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Imagining the Fetus: The Unborn in Myth, Religion, and Culture

Online ISBN:
9780199869077
Print ISBN:
9780195380040
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Imagining the Fetus: The Unborn in Myth, Religion, and Culture

Jane Marie Law,
Jane Marie Law

Associate Professor of Japanese Religion

Cornell University
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Vanessa R. Sasson
Vanessa R. Sasson

Professor of Religious Studies

Marianopolis College, Montreal
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Published online:
1 January 2009
Published in print:
12 December 2008
Online ISBN:
9780199869077
Print ISBN:
9780195380040
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

In contemporary Western culture, the word “fetus” introduces either a political subject or a literal, medicalized entity. Neither of these frameworks gives sufficient credit to the vast array of literary and oral traditions emerging from religious cultures around the world that see within the fetus a symbol, a metaphor, an imagination. The editors maintain that the fetus has been hijacked by two dominant and powerful modes’the political and the medical’and the potential of the fetus as symbol to serve as a gateway to imagination has been reduced as a result. This volume grows out of the acknowledgment of the fact that, throughout much of human history and across most of the world’s cultures, when the fetus was imagined, it enjoyed a much wider range of symbolic and cultural subjectivities, often contributing possibilities of inclusivity, emergence, liminality, and transformation. The purpose of this book is to restore the nuance of fetal symbolism and liberate it from the stultifying parameters of the abortion/embryonic stem cell debate, giving it room once again to function as a symbol of greater and more complex human emotions, dilemmas, and aspirations.

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