Beyond Normative Developmental Scripts: Reading for Reproductive Becomings in Contemporary U.S. Genres

Abstract

This dissertation investigates how reproductive body-subjects exceed the temporal, gendered, and material constraints imposed on them by medical, legal, and social institutions, elaborating the ways in which close textual analysis and feminist new materialisms make legible such modes of excess and becoming. Situated within the contemporary U.S. political landscape, where intensifying reproductive control, anti-trans legislation, and white nationalist natalism presently converge, this project demonstrates that normative developmental scripts function as biopolitical instruments that differentially discipline reproductive bodies along axes of gender, race, and disability. In my analyses of blogs (such as PillowAngel), legal texts, life-writing, and fiction (like Nightbitch), which are cultural texts that simultaneously reify and subvert biopolitical power, I trace how body-subjects inevitably exceed the scripts designed to contain them, revealing the failure points of normative life scripts and the generative capacity of bodies to become in ways that cannot be anticipated or controlled.