Introduction

This introduction challenges the assumptions in queer theory that only straight women get pregnant, that every pregnancy ends in the birth of a healthy, legitimate child, and that pregnancy always reproduces the family in a recognizable form. These frameworks not only dull the transgressive force of pregnancy in Shakespeare's work and the expansive ways in which early moderns thought about the pregnant body, but contribute to the erasure of so many lived experiences of pregnancy in our current, cultural imagination. In short, the concept of “queer pregnancy” not only reorients scholars to pregnancy in Shakespeare's plays and beyond — it illuminates how high the stakes are for pregnant people who continue to be read and treated through perspectives that do not take queer bodies and identities into account.