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Call for Papers | Abortion and Miscarriage: Narratives, Practices, Discourses (Special Issue)

(Guest Editor: Dr. Florian Lützelberger, Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg/University of Oxford)

In La condition fœtale (2004), Luc Boltanski describes the profound ambivalence that shapes cultural and social modes of engaging with the foetus: it appears at once as an invisible medical object, as a projection surface for social expectations, as a legally regulated life in the making, and as an intimate secret. This simultaneity of the visible and the invisible, the private and the political, embodied experience and social attribution, profoundly structures the narratives and practices surrounding abortion and miscarriage. The foetus thus emerges not only as a borderline case of individual experience but also as a paradigmatic object of biopolitical regulation in the Foucauldian sense: it condenses discourses that seek to govern life, bodies, and populations, thereby establishing normative orders of sexuality and reproduction. At the same time, a contested field opens up in which different publics and counterpublics intersect. While legal and medical discourses seek to capture the foetus within norms and categories, autobiographical, literary, or artistic representations generate spaces that elude hegemonial logic. In this respect, many narratives of abortion and miscarriage can also be understood as forms of what Lauren Berlant (2008) has termed counterpublics: communicative arenas in which marginalised experiences are articulated and positioned against dominant moral and political orders. Abortion and pregnancy loss thus appear not only as medico-legal issues or individual fates but as crucial sites where conflicts over visibility, recognition, and interpretive authority with regard to the childbearing body become condensed.

Contemporary debates underscore the urgency of the subject: the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the United States, the enshrinement of the right to abortion in the French Constitution in 2023, as well as ongoing controversies concerning the personhood of the embryo and the regulation of reproduction. Yet the field is shaped not only by juridical and political disputes but also by literary, artistic, and autobiographical testimony. Perhaps the most prominent example is Annie Ernaux’s L’événement (2000), which has become a central document of feminist literary history. Ernaux’s text demonstrates paradigmatically how literary language renders visible both the lived experience of abortion and its social condemnation, while simultaneously highlighting the individuality and subjectivity of such experiences.

The planned special issue seeks to examine the interferences and tensions between body, medicine, law, ethics, society, and subjectivity in relation to abortion and miscarriage, while taking into account a wide range of temporal, cultural, and social contexts. This issue positions itself as a platform for interdisciplinary dialogue that takes seriously both the long medical-historical and anthropological dimensions of abortion and miscarriage and their contemporary literary, artistic, and political articulations. Its aim is to open up a wide panorama of approaches that makes visible the intersections of body, knowledge, norms, practices, and lived experience within this highly sensitive field.

We invite contributions from all relevant disciplines, including social and cultural anthropology, empirical cultural studies, history of medicine, media studies, sociology, midwifery studies, medicine, law, history, literary and cultural studies, art history, film studies, philosophy and ethics, gender studies, and the medical and health humanities. Interdisciplinary approaches are particularly welcome.

Contributors might, for instance, engage with the following perspectives – or pursue their own questions in contexts of their choice:

● Practices and corporealities
How are everyday practices, rituals, and symbolic orders around abortion and miscarriage shaped? What roles do midwives, physicians, “backstreet” providers, healers, religious actors, families, and communities play? What transcultural comparisons can be drawn – for example, between local knowledge systems, biomedical discourses, and global health programmes? 

● Narratives and representations
How are abortion and miscarriage represented in literary texts, autobiographical and autofictional accounts, artistic works, films, digital media, or performative practices? What metaphors, aesthetic strategies, and narrative patterns of shame, pain, silence, or resistance structure these representations?

● Historical and social dimensions
What historical practices – from household remedies to modern gynaecological procedures – can be reconstructed? How are legal, medical, or religious regulations reflected in individual and collective responses? What regimes of visibility and invisibility govern discourses about abortion and miscarriage across different epochs and cultures?

● Theoretical reflections
How might sociological, anthropological, cultural, or feminist concepts (for instance, Boltanski, Illouz, Berlant) contribute to an understanding of reproduction, the body, motherhood, subjectivity, and gender? How can intersectional perspectives (gender, class, race, age, disability, religion) be productively incorporated?

● Affect, memory, kinship
What forms of mourning, commemoration, or genealogical connections emerge in the context of abortion and miscarriage? How do such experiences enter into dialogue with individual biographies, collective memories, and kinship structures?

Timeline and submission