Del i serien Critical Interventions in the Medical and Health Humanities

Abortion Ecologies in Southern African Fiction

Transforming Reproductive Agency

Häftad, Engelska, 2024

AvCaitlin E. Stobie,Stuart Murray

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Focusing on texts from the late 1970s to the 1990s which document both changing attitudes to terminations of pregnancy and dramatic environmental, medical, and socio-political developments during southern Africa’s liberation struggles, this book examines how four writers from Botswana, South Africa, and Zimbabwe address the ethics of abortion and reproductive choice.Viewing recent fiction through the lens of new materialist theory – which challenges conventional, individual-based notions of human rights by asserting that all matter holds agency – this book argues that southern African women writers anticipate and exceed current feminist revivals of materialist thought. Not only do the authors question contemporary discourse framing abortion as either a confirmation of a woman’s ‘right to choose’ or an unethical termination of human life, but they challenge conventional understandings of development, growth, and time. Through close readings of both literal gestation in the selected texts and the metaphorical reproduction of the post/colonial nation, this study advances the concept of reproductive agency, creating a range of queer ecocritical alternatives to tropes such as those of ‘the Mother Country’, ‘Mother Africa’, or ‘the birth of a nation’. This study situates abortion narratives by Wilma Stockenström (translated by J. M. Coetzee), Zoë Wicomb, Yvonne Vera, and Bessie Head alongside contemporary postcolonial feminist theories, melding traditional beliefs with materialist views to reconsider the future of reproductive health matters in southern Africa. Merging queer ecocritical perspectives from materialism and postcolonialism, this study will appeal to students and researchers in the medical humanities, new materialisms, and postcolonial studies.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2024-08-22
Mått156 x 234 x 22 mm
Vikt340 g
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
SerieCritical Interventions in the Medical and Health Humanities
Antal sidor224
FörlagBloomsbury Publishing PLC
ISBN9781350250222

Tillhör följande kategorier

Litteraturvetenskap inom Skönlitteratur
Genusvetenskap inom Samhälle och politik
Hälso- och sjukvård inom Medicin

Acknowledgements Credits Introduction: Abortion, discourse and ecological metaphor 1 ANIMALSPregnancy as parasitism in Wilma Stockenström’s The Expedition to the Baobab Tree Listening to beastly riddles Slavery, gestation and infantilization Translating negation A human being and powerful 2 PLANTSUprooting desire in Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town Autopoiesis and the Bildungsroman Apartheid’s abortive environments Seeds of disgust, roots of deviance Creative formations 3 MINERALSThe in/organic tragedy of Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning Transforming ‘rock bottom’ Reproductive agency in two abortion scenes Beating hearts or striking rocks 4 HUMANSQueer vitality and Bessie Head’s fiction ‘Something or someone’ and The Collector of Treasures Creative ferment in the Personal Choices trilogy Coda: New African time Conclusion: Questioning power, transforming futures References Notes

Caitlin Stobie’s Abortion Ecologies in Southern African Fiction situates literature front and centre in important debates about reproductive technologies and women’s bodies in southern Africa, and more broadly. The book confronts questions of secrecy and shame around the subject head-on, pointing out in powerful and persuasive ways that southern African fiction was theorizing abortion and agency in openly feminist terms throughout the period of anti-apartheid struggle. In discussions of Wilma Stockenstrom, Zoe Wicomb, Yvonne Vera and Bessie Head, Stobie argues compellingly that creativity represents a force for social justice.