Transgressive Reproduction: Cultural Anxieties about Women and Gender in the Near and Distant Past

The history of reproduction is an enormous topic that continues to expand in exciting new directions. Previously, scholars have produced excellent studies of the history of childbirth, contraception, abortion, sterilization, and eugenics, including within the context of war, imperialism, and slavery. These four new books under review remind us that there is still much to discover about the realm of reproduction.

Drawing on a wide range of sources and topics across three centuries and four countries, these authors present provocative histories of transgressive reproduction, including notions of dangerous women and nonconforming men. They provide analysis of representations of pregnant men in early modern Spain and cases of puerperal insanity in Victorian Britain. They assess the evolution of fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) in the latetwentieth century United States, and the construction of the professional midwife in late-twentieth-century Canada. Together they offer fascinating investigations of cultural anxieties about women and gender in the near and distant past.

Male Delivery: Reproduction, Effeminacy, and Pregnant Men in Early Modern Spain, by Spanish professor Sherry Velasco, is a study of the figure of the pregnant man in seventeenth-century Spanish literature and culture. It analyzes this image as a representation of the anxieties about masculinity, sexuality, and gender roles. At the center of the book is an interpretation of the one-act play, El parto de Juan Rana [John Frog Gives Birth], a farce from the 1660s about a pregnant man. Gender nonconformity is a key theme of the play and of Velasco's book. Velasco analyzes the play, in which a man gives birth and his wife bosses him around, in relation to the culture of early modern Spain.

Velasco argues that the pregnant man is a transgressive image that reveals men's insecurities regarding the dangers of birthing women and nonconforming men, and their desire for power over both. She asserts that the pregnant man was a contradictory cultural figure of fantasy and nightmare, liberation and the status quo. According to Velasco, the pregnant man image revealed men's desire to control reproduction by wresting pregnancy from women in order to address "paternity anxiety" (45). Men sought to assert the primacy of fatherhood and ensure that their children were actually theirs. Although Velasco points out that the pregnant man image has been around for centuries, it appeared in the early modern period at a time of crucial changes in reproduction, childbirth, and sexuality. At this time, she explains, scholars, theologians, doctors, and lawmakers gained ground at the expense of midwives and mothers, in part fueled by the debate over miscarriage. As men's authority over reproduction increased, women's authority declined.

Furthermore, Velasco argues that the image of the pregnant man revealed men's desire to control nonconforming men, in particular those who engaged in sodomy and acted effeminate in dress and manners. Even as men fantasized about the "male appropriation of maternity," they feared the "feminization of Spanish men" (xvi). Critics charged that some men neglected their responsibilities and engaged in useless indulgences in music, dance, fashion, and popular theater. These critiques of the excesses of elite life by idle men emerged in the context of economic troubles. Instead of fighting to secure Spain's declining empire, critics argued that some men had become soft, useless, and cowards. Velasco notes that it is in this context that increasing...