INTRODUCTION

This book is devoted to rethinking pregnancy and the provision of childcare from a feminist perspective. Representations of these experiences in popular culture and philosophy alike have too often distorted them. As a backdrop to my revisioning of these experiences, I present, in the opening sections of this chapter, some philosophers and artists who have what I see as troubling approaches to pregnancy. I choose these philosophers and artists not because I claim they have had widespread influence on popular culture, but instead because they serve as more extreme, and therefore more obvious, versions of similarly troubling views of pregnancy present in the larger culture.

Feminist theorists have for many years now lamented the absence of accounts of pregnancy from women's own point of view. Writing in 1984, feminist philosopher Iris Marion Young argued: “We should not be surprised to learn that discourse on pregnancy omits subjectivity, for the specific experience of women has been absent from most of our culture's discourse about human experience and history” (1984, 45). More recently, Moira Gatens suggests that experiences such as pregnancy are largely absent from the public arena not only because they are experiences of women, but also because they are bodily or, as she terms it, embodied experiences. She writes that the public arena “will not tolerate an embodied speech” (1996, 26).