ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I move into the Enlightenment era in order to demonstrate the ways in which questions about sexual difference manifest in the early establishment of medical discourses and the medical gaze. I do this through a discussion of maternal imagination and impressions, as reported in the British Medical Journal. In particular, I look at the case of Mary Toft who was said to have given birth to seventeen rabbits after she was startled by a rabbit while gardening. Though it was discovered to be a hoax, the preoccupation, not to mention widespread belief, demonstrates a concern about the role of the woman’s desire in her motherly duties and to what extent she can affect her child. This concern about the mother’s desires and her relationship to her fetus is also depicted in a number of films, such The Brood and Prometheus. Such films demonstrate the potential horror of the woman’s desire, not only to create an alien or monster, but also to consume and enjoy whoever she comes into contact without any regard for their subjectivity. These films, as in the cases of maternal imagination, reflect a fantasy in which an instantiation of the paternal metaphor is needed to contain the jouissance of the Other. I use this opportunity to then explore Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding the mother–fetus assemblage as an example of becoming-multiple. This perspective then allows for a reconfiguration of consciousness to include Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of molecular consciousness, in which the body and the mind are always already constituting and constructing one another. This type of consciousness radically challenges assumed phallocentric knowledge as can be seen in the cases of monstrous births cited in this chapter.
