By Hayley Wagner
No longer can abortion simply be talked about in terms of individual choice and morality—in a country where access varies from easy to impossible and where structural violence pervades society, the terms of this issue must be expanded. The highly controversial issue of abortion has become stigmatized as a kind of eternal, polarizing debate in which “Pro-Life” and “Pro-Choice” are continually at odds with no solution in sight. Especially in the last few years, varied access to and increased legislative targeting of abortion clinics in the United States has added a new facet to the debate. The decision to have an abortion, or whether a woman can access one, is much more dependent on social context than what is currently allowed by the debate’s highly liberal rhetoric.
Pro-Lifers criminalize women who decide to terminate a pregnancy and place an immense amount of intentionality on the decision while neglecting the woman’s physical, emotional, and mental health. With the exception of tolerance in cases of rape, incest, and medical emergency, Pro-Life activists have retained a highly moral conception of abortion framed as “an issue of morality and sanctity of human life.”[1] Unfortunately, the Pro-Choice movement suffers from some of the same assumptions about an individual’s ultimate autonomy over their body and a neglect of the social uptake of health-related decision making. Having an abortion is much more complicated than whether or not a woman feels she has control over her reproductive health; it necessitates universal access to abortion clinics, the inclusion of a discussion on racial discrimination, and the role of affect. Thus, it is necessary to bolster the liberal discourse of the Pro-Choice movement in order to provide a more effective platform on which to advocate for the reproductive rights and bodily autonomy of women of color. Instead of assigning the entirety of the abortion decision onto a single woman, this paper considers an alternative formulation of embodied liberalism. The goal herein is to be attentive to the highly affective nature of reproductive rights and recognize that “agency eludes personal control” and is dependent on social context.[2]
In order to truly examine female bodily autonomy, it is necessary to consider the root of what we consider to be self-evident. In terms of our own sovereignty and relationship to the state, what do we value the most? In recent years, Pro-Choice activism has become highly liberalized in its doctrine—the name alone evokes a “feeling” of individual autonomy and freedom. In this paper liberalism refers to the Enlightenment-era idea that sovereignty originates in an individual’s freedom from the interference of others. It is dependent on notions of complete autonomy over one’s person. When applied to abortion rhetoric, this discourse is more complex than it appears, as is evident in the widely disparate levels of access to abortion throughout the United States. Ultimately, it is often not a woman’s lack of “autonomy” that prevents her from seeking or obtaining an abortion, but other variables, such as racial discrimination, economic inequality, or legal measures, that disproportionately affect certain populations.
Recent discourse on abortion rights have sparked debates about the problematic nature of a singularly liberal and individualist model of bodily autonomy, as it often ignores the social context in which women make decisions about their bodies and families. However, these discussions remain largely silent on racial discrimination and disparity in reproductive care access. With attention to the current scholarship on sovereignty and the body, especially by Imani Perry and Sharon Krause, it becomes clear that notions of liberal freedom are not sufficient in their capacity to support efforts of reproductive rights activism. In order to understand why access to abortion and the policing of female bodies is so varied, a racially-conscious and “non-sovereign” conception of freedom is necessary. In other words, freedom must be conceived of as being dependent on social context and inequality, rather than as a static, individually-based concept. This reformation of activist language recognizes that reproductive health care choices rely on more than individual intentionality. The social uptake of women’s decisions remains crucial to a discussion of unequal access. It is not only the initial decision to have an abortion that is relevant in discussions of reproductive health. Whether that decision can come to fruition based on access, and how affect and embodiment prove valuable in a woman’s experience, must also be considered. Ultimately, it is a woman’s ability to have a safe and comfortable abortion, should she desire one, that remains of the utmost importance for reproductive rights advocates.
Liberalism and the Pro-Choice Movement: Reproductive Rights and Race
The Pro-Choice movement has taken up the aforementioned liberal doctrine in an attempt to “embrace abortion as an element of a broader ‘rights’ framework, encompassing both women’s right to equality and the gender-neutral right to freedom from state intervention.”[3] According to Strickler and Danigelis’ 2002 study on opinions of abortion between 1977 and 1996, the increased popularity of the radical Christian Right and the highly affective, moral doctrine of the Pro-Life movement has cemented Pro-Choicers more firmly in a liberal framework.[4] Jeanine Ludlow, in “Love and Goodness: Toward a New Abortion Politics,” continues this discussion with a more contemporary analysis of the link between liberal individual sovereignty and Pro-Choice activism. She states that “the dominant messages of abortion rights advocates—[are] that abortion is a woman’s choice and that reproductive rights are a legacy of Enlightenment liberalism,” thereby making the connection explicit and then moves to locate the argument’s holes.[5] Under this doctrine, does a woman’s choice to have an abortion automatically render her as a political subject? Does this language of “rights and autonomy and choice” even appeal to the women whose lives are at stake?[6] What about the role of affect and feeling in such embodied experiences?
