ARTICLE | The Infant as Biopolitical Absence: Materiality, Viability, Mortality | American Quarterly | by Megan H. Glick

Glick, Megan H. “The Infant as Biopolitical Absence: Materiality, Viability, Mortality.” American Quarterly 71, no. 3 (2019): 881–88.

“Not only does it seem impossible to imagine the category of infancy outside a biologically deterministic framework, but so too does a rejection of such essentialism in the name of “reclaiming” infant subjectivity produce an uncomfortable proximity to pro-life fetal personhood arguments. In an era marked by an increasing assault on reproductive rights, the stakes of interrogating these assumptions are high. Nonetheless, it is precisely in the wake of their omission that other issues emerge, a problematic that must be understood in relation to the history of the category of infancy itself” (881).