Abstract
In its analysis of Mina Loy’s 1914 poem “Parturition” alongside Jacques Lacan’s theory of the
Real, this article considers how childbirth problematises dominant notions of subjectivity,
gender, and temporality. Beyond the identity category of ‘mother,’ it begins by examining
childbirth as an intersubjective phenomenon which complicates the distinctions between
inside and outside, self and (m)other, and man and woman. It then explores how childbirth
disrupts linear notions of temporality in Loy and Lacan. Far from the ultimate ‘beginning,’
childbirth is portrayed as a psychological substratum which rises from the subconscious
throughout one’s lifetime, and as the goal of the death drive. Finally, it explicates the ways
in which Loy and Lacan centre childbirth in theories of artistic and cosmic creation. In both
writers, parturition is regarded as a phenomenon which is able to challenge, and therefore
reconfigure, the dominant logics which underpin our sense of the ‘possible.’