When examined critically, this discourse on reproductive rights is problematic in that it does not recognize that the state discriminates between those it sees as fit to have their own bodily autonomy and those it does not. This inherent discrimination is ensconced in a larger system of structural racism that limits real health care access. For those who do not conform to “gendered, raced, and classed assumptions about who should reproduce and what it means to reproduce responsibly,” or state-produced norms about reproductive autonomy, Jennifer Denbow argues that the state currently feels compelled to “guide” their decisions.[7] In this case, the rubric of individualist liberalism lacks a consideration of how actors, in this case women seeking to terminate pregnancy, are affected by state-level discrimination of both practical and emotional barriers to their decisions.
One particularly well-known case of how notions of personal responsibility and sovereignty are clouded by a distinction between those who have legible reproductive autonomy and those who do not is the phenomenon of the “welfare queen.”[8] While specifically not about abortion, the trope of the welfare queen is evidence of how reproduction is closely related to the sociopolitical context. It also shows how the Pro-Choice movement’s assertion that “the existence of the right to abortion increases women’s autonomy in the sense that the right allows women greater control of their own bodies and lives,” is too simplistic in its logic.[9] Denbow describes the power of this myth throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and the tropes of irresponsibility that it ascribed onto the bodies of single African American women. The combination of a shift toward a conservative, neoliberal state and the appropriation of similar ideals across large populations of voters reflected panic about the state’s contribution to those on welfare. The myth of the welfare queen cast single African American women as “privileging their own greedy interests above all else,” and, as a result, completely dependent on the state as a result of an individual “bad decision,” whatever that may have been.[10]
However, there were much larger consequences for these women in terms of the removal of their status as liberal individuals capable of being sovereign over themselves:
The welfare mother trope became a powerful symbol of the dependencies and poor decision making that public subsidies supposedly encourage. Proponents of slashing welfare spending argued that withholding government support of those who reproduced irresponsibly would push such women to make better decisions. When poverty intersects with race, marital status, and/or disability, the message not to procreate is intensified.[11]
This case provides an example of notions of responsibility are highly linked to gender, class, and race. Such a conception of rights fails to consider the possibility that women who are not read as “responsible” or “autonomous” do not have ultimate control in the face of state-level discrimination and rampant abortion law enforcement. These women are seen as incapable of control over their bodies and are thus “discouraged” from reproducing. Abortion access cannot be examined without consideration of how structural racism affects the distribution of health care.
Since the implementation of TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers), beginning in 2011, hundreds of clinics have been shut down, particularly in the South, and have severely limited access for poor women of color[12]. TRAP laws serve as “state regulatory regimes that subject abortion providers to more extensive and burdensome regulations than comparable medical practices… [that] lead to increased costs for abortion providers and encroach on the privacy of the patients they serve.”[13] Here, reproductive health decisions, such as whether to have a child or whether to seek an abortion, are heavily influenced by insidious and often unintentional racism, defined as “correlational racism”[14] by Imani Perry. Racism does not always come in the form of blatant statements or legislation—rather, state-level decisions are made based on assumptions about various groups. Again, the liberal doctrine of intentionality and individual sovereignty problematized by the racism evident in spheres of reproductive health, especially when they intersect with race and social issues such as welfare. Further, racism often evades intentionality and intended meaning and is more a result of larger social inequalities, which in turn render the racialized subject incapable of autonomy and responsible intentionality as well.
