ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some of the ways in which feminist perspectives have been brought to bear on the pregnant body. Many earlier feminists, for good historical reasons, seem to accept the idea of the reproductive female body as a ‘biological trap’ that can be evaded but never extinguished, and thus they reaffirm a necessary split between a mind desiring control, and an intransigent, irrational body. From a late 1990s feminist position, Mary O’Brien’s analysis can seem both resolutely heterosexist and over-ready to universalise. A socialist-feminist analysis is sceptical of the ways in which ‘choice’ may be used in ways that obscure the economic inequalities that govern who can choose, and what range of choice they have. The work of contemporary feminist theorists of ‘the body’ is characterised by a dissolution of the boundaries between what is conventionally described as ‘the real world’ and its representation in language, visual and other imagery.
