Hospitality of the Matrix: Philosophy, Biomedicine, and Culture 9780231504089

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hospitality of the matrix

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hosp i ta l i t y

of t h e m a t r i x Philosophy, Biomedicine, and Culture

Irina Aristarkhova

Columbia University Press

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New York

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Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex

Copyright © 2012 Columbia University Press All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Aristarkhova, I. (Irina) Hospitality of the matrix : philosophy, biomedicine, and culture / Irina Aristarkhova. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p.

) and index.

isbn 978-0-231-15928-9 (cloth) — isbn 978-0-231-15929-6 (pbk.) — isbn 978-0-231-50408-9 (e-book) 1. Birth (Philosophy) role.

2. Human reproduction.

5. Nurturing behavior.

3. Reproduction.

6. Hospitality—Miscellanea.

4. Sex

I. Title.

bd443.a75 2012 113'.8—dc23 2011039140

Casebound editions of Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for Web sites that may have expired or changed since the book was prepared.

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To

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Mama and Guna

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

1. Journeys of the Matrix: In and Out of the Maternal Body 10 2. Materializing Hospitality

29

3. The Matter of the Matrix in Biomedicine

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4. Mother-Machine and the Hospitality of Nursing 5. Male Pregnancy, Matrix, and Hospitality Conclusion: Hosting the Mother

Notes

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169

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References Index

87

197

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Acknowledgments

There are many people, groups, and organizations that have contributed to my work and supported me during the research for and writing of this book. It would probably take another book to describe these contributions, and I apologize beforehand if I have unwittingly missed thanking one of these many people. I thank those who encouraged me early on in academia: Olga M. Zdravomyslova, now executive director of the Gorbachev Foundation in Moscow; Simon Clarke, from the University of Warwick, UK, and Gennady Semenovich Batygin (who passed away all too early), from the Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of Sciences. I thank my former and current colleagues at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the Pennsylvania State University. Numerous members of the Department of Women’s Studies and the School of Visual Arts have commented on various parts of the manuscript and encouraged me throughout my years at Penn State. In particular, I am grateful to Gabeba Baderoon, Joan Landes, Helen O’Leary, Micaela Amato, and Simone Osthoff. They are dear friends who fed me on many occasions literally and intellectually. I thank Lorraine Dowler, Nancy Tuana, Shannon Sullivan, Benedicte Monicat, Lori Ginzberg, and Melissa Wright for “being there” in the most challenging moments; and for the same reason,

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acknowledgments

Jennifer Wagner-Lawler and Leonard Lawler, without whom this book would not be what it is now. I thank my undergraduate and graduate students at Penn State and NUS—you have been a constant source of challenging questions. Rosi Braidotti, Marina Gržinić, Sarah Bracke, Esther Vonk, Laurence Rassel, and members of the OBN and subRosa cyberfeminist art groups prompted my earlier writing on topics of hospitality and the matrix. I thank Luce Irigaray for our correspondence, especially during my work on a Russian translation of her book An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Nayere Lahiji, who shared her expertise in placental pathology during our many discussions on biomedical research, has become a close friend in the process. The writing was made possible by grants from the Institute of the Arts and Humanities, Penn State University, and the Austrian Government’s Visiting Professorship in Gender and Media Art at the Department for Image Science, Danube University Krems. I thank the College of Liberal Arts for the research leave in Spring 2010. Susan Welch, Barbara Corner, Bill Doan, Charles Garoian, Graeme Sullivan, and Carolyn Sachs have made this publication possible through the financial and institutional support of the Colleges of Arts and Architecture and the Liberal Arts. I have also benefited greatly from invitations to give lectures at various venues, including the Franke Institute of the Humanities at the University of Chicago, the Fifth European Feminist Research Conference at Lund University, Transmediale Art and Digital Culture Festival in Berlin, and at the Exit Art Gallery, in Chelsea, New York. I am grateful to the following persons who supported me personally and / or professionally throughout this project: Lanfranco Aceti, Irina Aktuganova, Jeebesh Bagchi, Ryan Bishop, Mita and Arani Bose, Andreas Broeckmann, Pauline van Maurik Broekman, Elsa Hsiang-chun Chen, Nina Czegledy, Rana Dasgupta, Steve Dietz, Paul Domela, Diana Domingez, Marie-France Dumolie, Maria Fernandez, Charles and Sherrie Garoian, Oliver Grau and Wendy Coones, Dorn Hetzel, Kathy High, Ingrid Hoofd, Eduardo Kac, Matt Kenyon, Nisar Keshvani, Karen KeiferBoyd, Oleg Kireev and Anna Alchuk (both of whom are missed), Adeline Kueh, Pierette Kulpa, Verena Kuni, Don and Elaine Kunze, Nadir Lahiji, Dana Lam, George and Ruth Landow, Milagros Rivera, John Miller, Victor Misiano, Robert Mitchell, Alla Mitrofanova, Monica Narula, Helene von Oldenburg, Elena Omelchenko, John Phillips, the Pimenova family, the Prvacki family, Claudia Reiche, Boryana Rossa, Chitra Sankaran, Mira

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acknowledgments

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Schor, Mithu Sen, Olga Shishko, Gregory Sholette, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Andrea Sick, Laura Sivert, Shirley Soh, Cornelia Sollfrank, Mary Anne Staniszewski, Margaret Tan, Charissa Terranova, Phillip Thurtle, Eileen Trauth, Svetlana Yaroshenko, and Patricia Zimmerman. Susan Squier has read various versions of the manuscript and suggested many interesting directions. I thank her for being who she is to numerous colleagues and students and especially for her insistent question, “What is at stake here?” I have also benefited from her interdisciplinary leadership in and commitment to researching subjects that matter. Faith Wilding, whom I have the privilege of calling a friend, has been an inspiration in myriad ways. She had been bridging theory, biomedicine, and art long before this book took its shape, and I am grateful for her permission to use her artwork for the cover. To me, she has also been a bridge between cultures, languages and political commitments. I’ve learned from her the importance of keeping one’s door opened, and also how to “go on.” I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their intellectual generosity and suggestions. I alone, however, am responsible for any mistakes and omissions. Wendy Lochner, Susan Pensak, and their teams at Columbia University Press have been a pleasure to work with. Parts of chapter 2, 4, and 5 appeared previously in the following journals: “Ectogenesis and Mother (as) Machine” in Body and Society (2005); “Man as Hospitable Space: Male Pregnancy Project” in Performance Research (2009); and “Hospitality and the Maternal” in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy (2012). Artists Lee Mingwei and Virgil Wong have been generous with their time, and I thank them for permitting me to reprint images of their work here. Finally, I am grateful to my family members from Moscow and Singapore for their love and support throughout these years. I thank my dearly missed father for introducing me to the subject of philosophy. I thank my mother for introducing me to ethics and politics of philosophy. This book is dedicated to my mother, Valentina Grigorievna Baranova (nee Aristarkhova), and my husband, Gunalan Nadarajan. They have taught me about the work of hospitality.

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hospitality of the matrix

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Introduction

This book is a systematic study of the philosophical, biomedical, and cultural conceptions of the matrix as it relates to the notion of hospitality. Throughout the centuries, thinkers have been fascinated with generation, with questions about how we come into being, where we come from, and how the world was created. In fact, most mythological, cosmological, and religious stories start with some version of genesis, a story about the creation of the world and of living beings. Western culture is no different, even if it has historically fused the mythological, scientific, and metaphysical aspects of these generation narratives. As Joseph Needham, an embryologist and a well-known historian of science, observed in 1931: It can be hardly a coincidence that so many among the great embryologists of the past were men of strongly philosophic minds. It would be absurd to support this opinion by citing Aristotle, but it holds less obviously true of William Harvey, whose book on generation is full of thoughts about causation, and in the cases of Ernst von Baer, Ernst Haeckel, Wilhelm Roux, Hans Driesch, d’Arcy Thompson, and J. W. Jenkinson, there is no doubt about it. It is not really surprising, for of all the strange things in biology surely the most striking of all is the transmutation inside the developing egg, when

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introduction

in three weeks the white and the yolk give place to the animal with its tissues and organs, its batteries of enzymes and its delicately regulated endocrine system. This coming-to-be can hardly have failed to lead, in the minds of those most intimately acquainted with it, to thoughts of a metaphysical character. (1931:7–8) Missing, however, in Needham’s account of the relation between the metaphysical and the embryological in generation is the figure of the maternal body that spatially accommodates and nourishes that embryo or egg as it develops. It is especially pertinent now to explore the maternal body as it figures in generation, for recent developments in biomedical science and technology have increasingly problematized its role and relevance. I examine here the place of the maternal in generation by focusing on the concept of the matrix, which itself both embodies the reproductive capacity of the maternal while, at the same time, being deemed unrelated to it. What is the matrix? Or, to put this another way, to which matrix am I referring: the movie, mathematics, polymer scaffolds, printing, biology, art, tissue engineering, space, virtual reality? This book is in part an attempt to determine why and how the word matrix is able to signify and evoke references to such a diversity of ideas, things, and phenomena as, for example, a pregnant animal and a mathematical array of numbers. The nexus that seems to connect the various meanings is the early designation of the matrix as that from which and from where everything comes. Matrix is “ground zero”; it is the origin; it is that original place/ space of generation and becoming. This connection to origin and generation was etymologically embodied in one of its oldest usages—“a pregnant animal.” The fact that this earliest meaning of the word has been supplemented by a whole range of related and (seemingly) unrelated meanings is not just intriguing but telling. It is telling that this accumulation and multiplication of meanings has subordinated and obscured the original connection of the matrix to the maternal. In writing this book, I was keen to trace the cultural predilection to rely on the maternal for generating these other meanings while simultaneously abstracting the maternal itself out of the matrix. I have therefore sought to reconnect the maternal to the matrix, articulated as the matrixial/maternal, by deliberating on the specific ways in which the other meanings of the matrix have operated, especially in philosophy, reproductive technology and biomedicine, and culture. Throughout this book, I use the terms matrixial/