In order to allow women, especially women of color, “freedom” in their decision to terminate a pregnancy, the stigma of those who choose not to have children must be undermined. Otherwise, “subjects, who by getting themselves into the situation in which abortion is an appealing choice, have called into question their capacity for self-governance.”[15] Any subject who is socially cast as incapable of self-sovereignty is also seen as incapable of making her own reproductive decisions. As a result, she is rendered incompatible with the singular association of womanhood with motherhood. A recasting of the doctrine used in reproductive rights and Pro-Choice politics, specifically the recognition of the role of race and class, would disrupt the belief that womanhood is incomplete without motherhood. In short, the claiming of abortion rights “can thus be understood as an expression of autonomy and as a form of counter-conduct that alters force relations and affects others’ possibilities of action.”[16]
Perry makes a similar argument in her discussion of the ways racism and classism result in the portrayal of certain groups by the state as non-sovereign or ‘irresponsible’ subjects, but also in the real-time effects that stem from unequal social infrastructure. Also using the “welfare queen” example of the 1980s and 1990s, Perry dismantles contemporary racial narratives including post-racialism to argue that these conceptions of group behavior are stereotypical and present “a particular image…something consequential that will follow in the lives of people or characters in ways that are presumably reflective of their membership in a particular racial group.”[17] In order for a Pro-Choice argument to have more influence in a heavily racialized society with significant social and political barriers to a woman’s right to make reproductive decisions, activists must cast aside the simplistic ‘individual woman’s choice’ rhetoric to make women of color legible in terms of their bodily agency and freedom.
Abortion and Affect: Re-conceptualizing Political Activism
The post-1990s turn to affect theory in the social sciences, particularly when dealing with embodiment, has provided a new platform from which to view notions of bodily autonomy. Patricia C. Clough argues that this paradigm shift, while not necessarily new in terms of its recognition of “the subject’s discontinuity with itself,” did introduce a new language to discuss the dynamism of bodily matter, which had often been “treated in terms of various constructionisms under the influence of post-structuralism and deconstruction.”[18] Affect, here, refers to the involuntary bodily responses that is considered by some to precede a conscious emotional state. This is a reinvigorated way of examining affect, most importantly as “pre-individual bodily forces” that lie outside the intentionality and individualism inherent to current doctrine on both sides of the abortion debate[19]. The role of raw emotion and bodily response to a terminated pregnancy—the embodied experience of shame, relief, melancholy, etc. has often been overlooked in favor of the mother’s intentions concerning the fetus. Within her discussion of affect, Clough turns to the work of Brian Massumi, whose conceptualization of affect is about “opening the body to its indeterminacy, the indeterminacy of automatic responses,” which necessitates that it is separate from conscious emotion and perception.[20] In addition, according to his argument that what we perceive consciously is “to be understood as the narration of affect,” there always remains an excess of affect that lies outside this perception.[21]
In terms of abortion, both Pro-Choice and Pro-Life rhetoric have neglected the way in which women’s bodies respond affectively to abortion and rather favor doctrines that assume that the primary factor in a woman’s choice to terminate a pregnancy is whether she is politically intentional in her decision. In other words, the assumption made on both sides of the debate is that the patient’s political leanings and belief in, or dismissal of, abortion are central to making her decision. The many thoughts, feelings, emotions, and bodily responses that accompany abortion are ignored. The few attempts that have been made to add affect into the discussion are primarily from Pro-Life groups and abortion support groups that encourage women to give a certain narrative about their experience—but what narratives are valued over others? Is a woman expected to “feel” a certain way post-procedure and what is the role of telling that narrative? In their work on somatic management and mental health, Steven D. Brown and Ian Tucker discuss the role of the patient in being able to “describe” their feelings as a part of the therapeutic process. This presumes a level of consciousness on the part of the patient, who is “required to both ‘notice’ and ‘report’ their own conscious and physiological states.”[22] While reproductive health concerns and abortion procedures are not usually considered within the realm of mental health, this paper argues that a similar effect takes place when women are expected to narrate their conscious feelings in preparation for, or after, the procedure. The reliance on garnering emotional information as medical data follows a very liberal assumption about bodily sovereignty: “it is the service user who ‘knows’ his or her body from within, who has primary access to his or her feelings or thoughts.”[23] However, there remains a paradox within this gathering of affective information because it also relies on the reception by another (medical professional, focus group leader, etc.) to be rendered legible, and is therefore not considered medically relevant on its own.[24]
