Abstract

March’s meeting will be led by Dr Helen Charman from The Faculty of English.

Our reading group provides an interdisciplinary space for engaging discussions on reproduction in all its forms. All welcome, postgraduate and staff! You’ll need to be based in Cambridge though as sessions are in person only.

We dive into texts that examine reproduction not only from biological and medical standpoints but also explore cultural, social, ethical, and political dimensions.

For March the group will be discussing:

’The politics of miscarriage’ (Radical Philosophy 203, December 2018, pp. 62–72)

This essay, which was later expanded into the fifth chapter of Browne’s monograph Pregnancy Without Birth: A Feminist Philosophy of Miscarriage (Bloomsbury, 2023), considers the ways in which solidarity might be extended across miscarriage, pregnancy and abortion as sites of political experience and struggle. Browne’s work aims to redress the surprising absence of miscarriage and stillbirth in feminist theorisations of reproductive politics, as well as offer a philosophical perspective on the experience of gestation itself.

Rooting her analysis in the rising criminalisation of miscarriage and stillbirth in the US, Browne rejects a framework of resistance to this increasingly punitive status quo that relies upon the category ‘innocence’. Instead, she advocates for a ‘full-spectrum’ understanding of all forms of gestational experience, which centres pregnancy as an experience in its own right, rather than a process defined solely by its ‘product’.

Session starts with lunch at 12.30, group convenes at 1pm and finishes 2pm with close at 2.30pm

Find out more https://www.repro.cam.ac.uk/events/cambridge-reading-group-reproduction-march-2025