Abortion Ecologies in Southern African Fiction

Transforming Reproductive Agency

Caitlin E. Stobie (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

224 Seiten

2024
Bloomsbury Academic (Verlag)
978-1-350-25022-2 (ISBN)

Artikel merken

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.

Caitlin E. Stobie is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Leeds. She is the author of Thin Slices (Verve Poetry Press, 2022). Her personal website is www.caitlinstobie.com.

Acknowledgements
Credits
Introduction: Abortion, discourse and ecological metaphor
1 ANIMALS
Pregnancy 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 PLANTS
Uprooting 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 MINERALS
The in/organic tragedy of Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning
Transforming ‘rock bottom’
Reproductive agency in two abortion scenes
Beating hearts or striking rocks
4 HUMANS
Queer 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

Erscheinungsdatum	20.02.2023
Reihe/Serie	Critical Interventions in the Medical and Health Humanities
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 234 mm
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
	Medizin / Pharmazie ► Gesundheitswesen
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Gender Studies
ISBN-10	1-350-25022-8 / 1350250228
ISBN-13	978-1-350-25022-2 / 9781350250222
Zustand	Neuware