Erin Maglaque's "Presence"

Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf speak to historian Erin Maglaque about Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body, which interrogates contemporary notions of how women's bodies work. The book is both a personal account as well as an excavation of the rituals, beliefs, and experiences of women from pre-modernity. It covers everything from pregnancy and child-birth to abortion, sexual desire, work, and sleep. Maglaque contrasts the idea of our bodies as separate from our minds—both optimizable and containable—with a pre-Cartesian conception of them as porous, vulnerable, and infinitely complex, inviting a consideration of some of the freedom of the deeper past and its starkly different ways of being embodied.