Then, to what degree does the accumulation of affect through narration become relevant in the reproductive health archive? Jennifer Keys, in a study of the abortion experiences of forty women who had undergone the procedure, argues her interlocutors on both sides of the political debate expressed being encouraged to feel a certain way. These ideological claims to the correct response to abortion are outlined as follows: “Antiabortion literature contains grave pronouncements about the inevitable onset of grief and despair for so called post-abortive women. Prochoice advocates counter that severe emotional distress is an atypical response,” stating that relief and an establishment of bodily control are more likely to be felt.[25] Through an analysis of her study, in conjunction with background about the rhetoric used on both sides of the debate and an understanding of a liberal conception of bodily autonomy, it becomes clear that the current literature is ineffective in its lack of consideration of affect in addition to conscious emotion. In order to provide women with the resources, both physical and emotional, to maintain reproductive health, Pro-Choice rhetoric must move beyond the assumption of a clear narrative of feeling after the procedure: relief and comfort in complete bodily autonomy. Keys’ work serves to identify “the feeling rules that script the abortion experience and the emotion management techniques that women use to either maintain ‘correct’ feeling states or reduce discrepancies between what is and what ‘ought to be’ felt.[26]
A telling example of the way in which predisposed exposure to the abortion debate skews women’s narration of their feelings is present in Keys’ study, in which she delves more deeply into the stories of two women on opposite poles of the political spectrum. Britt, a staunchly Pro-Choice woman who had attended rallies since her teenage years claimed that she felt nothing but relief after the procedure: “Immediately after her abortion, Britt had actually told her roommate, ‘God, that was so easy, I could do that again,’ [and] dismissed claims about ‘postabortion syndrome’ as scare tactics, declaring, ‘I don’t have any trauma.’”[27] However, Debbie, a religious and politically conservative woman, “carried around the ‘picture of her baby’ [ultrasound] for years afterword [and] punished herself further by using the harshest language possible, describing the abortion as ‘murder.’”[28] Keys argues that these two women, representing the two extremes of feelings towards abortion, provide insight into the way that abortion rhetoric encourages, often unconsciously, the responses and narration of emotion that is expected to women after the procedure. It is clear here that the abortion rhetoric that these participants had access to was correlated with their responses when expected to retell their stories after the fact. It is also interesting to note that Britt, fueled by the very liberal Pro-Choice rhetoric, felt completely autonomous and in control over her decision, whereas Debbie remained guilt-ridden and almost aghast of her decision making, as if she had no control at all.
But to what extent, during such an affect-heavy experience, do these women guide their conscious emotions through what Keys calls affective control? The affect of the procedure itself as seen through muscle tightening or relaxing, breathing patterns, response to pain, and vocalization, is something that the archive on abortion literature has not discussed at length. In order to examine affective control in the midst of a procedure, the way in which affect is defined—as illuminated at the beginning of this section—is crucial. In order to maintain an accurate and appropriately dynamic definition of what constitutes affective behavior, this paper follows Clough’s and Massumi’s definition arguing that it is “‘freer’ than the drives as theorized in psychoanalysis, and therefore…more amenable to change.”[29] For many of the women in Keys’ study, there was an expected or even “correct” way of feeling that was seen as the ultimate endpoint of the experience, whether that was relief, guilt, shame, or bodily freedom and control. Of the forty women interviewed, fifteen reported that they used breathing exercises in order to calm themselves during the procedure, and to ultimately achieve a “desired emotional state.”[30] These expressions of affect are, of course, subject to change and are influenced by the presence of a medical professional, spouse, or other support system that is in the room with the woman during the procedure.
Keys found that there was a middle group of women—those who were neither staunchly guilt-ridden nor relieved—that were most affected by affective control strategies such as “rituals, deep breathing, and the ingesting of various substances, all of which act directly on the sensations that induce arousal.”[31] Some women were encouraged to control their affective indicators of stress by being told by clinic workers to breathe deeply, and some were given objects such as stress balls or stuffed animals to clutch during the procedure.[32] Again, the assumed goal of these medical interventions into affect is that affective excess must be controlled, and that a woman has complete sovereignty over her body. Interestingly though, the uptake of these efforts to curb affect were dependent on whether or not the patient ascribed to a certain ideological stance from the beginning. For example, women who identified as Pro-Choice and/or had had prior terminated pregnancies, saw the procedure as routine and did not require “unnecessary expenditures of time and money…or that it would diminish their control [emphasis mine] over the process.”[33] One woman in this category stated that she preferred to just “‘get in there and get out.’”[34] The assumption that medicine will limit control over one’s body is also compatible with liberal logic of sovereignty. It appears this woman wanted to feel as if this was a routine procedure without unnecessary emotion, a state that could be altered by pain medication or anesthesia. She wanted to feel fully in embodied control during the procedure, but was also likely swayed by the fact that she ideologically believed that the operation was straightforward and that no unnecessary steps needed to be taken to dramatize that.
