... urge feminists to “recuperate the fetus” in their intro- duction to a volume of essays entitled Fetal Subjects, Feminist Positions. Recuperating the fetus, they explain, means to acknowledge the promi- nence of fetuses...

... relationship of the emerging field of sound studies to Descartes’s views of the sense of hearing. Descartes’s acoustic studies and anatomical work on the fetus reveal a persistent concern with resonance. But instead of subsuming resonance and its rich metaphorical field (which comprises vibration, sympathy...

... is accomplished is via constructions of the fetus as a patient": Through a range ofpractices within the domain of experimental fetal surgery, the fetus is constructed as a potential person with human qualities. In weekly fetal-treatment meetings, for example, fetuses are routinely referred to as "the kid...

... mothers of trying to harm their fetuses, anti-abortion activists drew on paranoid fantasies of supernatural forces and tried to allay that paranoia by enforcing an identification of the uterus with the space of a secure home and claiming that home as the fetus's castle. Medical discussions of maternal...

... to express alarm and then outrage over the commodification of babies and motherhood which has resulted from the ascendance of paid surrogate labor. In the last ten years it has simultaneously become a staple of feminist pro-abortion arguments to emphasize a conception ofthe mother and fetus as involved...

... 'artificial' unconscious lodged like a prothesis, a graft in the heart of an organ, within the divided self" (xxxvi); an object kept in an outside inside the inside; an object that is neither self nor other: an object that is both inside and beside the self; what could this object be save a fetus in a womb...

.... Conception therefore, is nothing else but this, that the opposite moments, these abstract representations, become one. (Nature 413-14; my emphasis) In this schema, women supply only the material element of the fetus, while men supply the "entire self." Women do not give subjectivity to their children...

..., where the uterus is rep- resented as a sort of lake with a small fetus floating in it (145). Another is a seventeenth-century anatomical illustration from Fabrici’s treatise on the formation of the fetus, depicting the womb...

... that normally develop into the placenta (Mayo). As a result, the fetus almost always dies at the end of the first trimester, when it should transition from being supported directly by the bloodstream to being supported by the placenta. In rare cases, the abnormal cells also burrow into the uterus, where...

... restructured to give the subject a level of agency and control visvis its mother that no embryo or fetus has. Merleau-Ponty understands the flesh of the world in terms of active/passive, touching/touched reversibility (differ- ent...

... "obligation" to give life and their power to deny it. Denial of life-deanimation in that sense-is the stigma to which any woman who withholds her reproductive capacity or aborts the fetus is exposed. In the case of abortion especially, she is exposed to the charge of being a baby-killer, and may feel that she...

... processes related to the Matrix, to the becoming-thresholds of borderlines. To begin with, I would like to present two pictures: first, that of the fetus in its mother's womb with some kind of awareness of I and unknown not-Irs), neither rejected nor assimilated; secondly, that of the mother carrying a baby...

... with "underactive immune systems" who end up rejecting their fetuses immunologically by forming antibodies against their tissues. Normally, women make special antibodies that mask the tell-tale foreign signals on the fetal trophoblasts, so that the mother's immune surveillance system remains blind to the fetus's...

... functioned within language to refuse a subject position. And what occurs is the presence of the fetus and also, in her chapter, menstruation and the dead child, at the expense of the mother. In considering figures of emergence in order to understand presence and absence, Johnson demonstrates how figures...

... Beth Whitehead accept an uneasy alliance with the Vatican and with arguments about women's nature in pregnancy. Assuming that a biological connection to the fetus automatically engenders an emotional one, Marilyn French insists that: "The woman who spends nine months in intense emotional interaction...

... here, Johnson tracks the political consequences of apostrophic address for what has become fetal personhood. In this scene, a silent, affectively present but physically displaced interlocutor (a lover, a fetus) is animated...

... was fundamental to the Christian conception of homicidium, was traditionally treated by Roman law as an inuria (injury) against the father; the fetus was not a victim. Its incorporation within applications of the Cornelian law was an attack upon women who had abortions, not a defense of the unborn.3 In the period...

... incorporated into the Vatican's rhetoric as grounds for denying women access to abortion and fertility technology, claiming that such procedures do not respect the fetus's personhood. What is even more interesting is that such "humanist" language is used extensively in the Church's polemic against secular...

... exults, "Thou are my warrior; / I holp to frame thee" (5.3.62-63). The words "mould" and "frame" both suggest that the womb has power to shape the fetus, as distinct from the father's more exiguous contribution to its beginnings. "Mould" means not only friable earth or topsoil, but also "earth regarded...

... of being-there in which the mother “gives herself in the ‘form’ of fluids” that “penetrate into him [the subject], exceeding all boundaries” (32). In this scene where form is permeable and porous, in this fluid gift of life from mother to fetus, there can be “no distinction between giver and receiver” (82...