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maternal, separated by a slash, to keep the etymological affinities between them continuously in play. As this book seeks to problematize the historical dissociation of the maternal from the matrixial despite the latter’s fundamental etymological dependence on the former, this stylistic device of keeping them in constant association with each other is tactically valuable. The strategic objective of this device is indeed to make it impossible to speak of the matrixial without simultaneously articulating and reminding oneself of its association with the maternal. My usage here parallels the critical interplay between the notions of maternal, material, and matrixial in the writings of Luce Irigaray.1 Many scholars, especially feminist theorists, have pointed out that this conflation of space and mother by way of their role (mother as originary space, as a receptacle that contains and generates all) is one of the foundations of our cultural, philosophical, and scientific imagery. The problem with this conflation, they argue, is that it “reduces” mother to space without acknowledging that she is more than “just” a sacrificial receptacle, a “bag of tissue” for the child. More important, this definition of the mother has been employed to justify denying the mother legal and political rights and has framed her as a “lack” in phallologocentric and patriarchal culture. My book builds on this previous scholarship, for I begin with a careful consideration of what Luce Irigaray calls the “matricidal” foundation of the philosophical concept of space and its feminist critique. We must also interrogate the concept of space, if we hope to understand the history and future of the matrix, for the matrixial space, as an “already there,” cannot be assumed. Thus I argue that the matrix is not only generative as space, but is in its renewed relationship to the maternal the very generation of space for the possibility of others. What the matrix does, rather than what it is, becomes my focus. And this is its significance and theoretical merit in understanding space and generation: before we imagine a space for all becoming, as far as the maternal is concerned, the space itself is being made by the mother. There is no space available for the other unless the mother makes it, while the other grows inside or outside her. Thus I build on two of the terms that historically were associated with the matrix: genetrix (a female generator) and nutrix (a female “nourisher,” a nurse). Neither is “natural,” if natural is understood as unconscious (contrarational), biological, and inborn. But neither are they disembodied ideals, and even as ideals or ideas they are powerful primarily as practices: as practices of

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introduction

generating and nursing. The mother is the generator not only of the child but also of the space of generation, that is, of herself as generative space before and after the child is born. With the growing emphasis on the importance of the “space of generation” (the environment where cells/organs/organisms are generated) in contemporary biomedicine, the mother as generative space and the maternal are becoming a key area of research. The value of the matrix as a concept is not simply its connection to the mother as “space” but rather its capacity to evoke production of space and matter as such. This in turn is connected to another concept that is also becoming significant in cultural analysis and related to, in a very repressed manner, the maternal: the concept of hospitality. This ability of the matrix as a concept to “make” space and matter where, it seems, there is none needs to be recovered through the systematic questioning of the matrixial/maternal as the very possibility for the relation of hospitality. I propose that this enunciation of the maternal in/as hospitality is essential to a critical consideration of many recent biomedical or cultural practices that seek to understand and mimic the maternal body. I must clarify, however, that I am not arguing here or elsewhere for any “natural” or “essential” hospitality of the maternal body or mothering. It is exactly the agential (and not taken-for-granted) character of hospitality as mothering and mothering as hospitality that will be teased out and connected to the (risky and seldom articulated) problem of “actual mothers.” The mother is so tacitly embedded into the matrix and hospitality that she is nowhere to be seen. By placing the matrixial/maternal into their historical, biomedical, cultural, and etymological contexts enables us to look at them anew as well as to develop different configurations thereafter. The concepts are no longer “naturally given,” but rather revealed in their historical and cultural specificities. This critical disarticulation and distancing creates an interval, a space in between the matrixial/maternal that will allow them to be not so naturalized and neutralized that they become substitutes for each other. Second, after achieving the separation of the matrixial/maternal where they are no more one and the same, I reestablish their relation via hospitality. This rearticulation enables me to present the significance of the matrixial/maternal via practices of hospitality in generating and nursing. And it also allows me to argue that hospitality is not an essential property of the matrixial/maternal, but rather an important practice through which we can articulate a different relation between self and other.

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introduction

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The exact meaning in the use of the term matrixial/maternal here might initially seem confusing. After all, the notion of the matrix has been used by various disciplines in various ways, from the pregnant animal to a spatial array of numbers. What remains constant in these definitions, however, is their allusion to maternal generative and nursing qualities and, as I argue, maternal hospitality. These various usages are symptomatic, and their genealogy allows us to better understand the contemporary currency of the matrix in philosophy, biomedicine, and culture. In the spirit of genealogy as employed in the works of Foucault, this book is a history of the present discussions on generation and its epistemological, ethical, and ontological understanding. The question of generation can be approached differently if we include the role the matrixial/ maternal plays in generation. And hospitality provides one important and productive concept in understanding that role. It is this story (albeit a story) of hospitality, of the matrix, that I seek to unfold. The question about the ”right” answer to how generation occurs is not what interests me here. The question of how philosophical, biomedical, and cultural framing of a hostile, tolerant, and nourishing matrix keeps maternal acts of hospitality out of the discussion of generation is. Metaphors and narratives of biomedical sciences both follow and lead philosophical and cultural discourses on generation—a connection with which I started this introduction and that I pursue further in the book. What does a particular way of defining the matrix enable in philosophical, biomedical, and cultural discourses on generation? It is not a question of a “better” and “truer” definition, but rather an exploration of the possibility to finally approach the question of matrixial/maternal via hospitality. The first and second chapters present the central theoretical concepts of the book: the matrix and hospitality respectively. Chapter 1, “Journeys of the Matrix: In and Out of the Maternal Body,” presents the semantic journey of the matrix from meaning the generative (as genetrix) and the nourishing (as nutrix) to meaning containment and imprint making. One of the most important cosmogonic accounts in Western philosophy, Plato’s Timaeus, for instance, uses the concept of the matrix in a way that obscures and negates its maternal origins. After deliberating on the related concept of chora as presented by Plato and Derrida, I outline a (feminist) critique of chora by reconnecting it to the maternal body, focusing on the works of Luce Irigaray and Emanuela Bianchi. This approach enables alternative technological and cultural incorporations of the mater-

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nal as part of the concept of the matrix. Finally, I present my conception of the “matrix effect” as a generative and productive relation to space that has been mobilized in the development of different cultural and technological imaginaries of space in the fields of reproductive biomedicine, philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, and new technologies of cyberspace and virtual reality, but, at the same time, has been disarticulated from its connection to “actual” mothers. Chapter 2, “Materializing Hospitality,” explores what the matrix “does.” The matrix as genetrix and nutrix enables the very possibility of hospitality, and that hospitality is the practice that embodies and materializes the matrix. The matrix needs to be conceived as a hospitable space, which includes the maternal relation of hospitality as a useful paradigm for any social relation. First, I briefly explicate the conventional conceptions of hospitality we have inherited, which continue to have currency in critical debates, specifically those of Kant, Levinas, and Derrida. I show that it is “tolerance,” and not hospitality, that has founded these ethical discussions of social relations in Western thought. Second, I critically analyze the place of femininity in theories of hospitality, especially as they attempt to transcend the discourses of tolerance in Levinas and Derrida. Questioning what constitutes femininity and its slippages with notions of interiority and home in these conceptions of hospitality grounds the third part of this chapter. Here I propose that the missing foundation of the concept of hospitality that it thus far assumes is indeed the maternal as the “first home.” I conclude with a renewed call for a parallel reading of hospitality and the matrixial/maternal, as they reactivate each other, opening the possibility of finally welcoming the maternal and redefining the matrix as a hospitable space. The last three chapters are substantive discussions that draw on the earlier theoretical deliberations to exemplify my argument for thinking the matrix and hospitality together in the biomedical sciences, reproductive technologies, and culture. I examine studies of generation in biomedicine, with particular focus on recent research into the maternalfetal interface as it figures within reproductive immunology; ectogenetic technologies, such as artificial intrauterine environments, incubators, artificial placentas, neonatal intensive care units, and cultural practices of male pregnancy, such as sympathetic male pregnancy, pregnancy bellies, and contemporary art. My main question is, What does it mean for someone or something to become matrix/mother? This change requires more than a “biomedical” or a “technological” fix; it involves hospitality, as a

