Maren Lange

Dissertation project in the DFG Research Training Group Gender as Experience:
"On the kitchen table"? Experiences with the performance of abortions in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s (2024-2027)

Maren Lange's doctoral project is interested in experiences with abortions in Germany before the criminal law reform of § 218 in 1976. Although abortions were officially largely prohibited, it is assumed that several hundred thousand abortions, including illegalised ones, were performed each year in the 1950s to 1970s. The work centres on qualitative narrative interviews with contemporary witnesses who performed abortions on other people during this period or were involved in performing abortions. These people included doctors, midwives and people without medical training.

Abortions are understood as a deeply embodied experience that is characterised by both biopolitical knowledge regimes and material conditions. In the context of how bodies are made unequal and materialised and why they are reg(ul)ated, controlled, moralised and stigmatised in this way, processes of subjectivation and agency are of particular interest. The study aims to understand the significance of embodied and lived experiences for social discontinuities, persistence or change. What is the relationship between gender relations, biopolitical mechanisms and the experiences and actions of the staff, people concerned? And how are lived and narrated experiences integrated into current debates about abortion and what implications can be drawn from them? The work ties in with historical and current discourses on reproductive rights and justice, bodily self-determination and care and is embedded in ethnographic reflections on performative memory, feminist narratives, vulnerability and solidarity.

Research interests:
- Historical research on reproduction, sexuality and gender relations
- Reproductive rights and justice
- Biopolitics, power-knowledge regimes and subjectivisation
- Queer-feminist materialism and feminist critique of science
- Gender as experience and embodiment
- Performative remembering, oral history and biographical research
- Qualitative interpretative research