66 min listen
Karen Weingarten, "Pregnancy Test" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Karen Weingarten, "Pregnancy Test" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
ratings:
Length:
40 minutes
Released:
Sep 27, 2023
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
In the 1970s, the invention of the home pregnancy test changed what it means to be pregnant. For the first time, women could use a technology in the privacy of their own homes that gave them a yes or no answer. That answer had the power to change the course of their reproductive lives, and it chipped away at a paternalistic culture that gave gynecologists-the majority of whom were men-control over information about women's bodies.
However, while science so often promises clear-cut answers, the reality of pregnancy is often much messier. Pregnancy Test (Bloomsbury, 2023) explores how the pregnancy test has not always lived up to the fantasy that more information equals more knowledge. Karen Weingarten examines the history and cultural representation of the pregnancy test to show how this object radically changed sex and pregnancy in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Jana Byars is an independent scholar located in Amsterdam.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
However, while science so often promises clear-cut answers, the reality of pregnancy is often much messier. Pregnancy Test (Bloomsbury, 2023) explores how the pregnancy test has not always lived up to the fantasy that more information equals more knowledge. Karen Weingarten examines the history and cultural representation of the pregnancy test to show how this object radically changed sex and pregnancy in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Jana Byars is an independent scholar located in Amsterdam.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Released:
Sep 27, 2023
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
Elizabeth Heineman, “Before Porn Was Legal: The Erotica Empire of Beate Uhse” (University of Chicago Press, 2011): When I was in college in the 1980s, I liked to listen to Iggy Pop (aka James Newell Osterberg, Jr.). I was always mystified, however, by his song “Five Foot One,” with its odd and catchy refrain “I wish life could be/Swed-ish mag-a-zines! by New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work