Presence - by Erin Maglaque (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A vibrant history of women's bodies, expertise, and work from a major new writer--stylish, revelatory, and liberating.

Today, we understand the mind and the body to be distinct; that the mind exercises control over the flesh. But as Erin Maglaque experienced the transformations of pregnancy, abortion, birth, and care-giving, she began to doubt the truth of that dichotomy. In an effort to better understand her experiences, she found herself reaching to the premodern past, a period when the strange rubbed up against the strikingly recognizable: when people accepted both levitation and the smallpox vaccine, witchcraft and universal gravitation; a time when understandings of the body and its capacity for thought were more expansive, and more unruly.

Structured as a biography of the author's own body, from girlhood and adolescence, to sex and abortion, to feeding and caring for an infant, to her experience caring for someone as they were dying, Erin places her personal history into a deep dialogue with the premodern past. She explores the relation between imagination and gender, between maternal and historical subjectivity; she positions female desire as a practice with a past, and offers gentler and more forgiving understandings of housekeeping, pregnancy, early miscarriage, abortion, birth, sleeplessness, and breastfeeding.

For readers of Amia Srinivasan's The Right to Sex, Cat Bohannon's Eve, and Olivia Laing's Everybody, Presence is a unique experiment in historical thinking and embodied knowledge; a thoroughly researched, vibrant history of women's bodies, expertise, and work from a major new writer.

Review Quotes

"Engrossing and vital, Presence rediscovers the female body as a vessel of history. Interweaving past and present, the personal with incisive scholarship, these stories reveal the rich, unexpected, and sometimes brutal ways in which the complexities of female embodiment connect all women across all time."
--Michelle Orange, author of Pure Flame

"In Presence, Erin Magalaque expands and explodes the genre of personal history. In a voice at once deeply learned and often disarmingly intimate, these explorations unravel much of what women have been told about our bodies, desires, and capacities. They embody a mode of thought that does not only describe freedom but enacts it."
--Moira Weigel, author of Labor of Love

"An immersive, revelatory, and astonishing book about women, told through the distinct bodily experiences that punctuate our lives, and the history we've rarely been taught. Beautifully written and acutely insightful, Presence connects us to ourselves, our foremothers, and each other."
--Sophie Gilbert, author of Girl on Girl

About the Author

Erin Maglaque is a writer and historian. She teaches history at Durham University in the UK, and received her PhD from the University of Oxford. Erin writes regularly about history, gender, and feminism for the London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and other publications. Presence is her first book.