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Uterine time and subjectivities: an ethnographic account of the uterus in online body-talk and other articulations of reproductive justice in South African feminist publics

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10 dimensions of the uterus, that is by considering how the temporality of the organ contributes to conceptions of uterine body. 11 health and social justice discourse, and against the broader problematization set out in this introduction, this dissertation explores how young people's personal experiences and feelings about the womb are influenced by and mediated by public discourses on reproductive health, rights and justice, intergenerational cultural expectations. of the uterine body, and vernacular expressions of body talk that are amplified and disseminated in an intimate public such as South African Feminist Twitter. What contemporary South African feminist publics and their expressive colloquialism around the uterine body reveal about social and political meanings of the womb.

Chapter three presents an overview of the research on reproductive worlds and bodies that has shaped this project's conceptualization of the womb. 12 Chapter 6 presents my analysis of the entanglements of the womb in feminist body talk, affective contagions, and the place of feeling in the production of collective future orientations, followed by a brief conclusion in chapter seven.

CHAPTER TWO

The female body was thus represented as hollow, with the entire body seemingly taking on the hollowness and load-bearing capacity of the womb. For the purpose of this research study, these conceptualizations of the relationships of the self and the embodiment of gender are important in the work of feminist ideas for new articulations of reproductive freedoms. The under-representation of the uterus in contemporary socio-theoretical literature seems to follow the medicalized ontologies in which the organ is only important for reproduction.

Yet biomedical accounts of the condition/suffering are characterized by uncertainty and ambiguity, invisibility and complexity. 6 Endometriosis is a condition in which endometrial tissue, the uterine lining that forms and sheds each menstrual cycle, grows in places outside the uterus.

CHAPTER THREE

In my profile information (colloquially “biography”), I identified myself as a researcher interested in the ways people talk about the womb in general and online specifically. The methodology in virtual ethnography was based on my participation in specific (overlapping) online communities of engagement that I call South African Feminist Twitter (SAFemTwitter). I included a question in the survey asking people if and why they post about their uterus or menstrual cycle on social media.

Ula's views that menstrual education will lead to more positive experiences of the first period are supported in the survey data. As such, there is a dissonance between the ascribed meaning of the event ("you are now a woman") and the degree of parental involvement in the child's 'transition' to this phase of life and physicality.

AFFECTIVE CONTAGIONS OF THE UTERUS

Complaint

This is consistent with my experience of the way feminists in digital publics view them. Much of the resulting body talk about this digital feminist public tended to emphasize their antagonism (or ambivalence at best) to the wide set of concerns or "life administrators"22 that accompany a womb and are seen as interfering with their enjoyment and quality of life. This is evidenced in the everyday use of the phrase "my uterus is trying to kill me" (or other variations of the idea of ​​a murderous uterus) when engaging in public complaints about menstruation.

Other catchphrases appearing on SAFemTwitter's radical tongues included terms such as 'demonic tool' to describe the womb itself, descriptions of menstruation as 'torture' and 'punishment for not being pregnant', as well as references to the speculum, gynecological an instrument used in Pap smears, as This is a contextually responsive (or reactive?) state where, through performative performances of action, the emergent radical feminist discourse contributes to the construction of a countercultural popular imaginary of the womb that touches on the concept of the monstrous womb. The 'attractiveness' of the idea of ​​a monstrously strong uterus is evident from the repeated reference to the phrase "my uterus is trying to kill me" as shorthand for what is understood in the intimate public as a rise of antagonistic emotions towards a potential gestational future.

In Cecilia's and many others' imaginations about the life of the womb, the anticipation of violence is first felt. My generation is hyper-aware of this intensity of past and future time-spaces on our experience of the present. Nix is ​​one of my 'mutuals' in the intimate public; we are also age-mates, part of the group of millennials who were "90s kids" and are now reaching the age of thirty.

This included anticipating and making sense of the way the uterine cycle activates certain affective-temporal concerns. This is reflected in the division of the book into sections entitled 'The Physical', 'The Psychological' and 'The Political'. The life of the womb is an intensely temporary one, and so are many of the affective relationships people have with the organ.

