Childbirth Beyond Female Gender Identity: Freud and the Futurists

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Childbirth has long been held as the exclusive power, or burden, of women. Recent developments in reproductive technologies and the reality of trans male and intersex parturitions, however, demand a re-examination of the relationship between birth and gender identity. Building on an increased questioning of this relationship in literary and psychoanalytic criticism, my research contributes an original historical foundation to these important debates. Specifically, I examine the integral contribution of Freudian psychoanalysis and Futurist literature to modernist reproductive discourse, explicating how their work complicates the gender of birth, and how these modernist debates offer a crucial historic precedent tocurrent discourse. My research asks: to what extent do Freud and the Futurist question fixed notions of birth's gender; how central is this questioning to their work; and in what ways can these antecedent insights expand understandings of birth's gender in the current moment?