This process ignores the important role of affect in considering emotion and bodily response during and after surgery to be conscious and intentional, ideally moving towards an “expected” feeling at the end. In order to truly provide a medical and social environment in which women are able to access adequate reproductive health services, including abortion, Pro-Choice rhetoric needs to move beyond a focus on individual bodily “control” and allow that some uncontrollable emotion or affect will occur. Pain, relief, regret, and many others will undoubtedly appear in waves and different combinations, and activists cannot expect a woman to feel simply relieved or in control after an abortion. This only adds to the stigmatization of abortion as a moral choice rather than an embodied experience.
The dual effects of abortion stigmatization and a general neglect of the role of affect are significant barriers to the success of reproductive rights activism—a glaring error in such an overt example of an embodied and emotionally-heavy event. Jeannie Ludlow defines abortion stigmatization as the “ascription of negative attribute[s]…to women who seek to terminate a pregnancy…mark[ing] them, internally or externally, as inferior to ideals of womanhood.”[35] As discussed in the previous section, the choice to forgo motherhood is seen as incompatible with femininity. Ludlow argues that the recognition of such stigmatization is largely ignored in Pro-Choice doctrine and that due to an overemphasis on “Enlightenment liberalism,” the resulting affect of abortion patients is not considered. This stigmatization, albeit largely unrecognized, occurs in abortion clinics, rallies, support groups, and counseling sessions and contributes to the dissonance between a woman’s right to abortion and her legibility as a free and sovereign subject. For example, Ludlow notes that increased security—including guards outside, parking lot escorts, and metal detectors—“can intensify women’s feelings of fear and stigmatization.”[36] These barriers are ignored under the assumption that because a woman is seeking an abortion, her intentionality is inherently political. She is exercising her right in an objective and political way that is independent of affect and focused entirely on her position as a lone sovereign subject unaffected by social pressures, family life, economic conditions, and political limitations.
A particularly telling example of how an exclusively liberal activist rhetoric does not resonate with all women seeking abortions is explored through Ludlow’s discussion of counseling sessions and focus groups she had experienced during her research. She found quickly that women were often not concerned with the politics behind their choices, but rather had more affect-laden concerns:
They were pregnant—often feeling sick—sometimes sad or anxious about the impending procedure, and worried about their families, their finances, their jobs, and their lives. At a moment when a woman is concerned with the materiality of her life, so profoundly embodied, rights and legislative actions seem removed from her experiences. Our activist messages ignore this.[37]
It seems self-evident that affect theory would play a role in any rhetoric surrounding bodily rights and reproduction, and its absence is especially problematic for the type of expanded, intersectional, and race-conscious liberal theory that scholars such as Sharon Krause have argued for. A call for a non-sovereign view of agency—one that is inclusive of social inequality and does not assign personal responsibility for actions that no single individual can be responsible for—can amend some of the lack of attention to social inequalities and affect that have so plagued the Pro-Choice movement.[38]
Krause’s project is to dismantle the myth of the sovereign self and its role in individual agency by stretching the limits and complicating the terms of a liberal framework. By asserting that freedom does not lie solely in one’s own decision making, and does not take place in a social vacuum, Krause’s argument is successful in its reconceptualization of what it means to be a free subject and how social uptake remains ever relevant in an individual’s ability to make decisions. Using Hannah Arendt’s division of action into two parts—“beginning” and “finishing,”—Krause argues that actions do not begin and end with the individual but rather are deemed agentic by their effect on others in a particular social context. In her words, “the efficacy dimension of agency, in other words, is subject to the contingencies of social interpretation and response.”[39] As discussed previously, this proves true in cases of abortion rights and limited access to reproductive health care. A woman’s choice to have an abortion is not simply dependent on her status and a free and sovereign actor, but is also affected by legislative barriers, the general political climate, family members, bodily instincts, and more. When decisions are rendered agentic based on the reactions of others, affect plays a crucial role in determining who can make a decision or what that decision will be.
In sum, Krause’s theory proves relevant in its inclusion of individual agency among marginalized subjects. Freedom Beyond Sovereignty, albeit idealist in some of its predictions, does provide examples of how subaltern populations can and do exhibit freedom and agency in their decision making. For example, Krause asserts that positions of social inequality can stimulate the imagination that “inspire the individual to initiate action under conditions of systematic inequality, it also has a role in reconfiguring the social meaning of that action in ways that can help it bring to fruition.”[40] Here, a woman’s experience as a racial minority, a member of the working class, and other affect-laden social “feelings” are legible and relevant. As Krause argues, in some cases, the “revolutionary” nature of decision making also reveals the ways in which counter action can prove resilient and agentic in the face of social inequality and oppression.
