Authors
Rebecca Howes-Mischel
Journal
THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE FETUS
Pages
252
Description
In this chapter I draw on public encounters with fetuses in two seemingly disparate locales—the theatricality of US anti-abortion legislative activism and everyday interactions between doctors and patients in a southern Mexican public hospital—in which audiences were asked to recognize a fetal subject as social, prompted by the sound of its amplified heartbeat. Rather than offer them as comparative cases within equivalent reproductive politics, I query how they might together illuminate implicit propositions about fetal biosocial existence and the proof thereof. As such, this chapter offers a speculative set of methodological and analytic approaches for glimpsing the production of fetal personhood as it emerges through the mediation of diagnostic technologies. Here, I name such productions “fetal propositions” to highlight their not-yet-settled and suggestive nature, while arguing that anthropology offers a kind of tool …
Scholar articles
R Howes-Mischel - THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE FETUS