Swollen: Ordinary to Extraordinary Pregnancy and Maternity
Monsters are linked to the female body in scientific discourse through the question of biological reproduction." The capacity of the female body to grow, change, and produce new life has been a simultaneous source of fear and wonder, while incidents of monstrous births and the opacity of those same bodies drove centuries of speculation about how and why the process of reproduction could 'fail.' As medical understands of pregnancy grew, the possibility of non-biological reproduction in the form of Frankenstein’s monster or Stoker’s vampirism opened new frontiers of extraordinary bodies to people the popular imagination. Susan Caldwell, in a different cultural context, refers to the mother goddess in the Hindu Pantheon as a terrifying mother.