The Politics of Birth from Heidegger to Haywood
Colloquium
Speaker: Jill Drouillard, Mississippi University for Women
Start: Nov 07, 2025 - 03:30pm
Where: MITCH 102
Description:
In my recent book Feminist Heidegger: Sex, Gender, and the Politics of Birth, I explore an unanswered question that Heidegger raises in a 1923 Freiburg lecture, “Problem: What is Woman?” This question, this problem, leads to an analysis of how the concept of birth fits into his philosophy and what it can teach us today in the realms of bioethics, law, pedagogy, and politics. The book ends with a feminist reading of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks and points to a subtle form of pronatalism within Heidegger’s philosophy. In this talk, I expand on why pronatalism necessarily accompanies philosophies of nationalism, paying particular attention to how the “Problem: What is Woman?” gets answered in our current pronatalist political climate.