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process of generating welcoming spaces, expecting and anticipating the other, and nursing and nourishing. The peculiarities of these biomedical, technological, and cultural attempts at modeling the matrixial/maternal are symptomatic of a more pervasive lacuna in our thinking about the nature of the maternal as it relates to space, generation, and social relations. Chapter 3, “The Matter of the Matrix in Biomedicine,” explores Needham’s aforementioned quotation on the connection between intellectual and scientific approaches to generation and development in greater detail. Specifically, the chapter focuses on research into a maternal-fetal interface and its larger conceptual paradigms in immunology, their theoretical underpinnings, feminist interpretations, and implications for the understanding of such concepts as self and other, organism and environment. Finally, it proposes that the concept of hospitality, as accommodation and expectancy/expectation, might be useful to consider within the context of hostility and tolerance paradigms in reproductive immunology. This chapter has two main sections. The first section focuses on the maternal-fetal interface (defined as placental tissue and fetal membranes) and current feminist responses to these biomedical studies, with particular emphasis on how the “placental relation” between mother and fetus is configured, drawing on the works of Luce Irigaray and Kelly Oliver. The second section explores wider discussions in contemporary theories of life and generation, again with a particular focus on immunology and perspectives from the emerging field of evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo). It shows that perceptions of the maternal environment are shifting from that of a hostile space for generation to beneficially constitutive for fetus and mother. Most important, chapter 3 argues that this reconfigured notion of the matrixial/maternal “environment” enables us to move beyond the conventional immunological paradigm of hostility/tolerance in pregnancy to acknowledge the importance of the embodied hospitality of maternal accommodation in our understanding of generation. Chapter 4, “Mother-Machine and the Hospitality of Nursing,” explores the technological attempts at mimicking the maternal environment, called ectogenesis, and how these attempts reflect cultural and biomedical conceptions of the matrixial/maternal. Can the machine nurse? This is an absolutely critical question for ectogenesis, as it requires considering the need for accommodation, expectation, and nursing. I begin with a short introduction to what I call ectogenetic desire and follow with a presentation of the main concepts and arguments on ectogenesis gener-

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ated to date. Next I focus on the historical ideas and practices surrounding incubators, as one of the principal ectogenetic technologies, in order to understand how the “space” and “matter” of generation are built into these environments. Recounting feminist accounts of and responses to ectogenesis, the chapter focuses on how feminists have theorized the relation between mothers and machines, from experimental theoretical writing inspired by cyborg imaginaries to the radical feminist rejection of attempts to develop an artificial womb. Chapter 4 concludes by tracing the historical and technological dependence of artificial ectogenetic environments on nursing practices, arguing that nursing should be seen as the central challenge for ectogenesis. From early “warming baths” to modern incubation technologies for severely premature infants in neonatal intensive care units, the successes and failures of ectogenesis need to be read through the acts of hospitality embodied in nursing. The continuous but unacknowledged presence of nurses in sustaining practices of ectogenesis continues to haunt developments in ectogenetic technologies and environments. Chapter 5, “Male Pregnancy, Matrix, and Hospitality,” considers questions that have eluded us thus far in discussions of either matrix or hospitality: What does it mean for a man to become a mother—to make one’s body into a hospitable space? Rather than ridiculing or dismissing male pregnancy, the chapter explores its various cultural forms of mimicry and performance: practices of couvade, sympathetic pregnancy, artificial bellies, and contemporary art. The chapter also seeks to situate male pregnancy within the framework of a growing number of cultural and biomedical practices and discourses that question definitions of “men” and “masculinity” posed in contradistinction to birthing, mothering, nurturing, and femininity. While the female body has been articulated anew as a generative, material, and life-giving body in many recent feminist studies, the male body has remained relatively absent in critical discussions on new reproductive technologies and masculinity. The question to be asked, then, is, What does it mean for a man to embody himself as open to the other, to be expectant to and welcoming of the other in his own body? A central aspect of this discussion is the presentation of the art project Male Pregnancy by Virgil Wong and Lee Mingwei. Lee Mingwei’s contribution to this artwork, considered together with the biomedical and cultural discourses and practices of male pregnancy, articulates the maternal relation as a relation of hospitality, not through simulation but through the practice of the hospitable relation between self and other.

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By refusing to present male pregnancy as a “biomedical fix” of the male body, as a question of locating “where” a man can contain a baby inside himself, I argue that the question of male pregnancy is posed most powerfully as an attempt at maternal hospitality. The book reorients the matrix from a dematerialized definition of space as a “wet nurse of all becoming” (Plato) to a more considered regard for the matrixial/maternal as a relation of hospitality. Assisting us to imagine hospitality before and beyond its reliance on preexisting tenets and claims of ownership of things and places, including homes and places of refuge and community, matrixial/maternal hospitality points to the concrete practices of “making space” for the other through accommodation, expectation-expectancy, and nursing and nourishing. I hope that this book reconfigures matrixial/maternal hospitality, from fables of welcoming feminine smiles, of fleeting but warm feelings of being at home with oneself, or even from being “an-other-within,” into a foundation for rethinking the concept of space and the ways in which we can imagine ethically grounded relations between self and other that go beyond tolerance or, at best, a temporary peace. The “thinking together” of the matrix and hospitality opens an alternative vision of self-other relations that can inform and redefine a new biomedical and cultural vocabulary.

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Journeys of the Matrix In and Out of the Maternal Body

This chapter explores a simple question, “What is the matrix?” The term matrix and questions about it came to the forefront of popular culture in the late 1990s, when the movie The Matrix became a global box office success and a cultural phenomenon. Today the notion of the matrix is variously employed to mean “an array of numbers,” “mold,” “virtual reality,” and a “symbolic order that structures reality for us.” However, though this term also meant “the womb” and “mother” for a significant portion of its existence (even as late as the end of the nineteenth century), this relationship to the womb and the maternal body is almost completely absent in most contemporary uses of matrix. This curious but oft-neglected connection between the maternal body and the term matrix as it is employed (or not) in philosophy, art, and biomedicine has been the subject of my research for a while now (Aristarkhova 2002, 2006). In the course of this research, I have increasingly come to realize that what is at stake here is not so much to establish what the matrix really is (i.e., about arriving at a particular definition, “better” as it might seem to be), but to understand what an expanded formulation of the matrix, one that includes this relationship to the womb and the maternal body, does: what it enables and produces in terms of our experiences of space and embodiment, especially with regard to the technological and cultural imaginaries

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of reproduction. This project of recovering the maternal from/in the matrix is not an etymological curiosity, but one of cultural urgency insofar as the question of how one imagines and therefore inhabits space and embodiment (maternal or not) with others will continue to remain a critical sociopolitical challenge. What is also at stake here, therefore, is our definition of space and the role that a reintroduction of the maternal connection to the matrix plays in producing a different conception of space. In the next chapter, through the concept of hospitality, I specifically examine the ethical potential of enabling a different relationship to others that is embodied in this reformulation of the matrix.

The Meanings of Matrix The etymology of matrix, with its connection to the root words for matter and mother, reveals the term’s direct relation to the maternal body and its originating role as the source of being and becoming. This early connection to the maternal body was transformed in modern usages of the word, especially after the English mathematician J. J. Sylvester, in the middle of the nineteenth century, used the term matrix to name an enclosed array of numbers. This section traces the remarkable persistence of the notion of the matrix, especially as it has been captured and circulated within the contemporary imagination at this moment in history and its proliferation from highly discipline-specific deployments (e.g., in geology or molecular biology) to popular culture (e.g., the car Toyota Matrix or the movie The Matrix). Thus, the word matrix needs to be analyzed with reference to the old semantic triad of matter, mother, and matrix. If we imagine a simplified map of meanings as a series of concentric circles, the matrix is within the mother, and the mother is within the matter. In most Indo-European languages today the most common word for the womb is not matrix but uterus (in biomedical usages). Moreover, unlike its synonyms—womb and uterus—the word matrix has been used in relation to any type of matter (plant, animal, geological, imaginary, etc).1 The matrix’s simultaneous relation to and dissociation from the maternal body, the womb, and pregnancy enable its powerful return in a multiplicity of discourses. Matrix, an Indo-European word, is formed from the root mater, “mother” (and thus is related to the word material, “matter”). In Latin the suffix trix refers to a “productive feminine agent” (Baldi 2002:302).

