Since it has not to date arisen as a question, is it possible to open a debate with Giorgio Agamben concerning the role of women's bodies in the politicization of life? The woman about whom a ruling is passed forbidding an abortion is sometimes figured as a potentially murderous competing sovereign whose self-interest would thwart the intervening motivations of the state concerned with the interests of a threshold life. She is attributed with a pseudo-violent decision that this fetal life is not to be lived. Neither zoē, bios, bare life, nor homo sacer, the fetus is rhetorically and varyingly depicted as all of these, in an imitation of these patterns as they take place around zoē, bios, and the production of bare human life as vulnerable excess to which political life can be reduced. Agamben's analyses illuminate the way in which fetal life can come to be considered, particularly in antiabortion contexts and erroneously as a politicized bare life exposed to sovereign violence. Moreover, women's potential reducibility to naked life intertwines with their reducibility to reproductive life. If the fetus is falsely figured as homo sacer, it might be argued that this simultaneously reduces the woman to a barer, reproductive life exposed to the state's intervention. As she is figured as that which exposes another life, is she herself gripped, exposed, and reduced to barer life?

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An avid reader of Nietzsche, the German radical feminist Helene Stöcker referred in 1893 to the Verfrühung of the modern woman, her prematurity. She used references to Mill, Bebel, Darwin, Galton, and Nietzsche among others to develop a concept of women's untimely modernity. This paper considers how a number of concepts of time, transformation, biological futurity, and putative agency over nature became, for Stöcker, the basis for a feminist claim to autonomy, agency, and reproductive rights. The paper goes on to ask how some of these concepts and their context could also have provided the implicit resources to resist their conversion by Stöcker.The radical turn-of-the-century German feminist Helene Stöcker argued against the racial hygienist views of her contemporary, the philosopher Christian Freiherr von Ehrenfels, because his version of eugenics promoted male sexual rights over women. But she herself promoted variations on a eugenic perspective, associated with women's individual rights. She used the language of 'rights over herself' (das Recht über sich selbst) and 'over one's own body' (über den eigenen Körper) (Stöcker 1908b, 402).s jp_18 18..35 Given that the association today is hard to imagine, what was a radical feminism that could manifest a eugenic inflection? Trained in philosophy, Stöcker spoke enthusiastically of Francis Galton, but also of Friedrich Nietzsche. If she managed to associate the two by overlooking their incompatibilities, although Stöcker was an assiduous reader of Nietzsche. But the reading of him occurs through the lens of a preoccupation with matters of procreation, so the Übermensch was not reduced to, but was associated with,