Subtheme:
From Resistance to Refuge: Body Sovereignty, Community, and Care
Organizers: Sarah Baechle (University of Mississippi) and Carissa M. Harris (Temple University)
In July 2022, one month after the US Supreme Court cited medieval law to deny reproductive self-determination to millions of individuals, Dr. Caitlin Bernard performed an abortion for a ten-year-old rape victim who had traveled to Indiana after being denied the same care in her home state of Ohio. Dr. Bernard’s act of care, for which she was censured and fined by Indiana’s medical licensing board, witnesses the value of care as a form of resistance to bodily domination, as Bernard herself reiterated, framing her provision of reproductive care to the young victim-survivor and its subsequent publicity as a public good, informing others about the harms of laws curtailing sexual and reproductive freedom. So, too, did medieval individuals and institutions provide care, refuge, and an opportunity for recuperation for those who suffered gendered harm, or whose forms of embodiment or sexual/erotic and reproductive experiences did not align with the church’s standards for sexual conduct or gender expression. Records from medieval church courts attest to individuals sheltering pregnant singlewomen, as when Elizabeth Dunoulde was cited by religious authorities in Ely for harboring her pregnant daughter Margaret in 1591; so, too, did institutions such as hospitals provide refuge and care for unmarried mothers, such as St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, or the almshouse in Rochester where a pregnant singlewoman named Sara, daughter of the wife of Thomas Louth, stayed in the 1450s. Literary depictions of sexual assault and abuse explored the place of resistance and restorative care in surviving gendered violence: insular pastourelles present women's resistance through anti-rape peer education as public good, while anonymous carols show victim-survivors negotiating reparative care from assailants, receiving solace by confiding in their female friends, and even turning to networks of women for post-assault reproductive care. And in fourteenth-century Oxford, those who facilitated Eleanor Rykener’s work in gendered labor, such as John Clerk who employed her for six weeks as a tapster or the women who helped her procure employment as an embroideress, illustrate the refuge of communities doing gender labor, inscribing her socially as a woman.
This thread welcomes proposals for papers that explore the relationship between care, refuge, and body sovereignty capaciously rendered, including gender and reproductive self-determination and sexual autonomy. Papers might explore the roles of institutions (such as hospitals or almshouses) or individuals in granting refuge or facilitating care for pregnant singlewomen or victim-survivors of sexual assault. They can analyze the self work of recovering from violence, the embodied labor of quotidian demands of familial and domestic care, or the relationships between such individual and communal care, especially informed by contemporary critics such as Silvia Federici on housework, Evelyn Nakano Glenn and Mary O’Brien on reproductive labor, Sasha Turner on reproductive body work, or Sophie Lewis on care work. We particularly welcome talks which examine the movements between resistance or struggle and recuperation and care work, which consider the ways or that examine the ways one or the other is privileged in activist scholarly discourse: when, from whom, do we expect the labor of resistance and to whom do we allow the refuge of care?