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Its meaning is related to genetrix, meaning then a biological mother, and nutrix, a female nurse, as well as a Roman slave (Ernout and Meillet 1932:565). The suffix (“productive feminine agent”) embodies the very referent of productivity, making a connection between the feminine (symbolic) and maternal agency.2 The matrix’s relation to generativity via nursing is also noteworthy and will be explored further in the second section of this chapter with reference to the concept of chora. Early Latin (before the first century ce) meanings of matrix indicated a female animal kept for breeding or a pregnant animal. It could also mean a “parent plant.” Its most general early meaning was the “source and origin” (a birthplace or, understood more generally, a place of generation). Matrix was not used widely to mean either “womb” (especially the human womb) or “original place.” Uterus was the standard term for “womb” in Latin, while chora was a privileged, maternally inspired term used in ancient philosophy to ponder the nature of space and place. The first use of the matrix as “womb,” detailed by J.  N. Adams in his Latin Sexual Vocabulary, occurs in Seneca the Elder’s Controversiae, written around the very beginning of the first millennium ce: “she no longer pleases her husband as [the matrix, womb] breeder” (Adams 1982:105). Here, it seems, that the old meaning of the “breeding animal” is mobilized to make the first known usage of the matrix as the womb. It refers to pregnancy indirectly, by inference from a heterosexual relationship. Adams suggests that this transitory meaning personifies the womb and could be seen as an “ambiguous,” and nascent use of the term. The establishment of matrix as “womb” in Late Latin partially relies on the close semantic relation between mother, breeder, and womb; these words were often used interchangeably (Adams 1982:106). This shows how the early relation between matter, mother, and womb remained in the use of the matrix long after it stopped meaning “the breeding animal” or “parent plant.” After its meaning of “womb” became established, matrix was used widely in Late Latin medical literature. Adams documents its usage as “womb” in Theodorus Priscianus’s writings on gynecology (circa 400 ce), replacing other words for womb, including uterus. In general, he concludes that “it is a fair assumption that the great frequency of matrix in late medical works considered as a whole reflects its wide currency at the time” (Adams 1982:107). Thereafter, the word primarily survived through a rather narrow usage in printing and casting, meaning a mold employed in the production of various relief surfaces. Even though some etymological dictionaries

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(The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, 1981, 1744) indicate that between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries it was also used as “place or medium where something is developed” (around 1555) and “embedding or enclosing mass” (1641), these usages were rare. Although matrix was still used to designate “womb” in 1526 (in biblical translations into English, Tyndale, 1837 [1526]:26), uterus became a much more common term for “womb” in the newly established disciplines promulgated under the rubric of “generation” study: as an organ (muscle tissue) where offspring develops.3 Since the nineteenth century, matrix has become increasingly framed as a productive and generative site in thinking about space, while uterus seems to have been permanently defined in the negative: as a “place” of suffering and all kinds of other “problems.”4 Judging by the previous examples, matrix in English oscillated between being a space from which things and beings originate and a mold for printing and casting. It is important to note that until recently it has maintained its reference to the maternal body in some other IndoEuropean languages. In modern times, however, its meaning of “womb” even in Romance languages (matrice) was overtaken by other meanings— such as mold and imprint bearer—making the old references to “womb,” “breeding animal,” “parent plant,” and, to a lesser extent, “the origin/ source” archaic or altogether defunct.5 The matrix could easily have continued to be an unexciting “mold for casting” and obscure “origin” to the general public, popular science, modern art, and philosophy if not for J. J. Sylvester. In 1850 Sylvester suggested the use of the term matrix for a novel development in mathematics. It was here, in mathematics, that we see the modern revival of the matrix. Since then we have observed the word’s proliferation and permutation in multiple contexts, while its connection to the womb has become archaic and outdated or even completely forgotten, as in the definition from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary to follow. While Sylvester himself borrowed the term directly from its etymological meaning of “womb,” and not from the world of casting and printing terminology, he applied it to the most abstract conception of mathematical thought. Karen Hunger Parshall writes in her biography of the mathematician that the first times Sylvester used the term matrix were in passing in November 1850 and in a published paper from 1851. He introduced it with this revealing explanation: matrix is “a rectangular array of terms, out of which different systems of determinants may be engendered, as from the womb of a common parent” (Sylvester, quoted in Parshall 2006:102). In line with my argument about the “generative”

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and “supporting/forming” potential of the matrix as the main impetus for its current usages, Parshall notes that Sylvester saw “unlimited possibilities” “in the matrix as the underlying structure and in the determinant as a key construct based on it” (Parshall 2006:102). Moreover, Sylvester considered naming to be a very important act in moving mathematics forward and thus paid a lot of attention to it. He even claimed himself be a “Mathematical Adam” (2006:111). Parshall suggests that he was aligning himself with “those who give birth to new lives” and therefore “have the privilege of naming their offspring and, in so doing, of establishing their patronage” (2006:111). For the first time, Sylvester connected the symbolic realm of the matrix as a “generative space” with the applied realm of the matrix as a “mold” in casting and printing. For Sylvester, the matrix was a container and a thing like a womb. His leap occurred through the introduction of a “common parent,” replacing the mother with an abstract substitute through this “common” claim to the womb. Intrinsic to Sylvester’s choice of the term matrix is a hope that the new mathematical entity he (with others) was working on would be as “generative” as the womb. This mathematical nomenclature is enacted as a classic metaphorical operation—it mines the semantic associations with the womb and the maternal even while distancing its meanings from the maternal body. One could argue that all usages of matrix issuing from this particular semantic appropriation can operate as metaphors only insofar as they are “not” the womb, thus enabling the amnesia of its meaning as the “womb” in all its current cultural appropriations.6 In the twentieth century the matrix has become a catchall term to designate things, numbers, ideas, and phenomena, connected, if at all, only by a faint memory to a spatial, voluminous, stretchable “something.” The main quality of that entity is its ability to “hold things together” in space. The desire for its passivity translates into an insistence on representing the matrix in the highest degree of abstraction (such as in mathematical matrix theory), as if there is nothing there at all, separating growth and becoming from its environment, as in a perfect incubator that has no impact on what is inside—except that it supports life. The metaphoric operations on the matrix have resulted in its twentiethcentury definitions: on the one hand, it is an originary place from which all things develop and come into being; on the other hand, it is constituted as the most abstract, mathematically inspired notion of spatial arrangement of numbers, items, ideas, and systems. To support my point,

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here is an indicative list of the range of meanings of matrix in contemporary circulation, presented by the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary: “Etymology: Latin, female animal used for breeding, parent plant, from matr-, mater Date: 1555 1: something within or from which something else originates, develops, or takes form 2 a: a mold from which a relief surface (as a piece of type) is made b: die c: an engraved or inscribed die or stamp d: an electroformed impression of a phonograph record used for mass-producing duplicates of the original 3 a: the natural material (as soil or rock) in which something (as a fossil or crystal) is embedded b: material in which something is enclosed or embedded (as for protection or study) 4 a: the extracellular substance in which tissue cells (as of connective tissue) are embedded b: the thickened epithelium at the base of a fingernail or toenail from which new nail substance develops 5 a: a rectangular array of mathematical elements (as the coefficients of simultaneous linear equations) that can be combined to form sums and products with similar arrays having an appropriate number of rows and columns b: something resembling a mathematical matrix especially in rectangular arrangement of elements into rows and columns c: an array of circuit elements (as diodes and transistors) for performing a specific function 6: a main clause that contains a subordinate clause.”7 Thus the current meanings of matrix in English highlight productivity (“something within or from which something else originates or takes form”) and receptivity (“material in which something is embedded”). However, these definitions do not include one of the most striking and well-circulated usages of matrix: as a metaphor for virtual space and cyberspace, most conspicuously exemplified and labeled as such in the

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movie The Matrix. Since the movie has been extensively discussed elsewhere (Žižek 1999; Hochenedel and Mann 2003; Irwin 2002; Diocaretz and Herbrechter 2006), here it will suffice to note that most definitions of matrix issuing from this movie also conveniently miss (or quickly pass over) the relationship to the maternal body while retaining its generative and enveloping properties.8 It is fascinating that the film’s signature image (vertically running green numbers on a black screen, the matrices of zeros and ones) references the mathematical matrix as an array of numbers, while within the plot itself the matrix refers to the machinegenerated world in which we are immersed as in a dream while our bodies are imprisoned in a womblike capsule (which echoes and is analyzed via the Platonic “cave” metaphor). In the words of one of the main characters from the movie, Morpheus: “The Matrix is everywhere, it’s all around us, here, even in this room. You can see it out of your window, or on your television. You feel it when you go to work, or go to church or pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth . . . that you like everyone else was born into bondage . . . kept inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste or touch. A prison for your mind. A Matrix” (Wachowski and Wachowski 2001:26),9 We can conclude that the journey of the word matrix is indeed remarkable: from “a female animal used for breeding” and “parent plant” (and “womb”—as per Late Latin usages) to “a main clause that contains a subordinate clause” and “a prison for your mind.” The multiple twists and turns that the matrix as a concept has taken and its widespread popularity today lie in the fact that it has, essentially, enabled a particular and very effective rendering of the concept of space, whether in mathematics, biology, or philosophy.10 I term the matrix effect that which enables the positing of space as hospitable, as in materializing and/or engendering space—in a way, providing “place” to “space.” The matrix seems to be placing space, facilitating its intelligibility. Or, as other usages of the term indicate, matrix seems to possess a form-producing quality; it is a term that indicates how we imagine what forms are and/or come to be (especially in the history of embryology). Taking on the meanings of the mold, imprint bearer, and, later, mathematical number and cyberspace, the matrix today, as it is defined in philosophy, popular culture, and biomedicine, has no relation to the maternal body except through etymology.11 This distancing is noteworthy, as it precludes an ethical relation to the mother; by taking the mother out of consideration in questions of generation and conception, the matrix becomes matricidal.

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The concept of chora provides an especially important step in understanding how the meanings of matrix can contribute to a definition of space that includes hospitality. Specifically, an outline of the feminist critique of chora by Luce Irigaray and Emanuela Bianchi demonstrates how the abstract concept of the matrix can be reconnected to the maternal body. This in turn allows one to redefine hospitality beyond a passive notion of tolerance to include the generativity possessed by maternal bodies.

