future. Whose future? Whose fantasies? Elliot Aguilar looks at the growing trend of genetic self-discovery and the myriad programs that offer consumers glimpses of their heritage in African nations or an- cient Rome. Aguilar untangles the threads of genetic identification, investigating the suitability of DNA evidence for creating families, tribes, and identities. But often, the choice is not ours. In the efforts to create clean streets and healthy families, somehow poor bodies are al- ways in the way. The legitimate fear of poor communities is that institutional racism will deny them families. In North Carolina, involuntary sterilization of poor women, mostly African American, ceased only in the 1970s. During India’s mid- 1970s state of emergency, as Kartik Nair details in “Temple of Womb,” underclass urban men were bribed and coerced into “THE MOST MERCIFUL thing that a “voluntary” sterilization programs. Ironi- family does to one of its infant members cally, the same cheap video technology is to kill it.” Thus wrote Margaret Sanger, that spread the boiling fear of underclass the mother of birth control and founder virility would also permit the uncontrol- of Planned Parenthood, in a 1922 pam- lable propagation of B movies and other phlet entitled “The Woman Rebel.” It entertainment regarded as subversive by has stayed with us as a popular bit of the state. anti-abortionist propaganda, illuminat- As Sophie Lewis notes in “Labor Pains,” ing the supposedly depraved underpin- Indian women are now contracted to serve nings of family planning. And yes, fam- as wombs for white Western children, be- ily planning was enlisted in quite a lot of coming entrepreneurial proprietors of their projects: not just women’s rights but also alienated reproductive function, undermin- “poverty reduction”— eugenics for, in ing the possibility of a commons that might Sanger’s own words, “a cleaner race.” The unite women across geographical and class utopian aims of such projects were linked lines. Instead one group of women is made to heavy-handed efforts to control social to serve another, and must threaten self- “pollutants”—low IQs, too little money, harm and infanticide to mark their resis- too many people—through the disciplin- tance. How does one strike for better terms ing of the family. For a better world, let when the only way to halt work would be to the state help you make your family just destroy the body? the right size, shape, and color. In “Prescription Strike,” Ayesha A. Sid- In this issue, our writers consider fam- diqi explores another kind of Western oc- ily planning—the intersection of care and cupation and the distrust it engenders: social control, of love and fantasies of the the deployment of U.S. intelligence in Pakistan. Aid workers have been murdered tive labor and posits the figure of a mother- abroad for providing polio vaccinations ly Grown Woman as these Man-Children’s and some families reject aid altogether. dialectical counterpart. Why not, instead Siddiqi points out that popular percep- of irony and disavowal, a recognition of tions of aid workers are intertwined with the positive potential of social reproduc- perceptions of that other “for your own tion and care work; why not a Preliminary good” force: Western interventionism. Materials for a Theory of Motherhood? “The families refusing vaccines do so with Hannah Black, in her “Theory of the the logic that a country launching drones Hot Babe,” delineates the alternative, a with one hand, can’t be trusted offering subjectivity both blank and self-regarding, aid with the other.” incapable of conceiving or participating in A woman, wrote Sanger, “goes through a family, plastic and wombless. the vale of death alone, each time a babe In the reviews section, JW McCormack is born.” You would think family planning takes on book two of Karl Ove Knaus- would address the burden of her carrying gård’s epic autobiographical My Struggle, this risk alone. Yet behind much family- subtitled “A Man in Love.” Love and fam- planning intervention is not female em- ily are for him a freely chosen insanity. The powerment but the underlying assump- writer claims “we are most unalike as chil- tion that women can’t be trusted with dren and most similar when dead. In the something so momentous as reproduc- middle, love restores the madness we are tion. (In Monty Python’s The Meaning of born with and gradually cured of.” Life, a woman in contractions is wheeled But for younger people, family may be into a hospital room crowded with ma- an asylum in a more literal sense. Hikiko- chinery. “Doctor, what do I do?” “Nothing mori, regarded by its first