The Magic of a Fetal Fetish in the Face of Climate Crisis and the Expanse of Dense Temporalities

Abstract

In times of cultural upheaval, the image of the child, typically a White girl, has been used to represent the vulnerability of humanity as a whole. In the face of escalating climate crisis the fetus is now standing in to represent the future, and the uterus has become the only environment many politicians are willing to legislate. It appears the fetus has become a flexible fetish object used both to displace growing annihilation anxieties in the present and as a way of racially colonizing the future. As fetal protection and anti-abortion laws spread across the United States, gestating bodies have been identified as the primary threats to healthy pregnancy. Integrating psychoanalytic theory with concepts from anti-Blackness and Indigenous theories, I outline a situation where the fetal fetish functions as a colonizing temporal system of affect regulation that is currently being used consolidate and secure White, cisgender, able-bodied, heteromasculinity and human exceptionalism.

Keywords:

• abortion and reproductive justice
• fetal fetish
• anti-Blackness and critical race theory
• time and temporality
• climate crisis
• Indigenous theory
• decolonization and psychoanalysis

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katie Gentile

Katie Gentile, Ph.D. is Professor and Chair of the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (City University of New York). She is the author of Creating bodies: Eating disorders as self-destructive survival and the 2017 Gradiva Award winning The Business of being made: The temporalities of reproductive technologies, in psychoanalysis and cultures, both from Routledge. She is editor of the journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality, on the faculty of New York University’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and the Psychoanalysis and the Critical Social Psychology program at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is in private practice in New York City.