Baby Snatchers, Heinous Hags, and Harbingers of Apocalypse: Infertility and Gender in Modern Storytelling

Join us for a Halloween-inspired deep dive with Carrie Russpatrick. 

From Rosemary's Baby to Hereditary, modern storytelling has long made female fertility–and its disruption– a source of terror. The infertile woman in particular holds a uniquely monstrous place in this history: too old, too willful, too broken, too "unnatural" to belong.

This talk traces the archetypes that have stalked the infertile female body on screen and on the page: the childless crone, the shrill lesbian, the depressed, aging wife, the deluded baby snatcher, and more. We'll map how these figures serve as anxious correctives to the normative family, punishing or forcibly correcting those who exist outside reproductive norms.

With examples from science fiction, drama, horror and beyond, we will discuss how genre shapes our normative expectations around gender, sex, and reproduction. From Children of Men’s science fiction take on Earth’s apocalyptically barren women, to a woman driven mad by medical gaslighting in the thriller False Positive, to the incest-damaged, shut-in desperate for a child in the horror film Barbarian, we will discuss how the infertile female archetype travels and changes across genres.

And in all this, we will ask an even rarer question: where is the male infertile body in this pantheon? When the male body fails to reproduce, these genres rarely stage the same bodily horror, social exile, or violent correctives given to female characters. Drawing on film, television, and key literary touchstones, this talk invites you to see fertility anxieties not as timeless truths, but as politically loaded narratives about our normative ideals surrounding gender, the family, and what it means to be fully human.

When: 22 October, 18:00 - 19:00 

Where: Prismatic Pages, Rathkes gate 7b

Carrie Russpatrick is an independent researcher in Media, Gender and Culture. Current projects include mapping the differences in film ratings for queer films across countries and media representations of the trauma of infertility. She has also studied the theoretical crossings of aesthetics and queer embodiment in the cinematic trope known as  the "vulva monster". She is an active member of the Monster Network which fosters international collaborations among those with interest in monsters and the monstrous and is a founding member of the Norwegian Queer Research Group  In her spare time, she is a lover of zines, fossils, poodles, and all things cult classic.