"Reproduction Without Bodies, Bodies Without Reproduction" is a transhistorical issue that moves chronologically from 1500 to 1900 but resists the impulse to suggest any single story about reproduction and bodies from early modernity to the end of the nineteenth century. Rather, we argue that nonreproductive bodies and nonbodily reproduction are always importantly interrelated in ways that can shift in time, place, and context. In recognizing the limits and violent legacies of reproductive futurity, this themed issue features ongoing analyses of reproductive refusal as well as of organizing attunements to patriarchal reproductive powers, race and racialization, medicalization and embodiment, and anti-feminism. Bodily, reproductive, political, and disciplinary precarities frame our interest in both "reproduction" and "body" as pressing and mutable categories.
In this article, I discuss Margaret Cavendish's consideration of reproduction and birth across several texts, then focus on her imaginative vision for reproduction outside of the maternal body in her science fiction. In The Blazing World (1666), a material gum allows an aged body to be wholly rejuvenated, while in Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1656), fleshy beds offer external wombs for the same purpose, both over the course of nine months. Examples of similar reproduction abound in science fiction today, and as a progenitor of the genre, we find many such examples across Cavendish's science fictional writings.
This essay argues that early modern English tragedies frequently understood the primary political crisis through what we call an "abortive poetics of tragedy." This pervasive trope relied upon actual abortions, abortive metaphors, procreative refusals or regrets, and socially unacceptable births that signal an antisocial strain within the population that threatens its re-productive future. The characters embodying antisociality often experience literal, potential, or metaphorical abortions through the catharsis of the tragedy's bloody end. From Isabella's grief-driven maternal regret in Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy specialIntscript to Annabella's death and terminated pregnancy at the end of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore specialIntscript to Lady Macbeth's infamous refusal of maternal care in Shakespeare's Macbeth specialIntscript we illustrate how abortive poetics were a central and even structural component of early modern tragedies. By way of conclusion, we point to the urgency of attending to the wide-ranging definitions of "abortions" in the past, present, and future. In the context of the current politicization of women's healthcare in the United States, we urge that attending to the slipperiness of the "abor-tive," as a political, medical, and even (to some degree) fictional category, will open the door to a more robust and humane dis-course around abortion care.
This essay investigates botanical metaphors in poetic depictions of the nonreproductive female body. Though the nineteenth century dawned in the era of Malthusian angst about overpopulation, by midcentury the figure of the childless woman had become a source of anxiety, implicated in panic about "redundant" women and declining birth rates. In what ways does Victorian poetry register changing figurations of fruitlessness? I explore Victorian poems-especially poems by women-that resist the reproductive imperative even as they attend specifically to the sexual potential of the flower. I begin by surveying midcentury poems about "useless" flowers, focusing on poppies, before turning to queer botanical figures in the aestheticist poetry of A. Mary F. Robinson and Michael Field. In attending to the temporality of the flower itself-resisting the pull toward the future signaled by fruit and seed-these poets offer a queer, autoerotic repurposing of botanical imagery that decouples sexuality from reproductivity.
This inaugural installment of "SEL: The Exchange" brings together Susan Fraiman (University of Virginia) and Gayle Salamon (Princeton University) in a wide-ranging conversation on gender, sexuality, domesticity, and cultural critique. Beginning with the recent television series Adolescence (2025), the exchange explores masculinity "in full collapse," the family as an alternative to courtroom drama, and the gendered resonances of physical acts such as throwing and walking. From there, Fraiman and Salamon turn to questions of feminist comportment, consciousness-raising, and the persistent divide between equality and difference feminism. Their discussion engages phenomenology, queer and trans theory, and the history of feminist debates, while also drawing on film, nineteenth-century fiction, and memoirs of eldercare. Throughout, they examine how gender and sexuality are co-constitutive categories, how domestic labor embodies creative intelligence, and how trans and feminist discourses need one another in fraught times. The result is a vibrant dialogue that models intellectual generosity and shows the continuing urgency of feminist and queer analysis for literature, culture, and everyday life.
