Article

Dialogues in Human Geography 2018, Vol. 8(3) 300–316 ª The Author(s) 2018 Cyborg uterine geography: Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions Complicating ‘care’ DOI: 10.1177/2043820618804625 and social reproduction journals.sagepub.com/home/dhg

Sophie Lewis Independent Scholar, USA

Abstract Most geographers have sided with ‘cyborgs’ (technonatural subjects) against ‘goddesses’ (e.g. Mother Earth) on questions of embodiment. In itself this provides no justification for the relative dearth (in geography) of theorizing ‘with’ the uterus as a site of doing and undoing; what I propose to call uterine geography. ‘Uterine’ relations are fundamentally cyborg, animatedly labouring and not only spatial but spatializing: they make and unmake places, borders, kin. This includes not only abortion, miscarriage, menstruation and pregnancy (whose transcorporeal and chimeric character is well documented in medical anthropology) but also other life-enabling forms of holding and letting go that do not involve anatomical uteri (such as trans-mothering and other alter-familial practices). Despite our discipline’s ostensible interest in co-production, hybridity and the more-than-human, the ‘doing’ aspects of intra and interuterine processes have tended to be black- boxed in accounts of care economies and social reproduction. The proposed remedy is deromanticization: an approach that critically politicizes uterine relations as historically contingent and subject to amelioration through struggle. Potential aides include Maggie Nelson’s idea that ‘labor does you’, Suzanne Sadedin’s account of gestation’s mutual hostility and the concepts of ‘sym-poiesis’ and ‘metramorphosis’. One notable consequence of this expanded concept of the uterine is that ‘assisted reproduction’, as it is characterized today, ceases to be categorically separate from other kinds of reproduction.

Keywords gestation, maternal, matrixial, reproductive technology, reproduction, sym-poiesis, staying with the trouble, transcorporeal, trans reproductive justice, uterus

Cyborg gestation 2002; Whatmore, 2006; Wilson, 2009). ‘I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’ – the immortal In determining how best to conceptualize the closing lines of the Cyborg Manifesto – had, after chimeric character of human, or rather, ‘more- than-human’ embodiment, many geographers have intuitively opted for the impure, partial agent Donna Haraway (1989) called ‘cyborg’, over the powerful Corresponding author: Sophie Lewis, Independent Scholar, 4815 Baltimore Ave, 3R and pure mother-goddess archetype of ecofeminism Philadelphia, PA 19143, USA. (namely, Kirsch, 2014; Lorimer, 2011; Schuurman, Email: [email protected] Lewis 301 all, not only articulated but resolved this choice biological determinism as the reason why feminists (Haraway, 1989). It is in the critical field of geogra- in this field have ‘tend[ed] not to study pregnancy, phy that the notion of a monstrous, hybrid, ‘cyborg birthing and breastfeeding as material processes’ urbanization’ has principally been elaborated (Hird, 2007: 3). Hird herself has ventured to (Gandy, 2005; Swyngedouw, 1996). Yet, in ways describe these material processes anew – and many also inspired by Haraway – whose latest work others along the way – in terms of ‘gifting’ and appeals to a litany of Indigenous mother- ‘corporeal generosity’: ‘the literal and metaphoric goddesses such as Tangaroa, Naga and Pachamama giving of our selves’ including dust, DNA, viruses, (Haraway, 2016: 101) – feminist geographers have white and red blood, myriad other cells and bacteria also found room for ‘goddess’-inspired ecologies as (Hird, 2007: 14). The intervention in question is part of the broader assault on modernity’s nature/ highly instructive but, in my reading, nevertheless culture binary or else rejected the cyborg/goddess persists in sweetening the account of uterine rela- dichotomy in the first place (Gergan, 2015; Jacobs tionality somewhat – implying that the gifting is and Nash, 2003; Nesmith and Radcliffe, 1993; more or less symmetric, while leaving out moments Sundberg, 2014). But for those of us unnerved by of refusing, devouring and killing that, as will see, what appears to be at best a latent rehabilitation of also characterize this deeply intimate bedrock of eugenic and populationist thought in multispecies interpersonal care. feminism (‘make kin not babies’; Haraway, 2016), It was non-fiction literature that first elicited in the figure of the cyborg is likely to remain an emi- me the desire for an unromantic, or cyborg, uterine nently preferable heuristic to the ‘goddess’ – pre- geography. In her memoir The Argonauts (2015), cisely because of its potential for deromanticizing Maggie Nelson describes the endpoint of her own the politics of mothering, care and reproduction, uterine labour as an event that ‘runs you over like a where it is usually not the one (of the two) to be truck’ (Nelson, 2015: 134). She recalls receiving deployed. Neither pro- nor anti-natalist, neither pro- sobering advice during her pregnancy: ‘You don’t nor anti-maternal, the cyborg was and remains an do labor. Labor does you’ (Nelson, 2015: 134) account of a historically specific proletarian labourer, (Emphasis is added). Reading this passage, it struck an anti-racist feminist subjectivity that is hybrid: me that a long line of anti-work thinkers, from the network-situated yet antagonistic vis-a`-vis capital- Wages for Housework Committee onwards, have ism, colonized yet complicit, more-than-human yet described all alienated labour – particularly the corporeal and avowedly ‘non-innocent’ (Haraway, work of love under capitalism – in this way. Nota- 1989). In misrecognized surrogate ways, the cyborg bly, in the eyes of the militants who sought to pit labours. She (not necessarily a ‘she’) makes and wages against housework, ‘every miscarriage is a unmakes babies, identities, cities. Cyborgicity is thus workplace accident’ (Federici, 1975). What kind far more conducive to spatial–historic thinking than of workplace are talking about? Nelson continues: any vitalist, pro-maternal figuration of the human animal as tragically divorced from (yet innately If all goes well, the baby will make it out alive, and so reconcilable to) the web of life. Moreover, as this will you. Nonetheless, you will have touched death article argues, it is far more conducive to thinking along the way. You will have realized that death will uterine labour and uterine labour geographies, spe- do you too, without fail and without mercy. (Nelson, cifically, in an anti-capitalist way. 2015: 134) While the monopolizing of womb-related mat- ters by various either pro- or anti-natal mythologies In The Argonauts, there are two survivors of suggests an explanation for the relative dearth in pregnancy, and one – cyborg – subject. If the work feminist geography of theorizing with the uterus as of pregnancy is desired by its bearer, the impossible a site of doing – what I propose to call uterine geo- job of the cervix becomes, first, to stay shut and graphy – it does not really provide an excuse. Myra thereafter, as Nelson reflects (since her delivery was Hird is right, I think, to identify wariness of vaginal) to ‘go to pieces’. The moment of 302 Dialogues in Human Geography 8(3) parturition, this subject tells, ‘demands surrender’ such as trans mothering, end-of-life care, adoption, and brings you psychically to your knees. Extrapo- foster care and other practices that provide for lating from this encounter with death, Nelson sug- births, better deaths or survival. gests there is a social necessity for humans to forget In my opinion, despite our discipline’s ostensible gestation. She notes, by way of evidence, that hege- interest in co-production, hybridity and the more- monic narratives about pregnancy tend to subsume than-human, the relational animacy of these pro- any and all suffering (the individual’s heroic means) cesses has often been black-boxed in accounts of under ends (the baby). As the wracked anonymity of ‘care’ and social reproduction. The remedy, I a British news article of December 2016 confirms – believe, begins with deromanticization: an approach collecting testimonies from ‘Parents who regret that critically politicizes uterine relations as histori- having children’ (BBC, 