cfp

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

Guest Editors

▪ Dr. Florian Lützelberger, Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg/University of Oxford
▪ Dr. Agnieszka Balcerzak, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München 

Abortion and Miscarriage: Narratives, Practices, Discourses

In La condition foetale (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. On the one hand, there has been a global tightening of access to legal abortion. This includes the restrictive reform of abortion law that came into force in Poland in 2021, as well as the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade in the United States, which ended the constitutional right to abortion that had been in place since 1973. On the other hand, there have also been significant liberalizations, such as the legalization of abortion in Ireland in 2018 following a historic referendum, or the enshrining of the right to abortion in the French constitution in 2024. At the same time, intense controversies continue over the so-called “fetal personhood” of embryos and over state interventions in reproductive rights and technologies. These debates are not confined to legal-political arenas but also resonate in literary, artistic, and autobiographical engagements. 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. A similar concern is pursued by the Portuguese artist Paula Rego in her series Untitled. The Abortion Series (1998), a set of large-scale pastels that powerfully depict the physical and emotional burdens of illegal abortions. Her works emerged directly from the political struggles surrounding Portugal’s then-existing abortion ban and became an important visual intervention in the public campaign that ultimately culminated in the liberalization of abortion law in 2007.

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 broad panorama of approaches, revealing the intersections of body, knowledge, norms, practices, and lived experience in this highly sensitive field.

We invite contributions from all relevant disciplines, including social and cultural anthropology, 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 welcome. We also explicitly encourage contributions emerging from activist contexts and from the broader fields of political, social, or artistic practice that engage with questions surrounding abortion and miscarriage.

Contributors may engage with, among others, the following perspectives – while also developing their own research questions and pursuing contexts of their own choosing:

• 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 representation: 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 dimension: 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, cultures, and geopolitical regions?
• Theoretical reflections: How might sociological, anthropological, cultural, or feminist concepts (for instance, Boltanski, Illouz, Berlant, Ross) contribute to an understanding of reproduction, the body, motherhood, subjectivity, and gender? How can intersectional perspectives (gender, class, race, age, disability, religion, sexuality) be productively incorporated?
• Methodological approaches: Which methodological frameworks are suitable for researching abortion and miscarriage across different social, cultural, and political contexts? How can qualitative methods – such as ethnographic fieldwork, participant observation, problem-centered or narrative interviews, digital ethnography, or visual methodologies – be productively employed? What ethical challenges arise when working with sensitive data, vulnerable interlocutors, and situations shaped by shame, stigma, or trauma? How can researchers engage reflexively with their own positionality, affective involvement, and the power relations present in the field?
• 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?

Submission and timeline

▪ Abstracts (approx. 350 words plus references and a short bio-bibliographical note; languages of submission: German and English) are to be submitted by 31 December 2025 to: florian.luetzelberger[at]uni-bamberg.de & agnieszka.balcerzak[at]ekwee.uni-muenchen.de

▪ Notification of acceptance will be provided during the winter break 2025/26
▪ Submission of full papers by 1 June 2026
▪ Peer-review process and revisions will take place over the summer of 2026.
▪ Planned publication of the special issue in autumn/winter 2026