ABSTRACT

Pregnant women in public space are often constructed as ‘matter out of place’ (Douglas 1966: 35). In this chapter I draw on the earlier discussion of abjection to further understanding of a group of women who were pregnant for the first time and living in Hamilton, New Zealand (see Longhurst 1995a, 1998). Pregnant women are thought to threaten and disrupt a social system that requires them to remain largely confined to private space during pregnancy. They can be seen to occupy a borderline state as they disturb identity, system and order by not respecting borders, positions and rules. Some work which links pregnancy and abjection has already been carried out. Oliver (1993), for example, in Reading Kristeva discusses ‘the abject mother’. Jan Pilgrim (1993) uses Kristeva’s concept of the abject to examine representations of the naked pregnant body. I utilise Young’s notion of ‘ugly bodies’ by examining the possibility that pregnant bodies are sometimes constructed, both by pregnant women themselves and by others, as ugly.