2016) – most morally cally contingent and subject to amelioration through prescribed scripts gloss over post-partum trauma struggle. If ‘care’ and ‘social reproduction’ are the and not only presume but demand happiness (newly re-popularized) words we have at our dispo- (Ahmed, 2010). In Nelson’s memoir, death, birth, sal to describe this business of (re)making and of parenting and gender transition are each being made, then they require thoroughgoing dero- described in terms of asymmetric but mutual manticizing in our discipline. Some materials of forms of holding and letting go. I attempt to stay interest to this end include the following variations with this insight in what follows. on the idea that ‘labor does you’ back, consisting of Theoretic treatments of uterine (non-)productiv- a weave of holding and letting go that moves us ity as collective and political are overwhelmingly through each other’s bodies: the molecular biologist initiated in subjects like English (Handlarski, Suzanne Sadedin’s account of gestation’s mutual 2010), history (Murphy, 2012) and cultural studies violence (Sadedin, 2014); the concept ‘sym-poiesis’ (Tyler in Ahmed and Stacey, 2001). Feminist sci- (i.e. making-with; Haraway, 2016); and ‘copoiesis’ ence scholars, too, have emphasized the two-way, (i.e. making-together; Ettinger, 2006), also referred microchimeric character of gestation and its after- to as ‘metramorphosis’. math (Hird, 2007; Martin, 2010; Kelly, 2012; Vora, A shared consequence of these various reloca- 2015): the co-production of gestators by fetuses at tions of uterine matters beyond the borders of the genetic and epigenetic level. These microchi- ‘womanhood’ is that ‘assisted reproduction’, as it merism researchers position gestation as a model is characterized today, ceases to be categorically of universal identity plasticity, permeability and separate from any other kinds of reproduction. All often unwelcome fusion. They insist that, through reproduction reveals itself as, in a sense, ‘surrogate’. pregnancy, maternal anatomy becomes a chimera, Given Haraway’s predilection for making precisely having been permanently infiltrated by fetal DNA. this point, and notwithstanding her commentary, And, as these theorizations suggest, it is not simply a which I will revisit, on the artist Patricia Piccinini’s baby that is birthed during a birth, but rather, two sculptures of transspecies gestator-Surrogates (Har- unequal beings who are both survivors of their away, 2011a), it surprises me that the author of The own matrixial sym-poiesis. Desiring that this preoc- Cyborg Manifesto has never directed her acumen cupation be elaborated in geography, my starting substantively towards gestation per se (except, point is the contention that ‘uterine’ relations are lately, to recommend that her readers don’t do it fundamentally cyborg, animatedly labouring and in Staying with The Trouble: Making Kin in the collectively spatial. This includes not only abortion, Chthulucene) but colluded in the tendency to leave miscarriage, menstruation and pregnancy (whose the nitty-gritty of gestating-ness out of discussions transcorporeal and chimeric character is well docu- of care and social reproduction. In Haraway’s mented in medical anthropology, namely Alaimo, accounts of earthly life, eating one another and 2010; Hird, 2007; Kelly, 2012; Martin, 2010; Vora, being eaten is simultaneously an inescapable reality 2015) but also other life-enabling forms of holding and a conscious art to cultivate responsibly and letting go that do not involve anatomical uteri, (response-ably) (Haraway, 2011b, 2016). But Lewis 303 gestation – human or non-human – is never spot- secretions, this placenta ‘digests’ its way into its lighted as an example of this. Perhaps relatedly, the host’s arteries, securing full access to her tissues. ‘companion species’ turn in Haraway’s theorizing ‘Mammals whose placentae don’t breach the walls has correlated with a diminution in the grappling of the womb [in this way] can simply abort or reab- with exploitation, asymmetry, oppression and sorb unwanted foetuses at any stage of pregnancy’, inequality that characterized the 1980s Manifesto. Sadedin notes (Emphasis is added). For them, ‘life Regardless, her eye for ‘sympoiesis’ and ‘symbio- goes on almost as normal during pregnancy’ (Sade- genesis’ (‘becoming-with’) is what I am proposing din, 2014). Conversely, a human cannot rip away a is part of what I think is missing from geographies of placenta (because they’ve changed their mind or, mothering and childhood. Finitude is not scarcity, say, found themselves in a drought or war zone) Haraway suggests; eating one another need not without risk of fatal haemorrhage. The embryo has imply competitive individualism; and saying ‘no’ hugely enlarged and paralyzed her arterial system (killing, even) is not necessarily cruel (Haraway, while at the same time elevating (hormonally) blood 2011b, 2016). As mentioned, however, I have con- pressure and sugar supply. cerns about Haraway’s new turn to populationist Although feminist forms of lay science, health- anti-natalism. Meanwhile, though an alternative care activism and medical anthropology have parsed name might be ‘matrixial’ geography, following the pregnancy ambivalently for many decades (Mur- philosopher Bracha Ettinger (from ‘matrix’, mean- phy, 2012), Sadedin’s denaturalization of these ing ‘a place or medium in which something is ori- ‘biological’ realities is still capable of generating a ginated’), this comes from psycho- and strange dissonance in vis-a`-vis the affects of uncri- schizoanalysis and is beyond my power to justify tical celebration associated – hegemonically – with transposing into geography. I lean, therefore, childbearing. It unsettles vestigial habits of unthink- towards calling my intervention ‘cyborg uterine ing acceptance and vague adulation of gestating, geography’. whose sheer necessity every thinkable politics seems to take for granted but never seeks to expli- citly organize. Sadedin’s is not a somehow ‘anti- The agonism of gestation pregnancy’ intervention. True, in her account, when The theoretical biologist Suzanne Sadedin is ada- we gestate, we are battling to place acceptable limits mant that normal human gestation is a site of con- on our own colonization, forced to work absurdly siderable, species-exceptional violence. Unlike hard to stop a fetus from taking more than we are almost all other animals, humans die because of willing to give. But placed within a framework their pregnancies every year in their hundreds of within which the exceptionalism surrounding preg- thousands, making a mockery of UN millennium nancy is reversed, this understanding might sharpen goals to stop the carnage. Many survivors of preg- our understanding of the concrete contradictions we nancy suffer a range of health problems including have to navigate on every walk of life as we struggle hyperemesis gravidarum, gestational diabetes and to build something better than capitalism. On the cholestasis. Unless aggressively contained, human left, there is growing awareness that culturally placental cells ‘rampage’ through every tissue they sacralized work – such as nursing – is still work and touch, the genes that are active in embryonic devel- can be subject to strategic withdrawal (e.g. the opment are also implicated in cancer. But this is not motherhood, midwives’ or sex strike). So, what geo- the only reason that pregnancy among Homo graphies of gestated-ness, gestating-ness, aborting sapiens has evolved – in her account – to be a per- and miscarrying might become imaginable if a petual biological ‘bloodbath’. It is the specific, rare wider range of ongoing social labours were felt to type of placenta we have to work with (hemochorial be ‘uterine’, and the uterine made seriously compa- placenta) which ensures that fetuses truly dominate rable to other labours? Whereas accounts of agen- the process. Rather than simply interfacing through tive multi-actant ‘hybridity’ and ‘care’ studies alike a filter or contenting itself with freely proffered can sometimes flatten power relations, implying 304 Dialogues in Human Geography 8(3) that phenomena are desirable simply because they with the trouble’. Martin’s and Casper’s interven- exist and are ‘co-produced’, the drama of gestation tions have been invaluable, and to me it follows pace Sadedin poses a drastic challenge to such from rather than contradicts them to say that a way acquiescence. of articulating gestational labour still needs to be Contrary to the harmful fantasy of human mater- found that both acknowledges violence and does nal generosity as idealized boundlessness – retheor- something progressive with that acknowledgment. ized pragmatically by Myra Hird (2007) – Sadedin As elsewhere on earth, conflicts of interest mediated notes that our anatomy is perpetually decreasing in the placenta always coexist with confluences of sugar and blood pressure in response to the fetus interest; elements of antagonism must be acknowl- signalling for more (Sadedin, 2014). Human moth- edged and addressed, rather than denied. Indisputa- ers are thus technically ‘less generous’ than most bly, Sadedin leaves to others the task of non-human mothers, she explains. This is because contemplating a possible affirmative politics human fetuses, ‘tunnelling towards the mother’s informed by her claims. ‘How did we humans get bloodstream’, fight and override her ‘no’ through- so unlucky?’ is the pivotal evolutionary question for out. For instance, they disable her immune system Sadedin. ‘What do we do about this?’ is one that with floods of cortisol and constrict her blood ves- could be taken up in the critical social sciences and sels (if necessary) with the help of toxins, causing humanities. kidney or liver damage and stroke. In short, the unborn routinely deploy all manner of ‘manipula- tion, blackmail and violence’ (Sadedin, 2014) as Care and the human matrix their contribution to being made. Yet, to infer from In geographic engagements with the myriad labours this that to gestate willingly is an irrational embrace that provision basic emotional and biophysical of violence and thus actually ‘bad’ – or to take human and proto-human needs intergenerationally, offence because of this implication – is to miss the there has been a tendency to refrain from criticism point of Sadedin’s retelling. Sadedin, who has or even close assessment. This is well-motivated: gestated full terms herself, may feel that her coun- ‘care’ and ‘social reproduction’ are, after all, tanta- ternarrative is guaranteed to be widely unpopular. mount to mothering, and mothering – together with Ironically, it shouldn’t necessarily be, since it is the desire to abstain from it – is already structurally possible to read Sadedin as calling upon some of the subject to a barrage of punitive coercion and poli- very same metaphors of combat, competition and cing (Longhurst, 2008; Martin, 1990; Murphy, complementarity that prevail in hegemonic stories 2012). Those of us who are would-be critics of capi- about sexual reproduction, as famously analysed by talist White-supremacist patriarchy perceive that Emily Martin in The Woman in the Body (Martin, mothers (particularly mothers of colour) are not pri- 1990). marily culprits of systemic evils but rather, primar- Sadedin’s evolutionary account ultimately ily, victims. As a result, critical geography coheres with a narrative of fetal–maternal antagon- occasionally waxes a little schizoid: excoriating ism Martin pinpointed in scientific and medical ‘the’ family while at the same time valorizing it as fields, whereby the fetus represents the binary a site of ‘care’. ‘otherness’ of the father’s genetic difference from Rather than helping in advancing scholar- the mother. As Monica Casper has in turn convin- reproducers through these very real contradictions, cingly argued, this narrative underpinned notions of the genre of social reproduction study with which I the fetus as subject (Casper, 1998) which have, to identify can in my view sometimes become dis- date, been deployed exclusively to women’s detri- jointed and disorienting, keenly focused on divi- ment. Nevertheless, Sadedin’s tacit insistence on the sions of familial labour that cross micro- and agonism of gestation does not strike me primarily as macro-borders, for example, yet warped by the a subjectification (or vilification) of the fetus but assumption that mothers perpetrate little or no struc- rather as a clear call to (in Haraway’s phrase) ‘stay turally consequential violence. As thinkers of Lewis 305 reproduction’s world-shaping power, we paradoxi- rubric, ‘care’, has taken off conceptually across the cally want not to implicate mothers as harmful social sciences, especially in geography, where calls agents. Perhaps this move damns mothers by failing for ‘geographies of care’, ‘geographies of intimacy’, to gesture towards a better mothering horizon for ‘care politics’ and ‘landscapes of caring’ have been everyone. It is for these reasons, I believe, that Mar- legion (Lawson, 2007; Lewis, 2016; Parr, 2003; ionWernersuggestedthattheturnanimatedby Valentine, 2008). By and large, however, as I argue ‘care’ and ‘social reproduction’ sometimes obscures in the two subsequent sections, when geographers more than it reveals (Werner, 2016). Inseparable have thought about number [1] they have neglected from ‘production’, she said, social reproduction per- the qualitative dimensions of the uterine, for petually risks collapsing into ‘life’ and becoming an instance, the ways in which that labour and its various unwieldy ‘everythingism’ whose analytic affor- outcomes can be collectively constituted. It is cer- dances are not clear. ‘Care’ geography, then, is tainly safe to say that there have not been many con- futile if we do not draw distinctions between good versations framed about gestating, not gestating, and bad care, conscious and unconscious abuse, and refusing to gestate, ceasing to gestate, and gestating acceptable and unacceptable structural familial vio- ‘otherwise’ (perhaps sharing, delegating or automat- lence (from gestation onward). ing it) all together, in one breath. Viewing these mat- Sticking with the challenge of thinking ‘care’ and ters together could highlight uncomfortable political ‘social reproduction’ in meaningful ways remains imperatives: strategically non-provisioning and non- for me an important route to apprehending the caring; not-reproducing certain labouring popula- extent and (more importantly) the limits of capital- tions as labouring populations; and placing an ism’s penetration into life, body and soul. At its best, embargo on the very idea of ‘biological’ reproduc- theorizing these matters encourages multifaceted tion. The result of the trinity articulated explicitly by consciousness of the intertwinement of capital with Strauss, anyway, has been that scholars mostly hold our intimate lives and provides a perpetual reminder back from talking about the actual labour of Strauss’s of the ability we possess collectively to not repro- first component as social reproduction. duce capital (and to reproduce not-capital). The dif- To take Sadedin’s anti-romantic description of ficulty of apprehending the difference between gestation and extrapolate from it about the nature of social reproduction and capitalist reproduction care might begin something like this: there is inevi- (except analytically) guarantees confusion, cer- tably a lot of boundary violation and reciprocal non- tainly, but also reflects the framework’s depth. consensual use, and it is always asymmetric. Too few When we engage with social reproduction’s norma- of us are equipped to know how much of it is inevi- tive stakes (rather than, as sometimes happens, sim- table or to generalize about what is acceptable. ply naming various things and phenomena as ‘part Reproducers seldom confront the unacceptable in the of social reproduction’ without at least gesturing at people they reproduce (or love). There is a tendency how that could be otherwise or explaining why it among people – and the many entities that compose matters) we are goaded, in a way I find uniquely them – towards unconscious self-defence and extra- thoroughgoing, to remake life in a liveable mould. ctivism as well as towards cooperation. Humans Kendra Strauss distinguishes three constitutive come into the world with astonishingly resource- parts of social reproduction: ‘[1] biological repro- intensive, brain-heavy bodies, expensive to manufac- duction, [2] the reproduction of the labouring pop- ture and to maintain, so much so that giving us life is ulation, and [3] provisioning and caring needs’ fatal to many other beings. Holding us is hard and (Strauss, 2013: 182). They are not distinct. (Where letting go of us is even harder. The cyborg matter of does ‘biology’ end and ‘care’ begin?) Still, it is uterine (matrixial) praxis is all about this blood- possible to say that interdisciplinary Marxian fem- stained and productive care; this holding and letting inists and ‘surplus population’ studies have focused go, whether or not an actual uterus is involved. extensively on the second of these (McIntyre and The assumption here is that a somewhat Nast 2011; Nast, 2011); while meanwhile, the third unbounded uterine site exists of historically 306 Dialogues in Human Geography 8(3) contingent, technological and biological encounter; seems clear in context that she means ‘intrauterine’, something a little more specific than the new Har- but the accidental posit of interuterine space has the awayian sympoietics, yet broader than Ettinger’s potential to stimulate appreciation of the geographi- copoietics. The trampling-nurturing-and-growing- cal valence of the uterine – a web of holding and out-of-one-another I have in mind generates an letting go that transcends corporeal boundaries – immanent more-than-human politics. Thinking that I am interested in pursuing. We do in fact all about how we and others are manufactured, in this occupy interuterine space and, as I see, it, combin- spirit, may allow us to remember that the manufac- ing interuterine with intrauterine geography at the turing was never singular nor completed at birth – analytic level is the challenge we face: extending and to treat even seemingly distant humanity Longhurst’s account of ‘fluid boundaries’ so as to accordingly. For, if they can reject bioessentialist encompass and adopt unlikely (adult) gestator- and gynocentric feminisms, ‘geographers’ are well gestatees. Bracha Ettinger forges a relevant path in placed to inquire normatively into the ferociously a very different disciplinary context, namely psy- intimate uterine relationships in which all human choanalysis, proposing – in relation to artistic copoi- identity is grounded. They are skilled at tracking esis – that one must think gestational-formation as ‘transcorporeal’ traces and could develop politically ‘metramorphosis’ (metra, like matrix, derives from necessary resources by spatializing the gestation- the Greek for uterus and denotes a kind of antonym abortion-surrogacy-miscarriage-menses-adoption- of meta, i.e. non-transcendence). Her idea that foster care continuum in relation to borders, classes, human becoming happens in matrixial ‘border- racial categories and myriad (human or more-than- space’ is an intra and interuterine imaginary (albeit human) parents. a highly abstract version). For her, ‘The womb, I have suggested so far that the relationship fetus, pregnancy and gestation [are seen both] as between uterine activity and a ‘feminist care ethic’ – corpo-Realities and image’, they are ‘supports for indeed, the relationship between the uterus and a matrixial field of theorisation’ (Ettinger, 2006: feminism generally – should not be assumed to be 182). Ettinger demands that matrixial consciousness unidirectionally ‘generous’ but instead treated as go beyond ‘the’ womb and refuse to separate what open to determination within a new geographic goes on ‘inside’ from the rest of social existence, account of how the world is populated. I’ve stated since the constant opening up of borders and sur- but not yet defended my perception that qualitative faces between social individuals is historically con- and normative issues around uterine labour – the tinuous. Transposed back to the fleshy contexts I’ve making, not making and unmaking of humans – has touched upon, in other words, one may say: it’s been neglected within critical geography’s (broadly sympoiesis, entanglement, and chimerism all the anti-capitalist) project. I now propose complicating way down. the ‘care’ framework by looking at literal gestation Ettinger claims that the constant metramor- geographically and, later, bringing in what I think phoses in which people participate (by living, car- could be seen as gestation-like features of other forms ing, and dying together more or less consciously, of sociality. Social reproduction and labour theory more or less well) produce emergent ‘trans-subjec- will benefit if duly ambivalent attention is given to tivities’. None of us is exempt; as Ettinger clarifies: the unfree, both mingling and mangling, destructive ‘the idea of the matrix should not be identified with and regenerative, relationality that is modelled in that the womb, nor Woman with Mother’ (Ettinger, dark, wet arena of care (a word that, after all, is also 2006: 183). And, just as mothering is not limited synonymous with trouble and grief). to ‘mothers’ (narrowly defined), the stakes of matrixial ethics are also more-than-human. Ground- ing personhood in the ‘matrix’ draws attention to the Inter/intrauterine: A missing matrix contingent and artificial but also conscious and fra- Robyn Longhurst has written that ‘we have all occu- gile character of kinship, identity and relatedness, pied interuterine space’ (Longhurst, 2001: 128). It undermining the ‘natural’ accretions of power, Lewis 307 entitlement and inequality that go along with them. activists were on the other side of the fracas over the It also invites us to mess with genealogy and bioge- valence of cybernetics crystallized for posterity by netics by tracing vertical (temporal) and horizontal the Cyborg Manifesto. Certainly one of the targets (spatial) relationships between uteruses, their con- of Haraway’s text at the time was a Euro-American tainers and their contents: hormonal flows, endocr- feminism that relied too uncritically on the emanci- inal, epigenetic and milk bonds linking various patory value of a transhistoric ‘procreativity’ of ‘the more or less animate matrixial producer-products mothering class’. Haraway was not alone in pointing across homes, continents and generations. Geogra- out that such Euro-American goddess-feminism phy and related fields have, for the most part, yet to often tokenized indigenous, colonized, poor and think about the cyborg affordances of the uterine in low-caste gestators in their gestures towards cen- this way explicitly. tring those groups in their analysis (Lewis, 2017a). The underrepresentation of gestating-ness within It sometimes violently policed the definition of critical post-humanities, technopolitics, ecomarx- ‘womanhood’ and the bounds of participation in its isms and new materialisms is most obviously attri- liberation, cleaving to the physicalist assumption butable to the desire to repudiate a widespread that belonging to an oppressed and exploited cate- caricature of second wave feminist womb- gory depends on particular (unclassed, unraced) celebration. Kathi Weeks has carefully argued, in body-parts. Yet the rejection of anti-reprotech pur- her reappraisal of the feminist 1970s, that this desire ism – as far as geographers are concerned – unex- betokens not only ‘inattention ...shame and dis- pectedly resulted in the disappearance of even the avowal [but] a more active mode of forgetting’ at situated, cyborg uterus from geography. the heart of feminism’s own historiography (Weeks, In ‘Speculative Fabulations for Technoculture’s 2012: 735). Gynocentrism was and remains a hugely Generations’, Haraway (2011a) takes up the nurtur- flawed part of feminism’s history. Ironically, the ing yet menacing figure of the gestating wombat- instrumentalization of women as wombs is only alien sculpted in various different iterations by the now finding a kind of literal expression in history, artist Patricia Piccinini. These sculptures of fictional namely in the gestational outsourcing (commercial humanoids have marsupial-like pouches and are surrogacy) industry where affirmations of worker glossed appreciatively by Haraway as companions autonomy are slowly making themselves heard who ‘nourish indigestion’; their gestation techno- (Kroløkke and Pant, 2012; Lewis, 2015). Even as digests, she says, categories like kinship, family and gestation becomes partially professionalized, so- sex (Haraway, 2011a). But noticeably, Haraway has called ‘fetal rights’ acts and other anti-abortion leg- dedicated little or no