Discourses on the pregnant body in Canadian constitutional law: A post-structuralist and anthropological analysis

Pregnancy has theoretical and political import because it is sexual difference made visible and because it is marked by historical, social, political, and cultural contexts. This thesis argues that the pregnant body is presented in these discourses as both a container (a legal person who stores the foetus) and as contained (the pregnant body as an untouched and bordered whole).

The theoretical paradigm or framework for this analysis was a feminist poststructuralist approach that presumed the importance of gender in social relations and emphasized problems in representing lived experience through language, specifically through legal discourse.

The objective of this thesis was to produce a theoretically informed descriptive case study of the legal status of the pregnant body in the cultural context of Canadian constitutional jurisprudence and to present some of the ways that pregnant subjectivity has been re-articulated as an embodied, active, temporal, contingent, and multiple subjectivity. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)