The next School of Humanities Lecture Series will be given by a leading gender historian.

Professor Maud Anne Bracke’s lecture is entitled “Reproductive rights and the embodied citizen: A tale of two abortion trials (Bobigny 1972 / Padua 1973)”.

The lecture, which is Professor Bracke’s inaugural lecture, will be held on Friday 23 June 2023 at the University of Glasgow.

Professor Bracke, who is the Professor of Modern European History, will discuss the trials of Marie-Claire Chevalier in Paris in 1972 and Gigliola Pierobon in Padua the following year which were watershed moments in shifting public and political opinion in favour of legal reform on abortion.

Using court records, media coverage, and feminist writing, this lecture reconstructs the trials as conflicted national conversations that revealed the difficulty in applying established concepts of political citizenship to women and their bodies.

More broadly, the lecture situates the era of abortion law reform in Western Europe, the long 1970s, in longer-term histories of gendered citizenship. It draws on intersectional feminist approaches to challenge teleological narratives towards ever-growing reproductive liberty, and instead explores the new cultural, medical and political norms that accompanied the de-criminalisation of abortion.

All are welcome to the in person event -  on Friday 23 June at 5.30pm in the Wolfson Medical Building’s Yudowitz Lecture Theatre (Room 253) - which will also be  live streamed. Full details can be found on the School of Humanities website.

First published: 8 June 2023

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