Susie Russell | “Toward a New Culture”? The Promiscuous Politics and Queer Potential of the ‘Pregnant Man’ Poster

This event will be held both on-campus and online via Zoom (a link to the online stream will be sent to registered attendees).

In 1972 a New England Free Press catalogue offered, amidst its extensive book list, three posters, priced at 5 cents each. One was a comic skewering capitalism, the second a reproduction of an ink drawing of Vietnamese resistance against North American military, and the third was an image widely known as the ‘pregnant man.’ Kept by the Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance Archives, the catalogue listed the ‘pregnant man poster’ under the category FEMALE LIBERATION and the SEXUAL CASTE SYSTEM, between the radical feminist periodical Off Our Backs and women’s liberation stickers in a section entitled TOWARD A NEW CULTURE. How did a British government health education poster crafted by what would become the world’s largest advertising agency belong in this radical, feminist company?

This presentation explores the lifecycles of the ‘pregnant man’ poster, investigating how it became, and remains, available for reinterpretation in varied cultural and political contexts over more than 50 years. As well as being taken up in family planning campaigns around the world, in parallel, feminists rapidly adapted the poster for abortion law reform campaigning. I argue that the poster’s queer potential is critical for understanding its proliferation and polyvocality in the reproductive politics of the late twentieth century Anglosphere.

Susie Russell is a Visual Medical Humanities PhD candidate in the ANU’s Centre for Art History and Art Theory, where she is exploring sympathetic pregnancy/couvade. Informed by training in anthropology and the history and sociology of medicine, Susie's research engages with questions of gender, embodiment, and race.

Image: Would you be more careful if it was you that got pregnant?, 1969, poster produced by Cramer Saatchi for the Health Education Council, issued by the Family Planning Association, UK. Photographer: Alan Brooking; Art Director: Bill Atherton; Copywriter: Jeremy Sinclair. Offset lithograph on paper, Victoria and Albert Museum, Given by Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising, E.755-1997.

The School of Art & Design Seminar series will continue weekly on Tuesdays from 1-2pm, between 17 February and 21 October 2025, co-convened by Dr Alex Burchmore and Alia Parker.