Working Thesis Title: Troubling the gendered boundaries of reproduction

Supervisors:  Dr Keren Hammerschlag, Senior Lecturer, Centre for Art History and Art Theory (chair and primary supervisor), Professor Catherine Waldby, Director, Research School of Social Sciences, Dr Katherine Carroll, Senior Lecturer, Sociology, Dr Caroline Schuster, Associate Professor, Anthropology

In this project, I take a nineteenth century anthropological term and its journeys through various disciplines and imaginaries as an entry point into exploring non-gestational experiences of pregnancy. Couvade, an umbrella term for a range of practices–including so called "male lying-in"—was initially used by white western European authors in pursuing theories of magic, family, and racial hierarchy. Into the twentieth century, couvade also proved useful in psychoanalytic theory and military medicine. Today, the term makes appearances in online parenting and health insurance articles, advertising, and beyond.

Informed by visual culture as well as histories of anthropology and medicine, my project investigates representations of non-gestational relationships to pregnancy and pregnant bodies. These representations traverse many genres and formats, including ethnographic imagery, medical illustrations, science and speculative fiction, comics and graphic novels, advertising, feminist and reproductive justice campaigns, films, and performance art. As well as exploring a rich visual corpus, I will conduct ethnographic fieldwork to investigate bodily boundaries in pregnancy. I propose to conduct fieldwork in a diverse range of sites, each operating with their own specific logics of gender and sexuality.

A key question driving this project is: What are the possibilities and limits to sharing pregnancy and birth? To investigate this, I take the figure of the non-gestational partner/supporter as my primary guide.