Matrix as Chora: The Mother and Receptacle of All Wherefore, the mother and receptacle of all created and visible and in any way sensible things, is not to be termed earth, or air, or fire, or water, or any of their compounds, or any of the elements from which these are derived, but is an invisible and formless being which receives all things and in some mysterious way partakes of the intelligible, and is most incomprehensible.

(Plato, Timaeus 51a–b)

The discourse of chora thus plays for philosophy a role analogous to that which chora “herself” plays for that which philosophy speaks of, namely, the cosmos formed or given form according to the paradigm. Drawn out of this cosmos are the figures for describing chora: receptacle, imprint-bearer, mother or nurse. . . . Philosophy cannot speak directly about that which [these figures] approach, in the mode of vigilance or of truth. . . . The dream is between the two, neither one nor the other. Philosophy cannot speak philosophically of that which looks like its “mother,” its “nurse,” its “receptacle,” or its “imprint-bearer.” As such, it speaks only of the father and the son, as if the father engendered it all on his own.

(Derrida 1997:30)

This section is devoted to how the matrix operates within the philosophical figuration of space, especially with reference to the term chora in both Greek and contemporary texts.12 Unlike matrix, chora is a much more specialized and rarely used concept. But, just like matrix, it was “resurrected” in twentieth-century philosophy and architectural theory to think through an alternative definition of space—one of heterogeneity, becoming, unfolding, and welcoming (while still remaining “malleable” to the philosopher’s or architect’s desires).13 A careful reading of chora as a “matrixial” operation/entity provides a basis for and supports my larger argument about the search for “hospitable spaces.” I will try to show that the maternal body is indeed the connection between matrix and chora even if philosophers like Plato and Derrida insist that this connection

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should not be understood as having anything to do with “the female race” (genos gynaikōn). I will draw on the works of feminists like Irigaray and Bianchi to reintroduce the (material, actual) maternal into chora so as to expand its conceptual and political potential as matrix. In Timaeus Plato (1953) presents his story of the origin of the world. Plato begins with the main character of the story, the Craftsman, who is the eternal Demiurge and makes and perfects the world through an ordering of preexisting chaos. He is “the Father of the World” and represents unchanging goodness, intelligence, and beauty. Plato reminds us that the order the Craftsman brings into the world, through the operations of the harmonious soul, can be easily disturbed by both internal and external forces. This ordering of the soul in an individual might include nurture and education. Plato uses mathematical (geometric) figures as well as the structure and function of the human eye to exemplify the ideal forms of order and balance created by the Craftsman. At the end of this process, we have the ideal forms and images of these forms in the visible world (that can only approximate the ideal forms). Even though the Craftsman is as much a living thing (material) as an ideal entity (nonmaterial), Plato seems compelled to add a third term to his cosmology. He refers to this third kind (triton genos) as “Receptacle”; it allows him to imagine a precosmic state that is ordered by the Craftsman, a state both material (physical) and purely spatial (receptacle-like) that exists through constant erratic and nonuniform (though circular) motion. The motion is between air, fire, water, and earth, and through nonuniform interaction it produces “senses” such as pleasure and pain. Their constant and erratic interactions arise from or give rise to Necessity, which Plato discusses further to explain the making of a human being. Humans are constituted by the mixing of Intellect and Necessity. Necessity contributes the material, while Intellect supplies purpose (thus the lungs are provided by Necessity, but Intellect gives them their function within the body).14 Most commentators on the Timaeus note that the second part of this dialogue, where the notion of the Receptacle is presented, is the most obscure and controversial. Plato defined the Receptacle as an underlying, precosmic matter, even though he gave it a somewhat material designation, chora, that at the time in Greek denoted space, territory, or land (around one’s home).15 For the coherence of his cosmological scheme, Plato needed a term that would be as invisible and as passive as possible, one that would generate and sustain the cosmos without leaving an imprint on it. What is important here is that this “impure” void metaphor-

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ically conjures the maternal body. However, by choosing to name “the mother and receptacle of all” as a third kind, a third gender, Plato arguably brackets out the generative (space) from the maternal (body). It is also noteworthy that chora is the final term Plato uses to describe this Receptacle. The other terms Plato proposes—hupedochē (with its reference to qualities of welcoming and receiving, as “the nurse of all becoming”) and ekmageion (referring to a mold that functions as a generative place and imprint bearer)—are discussed later in this chapter. The chora could be read as an instantiation of the matrix, insofar as the matrix conceptually embodies characteristics of all three of the terms he used to describe the Receptacle: hupedochē, ekmageion, and chora. As I have shown, in its various semantic permutations matrix encompasses the spatial, welcoming, and material imprinting qualities while maintaining its basis in the maternal body. Plato’s task in Timaeus is to offer a viable and cogent story of generation, of how the world came into being and what supported its becoming. However, to make sense of the “materiality” of the precosmic (preordered) state, Plato introduces chora as a conceptual placeholder for the sensible, though she herself is neither sensible nor intelligible. The character of chora and the terms he uses to refer to it are kept conspicuously obscure by Plato and his commentators, since the quality of this matter and space—as preordered, chaotic, changeable, and in constant motion— cannot be represented in rational, ordered language without losing its precosmic quality.16 Naming it in a hurried fashion might misrepresent it or even cause us to lose our hold on this invisible matter that supports everything. To use the jargon of contemporary embryology, chora cannot be studied in vitro (disconnected, as if in a philosophical laboratory); chora needs to be studied and imagined in vivo (connected and in constant motion). The same epistemological problem that biomedical science faces when it “knows” matter only through transporting it out of its “actual” context arises here with chora, and hence all these provisional, painfully tenuous attempts at not naming it. Even calling it matter would not do it justice. The language Plato uses to refer to chora mostly evokes the maternal body or the matrix (as both imprint bearer and mold), but, as soon as he uses such language, Plato empties it out of the mother in favor of a metaphor of number or a schema. Following Plato, Jacques Derrida, in his own discussion of Plato’s Timaeus, insists that chora should not be reduced to “the anthropomorphic form,” that is, of a woman, mother, nurse (Derrida 1995:95, 103). Derrida is especially adamant that since the

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maternal is one of the many tropes elicited by the chora, it would be problematic to frame chora only or primarily with reference to actual mothers and/or the maternal. Derrida asserts that “the ‘mother’ is supposedly apart. And since it’s only a figure, a schema,17 therefore one of these determinations which khõra receives, khõra is no more of a mother than a nurse, is no more than a woman. This triton genos is not a genos, first of all because it is a unique individual. She does not belong to the ‘race of women’ (genos gynaikõn). Khõra marks a space apart” (Derrida 1995:124). It is puzzling that Derrida (after Plato) even proposes calling the one “who gives place without engendering” a mother at all. Why should chora be “mother” if it is, most probably (as we are reminded by Derrida), not? While he insists that chora is “no more of a mother than a nurse” and “no more than a woman,” so as to remove chora from consideration as part of the “race of women,” his argument equally allows the possibility of chora also being “no less of a mother than a nurse” and “no less than a woman”. The materiality of being “an actual mother” seems to have been posed, problematically I think, as anathema to this discourse on space. The “neutral” interval that Derrida speaks of is understood by him problematically as a “ nonrelation” rather than as a precondition for a relation. Derrida calls any reference to an “actual” mother, nurse, or woman an “anthropomorphism” (1995:103). I argue that this ideal(ism) cannot be sustained unless the mother, the nurse, the woman are no longer equated with a necessary “anthropomorphism.” As we will see, this anxiety over “actual” mothers as some sort of ontic contaminant reducing the discursive complexity of becoming and mothering permeates other discussions of the nexus between the maternal body and the matrix. Like the matrix, chora seems to be an imprint bearer, a form that can take any form. Therefore, Derrida, like Plato, wants chora, although partaking of the “maternal” (as the mother and the receptacle of all), to remain neutral and detached from sexual difference. However, contrary to Derrida’s assertion that philosophy “cannot speak of that which looks like its mother” (1997:30), philosophy does seem extremely willing to speak at length on the subject of some other mother: Mother as a third race/ kind/genos, as the one that receives and gives “all” that is intelligible. “In the couple outside of the couple, this strange mother who gives place without engendering can no longer be considered as an origin. She/it eludes all anthropo-theological schemes, all history, all revelation, and all truth. Preoriginary, before and outside of all generation, she no longer even has the meaning of a past, of a present that is past. Before signi-

