Böcker av Caroline Arni

A new history of the concept of fetal life in the human sciences At a time when the becoming of a human being in a woman's body has, once again, become a fraught issue--from abortion debates and surrogacy controversies to prenatal diagnoses and assessments of fetal risk--Of Human Born presents the largely unknown history of how the human sciences came to imagine the unborn in terms of "life before birth." Caroline Arni shows how these sciences created the concept of "fetal life" by way of experimenting on animals, pregnant women, and newborns; how they worried about the influence of the expectant mother's living conditions; and how they lingered on the question of the beginnings of human subjectivity. Such were the concerns of physiologists, pediatricians, psychologists, and psychoanalysts as they advanced the novel discipline of embryology while, at the same time, grappling with age-old questions about the coming-into-being of a human person. Of Human Born thus draws attention to the fundamental way in which modern approaches to the unborn have been intertwined with the configuration of "the human" in the age of scientific empiricism. Arni revises the narrative that the "modern embryo" is quintessentially an embryo disembedded from the pregnant woman's body. On the contrary, she argues that the concept of fetal life cannot be separated from its dependency on the maternal organism, countering the rhetorical discourses that have fueled the recent rollback of abortion rights in the United States.

Für die kritische Auseinandersetzung mit der modernen Geschlechterordnung ist die Debatte über "Kultur" vs. "Natur" zentral. Hier wurde und wird weiterhin argumentiert, das vermeintlich Natürliche sei eigentlich ganz und gar kultürlich und die "natürliche" Geschlechterordnung (ja, die Geschlechtlichkeit selbst) infolgedessen sozial konstruiert. Jede Referenz auf "Natur" ist damit grundsätzlich dem Essenzialismusverdacht unterworfen worden, was auch zu harscher Kritik am Ökofeminismus oder am so genannten "Differenzfeminismus" führte. Für die historische Arbeit entpuppt sich dieses Denken zunehmend als unproduktives Hindernis bzw. als vorschnelle Begrenzung der Forschung - wenn nämlich nicht gefragt werden kann, wovon AkteurInnen eigentlich handeln, wenn sie von "Natur" reden, aber auch, wenn ein Naturbegriff absolut gesetzt wird, der selbst erheblichem historischem Wandel unterworfen war und ist. Im Heft werden solche Fragen an diversen historischen Szenarien (insbesondere der Vormoderne) diskutiert. Damit wird ein wichtiger Beitrag zur derzeitigen Debatte über "Natur", Kultur und Geschlechterordnungen geleistet."Nature" and its presumed opposite, "culture" are central categories when examining the modern order of the sexes. A central argument has long been that what is supposedly "natural" might actually be entirely "cultural" and that the "natural" gender order and even gender itself is, indeed, socially constructed. Any reference to "nature" has thus been fundamentally subjected to a suspicion of essentialism, leading to to harsh feminist critiques of intellectual currents such as "ecofeminism" or "feminism of difference". This binary way of thinking, however, seems to bear in it an unproductive limitation of research. It becomes impossible to ask what historical actors are doing when they use the term "nature" and it makes the concept of nature absolute, rather than showing it to be the subject to considerable historical change. This issue discusses questions of the contingency of nature and its relationship with gender along various historical settings, thus making an important contribution to our current debate on "nature", culture and the gendered order of society.