Threatening Pregnant Bodies: Annegret Soltau and Staged Subjectivity

This article revisits the filmic work of German visual artist Annegret Soltau as a means for analysing the depiction of pregnant bodies within a culture that sees pregnancy both as threatening and as under threat. By presenting her own pregnant body as an embodiment of various contradictions enmeshed in complex gendered linages, Soltau contributes to our understanding of how pregnant bodies perform and narrate interconnected multiplicities. Soltau’s work ultimately breaks down binary understandings of subjectivity and dichotomies between the pregnant person and the foetus. Examining Soltau’s work today means being mindful of the fact that there is always also a threat embedded in bodies labelled as threatened, and that as much as the pregnant body links us to the future, it can also be a useful site for reconsidering our corporeal relationship to the past and the present.