ink directly to today’s actually islative strategies are flourishing around the world. existing human surrogates, the gestational labourers And, unfortunately, as touched on in the introduc- who define a new facet of an old global division of tion, the simultaneous discursive success of a right- reproductive labour, and who in some cases have ist technophobic wing within feminism – the already ‘nourished indigestion’ by organizing polit- so-called ‘radfem’ (‘radical feminist’) school and ically as mother-workers to make demands of their its ecoprimitivist affiliates (Lewis, 2017a) – has contractors (the ‘intended parents’) or clinical sur- resulted in an oddly authoritarian organicist stran- rogacy managers (Lewis, 2016). Thus, while glehold (which passes as progressive) on the mean- engagement with Haraway in geography is ubiqui- ing of ‘the’ womb and what ‘the’ womb ‘wants’. tous, engagement with the many different loci of the Among those who have pitted pregnancy per se uterus (including tech alternatives to it and specula- against patriarchy, alienation, technology and capit- tive or figurative versions of its functionality) has alism in the west is the international network Fem- beenallowedtoremainatextremelylowebb. inist International Network of Resistance to Simultaneously, the liberal bourgeois feminisms of Reproductive and Genetic Engineering (FINR- the establishment – as reproductive justice scholars RAGE) (Lewis, 2017a). Besides opposing all forms such as Dorothy Roberts and Michelle Murphy tire- of assisted reproduction in the 1980s, FINRRAGE lessly show – have thrown the vast majority of 308 Dialogues in Human Geography 8(3) proletarian reproducers under the bus (Murphy, mostly uncharted territory. Longhurst’s two illumi- 2012 Roberts, 2009). nating books provide a vivid ‘corporeography’ of Mainstream framings of uterine interests have pregnant embodiment as it seeps into public space, been limited either to trans-exclusionary and particularly the threat of vomit, sweat, milk, blood gender-normative ‘natural birth’ ideologies or to or amniotic fluid erupting unceremoniously from pragmatic pro-medicalization messaging framed the gestating individual. These dynamics are cer- around ‘choice’ – as long as the consumers are fig- tainly not remote from what gestating is, but they ured as national citizens by default (Murphy, 2012 do include a ‘ground zero’ account of gestational Roberts, 2009). It is in this context that leading relationality on the inside (of the kind Sadedin pro- feminist geographers have mostly abstained from vides). It is striking to me that neither of Longhurst’s theorizing uterine creativity and destructivity per monographs contains the active words ‘gestate’, se as the kind of scalar, co-productive and geopoli- ‘gestates’, ‘gestating’ or ‘gestated’; the same, how- tical affair they perceive in other dimensions of ‘the ever, is true of Catherine Nash’s Genetic Geogra- production of nature’ (Katz, 2001; Pratt and Rosner, phies (2015). While it can be argued that the term 2012). There is no major geographic exploration of ‘gestation’ is a medical one, it is nevertheless one of demands like Shulamith Firestone’s for a univer- the few active verbs that denote ‘being pregnant’. I sally available ectogenetic technology (Firestone, consider the epistemic tweak that would animate a 1970) or of the Wages for Housework campaign’s gestating-centred uterine corporeography subtle but for a militant and utopian interruption of gestational meaningful, irreducible of course to mere choice of housework on capitalist patriarchy’s terms (Feder- words, but basically absent from these texts. It is the ici, 1975). Most surprisingly of all, geography has interior of the uterus that is missing from these geo- not engaged with the aforementioned science graphic accounts of kinmaking, and consequently, around mosaicism, chimerism and epigenetics, even they fall short of mapping intra and interuterine though it is rife with migratory and spatial imagery. space. Ironically, Longhurst herself says that this Heidi Nast has proposed to geographers that we ‘closest of all spaces ...is seldom discussed in geo- ‘breach the domain of (procreational) sex’ by graphical discourse’ (Longhurst, 2001: 128). returning ‘biology’s centrality to reproduction’ The elision thereby indicated occurs even where (Nast, 2011: 1463) but it is as yet unclear to me what those influenced by actor-network theory (ANT) are kind of biology she means, or how it guards against addressing everyday birthing. For example, geogra- queerphobic effects. The miscarriage-threatening pher Katharine McKinnon ‘map[s] birth spaces’, bargaining-power of contemporary ‘gestational listing ‘coalitions of actants who are human assistants’ (surrogates and ‘mothers’ alike) is indeed (mother, baby, obstetrician, midwife), non-human something one must conceptualize in terms of the (wheelchair, clock, scalpel) and sub-human (hor- ‘necro(bio)power’ Nast and McIntyre have theo- mones)’ (McKinnon, 2016). Yet, here, strangely, rized (Nast and McIntyre, 2011). However, I would organs such as the placenta and the uterus do not like to see much more full-throated and explicitly figure alongside hormones in the ‘subhuman’ cate- queer-feminist grappling with the creativity and gory in this choreography. McKinnon’s multi-sited, destructivity that characterizes the inter and intrau- multi-actant ethnography quotes post-partum terine continuum. women to great effect and follows a couple of indi- vidual labours and deliveries back and forth between home and hospital in the form of a drama The uterus in geography involving ideological contestation around ‘home In my reading, Robyn Longhurst’s Maternities birth’ versus ‘medicalization’. McKinnon success- (2008) and Bodies (2001) tacitly demonstrate the fully evokes a highly contingent co-production fea- subtle difference between studying ‘being pregnant’ turing many players and agentive objects. Yet this – at which Longhurst excels – and thinking geogra- ANT-inflected account of parturition would be fur- phically ‘with’ the uterus, which I submit is still ther enriched, I maintain, by making explicit its Lewis 309 implicit sense of intrauterine liveliness: the ensem- Mitchell, 2004: 3) and features a chapter on the ble of hormonally flooded processes coming to a renaturalization of pregnancy in hospital birthing head in the interior of an abdomen, and their com- suites built as simulacrums of a bourgeois bedroom. plex distribution across the spectrums conscious/ The author of the latter, Maria Fannin, together with unconscious, agentive/non-agentive. Rachel Colls, elaborate on the need to ‘think geo- Kate Boyer and Justin Spinney (2016), in an graphically ‘with’ the placenta ...as a relational overview of feminist geography’s work on public organ’ (Fannin and Colls, 2013: 1087). Fannin and parenting, propose, excitingly, that: ‘motherhood Colls compellingly adapt JM Maher’s theorization is an accomplishment realised in part through of the pregnant subject as one that ‘does not depend encounters with the more than human’ (Boyer and on closed edges in order to construct itself’ where Spinney, 2016: x). Ultimately they mean baby- ‘connection and distinction are not necessarily related mobility baggage, ‘stuff’, infrastructural framed as mutually exclusive’ (Fannin and Colls, friction, a lack of provisioning and access under- 2013: 1089). Hiding in plain sight, placental rela- girding the world one traverses in the company of tions readily ‘serve as a model for thinking differ- babies. Poignantly summarizing the findings of over ently about the presumptions of boundedness, fixity, 15 items of scholarship on caring and mothering, stasis, and identity that tend to underwrite more they show how the needs of babies and their carers familiar geographical spaces of borders, barriers, are systematically ignored in the public realm. None territories, and boundaries’ (Fannin and Colls, of their source materials address the specificity of 2013: 1098–1099). Is this not uterine geography? actually holding or letting go a fetus, gestating not at In some senses yes: the placenta is tracked as an all, abortively or ‘to term’, as a topic distinct from ‘interior surface’ that ‘resurfaces’, exiting the body becoming a parent. Boyer and Spinney’s article only to re-enter