Comparing Oliver's "Pregnancy" and Waugh's "The Girl Who Made Us Think About Autonomy"

I don't know if we were supposed to make a new post or respond to our old ones, but...

In reviewing Kelly Oliver’s piece, we discussed the varying depictions of women and pregnancy in popular films. Though employing a “pro-choice” narrative, many of these films show women choosing to keep their babies and others suffering perilous fates if they do not. In “The Girl Who Made Us Think About Autonomy,” Joanne Waugh discusses the renowned Trilogy (The Girl Who…) and its complex character, Lisbeth Salander. Unlike the women discussed in Oliver’s piece, Lisbeth Salander is not a yearning mother. She is not even a warm or welcoming person. Suffered by the hands of men and authority, Salander lacks, what Waugh describes as, “the perspective of past and that of comfortable classes; she had neither a destiny prepared for her by a mother, childhood games, or adolescent fantasies about being in love, marrying, and having a baby or home” (145). This is best exemplified in her outward appearance. Described as looking like “an underdeveloped teenage girl” with piercings and tattoos, Salander’s physical appearance breeds no notions of “sexy” or “motherhood” (130). Because she does not exude the traditional categories of “woman” (mother, wife, etc.) and defies the gender roles expected of her, she becomes an open target to be violated by men. An excerpt from the book reads, “…by the time she was eighteen, Salander did not know a single girl who had not been forces to perform some sort of sexual act against her will…as a girl she was legal prey, especially if she was dressed in a worn black leather jacket and had pierced eyebrows, tattoos and zero social status” (134). Amongst Salander’s rape, torture and suffering, there is an implication that because she does not perform “womanhood” as socially accepted and expected, she must suffer a fate worse than death. This reads very similar to Oliver’s theory that women (and women of color) who do not live under society’s expectations of motherhood must suffer or die. This (again) brings into question why woman must be punished for nonconventional, untraditional or even autonomous actions.

(I look forward to talking more about this in class!)