Reinhabiting the body: the politics and poetics of contraceptive discontinuation in the UK

Thesis

This thesis examines the politics and poetics of contraceptive discontinuation in the UK, focusing on how and why people stop using hormonal contraception for reasons other than pregnancy. Through eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork – combining in-person research in London and Oxford with online ethnography – I analyse how discontinuation practices engage broader socio-political discourses of risk, reproductive citizenship, and bodily autonomy. Drawing on feminist phenomenology, medical anthropology, and critical theories of embodiment, I develop the concept of ‘reinhabiting the body’ to analyse how individuals renegotiate embodied rhythms, social relations, and reproductive futures when they withdraw from hormonal regimes. As such, the thesis traces how discontinuation is not a discrete event but a looping, indeterminate process shaped by digital technologies, peer networks, and gendered temporalities.

Across the chapters, I explore how menstruation is redefined through hormonal technologies, how ovulation is framed through anticipatory politics, how metaphors of rootedness draw on nostalgic imaginaries of ‘natural’ fertility, and how risk is socially and temporally constructed through discontinuation narratives. I examine the symbolic work of hormones themselves, showing how they operate as contested sites of meaning-making, boundary maintenance, and resistance to dominant reproductive scripts. By analysing menstrual cycles, fertility awareness methods, and anti-hormonal discourses, I demonstrate how distinctions between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ bodily states are produced and continually re-negotiated through everyday embodied practices, social interactions, and technological mediations.

In challenging binary distinctions between nature and culture, risk and safety, and fertility and infertility, I argue for an understanding of hormones as fluid, culturally situated entities that articulate broader tensions around control, autonomy, and reproductive futurity. The thesis contributes to feminist and medical anthropology by foregrounding embodiment, temporality, and metaphor as critical lenses for understanding reproductive politics. It interrogates normative assumptions underlying contraceptive practices and reproductive citizenship, showing how discontinuation both resists and reproduces prevailing norms around pregnancy, menstruation, and bodily autonomy.

Authors: Van de Perre, Z

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-amwgbzb9a
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English