Rejecting Reproductive Futurity: Abortions in Displaced Persons Camps, 1945- 1953
Historically, scholars have signified the DP camps as transient places of fecundity and marriage. Children represented a return to normalcy and order, a stake in futurity, a counter to murdered and lost children and even a form of reproductive revenge against the Nazi regime. The consequent “baby boom” in DP camps demonstrably reaffirmed this return to life and resignification of values, evidencing women’s interest and ability to reproduce.
What escapes Holocaust scholarship on postwar life are the illegal abortions that women requested with frequency in DP camps. Framing my research on women’s postwar abortions through queer theorists, I claim that reproductive futurism—or the prioritization of the future over the present, in the interest of futurity’s potential Child—historicizes only that which codes futurity and reproduction as one in the same. To abort a pregnancy, therefore, rejects futurity—women’s narratives of which, having eluded historicization, I locate and integrate into postwar scholarship.
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This seminar provides a forum for scholarship-in-progress in the area of German studies. The seminar is particularly interested in papers that cross disciplinary boundaries and that reconceptualize the materials and conventions of German Studies as a field, including beyond the frames of the German language and nation state. The seminar is generously sponsored by Germanic Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago, the Department of Modern Languages at DePaul University, and the Department of History at Northwestern University.