Details

ISBN-10: 1501376543
ISBN-13: 9781501376542
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Publish Date: 03/09/2023
Dimensions: 6.53" L, 4.86" W, 0.55" H

Pregnancy Test

Editor: Ian Bogost
Editor: Christopher Schaberg

Paperback

Price: $14.95

Overview

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

In the 1970s, the invention of the home pregnancy test changed what it means to be pregnant. For the first time, women could use a technology in the privacy of their own homes that gave them a yes or no answer. That answer had the power to change the course of their reproductive lives, and it chipped away at a paternalistic culture that gave gynecologists-the majority of whom were men-control over information about women’s bodies.

However, while science so often promises clear-cut answers, the reality of pregnancy is often much messier. Pregnancy Test explores how the pregnancy test has not always lived up to the fantasy that more information equals more knowledge. Karen Weingarten examines the history and cultural representation of the pregnancy test to show how this object radically changed sex and pregnancy in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in the The Atlantic.

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Reviews

"A new gem from Object Lessons. . . . A quick and quirky read." –Zoomer Magazine

"Karen Weingarten illuminates the fascinating history, politics, and culture of the pregnancy test in this kaleidoscopic and entertaining volume. It's all in there: life and death, feminist empowerment and patriarchal coercion, scientific discovery and sci-fi dystopia. Weingarten shows how a seemingly modest yet ingenious technology has profoundly shaped-and even brought into being-some of our most intimate, vulnerable, and meaning-filled moments." –Lara Freidenfelds, Ph.D., author of The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy: A History of Miscarriage in America

"As anyone who has anxiously shut a bathroom door to take one knows, the home pregnancy test is a riveting plot in and of itself: within its pages, lives are made and unmade. Karen Weingarten's Pregnancy Test tells the fascinating story of how this intimate technology came to be with insight and compassion, suggesting that the strange mix of reproductive agency and reproductive surveillance the home pregnancy test has enabled in US culture will be of central importance as these private dramas become ever more encroached upon by the state." –Sarah Blackwood, Associate Professor of English, Pace University, USA

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Details

ISBN-10: 1501376543
ISBN-13: 9781501376542
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Publish Date: 03/09/2023
Dimensions: 6.53" L, 4.86" W, 0.55" H
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