Blind Spots and Failed Performance: Abortion, Feminism, and Queer Theory

A friend, a deeply committed feminist scholar, asks me what I am working on.

"Abortion," I write.

"Yuck," she writes back.

She was, of course, kidding—but only partly. I know what she means. I am sick of the topic before I start. Abortion is the one subject I stay away from in the classroom. Like many, I avoid keeping company with student fundamentalism on this issue, and, more disturbingly, I do not trust the institutional apparatus to support how I would teach such a subject even as I count on that same institution to support (in its own way) my teaching of art and literature that engages nearly every other issue of importance to queer studies. My hesitancy to take up the topic in the classroom reflects not only a suspicion that academic freedom does not extend to the conversations about abortion I would like to stage, but a deeper disciplinary issue regarding the place of abortion as a subject within queer theory as it is practiced in the humanities.¹ Perhaps that hesitancy reflects my own identification, too, as an abortive subject—as we will see, speaking as an aborting body, speaking from within abortion can feel impossible. If I found myself tired of the idea of writing about abortion before I'd even written a word, it was because I'd given myself over to the effects of the deadening rhetoric that seeks to police and contain our relationships to the topic. As becomes clear in the second half of this essay, my critical interest was activated by a recent scandal over the place of abortion in a college student's art project. No feminist took a public position defending this student (quite the contrary)—this surprised me only until I noticed my own previous critical passivity around the topic. That is even more surprising given my personal sense that the abortion I'd had as a student at Rutgers in the 1980s was one of the most singularly empowering experiences I've had as a sexual subject. But, of course, I have hardly ever said so in public.

Jeannie Ludlow observes that there is a hierarchy within feminist discourse about abortion, with a premium placed on "traumatized" abortion stories—in which the ordinariness of abortion is eclipsed by politically expedient narratives about unwanted pregnancies brought on by sexual violence and abuse. The implicit demand that "abortion be the exception, and not a normal part of women's lives" ("TW," 32) pushes the extreme suffering of victims of rape and abuse into the public sphere and throws a blanket of silence, shame, and anxiety over nearly every other kind of unwanted pregnancy as they become stigmatized as personal failures. "Because they are presented so frequently, these circumstances [rape and abuse, medically dangerous pregnancies] have become reinscribed as the 'appropriate reasons' to have an abortion, and they render all other reasons for aborting questionable at best, and frivolous at worst" ("TW," 33). One of the many nasty effects of this form of narrative policing is the stigmatization of the agency of the vast majority of women who choose to have abortions—their choice becomes a disorder of will and desire. Ironically, too, we become more comfortable with abortion stories in which the pregnant woman is herself more like a child than an adult—a helpless victim of circumstance, pregnant through no fault or desire of her own. And so, for example, in a pro-abortion film like Four Months, Three Weeks, and Two Days (Mungiu, 2007) the pregnant woman seeking an illegal abortion is represented as a helpless baby—even as the film makes clear that in Romania during this period the most basic forms of contraception had been criminalized. The suggestion is that Gabriela's pregnancy is a result of her passive relation to the world. The protagonist of the film is, in fact, not the pregnant woman, but Otilia, the highly competent, savvy friend who takes care of Gabriela—and is raped by the abortionist for her troubles. The pregnant woman is thus represented as a child...