Pregnancy Test (Object Lessons)

Prof. Karen Weingarten

ISBN 10: 1501376543 / ISBN 13: 9781501376542

Published by Bloomsbury Academic, 2023

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 9781501376542

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Pregnancy Test (Object Lessons)
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication Date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1501376543
• ISBN 13: 9781501376542
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

In the 1970s, the invention of the home pregnancy test changed what it means to be pregnant. For the first time, women could use a technology in the privacy of their own homes that gave them a yes or no answer. That answer had the power to change the course of their reproductive lives, and it chipped away at a paternalistic culture that gave gynecologists-the majority of whom were men-control over information about women's bodies.

However, while science so often promises clear-cut answers, the reality of pregnancy is often much messier. Pregnancy Test explores how the pregnancy test has not always lived up to the fantasy that more information equals more knowledge. Karen Weingarten examines the history and cultural representation of the pregnancy test to show how this object radically changed sex and pregnancy in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in the The Atlantic.

About the Authors

Karen Weingarten is Associate Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York, USA. She is the author of Abortion in the American Imagination: Before Life and Choice, 1880- 1940 (2014).

Ian Bogost is an author and an award-winning game designer. He is Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences, Director of Film & Media Studies, and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Bogost is also Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC, an independent game studio, and a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic. Bogost is author or co-author of ten books, including Alien Phenomenology (2012)and Play Anything (2016).

Christopher Schaberg is Director of the Program in Public Scholarship at Washington University in St. Louis, USA, and the author of The Textual Life of Airports (2012), The End of Airports (2015), Airportness (2017), The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth (2018), Searching for the Anthropocene (2019), Pedagogy of the Depressed (2021), and Adventure: An Argument for Limits (2023), all published by Bloomsbury. He is also the founding co-editor (with Ian Bogost) of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons book series.