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fies no temporal anteriority. The relation of independence, the nonrelation, looks more like the relation of the interval or the spacing to what is lodged in it to be received in it” (Derrida 1995:124). Referring to this ability of chora to receive indiscriminately whatever or whoever comes to it, John Sallis seems to be giving away a deeper, underlying secret of Plato’s story when he calls the chora promiscuous: “Since it is all-receiving—not only a mother but, it seems, utterly promiscuous—it can itself have no form, no determinations whatsoever.” It can be “impregnated” by all paradigms and ideas, but “it is not determined by any of them” (Sallis 1999:110–11). Impregnated by all, promiscuous, a mother and receptacle of all and still unchanged by it, neutral, without any relation to “the race of women”—it is indeed the contestation of such definitions that is one of my principal tasks in this book. As this is a crucial point for my overall argument, it is important to reiterate the problem that I am underlining here. When Plato and Derrida initially connect chora (receptacle of all) to the maternal, they find it very important to take her out of the “race of women,” to constitute it as that of the interval (the third, the neuter), without acknowledging the cost of this procedure to the “mother,” who becomes negated by this gesture. On the other hand, there is an uncritical transition, conceived as an (obligatory?) anthropomorphism, between Craftsman, philosopher, father, and son: they each have a relation to “actual” philosopher, “actual” father (Derrida’s “father and son” in the epigraph at the beginning of this section), and “actual” Craftsman-God (whom Plato calls “a living thing”). They all have human form, while the matrix and chora, we are told, do not submit to such conceptions. And this paternal “anthropo-theological scheme” is not only a problem, we are to believe, but an objective (telos) of the whole text: cosmology as a story of how the world and man came into being. A significant number of feminist thinkers have challenged this creation story in a manner consistent with my assessment of chora as one figuration of the matrix. Here I present the ideas of two thinkers in more detail: Luce Irigaray and Emanuela Bianchi. Irigaray is the one who most consistently unpacked the ontological and ethical consequences of Western metaphysical theories on the maternal body and followed through with an ensuing redefinition of space.18 The problem of the womb becoming a metaphor for “matter” and “space” at the expense of mothers has been extensively explored by Irigaray in many of her works. While many of her arguments relate to the question of representation, projection, and

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the visible, and are discussed in the following chapters, here I focus on her response to the Platonic definition of the chora via the maternal body. Irigaray argues that Platonic cosmology, because of its conceptualization of the chora, enacts what could be called an “economy of metaphor” that keeps the maternal apart from the spatial construct that it metaphorically enunciates. This economy operates through the “eclipse” of the mother, of “the place (of) becoming, whose non-representation or even disavowal upholds the absolute being attributed to the father. He no longer has any foundation, he is beyond all beginnings. Between these two abysses—nothing/being—language makes its way, morphology takes shape, once the mother has been emptied out. Enumerating all the ‘beings’ that formed her, and their properties, in order to relate them to the father. In conformity with his desire and his law” (Irigaray 1985:305–7). “As for the ‘woman,’” writes Irigaray, “she is place, and therefore, without place”—like chora. She is “receiving without being received, without interval for herself that would allow her to be received in a place. As a consequence, we have infinity without ‘possibility of arresting the fall’” (Irigaray 1993b:38). The ways to arrest this “fall” include, I argue after Irigaray, not just restoring the maternal body to the chora but renovating the determinative and ethically significant presence of “actual” mothers in our imaginaries of space, generation, and “being with others,” essentially engaging in a critical project of demetaphorization. The challenge of dealing with “real” mothers in philosophical considerations of pregnancy has been a difficult one for many feminist thinkers. A key issue is ensuring that the role of “real” mothers in such discussions is not reduced to a functional one, as it often has been in patriarchal conceptions of reproduction, pregnancy, and motherhood.19 Michelle Boulous Walker, after Irigaray and in response to these dangers of patriarchal appropriation, argues that “we need an inscription of the maternal that does at least two things; one that actually refers to women as mothers (contra Kristeva) and one that theorizes the terrain of the mother’s body in less reductive terms (contra Cixous). We need to re-chart the maternal as a terrain of body and word. Irigaray’s work arguably does both” (1998:140). Following Melanie Klein, Julia Kristeva, Iris Young, and Adrienne Rich, Walker calls for resuming “our search for the real mother over and against her metaphorical inscriptions” (1998:140). Such metaphorical inscriptions as Walker bemoans are indeed found in narratives of generation like Plato’s Timaeus that appropriate maternal references to construct spaces and processes of becoming like chora while systemati-

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cally denying the place of real women in such narratives by conceiving the references as metaphorical and not material. In another reformulation of chora that is inspired by Irigaray, Emanuela Bianchi attempts to reinscribe materiality into Platonic chora in her article “Receptacle/Chõra: Figuring the Errant Feminine in Plato’s Timaeus” (2006). Bianchi contends that the “receptacle/chõra may be understood not merely as a violent abstraction and expropriation of feminine corporeality” (as some who deny its value for feminist scholarship have argued) “but also, critically reapproached, as offering a fecund and generative philosophical terrain in which a feminist rethinking of corporeality, spatiality, figurality, temporality and life may take (its) place” (2006:126). Based on her careful reading of Plato, Bianchi concludes, contra Derrida, that the ontic corporealities of the maternal and the feminine are exactly what should be reintroduced into the chora to enable its feminist reappropriation. In fact, Bianchi states that “the feminine generativity of the receptacle/chora is inalienably tied to the reproductive, maternal function. Any attempt to assess the value of receptacle/chora for feminist philosophy must therefore take seriously and grapple with its irreducibly maternal role in Plato’s creation story” (Bianchi 2006:138). In the following chapter I will analyze in greater detail the problematic connection between “femininity” and “woman” through their reciprocal slippages and substitutes, but for now it will be useful to examine Bianchi’s careful analysis of two other terms in the Timaeus story that are essential for understanding the connection between the matrix and chora I am establishing here: hupedochē and ekmageion. As noted earlier, for Plato, creation results in the existence of an ideal world (of forms), a visible world (copies of ideal forms), and a third kind (or genos, as Derrida refers to it) that Plato initially refers to as the receptacle and the nurse of all becoming: hupedochē. Bianchi suggests that in his discussion of Timaeus Derrida “privileged” the notion of chora, and she also argues that the contemporary privileging of chora in theoretical and philosophical discussions of Plato’s Timaeus should not be allowed to obscure the fact that two other equally important concepts, hupedochē and ekmageion, point to a different set of characteristics of this originary receptacle. Hupedochē is very important to my analysis because its various meanings once again suggest that the search for chora and matrix is the search for “hospitable spaces.” With unusual insistence, the theme of hospitality vis-à-vis space returns in Plato’s conception of Being and its origins via

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the term hupedochē, which is derived from a verb that means welcoming into and entertaining in one’s house. It is noteworthy that neither Levinas nor Derrida in their readings of hospitality (which will be my focus in the next chapter) mentioned hupedochē in their conceptions of hospitality or of chora, although the verb, in its female form, “also means to conceive or become pregnant” (Bianchi 2006:130). Bianchi argues that the move from hupedochē to chora as one of the former’s reformulations (probably its “final” or supplementary reformulation in Plato’s list of concepts) is contradictory because the first denotes the container (also as womb) and the second denotes space, place, position, country, and territory. She also notes that other feminist philosophers (such as Kristeva, Irigaray, Grosz, and Butler) either overlooked or did not pay sufficient attention to this reformulation toward chora. Insofar as Bianchi conceptualizes hupedochē as a space of interiority that “welcomes into” (presumably a home and/or the maternal body) and chora as an expansive, externally oriented spatial construct, there is indeed, as she argues, a problem in combining the two as semantic movements of the same concept. However, it is possible to argue that the productive slippages and connections between chora and hupedochē also enable a reading of space as generatively expansive because it is intimately welcoming and vice versa. While hupedochē might be read as welcoming into one’s home and body, even that is already transgressing the boundaries of the body and home and, interestingly, positions the womb as a possible model for welcoming at home and vice versa. In philosophically aligning hupedochē with chora it is also possible to conceive of extending the hospitality of the womb and home to an ethic of hospitality that one exercises beyond one’s home. As will be discussed in the next chapter, this is a crucial moment in the philosophical discussions of hospitality offered by Levinas and Derrida: the hospitality of the house is a precondition for the hospitality of the country and the people. “Homely” hospitality partakes from the maternal to couple with the communal for the possibility of communal hospitality, just as chora is another iteration of hupedochē. Thus the importance here lies in asserting the welcoming and hospitable quality of container/womb/hupedochē in the formulation of chora, and both as matrixial. Hospitality and matrix, therefore, provide a link between the private and public spaces of a container (domesticity, womb) and country (cultural hospitality to strangers). The other term Plato used (in avoiding direct naming of the Receptacle) is ekmageion, meaning a “model,” in the sense of a mold in ceramics. Bianchi notes that it has been translated as “neutral plastic material,”

