Interview with Sinah Theres Kloß and Antonia Villinger on ‘Pregnant Bodies – Embodied Pregnancy’
Body & Society
Volume 31 Number 1-2 June 2025
Interview with Sinah Theres Kloß and Antonia Villinger on ‘Pregnant Bodies – Embodied Pregnancy’
Published online first in Body & Society, Volume 31 Numver 1-2, June 2025
Abstract
Tomoko Tamari conducted this interview with the editors of the Body & Society special issue ‘Pregnant Bodies – Embodied Pregnancy’ in order to explore their rationale for focusing on pregnant bodies and exploring how their personal experience of being pregnant women during their editing process of the issue influenced their analytical insights into pregnancy and pregnant bodies. Tamari also raises the issues of transgender male’s pregnancy, which is often stigmatised, and analyses the lived experience so as to further discuss multifactorial and complex embodied pregnancy in society. In 2020 she introduced Body & Society’s special section on ‘Biocircularities: Lives, Times and Technologies’ (Vol. 29, Issue 2) and the notion of ‘recursion’ to raise the question of how the development of reproductive science and technology has transformed ‘the temporality’ of pregnant bodies to make possible ‘multiple temporalities’. Finally, Kloß and Villinger discuss their thoughts about experiences of ‘after pregnancy’ and ‘becoming a mother’ in order to open up potential future research topics.
Sinah T. Kloß is Research Group Leader at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS). University of Bonn, Germany. She holds a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from Heidelberg University. Her current research focuses on body modification practices, particularly tattooing, in Indo-Carib-bean communities. Most recently, she has edited the volume Tattoo Histories: Transcultural Perspectiveson the Narratives, Practices, and Representations of Tattooing (2020), which has been published with Routledge.
Antonia Villinger is a Research Associate at the Otto-Friedrichs-University Bamberg and PhD candidate in German Literatures at the University of Mannheim, Germany. She is currently finalizing her thesis, which focuses on the intersection of pregnancy, gender, and body in the dramatic plays of Friedrich Hebbel. She has studied Germanic Languages and Literatures, Sociology, and Theology at the University of Cologne, Charles University in Prague, and Washington University in St. Louis, MO. Her research interests include German Literature of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries with a focus on plays, gender, and embodiment studies.
Tomoko Tamari is a Reader in Sociology at the Institute for Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship, University of London. She is managing editor of Body & Society and has published ‘Body Image and Prosthetic Aesthetics’ (Body & Society 23(1), 2017). She is currently working on the following areas: body image and disability, human perception and the moving image, probiotics and immunity.