"When I became pregnant for the first time, I wasn't expecting such an intense bodily experience. My body had never been so heavy, tired, slow, and painful. But at the same time, I felt more alive, more embodied, more connected to myself, to the world, and to this other person who, in a totally incredible way, turned my body upside down before doing the same with my life."
"But is it really possible to think about pregnancy? Isn't it an experience only to be lived? Like any intense bodily experience, no discourse can describe or explain precisely what it means to be pregnant. But pregnancy is not just about bodies, it is not just a natural process, contrary to what ancient philosophy believed. It involves a subject, and this event has an impact on the way the woman experiences her body and her relationship with the world."
Pregnancy produces intense bodily sensations—heaviness, fatigue, slowness, and pain—while simultaneously increasing feelings of aliveness, embodiment, and connection to self, world, and the fetus. German and French phenomenological traditions largely omit analysis of women's pregnancy experiences, while Anglo‑Saxon feminist philosophers have developed sustained accounts of women's bodily specificities over the past forty years. Pregnancy cannot be reduced to a purely biological or natural process; it implicates a subject and alters bodily experience and relations to the world. Ancient philosophy treated pregnancy as an animal, bodily event with women as passive containers, and remnants of that vision persist in language and everyday behavior.
Read at Apaonline
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]