PArmi the announcements made by Emmanuel Macron during his press conference of January 16, the one which looks at the objective of a “demographic rearmament” of France seems to me not only shocking in view of the martial terms used, but also scandalous from a democratic perspective. Affirming the need for a pronatalist policy, even when accompanied by a plan to combat infertility, is to relaunch a program from another age and reverse decades of feminist conquest in favor of autonomy of women.
There is a close link between control of the maternal womb and the patriarchal logic of objectification of women’s bodies. Since Aristotle defined female existence through the sole prism of sexual and reproductive functions, it has been considered as a resource possessed in common by society and by each man in particular – even in our modern societies, as well as evidenced by the gestures and words that the smallest person makes at the sight of a pregnant body.
This idea of ownership of procreative capacity was theorized in the 1970s. For American radical activists, imposed motherhood constituted the price to be paid, by women, for the protection of those who became their “owners” and sheltered them from the violence of other men. Among French materialists, the anthropologist Colette Guillaumin mobilized the notion of “sexing” to designate the appropriation of women in their physical individuality by the class of men who monopolized control of their time (domestic tasks), the products of their bodies (children) and their sexuality (marriage, prostitution).
Logics of dispossession
Fifty years later, these analyzes are far from being outdated, as evidenced by contemporary mobilizations against sexist, domestic and sexual violence. Women’s bodies are and remain the site of sexual/maternal service owed to society and men. Anyone who tries to avoid it runs the risk of a sanction that is often symbolic – non-motherhood greatly stigmatizes those who make the choice – but also, sometimes, fatal – it should be remembered that feminicides are mainly the work of men who can’t stand their partner’s departure or desire to leave?
When the President of the Republic deplores the fact that women do not have more children, he obscures the reasons why the parental project is sobering today. The overall framework for founding families is discouraging. Environmental crisis, inflation, international insecurity: there is no shortage of reasons to give up on becoming parents. But it is above all the conditions in which women become mothers that we must question. The survey I conducted with around thirty of them (Such a big belly. Lived experiences of the pregnant bodyStock, 2023) reveals the intensity of the logics of dispossession by which women find themselves reduced to their very big bellies and, literally, desubjectivized, that is to say deprived of all reflexivity and all agency during their pregnancy and beyond.
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