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Feminist Studies

Not One, Not Two: Toward an Ontology of Pregnancy

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Basic understandings of subjectivity are derived from principles of masculine
embodiment such as discreteness. But pregnancy challenges such understandings
because it represents a sort of splitting of the body. In the pregnant situation, a
subject may experience herself as both herself and an other, as well as neither
herself nor an other. This is logically untenable—an impossibility. If our discourse
depends on discrete referents, then what paradigms of identity are available to the
pregnant subject? What could be the pregnant subject's ontology? Eric Bapteste and
John Dupré offer the idea that organisms are processual beings. In their view, the
ecological interrelationships between the organisms are defining, and render them
dynamic processes, rather than stable things. Does Bapteste and Dupré’s processual
ontological account accommodate pregnant organisms, including pregnant subjects?
Here, I suggest some criteria for an ontology of pregnancy. I test the processual
account and determine whether it can accommodate the phenomenon of
pregnancy. I find that a processual ontology captures a great deal about pregnant
embodiment and is a significant improvement over Cartesian and anti-metaphysical
accounts. However, in order to accommodate pregnancy, what we still need from an
ontology is the inclusion of subjectivity.

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English
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Subject(s)
Pregnancy
Ontology
Gravidity
Feminist Metaphysics
Processual
Natality
Ecological Interrelationships
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Article
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