it (or other bodies) in the form of according focuses, like McKinnon’s, less on the meals or swallowed capsules (placentophagy), uterine than on the public-sphere mobilities of the returning to the earth in Ma¯ori ceremonial rituals mother-baby-pram assemblage. Although sympa- (whenua burial) or seeping through the pores of thetic to their project, I contend that the ‘more- cosmetics consumers in the form of specialist skin than-human’ stakes of human reproduction come cream. I concur wholeheartedly with Fannin and into view long before buggies and bottles appear Colls that, ‘despite a focus on the maternal–fetal on the scene. I wonder if one could treat prenatal relation during and after pregnancy in the feminist space as continuous with the frictional vicissitudes literature ...there have been limited engagements of public space Boyer and Spinney animate, even with the placenta’ (Fannin and Colls, 2013: 1089); stretching the field from intrauterine holding my aspiration is that our projects may be coexten- through to assistive technology in elder care and the sive. But the placental is not synonymous with the work of ‘death doulas’ – without romanticizing any uterine and does not, I think, lend itself so easily to of it (just as Boyer and Spinner avoid doing). Public- non-gynocentric political appropriation. sphere ‘carescapes’ and caring mobilities are clearly The difference may seem slight but its domain is rich and important seams for critical and policy- encroaching, protecting, and filtering rather than oriented study. Boyer and Spinney’s insight into the holding and letting go. Accordingly, Fannin and more-than-human and encounter-based composi- Colls do not explicitly acknowledge the reality that tion of ‘motherhood’ invites an extension of itself, the relational result of gestation is not always inward and outward, as it were, ‘thinking through ‘motherhood’ – as we see in surrogacy, abortion, the skin’ (Ahmed and Stacey, 2001). abandonment and miscarriage – and suggest tacitly Proposals have appeared from geographers to that it should be. Indeed, the authors sharply reject, notice ‘placental relations’ (Fannin, 2014). The on feminist grounds, characterizations like Sade- Antipode collection Life’s Work: Geographies of din’s of maternal–fetal exchange as violent, prefer- Social Reproduction has surveyed ‘the interpella- ring, with Myra Hird, ‘generosity’ as the byword for tion of subjects as life workers’ (Katz, Marston and pregnancy. I see no real ‘feminist’ need for this 310 Dialogues in Human Geography 8(3) gesture and plenty of reasons why accounts of preg- 954). The political ecology of gestation I would like nancy that equate caring with the good need to be to abet would similarly treat the body’s processes complicated. The method in question implies that and products – menses, miscarriages, relationships the relational result of gestation is normatively and newborn persons, instead of adipose tissue – as determinate and manifestly takes for granted that historically open. Tim Cresswell ventures in this un-engineered human uterine lining is the opti- direction when he considers a neglected aspect of mal environment for nurturing a human embryo. human uterine activity among other common biopo- Sadedin (like Firestone in 1971) opens the pos- litical metaphors that posit ‘matter-out-of-place’, sibility that it is not. To say so is not a threat to namely the still-prevalent ‘view of menstruation as ‘women’ or fetuses. failed production’ (Cresswell, 1997: 334). Cress- The further danger of tracking the placenta well has not pursued uterine geography per se but rather than the whole of the uterus is that it risks in his discussion of secretions as metaphors he overlooking the animacy of the other parties in quotes Emily Martin’s suggestion that ‘Menstrua- gestation (i.e. gestator and gestatee), together with tion could just as well be regarded as the making the contingency of their doing and their being of life substance that ...heralds our non-pregnant there. As such, to me, even ‘placental’ geography state, rather than as the casting off of the debris of does not necessarily escape the naturalizing endometrial decay or as the haemorrhage of necrotic ‘black-boxing’ of procreativity. I do not get a blood vessels’ (Martin 1990: 80 quoted in Cress- sense, from Fannin and Colls, of the labour that the well, 1997: 341). Consequently, Cresswell is one placenta mediates, through which two beings (or of relatively few geographers to have engaged with more) emerge as opposite surfaces of one another, The Woman in the Body and to make links between on the one hand a being who is already a person, Martin’s findings and other forms of spatial organi- andontheotheraspeckorlumpofpluripotenti- zation of lively biology that discipline social ‘plur- ality shrouded in endometrial darkness and invisi- ipotentiality’. Cresswell’s and Guthman’s work bility, convulsing, erupting, traversed by thousands immanently gesture towards an innovative approach of frequencies, pressures, proteins, fats and acids. to the uterus that doesn’t carry a pro-reproduction The project on ‘the placenta as a passage to becom- bias. ing’ is rightly proposed as a (very valuable) ‘supplement [to] a “materialist” account of preg- nancy’ (Fannin, 2014: 300) rather than a dedicat- edly materialist one. ‘Assisted reproduction’ The term I have now twice deployed, ‘black-box- Lately, anthropologists and sociologists have busied ing’, is glossed by Julie Guthman as the moment themselves analysing exceptional terrains of the when ‘a scientific concept or term is ...taken to uterine such as the ‘clinical labours’ (Cooper and be objectively established, immutable, or beyond Waldby, 2014) mobilized by bioeconomic markets the possibility of human action to reshape it’ (Guth- in ‘third-party’ gestational contracts (Lewis, 2016). man, 2012: 956). Guthman herself is committed to But the valence of this tacitly accepted ‘exception- ‘the imperative to open up the black box of the body ality’ – of outsourced uterine productivity in relation and explore it as an ecological, geographical, and to non-commercial social reproduction, ‘surrogacy’ historical object’ (Guthman, 2012: 956) – exactly in relation to non-surrogacy – can become some- what I desire for the uterus. For example, in her what ambiguous under scrutiny, in the sense that pioneering work on the more-than-human, endocr- scholars exempt themselves from clarifying inal, economically and historically contingent pro- whether the distinction they draw is normative or duction of corporeal fat, Guthman avers: ‘current descriptive (Lewis 2017b). In this section, I make geographic perspectives on obesity black-box the the case that while the distinction may be an accu- human body and treat it as a machine that processes rate description of the capitalist organization of calories in a predictable manner’ (Guthman, 2012: directly versus indirectly market-mediated Lewis 311 reproductive spheres, its replication in social–scien- via seafood consumption, and the porosity of gesta- tific critique has anti-solidaritous effects. tional bodies, ‘as a lesson in the potential openness The ambiguous yet taken-for-granted siloization of all bodies to all environments, with recognition of of ‘assisted reproduction’ in relation to (simply) how different people are imbricated differently in ‘reproduction’ is a habit human geographers should this open environment’ (Mansfield, 2012: 976). not acquire. The division of conceptual labour that The differential character of imbrication, which puts care and social reproduction studies to one side the more euphoric theorizations downplay, is and ‘reprotech’ on the other, I argue, risks itself everything. Social co-imbrication may sound poly- becoming part of the unthinking reproduction of morphously sexy and exciting to many of us, but let capitalist, heteropatriarchal, cis-normative and it not be forgotten that – as in gestation – it is too racist reproductive stratification. I urge instead that often unconsensual. For some, to simply be ‘imbri- scholars in geography, once they have embraced the cated’ without the mitigating help of boundaries, uterine, should proliferate queer and counter- barricades and weapons is simply to be unsup- intuitive examples of reproductive assistance, which ported, exposed