Here is another wonderful essay submitted for a previous incarnation of Writing Place. It was written by Heather McIntyre, who completed her honours year in 2005. The essay looks at the way the womb has been imagined as a place over time. It kept reminding me as I read it of the song 'Alien', by Lamb, in which the following words appear over the sound of a heartbeat: 'This was a body / now it's a home'.
The sources Heather drew on to explore this are inspired: eighteenth-century medical literature, TV documentaries from the late 1980s, Naomi Wolf's Misconceptions, and even the Look Who's Talking films. I am still absorbing all that she's written about the womb-as-place, wondering over the succinct summary in her introduction: 'The womb is a place which ... blurs the boundary between bodily and linguistic experience, between bodily interior and exteriors, and between the various subjects which its space involves'.