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“molding-stuff,” and “recipient.”20 Just like contemporary scientific usages of matrix, it is presented as an imprint bearer as well as a generative, form-giving space: “ekmageion therefore holds together at once, and indeterminately, the mutually contradictory meanings of mark receiving, mark giving, and mark removing” (Bianchi 2006:128). According to Bianchi, this imprint bearer has at least four registers of “inscription and erasure”: a cosmogonic function in the “familial/maternal genesis of natural beings,” object production (as in ceramics), linguistic production (as in marking, metonymy, and metaphor, among others), and the production of memory (presumably as a result of all the above) (128). The capacity of the ekmageion to function as a space for marking and making is dependent on its malleability—that is, its ability to erase marks in order to renew its promise of registering new imprints. Bianchi’s reformulation of chora calls for recognition and strategic deployment of the specificity and materiality of “the feminine.” For her, this “feminine” quality relates to motion, to the quality of animated Being unfolding in chora. In answering Derrida, Bianchi argues that the division between “literal and figural is unsustainable,” and “the feminine generativity of the receptacle/chõra is inalienably tied to the reproductive, maternal function” (2006:137–38). Thus Bianchi challenges the dualism of “irreducible femininity” and “actual women” as a problem of intelligibility of space and generation. She strives to recover a “specifically feminine possibility” from chora as and through a “fundamental indeterminability, an impossible abyss, a site where mother, fetus, and their interrelationship are restlessly open to reconfiguration, forever escaping attempts to fix a determination of self and non-self” (140). Here Bianchi’s rendering of chora has merged with my earlier definitions of the matrix as a locus of pregnancy as well as the model for becoming and being. The various ways in which chora is carefully and persistently defined through enunciations of maternal metaphors that are supposed to aid in grasping what it “is” while “not defining” it (as Plato and others claim) indicate the persistence of the economy of metaphor of which Irigaray speaks. The metaphor itself, as a figure of speech, is not in question here; rather, we must explore what relation it has to “actual” mothers and why, in this case, “mother” has to become a metaphor to be legitimately included in cosmology. Though it might be problematic to reinscribe the materiality of chora through the repetition of Platonic images of “fundamental indeterminability,” as Bianchi does, her call for acknowledgment of the “placelessness” and idealism of the philosophical “mother” as a funda-

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mental problem in the Western metaphysical approach to space supports previous calls by Walker and, especially, Irigaray. This spatial and productive quality of chora—“feminine productive ability” of the matrix—as I argued, links chora semantically to the larger field of the matrix, for it is not what they are but rather what they enable that sustains their contemporary proliferation and relevance.21

The Matrix: Making Space When considering the matrix or chora, the question is often formulated thus: what kind of place is the matrix? Or, in another version: what kind of space is the mother? In his fascinating text “The Caesarean,” which concludes his book on the writings of Georges Bataille, Dennis Hollier argues that knowledge (“theory-philosophy-science”) has been “scissipated” (cut out) from pleasure (eroticism) by “eliminating sexual difference,” the mother and her desire.22 As Hollier weaves his psychoanalytic reading of Bataille’s writing about the mother as always a “dying mother” (relying on Bataille’s account of his mother’s words and desire), his primary question remains the same. It is the question that Maupertuis asked in 1745: “How can the places we come out of be discussed?” (cited in Hollier 1995:143). As the text progresses, Hollier strengthens his argument against “the economy of science whose primary function is the forgetting of the maternal body” (156). Hollier assures us that the erotic literature of Bataille brings this body, the place where we come from, back into the picture. How do we learn about Bataille’s mother’s desire? From his writing, as Bataille literally puts words into his mother’s mouth. Hollier equates the maternal body with “the place” where we come from, and the matrix represents the same kind of “space.” I argue that the aforementioned questions already assume that the mother is a kind of a space. She might be defined as a very special kind of space, not “just” a space; she could be privileged as a site of the relation between self and nonself that is like no other. However, she is still seen as a site; for example, Bianchi defines chora as “an impossible abyss, a site” where the mother and fetus are situated, albeit in an “indeterminable” and “unfixed” fashion. Moreover, I argue that the call for “reinscription” of the mother beyond the split between the “literal and the figural,” her materialization, is only the first step. And if the mother is reinscribed as a “site” or an “abyss” or an already assumed “interrelationship” between

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self and nonself that takes place inside her, it assumes that the mother is a space, albeit a special one. I agree that it is important to materialize and theorize the mother in philosophy and in science; I am concerned with the path to that materialization since the path we choose affects what we arrive at. I propose to further analyze what one might characterize as a problem in Plato’s formulation of space and matter as “irreducibly maternal” and his formulation of chora (and matrix) as “wet nurse.” I take up this question along with a call for the “materialization” of the mother in relation to our concepts of space and generation. What does it mean to be a “wet nurse of all generation”? Can we assume, as Plato does, that saying “wet nurse” immediately transforms the meanings of “wiping tears” and “rocking the cradle” (various meanings of chora-matrix-receptacle) into metaphors for leaving marks, receiving marks, and effecting without leaving any trace? So much so that the one who is wiping tears, who rocks the cradle, or carries another inside of herself is an abstraction of space as such. Considering this line of thought further requires us to take Plato and his followers to task for not deliberating more systematically about what makes the maternal so fundamental. Here, I argue, we need to consider the maternal not as fundamental by default, as something given or as something explained retrospectively because of our own birth or because we already exist. It is through thinking what the mother makes and does that we can finally start focusing on the generative and nursing practices of the matrix. The generativity and the nursing need to be reconnected, since they have been dissociated from each other in the popular imaginary of the matrix. The matrix as genetrix has been lost, giving space to a matrix “container” from which everything comes as though out of a receptacle. The aspect of nutrix has also been made secondary to the constitution of the matrix and denied any capacity for generativity—as if to nurse is not to generate. Thus I will attempt to reconnect nursing and generating as materially constitutive aspects of the matrixial/maternal. I pursue this by two main strategies. First, I problematize matrix as space, specifically, as a preexisting space. And, second, I complicate the view of the nursing element of the matrixial/maternal that understands it as a naturalized aspect of the feminine. At the outset it is useful to state that there is no space in the matrix. To put it simply, there is no space in the mother that is readily available and expectantly waiting to support generation. Space is what the matrixchora enables; it is produced by the accommodating work and hospitable

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acts of the matrixial/maternal. Generation does not happen ex nihilo, but through the nursing hospitality of the matrix. The space of generativity and the space of nursing are one and the same insofar as the acts that produce them are simultaneous and mutually reinforcing. Space and matter are produced together, and the design, which was previously thought to issue from without (in Plato and Aristotle: from a divine or male principle, soul, Form; for genetic determinists: from the genetic makeup), cannot be separated from the process of nutritive generation. There is no space in the womb, even if it is presented in embryological studies and research as always already empty and available. Anatomical images depict much more space in the womb than is actually available, almost as if they anticipate the fetus before it actually lodges itself in the womb. The womb does not have space except that which it makes by accommodating itself to the implanted embryo and its subsequent growth. The sticky association of the feminine with the maternal is what makes its complicity in the concept of “feminine generativity” problematic. Becoming mother implies the realization of a potentiality to make space and matter (not ex nihilo). The maternal, thus, needs to be thought in relation to space and matter rather than as space and matter, insofar as the failure to understand this difference conflates the categories of woman, feminine, and mother. In later chapters of this book, I propose that the imagined and technologically augmented potential of “other mothers”— ectogenetic machines (e.g., incubators) and pregnant males—is based on the misleading premise that the challenge of pregnancy and gestation is about “where” one hosts and nurses the child. If one argues that the feminine and the woman are more naturally related to and prepared for mothering than a man or a machine, since they possess a readily available space in the womb, then one mistakes the potentiality and unpredictability of generation and nursing. This position also naturalizes the acts of maternal hospitality, as I argue in the next chapter. The woman is not any more a space for generation and nursing than the man or the machine. The work of the matrixial/maternal is indeed the active making of space for and careful nourishment of the gestating child, tasks that one has to come to terms with long before gestation occurs and long after it ends. The essentializing rhetoric of constituting the feminine-womanmother as ready and able to gestate the child fails to acknowledge the highly specific and always-beginning-anew work of pregnancy and the acts of generating/nursing. And what exactly does it mean: “to be ready”?

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Materializing Hospitality

The matrix derives its philosophical, cultural, and scientific relevance more from what it “does/produces” than from what it “is” or is defined to be. Such an understanding helps us recognize in the current resurrections of the matrix through a variety of cultural and scientific discourses and practices what I have called a search for hospitable spaces. Hospitality has been presented in recent studies as either an intimate (private) or a communal (public) welcoming of strangers into one’s house or country or territory. Consequently, it has been viewed as the foundation of culture and ethics. Thus far, however, most conventional conceptions of hospitality have refrained from considering how hospitality implicates the maternal. I argue that insofar as hospitality does not account for or reckon with its unthought foundation, it remains ethically “impossible.” Therefore, the concept of hospitality needs to be radically renovated before its full implications for figuring the matrixial are explored.

Definitions of Hospitality Kant, Levinas, and, especially, Derrida have inspired and informed much of the contemporary discourse on hospitality in Western thought.

