This panel brings these two seemingly distinct areas of study together—queerness and pregnancy—asking audience members to expand their ideas of what pregnancy, reproduction, and family look like, and to invite that expansion into the narratives that shape their respective work and lives. Pregnancy, in fact, has long been a taboo subject. The writings of foundational feminist theorists consider how pregnancy breaks down the boundaries we often associate with the body (Beauvoir, Firestone, Gallop). To think about pregnancy as queer also challenges the heteronormative frameworks through which pregnancy continues to be read, assumptions like: only straight women get pregnant, every pregnancy ends in the birth of a healthy, "legitimate" child, and pregnancy always reproduces the family in a recognizable form. These frameworks, employed by many queer theorists, do not consider representations of LGBTQ+ people’s pregnancies and families across time—not to mention pregnancies that do not end in the birth of a healthy child. As each of the panelists’ papers will demonstrate, queer pregnancies and, in turn, family formations are far more expansive than the crushing onslaught of heterosexual representation would have us believe.
As a starting point for this history, Tuhin Bhattacharjee’s paper argues that a major preoccupation of the Ṛgveda, the oldest Sanskrit text, is the birth of Agni (the god of fire), both as the sacrificial fire and as the Sun. In many cases, Agni’s parents are depicted as two mothers whose lovemaking/friction results in his birth. And they not only possess “abundant semen” but are simultaneously “rich in milk,” nourishing and maternal. If queerness is about resisting monolithic identitarian taxonomies and unsettling normative expectations of sex and gender, Bhattacharjee argues, then the birth of Agni discloses itself as a fecund site for an engagement with the queer and offers an open mesh of possibilities for theorizing the trans body and its pregnant transgressions.
The next paper, by Alicia Andrzejewski, moves to Shakespeare’s England, taking Leontes’s infamous characterization of his wife’s pregnancy in The Winter’s Tale, “there is no barricade for a belly,” as a point of entry to demonstrate that even the most “spotless” pregnant person in Shakespeare’s plays is a “sexual dissident,” to conjure Jonathan Dollimore’s theory of marginalized yet central subcultures of “contained” transgression. In conversation with scholarship that imagines the erotic possibilities of Hermione and Paulina’s sixteen-year cohabitation, Andrzejewski demonstrates how Hermione’s queer pregnancy allows love between women to flourish in the face of an otherwise frigid, barren “winter’s tale.”
Next, Matty Hemming examines British-Caribbean author Jean Rhys’s first published novel, Voyage in the Dark (1934), which depicts a young white “Creole” woman who, living in London as an “amateur” sex worker, becomes pregnant and undergoes an illegal abortion. With its variously explicit but always unsettling depictions of a poor woman’s pursuit of bodily autonomy in an imperial Britain under the thrall of eugenics, Hemming argues that abortion narratives like Rhys's offer generative analytics to contemporary queer theory. The paper employs a critical framework that centers Black, queer, and trans feminist theories of the racialized and classed regulation of reproductive bodies.
Finally, Jon Heggestad’s “Pregnant Men and Alien Offspring” examines queer reproduction in contemporary works of science fiction. In Familiar Perversions, Liz Montegary observes that the 1980s were marked by both the AIDS Epidemic and an increased interest in and advocacy for family equality and queer parenting. However, Heggestad posits that these two phenomena overlap in SF depictions of pregnant men. Looking to the 1985 film Enemy Mine (dir. Wolfgang Petersen) and the short-lived television series Alien Nation (1989-1990), Heggestad examines how extraterrestrial characters were used to explore a wide range of queer feelings and experiences in mainstream works.
The panel will begin with a five-minute introduction, to offer the audience a working definition of “queer pregnancy.” Then, each paper will function as a case study, a strictly focused ten minutes, in order to leave plenty of room for questions.