Speculative Reproduction: Biotechnologies and Ecologies in Thick Time

Abstract

Speculative ReproductionBiotechnologies and Ecologies in Thick Time Astrida Neimanis Everyone loves me, Frida and the Abortion that fetus So Much Larger Than Life. Everyone loves that one. irrigation channelsthese waters as thick as blood (There is another painting I did, I called it “Roots.”) You the golden beets the potato bugs We are eating our young. Signed, —Frida Kahlo, Posthuman Gardener1 [End Page 108] Introduction Birth has never been a “natural” matter. In the context of proliferating new reproductive biotechnologies, we might be tempted to reconstitute a past when ushering new lives into this world only ever happened “naturally.” Yet reproduction has always been more than a simple question of fertilization, gestation, and delivery, whereby bodies might enact some natural biological destiny.2 Every reproduction is what we might call, after Donna Haraway, a “naturalcultural” one: that is, an inextricable entanglement of “natural” forces, matters, and processes, with “cultural” systems, values, and institutions (Haraway 2004, 2, 212–18) that together constitute a birthing ecology. Every human reproduction is thus not only a birthing of a human body, but also an event within certain conditions of possibility—a reaffirmation of, challenge to, and/or intervening otherwise in the structures, institutions, cultures, and ecologies of human and more-than-human bodies and technologies. On this view, a failure to birth, a decision not to birth, or a direction of one’s reproductive body or matter toward other kinds of births (not necessarily of one’s “own” child) are also “reproductions” within birthing ecologies. This is not at all to say that the reproductions we facilitate are always deliberate political choices or purposeful acts of compliance/subversion, even if in some cases they might be. Rather, it is to underline that all births are a co-configuration of naturalcultural bodies in context. What is birthed is also the affirmation of certain kinds of births, certain kinds of life, and certain value systems according to which life and reproduction are understood. Within this frame, we might also understand birth as the creation or reproduction of certain social and cultural imaginaries within which our values are oriented. Concomitant with such naturalcultural reproductions, then, might also be a speculation about what other sorts of births and birthing ecologies are possible—ones that might engender values and relations in which the technologies and naturecultures of reproduction can be imagined anew. In this paper, I contrast two very different versions of a reproductive imaginary—both birthed through the matter of our reproductive tissues, and both worth our consideration in the present moment. The first is the birthing of a neoliberal, individualistic reproductive imaginary of commodification and amnesiac bioscientific progress. Using terminology unpacked in more detail below, we might call this an autologous imaginary, where reproduction is disentangled from any obligation to other bodies in a polity of mutual care and concern. This imaginary promotes an erasure of the thick past of bodies and labors that produce reproductive tissues, and is focused primarily on preservation of the self and direct kin. This is what we find in dominant contemporary biobanking trends that divert human reproductive matter (here, [End Page 109] embryos, amniotic fluid, and umbilical cord blood) in the service of speculative “biological venture capital[ism]” (Waldby and Mitchell 2006, 123). In contrast, I consider a different kind of contemporary birthing imaginary, wherein one invests one’s reproductive matter in the service of both human and more-than-human reproductive ecologies. Drawing on two different artworks, I suggest that these creative interventions offer alternative “speculative reproductions.” Like contemporary biobanking regimes, these artworks speculate on what new kinds of bodies the reinvestment of reproductive matter (in this case, amniotic fluid and menstrual blood) might engender. Unlike the neoliberal regimes, however, these artworks confirm rather than repudiate a feminist ethics of corporeal generosity, and in fact, extend this ethics even further, through an imaginary of what I call posthuman gardening. Here, the literal resowing and reseeding of one’s reproductive matter establishes an extended, more-than-human birthing ecology that includes not only human bodies, but ecological bodies of various kinds. In this productive troubling of our commonplace Western and humanist understandings of the spacetimes of birth, we...

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