and vulnerable. In the late 1960s is to say, desirable and utopian praxes of life- and and early 1970s, Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P John- death-enabling holding and letting go that provin- son, two trans-women of colour active in gay lib- cialize (without rejecting) the normative biogenetic eration, managed to set up an open family home in model of family. I will visit a couple more theoretic a building in New York’s East Village. This was fellow travellers and then give two perhaps unex- the STAR house, for STAR ‘kids’, the survival pected examples to kick things off. wing of their organization Street Transvestite Literary critic Stacy Alaimo carves an instructive Action Revolutionaries. The commune’s primary path. Marking the concern that ‘the potent category provisioning strategies were sex-work (in the of ‘mother’ threatens to engulf the entire range of mothers’ case) and shoplifting (in the kids’). STAR identities that women inhabit’ (Alaimo, 2010: 104), house was a response to the annihilation of its Bodily Natures nevertheless refuses to shy away initiators’ queer comrades – ‘brothers and sisters’ – from discussing pregnancy. The discussion in ques- by the police, the state, poverty, AIDs and a vio- tion operates in Alaimo’s signature ‘transcorporeal’ lently queerphobic society. Although we do not mode whose focus – although race- and gender- usually use the term this way, this was clearly a sensitive – is not gender, nor even sex, but the moment of ‘assisted reproduction’: production of nature. An instinctive interuterine thinker, Alaimo ably captures the entanglement of We got a building at 213 East 2nd Street. Marsha creative labour and unconscious vitality in gesta- andIjustdecideditwastimetohelpeachother tion, while pluralizing ‘natures’ and distinguishing and help our other kids. We fed people and clothed people. We kept the building going. We went out between them normatively. Examples of potentially and hustled the streets. We paid the rent. We didn’t undesirable as well as desirable uterine relations want the kids out in the streets hustling. They become clear as she charts a series of toxin flows would go out and rip off food. There was always that connect the amniotic womb-habitat with the food in the house and everyone had fun. It lasted wider environment’s fluid reservoirs, topsoils, hot- for two or three years. (Rivera, 2011) and cold-blooded animal bodies, plant nectar and oceans: a moist chemical world, a matrix of our The STAR House may not have experienced bodies for which we are collectively responsible. much conventional gestation or menstruation. But the If pregnancy is an ‘inland ocean with a population focus of a uterine geography need not be a narrow of one’ (Alaimo, 2010: 103), it is in the sense that an conception of uterine space. As ‘uterine’ agents in ocean can never be a ‘sealed chamber, apart from this sense, Rivera and Johnson enabled surviving and water cycles and food chains’ (p. 106) or for that managed dying, holding up a star in the city, a space matter markets and states. Likewise, the geographer for living, while regulating what they were willing to Becky Mansfield sees evidence of fetal harm caused give across the intimate interface of the House, 312 Dialogues in Human Geography 8(3) holding, then letting go, its constituent adult children geographies must include such things as migrations and their obdurate trajectories of becoming. of wet nurses, surrogates and au pairs, as well as the In a different wing of transfeminist reproductive removal, recrafting and redistribution of uteri theory and practice, the biological uterus is now a (through transplant technology). primary raw material for a bio-hacking cooperative In The Argonauts (2015) Maggie Nelson under- in Catalonia called ‘GynePunk’. These DIY engi- goes IVF at the same time as her partner remakes his neers specialize (semi-ironically) in ‘witchcraft’ sex, and meanwhile, her mother-in-law coura- and call themselves a ‘hackteria’ (hacker collective) geously makes the crossing from life to death. The (Thorburn, 2016). Another way of describing them book’s title recalls the mythical Argo, a ship whose would be: uterine scholar-activists. While its mem- parts were all replaced, one by one. Becoming and bers write in Spanish about the trust and collective remaining the Argo were the same thing and, as holding that undergirds their scientific praxis, the such, the ship is analogous (on Nelson’s terms) to lab is also currently emphasizing the ability to any human being, the better word for which would expertly let go – of fetuses. Barcelona’s GynePunks in fact be ‘human becoming’, as Paul Channing are reviving the bottom-up knowledge of secret her- Adams offers (Channing Adams, 1995). Humans bal emmenagogues unearthed in the West Indies in are regenerative fictions who manage to retain iden- Plants and Empire (Schiebinger, 2007). They tities despite (or because of) the fact that nothing in declare themselves on their tumblr and wiki to have our bodies stays the same decade upon decade hybridized these methods with mechanical, syn- except, possibly, bone marrow. The Argonauts thetic, in vitro and even biogenetic techniques in accordingly produces a sense of the self as a rela- order to recompose themselves as a class (Thorburn, tion; an encounter that can only be collective and 2016). The vision of GynePunk is, thus, one other emergent. While it speaks to almost anyone, this template for those who wish to socially reproduce wisdom springs painfully from the experience of themselves via the most mutually desirable forms of transsexual, gender-transitioning and artificially care they can discover ongoingly through experi- fertilized pregnant bodies. Such are the characteris- ment and me¯tis (bricolage-based lay knowledge tics of the twin protagonists of The Argonauts:two production). mutant queers who hold each other and, again and The two models of trans-inclusive reproductive again, let go of each other’s past and present selves. praxis alluded to here take for granted that all repro- Together, Maggie and Harry’s organs, muscles and duction is assisted reproduction. Like other contem- endocrinal systems move, shed and morph. A trans- porary calls for reproductive freedom, voiced by man who self-administers testosterone transforms his trans- or cis-people alike, they frame themselves bone mass. A gestator’s body is irreversibly colo- as a fight for the right to live, a fight channelled via nized by strange DNA in the form of living fetal cells. direct actions seizing communized healthcare, user- Pregnancy is, for Nelson, a quintessentially queer directed research methods and universal free access phenomenon, ‘occasioning a radical intimacy with – to (i.e. common ownership of) the ‘means of repro- and radical alienation from – one’s body’ (Nelson, duction’ (Murphy, 2012). I believe a ‘uterine’ poli- 2015: 14). Maggie wonders: tics may be one way of finding conceptual purchase on the contours of this reproductive freedom strug- How can an experience so profoundly strange and wild gle. A ‘uterine’ and ‘matrixial’ conceptualization of and transformative also symbolise or enact the ulti- care and social reproduction – in which we become mate conformity? Or is this just another disqualifica- through each other, asymmetrically holding and let- tion of anything tied too closely to the female animal ting go – should attend to the plethora of reasons from the privileged term (in this case, nonconformity, why given bodies do not literally gestate, from con- or radicality)? (Nelson, 2015: 14) traceptives to lifestyle to not having a uterus, appre- ciating that their bearers all too often literally Have radical geographers, in their non-interest transmit life and/or help mediate death. These in the mapping of the uterine, colluded in this Lewis 313 mistaking of pregnancy for ‘the ultimate confor- Whereas ‘caring geographies’ and ‘social reproduc- mity’? Radical scholars tend to be critical (often tion’ studies sometimes merely draw attention to the damning) of the bio-nuclear family, yet they some- unpaid love that glues everything together, an crit- times forget these criticisms when parsing ‘repro- ical, anti-violent politicization of these processes tech’, implying that a special evil inheres in this would need