with “‘the boy’s with child!: Queer Pregnancy in Thomas Middleton’s More Dissemblers Besides Women,” Dr. Andrzejewski close-reads a brief speech taken from the climactic scene in Middleton’s play in order to demonstrate how queer theory extends feminist insights into representations of pregnancy on the early modern stage. In the play’s climactic moment, a male Page swoons and calls out for a midwife after rigorous dancing lessons. Cinquepace, their dance master, assumes a miracle, an upside down world, a strange case, and that a woman must have impregnated the Page—all of which allow for the possibility a young man could be pregnant. Andrzejewski argues that we must “push past the joke,” to use Simone Chess’s phrase, in reading Cinquepace’s response to a young boy going into labor. Rather, this moment conjures bodies across time—bodies that trouble how reproduction is culturally organized—inspiring audiences to “desire differently, to desire more, to desire better” for pregnant people (Muñoz 189).

Shifting literary genres, Dr. Chess’s paper, “‘The Soldier was Delivered’: Trans Pregnancies in the ‘Warrior Women’ Ballads,” approaches the panel theme of queer pregnancy through the instances of pregnancy described within the “warrior women” genre of early modern broadside ballads, in which a female character passes as a male soldier. Within the genre, it is rare but not unique that the soldier gets pregnant and gives birth. Ballads in the warrior women genre were popularized by Dianne Dugaw’s Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650-1850 (1996), and have since been investigated primarily through feminist approaches. The conventional reading, then, has been that the act of giving birth is a gender reveal moment, in which the soldier is revealed to be a woman and the queerness of the crossdressing lot is contained and concluded. But what if “warrior women” aren’t necessarily women, or at least not normative, cis-gender women? Using images, music, and ballad text, Chess makes the case for trans-studies-informed readings of “warrior women” pregnancies: first, that we might understand warrior women as transmasculine, and interpret their pregnancies as early modern explorations of male gestation and male-male reproduction; and second, that we might understand warrior women as transfeminine, and interpret their pregnancies as expressions of the fantasy and desire for transwomen to be gestational parents. These trans possibilities, Chess argues, can co-exist with each other and with previous feminist readings of the same source texts, highlighting the polymorphous queer potentiality of pregnancy in early modern popular cheap print.

Finally, Dr. Varnado’s paper, “Apparitional Pregnancy: How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?,” reinvigorates an age-old question in Shakespeare studies in light of current queer and materialist theory (Kathryn Bond Stockton, Heather Love, and Jane Bennett’s respective works, in particular). In grappling with a particular question, “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?,” Varnado also explores questions such as: What constitutes the category of the human? What qualifies as human life (does Macduff, not “of woman born,” qualify)? How is life manifest in other kinds of animate being: animal, plant (walking woods), stone, apparitional, witch-y? And how do these different, queer forms of pregnancy and generation affect our reading of the play? Varnado’s investigation plumbs the queer, unnatural, and uncanny dimensions of generation and birth as they’re represented in the material and figural universes of early modern drama, questioning whether the category of life has a direct or necessary connection to heterosexual congress, or to “natural” human bodies. In sum, Varnado reads Macbeth as queering pregnancy, birth, and death by contravening the suppositions that conception, birth, or breast-feeding entails motherhood; that heterosexual sex is the means of generation; that children are born from mothers and fathers; or that something recognizable as human life hews to a linear and unidirectional timeline.

The panel will end with a response from Dr. Melissa Sanchez—one of the few scholars in the field who has published on the troubling relationship between queer theory’s antisocial thesis and the pregnant body (2017). The three panelists will be strictly limited to 15-minute papers so that Sanchez has time to respond to them and field questions from the audience.