This is a call for a redefined Pro-Choice rhetoric—one that is aware of racialized and gendered stereotypes that affect a woman’s ability to terminate her pregnancy. Rather than focusing solely on the assumed morality behind the choice of whether or not to have an abortion, we need to also consider the fact that the procedure may be physically impossible, based on access or legislation, or much more complex in terms of a woman’s affective and emotional response. Conceptions about abortion as a simple and overly autonomous decision only serve to limit the number of women who have access to the procedure. It is this understanding of abortion that will center the debate on the experiences of the women involved rather than having it be caught up in liberal political doctrine.
About the Author:
Hayley Wagner is a second-year Master’s student in Africana Studies at the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. Her current MA thesis work is focused on the intersection of race and gender with respect to reproductive rights policy in NYC. This research concerns the role of liberalism and conceptions of bodily sovereignty in contemporary abortion rights rhetoric. She hopes to break open the current “glass ceiling” of reproductive rights activism with attention to the history of sterilization programs and coercive health policies that have been forced upon women of color in the U.S. She will be applying to PhD programs in Human Rights and Global Affairs this fall.
Endnotes
[1] Jennifer Strickler and Nicholas L. Danigelis, “Changing Frameworks in Attitudes toward Abortion,” Sociological Forum 17 No. 2 (June 2002): 187-201, 191.
[2] Sharon Krause, Freedom Beyond Sovereignty: Reconstructing Liberal Individualism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 5.
[3] Strickler and Danigelis, “Changing Frameworks in Attitudes toward Abortion,” 191.
[4] Ibid, 199.
[5] Jeannie Ludlow, “Love and Goodness: Toward a New Abortion Politics,” Feminist Studies 38 no. 2 (Summer 2012): 474-483, 475.
[6] Ludlow, “Love and Goodness: Toward a New Abortion Politics,” 476.
[7] Jennifer Denbow, “Abortion and the Juridical: Reproductive Autonomy and Protection from Injury,” In Governed Through Choice (New York: NYU Press, 2015): 61-96, 94.
[8] Denbow, “Abortion and the Juridical: Reproductive Autonomy and Protection from Injury, 83.
[9] Ibid, 61.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ludlow, “Love and Goodness: Toward a New Abortion Politics,” 478.
[13] Amalia W. Jorns. “Challenging Warrantless Inspections of Abortion Providers: A New Constitutional Strategy”. Columbia Law Review 105.5 (2005): 1563–1596, 1563.
[14] Imani Perry, More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States, (New York: NYU Press, 2011), 16.
[15] Perry, More Beautiful and More Terrible, 92.
[16] Denbow, “Abortion and the Juridical: Reproductive Autonomy and Protection from Injury,” 64.
[17] Perry, More Beautiful and More Terrible, 45.
[18] Patricia C. Clough, “The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia, and Bodies,” In The Affect Theory Reader, Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010): 206-225, 206.
[19] Clough, “The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia, and Bodies,” 207.
[20] Ibid, 209.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Steven D. Brown and Ian Tucker, “Eff the Ineffable: Affect, Somatic Management, and Mental Health Service Users,” In The Affect Theory Reader, Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010): 229-249, 242.
[23] Brown and Tucker, “Eff the Ineffable: Affect, Somatic Management, and Mental Health Service Users,” 242.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Jennifer Keys, “Running the Gauntlet: Women’s Use of Emotion Management Techniques in the Abortion Experience,” Symbolic Interaction 33.1 (2010): 41–70, 41.
[26] Keys, “Running the Gauntlet: Women’s Use of Emotion Management Techniques in the Abortion Experience,”42.
[27] Ibid. 50.
[28] Ibid, 49.
[29] Clough, “The Affective Turn,” 219.
[30] Keys, “Running the Gauntlet,” 59.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Ibid.
[33] Ibid, 60.
[34] Ibid.
[35] Ludlow, “Love and Goodness: Toward a New Abortion Politics,” 475.
[36] Ibid.
[37] Ibid, 476.
[38] Krause, Freedom Beyond Sovereignty, 6.
[39] Ibid, 31.
[40] Ibid, 103.