to radically transform and not just reva- unsettling ‘exception’. Meanwhile, childless, non- lue the domains of care and reproduction. Accord- reproductive or ‘found’ families such as STAR ingly, we also need to strengthen our defence of House and GynePunk are also excluded from the non-nihilistic carers who are biologically speaking topic of reproduction. As we can see from these non-reproducers. In many circumstances, the act of living histories, there are many things, relations and the most oppressed – for instance, the enslaved – has ways to reproduce – including temporary and uto- been to refuse participation in uterine creativity pian insufficiencies, experiments and absences. altogether, through subversive and secret use of A normal, prosthesis-free family doesn’t exist. abortifacients, or by committing infanticide in response to circumstances they have judged unlive- Conclusion: The more-than-human able (Schiebinger, 2007). uterus Where does the uterine end? Uterine geography would have no grounds to silo off such presently It is odd that the uterine does not feature explicitly in disparate-seeming issues as indigenous midwifery, many geographers’ accounts of ‘the carnal body as surrogacy, underground abortion providers, co- the mattering forth of discourse and flesh’ (Deta- parenting, gamete donation, DIY hysterectomies, more, 2010: 250); of the ‘the nature of the person, mitochondrial transfers (a new technique yielding as a geographic entity ...spill[ing] over boundar- ‘three-parent babies’), shelters for queer homeless ies ...[via] processes of fluctuating, dendritic people, womb transplants, polymaternalism and extension’ (Channing Adams, 1995: 267). Scott ‘death doulas’, instead gathering them together. Kirsch seems poised to mention gestation when he Where geographers have studied these things at all asks – in an overview of technocultural geogra- they have studied them in isolation and failed to phies – ‘what it means to be formative in the pro- embed them in the theoretic context of long- duction of nature’ (Kirsch, 2014: 692). Yet he standing reproductive justice and liberation strug- doesn’t. Perhaps the sheer hyperdetermination of gles. ‘Care’ may or may not cover what uteruses the terrain makes it seem fatally difficult to venture any normative account of uterine intra-action do (e.g. menstruate, proliferate, placentate, gestate). without making constant reference to ‘women’ or Whatever we decide, it behooves us to ask: might speaking from that subject-position. Nonetheless, not uteri help expose the limits – and thus, better as we’ve seen, it is possible. I would even venture define the value – of the ‘care’ framework? Care to say that a non-gynocentric gestational politics has may be all we’ve got, but that is no reason, after all, always existed in the cracks and underpassages of to suppose it doesn’t need thoroughgoing remedia- the prison-house of binary sex/gender. We do not tion, transformation and automation. Like families, always want to see the violent side of care, the vio- gestating uteruses are often very harmful zones lent side of gestation. We are deeply attached to (harmful for everyone involved). these processes, and they are indeed almost all In my somewhat wishful interpretation, the we’ve got. They are the strangely undervalued and more-than-human turn locates social reproduction at the same time fiercely defended contribution of a in the relations between persons, creatures and disproportionately feminized and racialized contin- things, while at the same time allowing the former gent of humanity. But this in itself does not prove to matter more. (The focus, as I see it, is expressible that they are good by default. Alienated low-status as ‘humans, and more’ in the knowledge that there is carers and multigendered mothers are complicit no such thing as a ‘just human’.) In the words of with and even instrumental in systemic violence. Nina Power: 314 Dialogues in Human Geography 8(3)

Only a collective, non-nihilistic non-reproduction of generate conditions in which not-forgetting it is pos- certain aspects of the status quo can ensure that we are sible, at the same time as participating in the thinking and acting according to the right scale: the demands of social reproduction? After all, in Nel- trick is to work out what we can and cannot say no to, son’s pithy, almost accusatory observation, ‘I can- together. (Power, 2014) notholdmybabyatthesametimeasIwrite’ (Nelson, 2015: 37). The structural incompatibility In this spirit, assuming that it is possible to of reproducing and theorizing under present condi- bracket some of the controversiality that dogs the tions is one of the key concrete as well imaginative ‘unborn’, we should be able to appreciate that it limitations of the capitalist form of reproduction, would be a great analytic loss to geography to let and a clear incentive to build a new form of repro- human intrauterine productivity fall into a gap duction premised as much on holding as it is on – between our interest in the human, on the one hand, simultaneously – making (or unmaking). and non-human, on the other. The designation ‘more-than-human’ emerged, as I understand it, pre- Declaration of Conflicting Interests cisely to prevent the formation of such a gap. And if The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest anything deserves the moniker ‘more-than-human’, with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publica- it is the activity of the human uterus. Curiously, tion of this article. though, in our justified enthusiasm to expand our understanding of social reproduction’s purview Funding beyond the human, in order for instance to account The author(s) received no financial support for the for ‘lively commodities’ and to describe the more- research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. than-human genesis of ‘encounter-value’, we have skipped over this salient site of unstable, co- References produced and emergent more-than-humanity. Ahmed S and Stacey J (eds) (2001) Thinking Through the The horizon of uterine possibility, in terms of Skin. London: Routledge. technofuturistic mobility and hybrid entanglement, Ahmed S (2010) The Promise of Happiness. Durham: has been greatly expanded in the last two decades: Duke University Press. successful human uterus transplants have been Alaimo S (2010) Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, undertaken since 2014; commercial surrogacy and the Material Self. Bloomington, IN: University of clinics routinely curate pregnancies involving no Indiana Press. genetic link between gestator and gestated; neonatal BBC (2016) Parents who regret having children. Avail- machine-incubators are able to take over from the able at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-3 human body at 20 weeks’ gestation if necessary; and 8145118 (accessed 6 December 2016). ectogenetic experiments (for fully disembodied Boyer K and Spinney J (2016) Motherhood, mobility and gestation) are advancing apace. Not least because materiality: material entanglements, journey-making these innovations apply strain to the naturalness of and the process of ‘becoming mother’. Environment ‘unassisted’ reproduction, this discussion has and Planning D: Society & Space 34(6): 1113–1131. defended the premise that the best place to uncover Casper M (1998) The Making of the Unborn Patient. New the weirdest more-than-human fundamentals of Jersey: Rutgers University Press. social reproduction is everyday pregnancy, as Channing Adams P (1995) A reconsideration of personal enacted by any old ‘normal’ uterus, thereby demon- boundaries in space-time. Annals of the Association of strating in the process that there is no such thing. American Geographers 85(2): 267–285. Maggie Nelson’s poietic account of labour ‘doing Cooper M and Waldby C (2014) Clinical Labor: Tissue you’ theorized that, in crafting human life, we touch Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioecon- our own death along the way. So, what kind of care omy. Durham, England: Duke University Press. might emerge from gestators’ commitment not to Cresswell T (1997) Weeds, plagues, and bodily secre- forget that encounter with death? How are we to tions: a geographical interpretation of metaphors of Lewis 315

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