diagnoser Saitō dear! You aren’t qualified.”) For this is- Tamaki as a “family disorder,” describes sue, Maya Gonzalez interviews filmmaker the severe withdrawal into homebound Irene Lusztig about The Motherhood Ar- silence by an epidemic number of young chives, an experimental documentary-in- Japanese people. Max Fox reviews Hikiko- progress exploring propaganda directed at mori: Adolescence Without End, published pregnant women. by Tamaki in 1998 and finally available Before a woman ever becomes pregnant, in English, exploring the connection of however, she is a Young-Girl. Is mother- hikikomori to the labor market and to the hood the cure? With misogynistic irony invention of adolescence. Have we all be- (or is it ironic misogyny) the Tiqqun col- come as disposable as a teen bagging gro- lective’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory ceries, as a teen sent to war? of the Young-Girl offers the Young-Girl as In the end, the family is less a haven in a the ideal consumer subject of neoliberal- heartless world than an arrangement that ism. Moira Weigel and Mal Ahern flip the has focused a hundred efforts at social im- manifesto on its head with “Further Ma- provement on the locus of relationships terias Materials Toward a Theory of the supposedly spun of love and affection. We Man-Child,” which likens Tiqqun to timid, take up only a handful of the resulting ten- indecisive male-graduate-student types sions and contradictions. It will take more who shy away from now mandatory affec- than a village to sort them out for good. n 7 The Birth of Motherhood Irene LusZTIG interviewed by Maya GONZaleZ It takes a lot of propaganda to make mothering seem natural MAYA GONZALEZ: What is your project footage. It comes out of an archive of about exactly—The Motherhood Archives? a hundred and something training films that IRENE LUSZTIG: The Motherhood Archives I’ve found in different places. Some are from is a history of childbirth. I would call it an eBay; some are from real archives. And out ideological or institutional history of child- of that material I built a film that episodi- birth that repurposes a giant archive of ma- cally looks at certain moments in time where ternal education, maternal-training films, childbirth is discussed in a new way, or the industrial films, and medical-training films. pain of childbirth is discussed in a new way. These films are spaces of training and edu- cation for forming women as they become What was the reason you started this proj- mothers, and I try to look historically at these ect? What’s your background and how did it films. Who’s telling women how to give birth lead you to work on this archive? and how to be mothers and why? For me, it’s I got pregnant. I’m a filmmaker; I’ve worked a been a way to think about childbirth and ma- lot with propaganda and archives—my back- ternity using this deep history, to see it in a ground is in communist, post communist much bigger context and trace the history of stuff, and my previous work is a trilogy of the language and the ideas that we use to talk films in China, Romania, and Russia that about these things. thinks through that set of historical ques- The film project is almost all found tions and engagements, a lot of it through 8 Maya GONZaleZ and Irene LusZTIG propaganda material. I’m very attuned to so for me I just found it hugely reassuring to propaganda. So when I was pregnant it be- understand that these things are completely came immediately, abundantly obvious to culturally bound, historically bound. There is me that almost everything I was reading or no wrong way to give birth. seeing or being exposed to was telling me It both is and isn’t a personal film in the how to give birth or how to be pregnant or end. The question of voice came up a lot in how to mother or look after my child. It was conversations. As I was showing the film as clear to me immediately that all of this is an a work in progress, at different points it was intense space of propaganda. more explicitly personal, in the first person, I have a very archival and historical and people would disengage from the film by turn of mind. I wanted to know, What’s the saying, “You must have had a really hard time history of these conversations? Where is with your pregnancy or your birth” or “You this coming from? Why is it such an intense must be trying to work through some prob- space of ideology? So I started buying films lem that you’re having.” I was really troubled on eBay. There’s a lot of weird stuff kicking by the “you, you, you” of that conversation, around on eBay. A lot of libraries now sell because this isn’t about me.