CHAPTER SIX

UTERINE HYPER-SUBJECTIVITIES

In light of this hyper-awareness, particularly of the ways in which the life of the uterine body can be read as a potential site of patriarchal subjection, I ask what we can learn about the way in which uterine subjectivities are produced in the current version of society. I consider this in relation to the way in which popular online feminist discourse produces affective contagions, such as the increasingly radical honesty I have described here, in which women and gender-diverse people purposefully highlighted antagonistic relationships in the womb. Interestingly, the wider digital feminist public on which this ethnography is based and in which the radical language of the murderous/antagonistic womb is produced.

By posing these questions together, I aim to draw attention to the ways in which the production of uterine effects is characterized by different temporal characteristics of the uterine body. For most people I've interacted with, the question usually leads to speculation about the life of the womb, most often simply translating into the question of whether pregnancy and birth figure into one's personal wishes for the future. Also commonly invoked are a host of other interrelated contextual concerns related to the political and material conditions of the current world, which become influencing factors in most people's feelings about the future of the womb.

This was evident in the way some participants spoke of the ability to conceive and give birth as not being "worth managing" by the menstrual cycle. To say that the uterine body is experienced through affective-temporal orientations is to recognize the ways in which "future potential exists in the present as a particularly intense feeling or affect" (Coleman 2018:41). Wade.33 While reproductive rights are considerably more secure in South Africa (at least on paper, constitutionally), there is a vigilant awareness of the ways in which global politics can have an impact closer to home.

People who reported feeling ambivalence or negative feelings about the uterus and its possible future spoke skeptically about the ideal temporalities of reproductive events, rejecting the notion of the uterus. This affective 'thickness' of time is an essential aspect of the mode of uterine hyper-subjectivity in which this analysis culminates. I argue that this knowledge effect is increasingly widespread and that it causes social misrecognition of the myriad other ways in which wombs matter to people who have one.

CONCLUSION

66 process (which is usually explained with reference to pregnancy) with a sense of overt gender responsibility linked to the bio-heteronormative model of the life of the womb. In the preceding discussions, I have elaborated on the operation and implications of a radical vernacular mode of complaint about the womb and explored some of the resulting discourse that produces collective affective orientations to the womb body. My investigation revealed the sense that one's personality is seen as inextricably linked to the potential of the womb, and the singularity of the life course it is supposed to map, that is, the birth horizon in sis- heteronormative imaginings of the 'life of the womb'.

Those sociocultural norms about uterine life contain dominant relationships with affective-temporal orientations of anticipation and speculation and expectation. I say that the radical vernacular I have described in this dissertation represents a visceral womb connection that is an established generational response to the felt implications of living in a sustained state of fear. Given the hypervigilance required of women and cross-gendered people in The Female Fear Factory (Gqola 2021) and the necessity to gain fluency in the social grammars of this fear, I suggest that the womb body in the current environment engages a gender . hypersu objectivity that positions the womb as the symbolic antagonist of feminist sensibility.

In connection with this research, I assume that younger feminists in particular are troubled by the moralizing associations of the uterine body and thus enter into an antagonistic relationship with what is experienced as alienating. I argue that what is expressed in the vernacular feminist language displayed in this work are the intensely felt impacts of the psycho-socio-cultural crisis of gender-based violence in South Africa. Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature.

Narratives of Violence Passed Down Through Generations of Women in the Cape Coloured Community,’ [Ongepubliseerde Honneursproefskrif], Universiteit van Kaapstad. Motherhood in the quest for social transformation’, What Gender is Motherhood, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, pp. Maternal Bodies in the Postgenomic Order: Gender and the Explanatory Landscape of Epigenetics, in Richardson, S. eds.).

Commodified relatives: death, mourning, and competing claims on organ donor bodies in the United States. The Birth of the Clinic and the Advent of Reproduction: Pregnancy, Pathology and the Medical Eye in Modernity.

References

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