Genealogies of abortion: On the limits of life and choice in modern America
Item
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Title
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Genealogies of abortion: On the limits of life and choice in modern America
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:f6d8cb4643c0:10302
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identifier
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10173
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Creator
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Weingarten, Karen,
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Contributor
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David Reynolds
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Date
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2009
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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American literature | Gender studies | American studies | abortion | birth control | eugenics | liberalism | reproduction
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Abstract
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Genealogies of Abortion focuses on early twentieth-century fiction and primary sources to construct a genealogy of abortion politics that challenges the current binary of "life" and "choice." The project argues that both choice and rights are implicated in a liberal discourse that emphasizes individual autonomy and responsibility. In connection to this argument, the project demonstrates how the anti-abortion position on "life" assumes an individuated personhood and reinforces what Hannah Arendt identifies as modern society's foundation in the recurring cycles of reproduction, which place more importance on ensuring that accumulation is continuous than on valuing the end product. The project thus critiques the foundations of current abortion discourses in individualism and privacy by contending that the liberal construction of subjectivity presumes an already self-determining and privileged citizen. Additionally, the project shows how abortion discourses are rooted in early twentieth-century attempts to maintain a majority white and Protestant citizenry in the face of significant social changes, such as the end of slavery and the dramatic rise in immigration from Catholic countries. Through tracing the emergence of references to abortion in American fiction, it examines how this new interest in abortion politics coincided with an anxiety about whiteness in the United States and a renewed emphasis on the autonomous liberal citizen. Some of the key texts that concern rhetorics of choice and rights are Anthony Comstock's anti-abortion polemics; F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned, which fictionalizes Comstock's interests; Margaret Sanger's pro-birth-control and anti-abortion writings, particularly in The Birth Control Review; and selected popular novels from the early twentieth century that represent abortion. The second half of the dissertation focuses on the rhetoric of life in abortion politics and examines Edith Wharton's Summer in the context of World War I, William Faulkner's The Wild Palms, and Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition. Through these texts, Genealogies of Abortion questions how abortion came to be framed in its present terms by examining how abortion discourses were circulated through novels, periodicals, law, and public rhetoric in the early twentieth century, and how those conversations lead to our contemporary understanding of abortion rhetoric.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
