Abortion Ecologies in Southern African Fiction: Transforming Reproductive Agency

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Focusing on texts from the late 1970s to the 1990s which document both changing attitudes to terminations of pregnancy and dramatic environmental, medical, and socio-political developments during southern Africas liberation struggles, this book examines how four writers from Botswana, South Africa, and Zimbabwe address the ethics of abortion and reproductive choice. Viewing recent fiction through the lens of new materialist theory which challenges conventional, individual-based notions of human rights by asserting that all matter holds agency this book argues that southern African women writers anticipate and exceed current feminist revivals of materialist thought. Not only do the authors question contemporary discourse framing abortion as either a confirmation of a womans right to choose or an unethical termination of human life, but they challenge conventional understandings of development, growth, and time. Through close readings of both literal gestation in the selected texts and the metaphorical reproduction of the post/colonial nation, this study advances the concept of reproductive agency, creating a range of queer ecocritical alternatives to tropes such as those of the Mother Country, Mother Africa, or the birth of a nation. This study situates abortion narratives by Wilma Stockenstrm (translated by J. M. Coetzee), Zo Wicomb, Yvonne Vera, and Bessie Head alongside contemporary postcolonial feminist theories, melding traditional beliefs with materialist views to reconsider the future of reproductive health matters in southern Africa. Merging queer ecocritical perspectives from materialism and postcolonialism, this study will appeal to students and researchers in the medical humanities, new materialisms, and postcolonial studies.

Reviews

Caitlin Stobies Abortion Ecologies in Southern African Fiction situates literature front and centre in important debates about reproductive technologies and womens bodies in southern Africa, and more broadly. The book confronts questions of secrecy and shame around the subject head-on, pointing out in powerful and persuasive ways that southern African fiction was theorizing abortion and agency in openly feminist terms throughout the period of anti-apartheid struggle. In discussions of Wilma Stockenstrom, Zoe Wicomb, Yvonne Vera and Bessie Head, Stobie argues compellingly that creativity represents a force for social justice. * Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in English, University of Oxford, UK *
Reading Abortion Ecologies in Southern African Fiction in the United States in the days after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that guaranteed American womens right to abortion as a personal medical decision, is a jarring experience. In this moment, its clear that Stobies work is prescient and timely in its careful analysis of southern African womens textual representation of the commodification of womens reproductive capacity within imperial and patriarchal capitalism. Informed by narratives in which southern African women writers process abortion as both lived choice and national metaphor, her analysis unpacks the ways that womens bodies are always enmeshed in the racist and sexist project of nation building. * Laura Wright, Professor of English, Western Carolina University, USA *

Author Bio

Caitlin E. Stobie is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Leeds. She is the author of Thin Slices (Verve Poetry Press, 2022). Her personal website is www.caitlinstobie.com.