Motherhood and Abortion in Performance and Politics

This project is about the cultural politics of motherhood, abortion, and fertility during the Weimar Republic. It is premised on two ideas: first, that we cannot understand debates around abortion without first understanding how motherhood itself is culturally performed and contested. Second, that changing representations of motherhood, debates about fertility, and conceptions of reproductive justice are intertwined with the development of new media and artistic movements; that there is not just a politics, but also an aesthetics of reproduction.

The struggle for reproductive justice in the Weimar Republic took place as much in the realm of culture as in politics. The 1920s–30s saw a proliferation of films, essays, novels, and plays that called for the decriminalization of abortion. Motherhood and abortion were contested on public stages ranging from theaters to courtrooms to public squares. By bringing together events, art works, and descriptions of private domestic life, the project reflects the intertwining of public and private in ideas of motherhood and reproductive justice. The project develops three themes:

• The relationship between aesthetics and politics: The Weimar Republic was a time of explosive debates about how art could create better ways of living and affect social and political change. Are theater audiences more moved by individual pity or by the revelation of structural injustice? Do catchy jazz numbers or strident communist marching songs bring more listeners out to the streets?
• How new and old media reshape the boundaries of the political: New technologies, especially the rise of home radio sets in the 1920s, blurred the boundaries between the public and private realms. Technological advances in photography and printing, alongside radio and film, enabled new forms of public debate and aesthetic experience, which in turn shaped cultures of motherhood and avenues of political participation.
• The concept of natality as a foundation of public life: I combine historical analysis with critical theory to reconsider Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality as a defining quality of public life—that with birth comes the possibility of new beginnings. While Arendt was long criticized for her rigid divisions between the public, private, and social, I point to natality as a concept that collapses these divisions and opens a new space for political action. By historicizing Arendt’s work within the reproductive debates of the Weimar Republic, I propose that her concept of natality might be deployed in resistance to the nationalist pro-natalism currently resurging in the United States and Europe.