Abstract
Laurie Foos's feminist novel Ex Utero is a comic exploration of the value of the uterus. Simultaneously recursive and resistant, Foos's novel reenacts, with a difference, two confining essentialisms: hysteria, a female disorder, and fetishism, whether understood as the psychosexual response to female lack, or as capitalism's motor, the displacement of desire onto commodities. The essay explores how, if we think of the womb neither as individual possession or commodified object, we can create a new space of possibility for women at the end of the millennium.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
REFERENCES
Abercrombie, M., Hickman, C. J., & Johnson, M. L. (1980). The Penguin dictionary of biology. New York: Penguin Books.
Apter, E., & Pietz, W. (1993). Fetishism as cultural discourse. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press.
Ape-child? (1926, August 16). Time, 16.
Beizer, J. (1994). Ventriloquized bodies: Narratives of hysteria in nineteenth-century France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Benjamin, H. (1930). The reactivation of women. In N. Haire (Ed.), Sexual reform congress W.L.S.R., the Proceedings of the Third Congress of the World League for Sexual Reform (pp. 564–573). London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd.
Foos, L. (1995). Ex utero. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press.
Gibson-Graham, J. K. (1996). The end of capitalism (as we knew it): A feminist critique of political economy. Oxford and London: Blackwell Publishers.
Joralemon, D. (1995). Articles and commentaries: Cultural perspectives on organ transplantation. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 9(3), 335–356.
Martin, E. (1992). The woman in the body: A cultural analysis of reproduction. Boston: Beacon Press.
Montagne, R. (1998). “British Infertility Controversy,” September 28, 1998, National Public Radio's “Morning Edition.” Transcribed by Federal Document Clearing House, Inc.
Squier, S. (1999). Incubabies and rejuvenates: The traffic between technologies of reproduction and age-extension. In K Woodward (Ed.), Figuring age: Women, bodies, generations (pp. 88–111). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Squier, S. (in press). Life and death at strangeways: The tissue-culture point of view. In Paul Brodwin (Ed.), Biotechnology and culture: bodies anxieties ethics. Forthcoming, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Starr, A., & Squier, S. (1998). Speaking Women's Bodies: a conversation. Literature and Medicine, 17(2), 231–254.
Starr, A. (1997). Where babies come from: A miracle explained. Art book, available from the author, 7 Homestead Road, Wellesley, MA 02181–6923.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Squier, S. Fetishism and Hysteria: The Economies of Feminism Ex Uterod. Journal of Medical Humanities 21, 59–69 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009054712964
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009054712964