... Exposures: Abortion Politics and the Optics of Allusion Valerie Hartouni Over the course of the last decade, the grammar and culture of abortion have been profoundly refigured. Although a variety of factors have converged to produce this refiguration, among the most pivotal has...

... (the “gag rule”) forbidding doctors in family planning clinics accepting federal funds to even mention abortion to pregnant women (even if that pregnancy threatened a woman’s life). In January 1992, the Supreme Court announced that it would rule on Pennsylvania’s restrictive abortion law...

... abortion law dating from 1920 was only abolished in 1975, and even at present the large majority of women, particularly those that need them most, can only obtain abortions at great financial and psychological cost because of the “conscience clause” included in the new law. Similarly...

.... In the early eighties, a bunch of feminists got together in New York and thrashed out how best to draw media attention to the threats then looming against abortion rights. Ellen Wil- lis, Annie Snitow, Judith Levine, Temma Kaplan, Carole Vance, Karen Durbin, Alex Kates Shulman, Vanalyne Green, Joan Bra...

...” American feminism. After all, French women obtained the vote for their heroic sacrifices after World War 11, and not after World War I like American women. The archaic abortion law dating from 1920 was only abolished in 1975, and even at present the large majority of women, particularly those...

... bargains of living and dying in (Trump’s) America. Of course, the language of abortion provides a ready-made pool of cultural affects—an “identity machine,” as Berlant would say, which does not simply articulate the US partisan divide, but which is crucial to a fantasmatic “logic of American personhood...

... appeared in The Spectator, Camera Obscura, The Canadian ]ournal of Political and Social Theory, and The Journal of Popular Culture. In association with Satori Productions, she is currently completing a documentary on Canadian women’s abortion expe- riences. Miriam Hansen is Professor...

... thing: that sex education for women could now be safely abandoned. Valerie Hartouni examines the ways in which “the grammar and culture of abortion have been profoundly refigured” over the last decade, attributing this change in large part to the increased public presence of the “ free...

... Brian Playing in the Dark: Privacy, Public Sex, and the Erotics of the Cinema Venue. No. 30; pp. 93-1 11 Hartouni, Valerie Fetal Exposures: Abortion Politics and the Optics of Allusion. No. 29; pp. 131-149. 142 Henderson, Joe et al. Camera Inforrnatica: Producing...

... to be contraceptive, abortive, infanticidal, alternatively as monstrous, deformed, and always apocalyptic. Such a thought, however, is but the return of the repressed abjection that consti- tutes the Western “conception” of the subject. It is, like VGER, an image of that which has been expelled...

... insights developed by the reproductive justice movement, which has crucially decentered dominant ways of thinking about the abortion debate in North America. As Loretta Ross and Rickie Solinger assert, “Women of color activists pointed out that the concept of choice masks the different economic, political...

... also expressed the evolving feminist consciousness of the 1970s by exploring issues of increasing concern to women throughout the decade: sexuality (Women on Sex: A Conversation, Women’s Video Collective, 1972); rape (The Rape Tape, Under One Roof Video/Jenny Goldberg, 1972); abortion (The Worst...

... and affirm rather than destroy heteronormative love, marriage, and the continuity of the family. The narrative attempts to resolve the contradiction by associating unprotected heterosexual sex with abortion and identifying the termination of the pregnancy — as opposed to the unprotected sex leading...

... filmmakers all over the world. In her own work, the spectator and more especially the female and/or feminist spectator, is quite con- sciously challenged. As Christie Milliken notes of Armatage’s 1979 film Speak Body: “By merely ‘looking’ at a film about abortion, the viewer must...

...-the years of fascism and the onset of war; 1979-a period of modern medicine, birth control, and abortion. 7. Ulrike Ottinger Born 1942; studied art in Munich 1959- 1961 and Paris 1962- 1969; director of film club in Constance 1969-1972; since 1973 resides in Berlin. FILMS...

... not only include children, of course, but abortions, venereal disease, psychic damage, and social ostracism (whether or not the sex was voluntary). The film begins with documentary footage of Soviet sol- diers on the streets of Berlin...

....” By this time the church, under the unflappable oversight of Howard Moody, was operating a military draft counseling service and organizing around issues of civil rights, free speech, abortion rights, and the decriminalization of prostitution. The small but devoted congregation came to many of the cultural...

... and the ideology of eugenics.47 And as Cheryl Johnson-Odim argues, “the fact that surgical sterilization re- mains free and that federal funding for abortions has been disallowed means that it is poor women to whom the choice to abort is denied, and their ranks are disproportionately populated by women...

...), and the intensification of right-wing fundamentalist political efforts to resubordinate women to men by reducing women’s social roles exclusively to wife and moth- 315 erhood and by rolling back gains in reproductive rights, notably the right to abortion, on the basis of the assertion that women’s social...

.... Aborting her unborn baby is one of several reversals in strategy that Ellen makes in the film. First she switches fiancés; next she nurtures Danny, only to kill him later; and then she gets pregnant to win Richard’s love back, only to abort the child a few months later. All this back...