As we saw in Chapter One, the striation of public space fosters an ordering in which certain practices, people, or discourses, are normalised, and others are not. We saw that the intervention of a disruptive body harbours the capacity to trouble this striation. Woman – of the domestic, excluded from the public realm – is discursively outof- place in public space (Wilson, 1991; Solnit, 2000; Elkin, 2016). As Rebecca Solnit (2000: 234) tells us, phrases such as ‘public man’, ‘man about town’, and ‘man of the streets’ mean something quite different when attached to a feminine noun.

Consider, then, the trouble posed by the pregnant body in public space. The penetration of the pregnant body into public space could be considered something quite banal – pregnancy is rather common, after all – but it is nonetheless a site of antagonism. Sex, which usually, although not always, is how pregnancies occur, is private, but pregnancy itself is not. Historically pregnancy, maternity, childbirth and childrearing have been discursively associated with the private realm of women. Confinement, also associated with the sequestering of a peri-natal woman in darkened and quiet rooms before and after the birth, takes its etymological origins from the Old French confins, and describes a boundary or border.