Editorial: Bodies, Reproductive Rights and Self Determination

Published online: 25 April 2023

© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2023

The texts in this section are short psychoanalytically informed responses to the curtailment of reproductive rights, especially those in the United States. With this watershed moment as the springboard, we have invited academics, scholars, clinicians, and activists to reflect about the global movement to control bodies. The collection addresses the failures of liberal universal humanism and the authoritarian and theocratic backlash in the form of the latest dystopia, the site of which is women’s bodies specifically, and more broadly, anyone who has a womb and vies for bodily autonomy. The surprise with which the tremendously violent and disruptive legal decision of the US Supreme Court was met is perhaps itself telling, especially since reproductive rights activists had anticipated its arrival for quite some time, and the narrowness with which it was interpreted—that is, only effecting cisgender women—appeared to replicate the logics of domination, coerciveness, and patriarchy in which the decision itself came to be made.

The texts are published in the Counterspace section of the journal, which is intended by the section editors as an avenue for psychoanalytic submissions that counter hegemonic psychoanalytic narratives, styles of writing, and methodology. Importantly, this section attempts to platform counter-hegemonic knowledge production—pieces written not in the usual academic register—especially related to the nexus of psychoanalysis, society, the body, political economy, social movements, institutions and power. In that sense, these pieces themselves embody their resistance and invite us into various entry points of encounters, working through, free association, and bearing witness. The generosity with which they are offered, the expansiveness of their focus, and their tremendous vulnerability and