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Following these thinkers, hospitality is often defined in two distinct ways. First, it is defined in terms of the privacy of one’s home and the intimacy of self/being associated with this private realm of dwelling: one welcomes others into one’s home or into one’s being. These studies often target the questions of subject and identity formation from the perspective of what it means to welcome others and be welcomed oneself (including its spiritual correlates).1 Second, hospitality is defined as a communal, cultural, and public relation, associated with the public space of a people or nation—as a cultural, political, legal, and national issue—that is, how a self-identified sociality welcomes strangers, immigrants, and refugees into one’s country or territory.2 The second definition is usually presented as dependent on and derived from the first; that is, communal or national welcoming is predicated upon a universally applicable welcoming that is foundational to being human. For the most part, Kant, Levinas, and Derrida, as well as their followers, conceive hospitality as a universal concept. Judith Still summarizes this universal character: “Hospitality is a topic that has consistently been considered important over long periods of time, and over wide tracks of the globe. Our conviction of its universality is indeed critical to our understanding of its structure: hospitality is traditionally defined as universal (even the universal) human virtue” (2007:194). Such a position assumes that, even if it differs historically and geographically, hospitality is nevertheless a part of the human condition and might be defined as a human virtue, as a system of communal or spiritual relations, and even as “culture” itself.3 Immanuel Kant, who is usually credited with the elaboration of the modern Western conception of ethics and morality, judged nations according to their hospitality: the way they treated strangers in their lands. He also outlined a framework for international law and cosmopolitan ethics in which hospitality was one of its conceptual foundations. His famous definition of hospitality in the key text “Perpetual Peace” reads: “Hospitality signifies the claim of a stranger entering foreign territory to be treated by its owner without hostility” (2005 [1795]:17–18). This definition is important to our further discussion of the matrix as a hospitable space, as it contains three key elements that are constitutive of the Kantian definition of hospitality: ownership, territory, and strangeness-foreignness. The Kantian conception of hospitality is primarily grounded in his well-known presupposition that the propensity for war and hostility to one another are “natural” qualities of man. Therefore, to achieve a state of even temporary peace, men need to work on institutionalizing various

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ways to prevent them from killing each other. Thus, hospitality is a way of keeping the peace or a working out of hostilities. Such a definition, however, establishes the lowest common denominator of hospitality, that is, the absence of hostility to the stranger who enters one’s space, as the absolute measure of hospitality. I have argued elsewhere (2005) that this lowest common denominator of hospitality is more closely related to the Western concept of “tolerance”—of accepting the presence of the stranger in one’s own territory—than to the active welcoming that hospitality represents in its full complexity. This Kantian definition also seems to be derived from the perspective of ownership of private property—in fact, even from the perspective of the one who owns that property rather than the one who enters it from outside. The centrality of private property and related notions of ownership and territoriality are at the heart of European conceptions of hospitality, where one can enter the relation of hospitality after/because one owns and where that which is owned can be shared, given away, donated. The Kantian definition of hospitality has been important in two ways: first, it has had a profound impact on international law and, second, it has signaled a specific kind of development in the European approach to modern ethics. As both have been studied extensively, I will not discuss them here.4 However, it is noteworthy that the question of ownership has remained the most contradictory aspect of Kant’s and his followers’ conception of hospitality. For even as European hospitality purported to call for a cosmopolitan and sharing approach to “land” and “earth” among men based on the common humanity of being on earth, the relation of such acts of hospitality to claims and conventions of private property was not problematized. This Kantian definition of tolerance as hospitality, its demarcation of self and other, Me and Stranger, through the legal framework of ownership, remains, I suggest, the basis not only for philosophical and political relations with strangers but also for the scientific and biomedical approaches to the maternal and the matrixial. In developing his ideas on the possibility of peace between nations and peoples, Kant was obviously responding to his times. Levinas, deeply troubled by the events of the twentieth century in Europe, especially the Holocaust, was concerned with alternative ways of defining the “natural” state of men. Rejecting the Kantian presupposition that war and hostility represent the state of “nature,” Levinas radically proposed the precondition of welcoming and being welcomed by Others as the foundation for political and social life. Moreover, Levinas argued that hospitality

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precedes any hostility and that welcoming is prior to war insofar as the ethical call of the Other is constitutive of and precedes ontology (contra Heidegger). For Levinas, then, hospitality stands as a primary dimension of being always open toward others. This positioning of welcoming and hospitality as primary modalities of ethics enabled Levinas to create a more dependent and vulnerable vision of man, which was profoundly influenced by the Jewish tradition. Levinas found his inspiration in the Torah and its ideals of brotherhood and fraternity. However, Levinas turned these ideals toward an intimate welcoming in one’s own home. Levinas presented these arguments throughout his later writings, especially in the book Totality and Infinity (which Derrida called “a treatise on hospitality”): Welcome First of all, hospitality for Levinas is about welcoming. It can be a word of welcome, a welcoming smile, openness to the other, a smile at the threshold of the house, unconditional acceptance of the other. While such unconditional welcoming might seem essentially passive, passivity here is not counterposed to activity but rather presumes an openness to whatever and whoever is to come and thus a certain intentionality. Without being equated with “consciousness” or some “rationalized” tending toward a goal, intentionality, nevertheless, clarifies that hospitality is not an automatic state of man, happening by itself. Even though Levinas suggests that this welcoming quality in man inevitably comes from on high, I will argue that the hospitality of the matrix is imbued with intentionality insofar as it entails materializing hospitality through the maternal relations of generating and nursing. Receptivity Second, hospitality is about receptivity and the vulnerability associated with such receptivity. To surrender is to receive all, to be responsible for all. It is a radical passivity. This passivity is responsibility for the Other. It is being able to receive despite of all possibilities of hostility, to be “more passive than all passivity.” The owner becomes hostage in one’s own house, where he is being received; he is being welcomed there prior to linguistic communication based on this “nonvoluntary” receptivity (1996:121–22). Receptivity therefore is learned not through communication but through the experience of being received prior to linguistic communication. Discretion Third, hospitality demands discretion. Discretion is the manifestation and withdrawal of the face; it defines hospitality

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through focusing not on the host, on oneself, but on the guest. Being discreet but at the same time receptive means that welcoming should not be overbearing and that the host should not be selfish and at the center of hospitality. Thus, discreetness in rendering hospitality is about emphasizing You and not Me, in Levinasian terms. Intimacy Fourth, hospitality is also intimate. Hospitality is about comfort; it is about the serenity of being at home with oneself. Thus it is an absolute “defenselessness,” a conscious and enjoyable vulnerability of feeling in a total refuge. Recollection Fifth, hospitality is about memory as recollection, naming a particular feeling as that of being welcomed. The feeling of being at home with oneself necessarily refers to memory as recollection, and the naming of our feelings, our memories, is done in the language of the welcoming host, recalling the first act of hospitality toward oneself. Habitation Sixth, following from all previous formulations, hospitality is about habitation. This relation to habitation, to home, to the interiority of the house, is a reminder of the self’s relation to its own corporeality, since “there is not yet the ‘you’ of the face, but the ‘thou’ of familiarity”: “With familiarity, separation is constituted as dwelling and inhabitation. To exist henceforth means to dwell. . . . It is a recollection, a coming to oneself, a retreat home with oneself as in a land of asylum or refuge, which answers to a hospitality, an expectancy, a human welcome” (Levinas 1969:155–56). For Levinas, being hosted is about being inside but also about being wanted, welcomed. An exile, after that first experience of welcoming is long gone, recollects in a faraway land an intimate feeling of being “at home with oneself.” Although he is hosted and welcomed by that feeling, at the same time he is tormented by his need for and constant obsession with home, with dwelling (“to exist . . . means to dwell,” an almost Heideggerian voice speaking in Levinas). However, for Levinas, even if there is no home, the “feminine” will provide this feeling of dwelling, of habitation, as an internal core of the memory of hospitality.5 For Levinas, all these elements of hospitality are directed toward, come from, and manifest themselves to us through two main reference points: the feminine/woman and from the on high. These reference points correspond, respectively, to the privacy of the house and the community of people under God (not necessarily in a usual religious sense). The first, as woman, is an underlying entity (which can be inside a man as a feel-

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ing, a recollection), and the second is an overarching entity, coming from above, on high. On the woman, Levinas says: “the other whose presence is discreetly an absence, with which is accomplished the hospitable welcome par excellence which describes the field of intimacy, is the Woman. The woman is the condition for recollection, the interiority of the Home, and inhabitation” (1969:233). The use of spatial terms to indicate the function of the woman (field of intimacy, interiority of the home, presence as absence in the house) is worth noting here, as it will figure in my extended argument on the “missing” matrix and its connection to inhabitation and interiority. While the feminine/woman provides the foundation, the Other (from on high) allows the intimate to be translated into the “communalpolitical” and back to the intimate. Hospitality is one of the three foundational concepts of human community, as conceived by Levinas, the other two being humanity and fraternity. These are not, certainly, new foundations of community; for Kant, and many other thinkers of Abrahamic traditions, humanity and brotherhood/fraternity are staple notions, as Derrida, among others, critically noted. What is different though is that Levinas radicalized the Kantian approach by placing hospitality as a primary category, a primary relation, and explored, in addition to the Kantian concept of ownership, three more constituents of hospitality in greater detail: femininity, home, and God. While for Kant hospitality is an opening toward tolerance of temporary peace among men and nations, for Levinas hospitality is an opening toward one’s feeling of being “at home with oneself.” It is Derrida who tried to connect the two realms of the international and domestic by questioning both the previous thinkers’ conceptions through his aporia of hospitality. Derrida has come to represent the contemporary philosopher of hospitality, for whom at various points hospitality stands for culture, deconstruction, and a radical alternative to current European politics and its treatment of “Others”: ethnic minorities, immigrants, refugees, visitors, as well as women and animals. Inspired in many ways by Levinas’s writings on welcoming and by Jewish and Christian “stories of hospitality,” Derrida closely considers the weaknesses and strengths of the Kantian and Levinasian concepts of hospitality in his extensive writings. For Kant (1974, 2005), universal hospitality is a matter of not being hostile to one’s guest, provided the guest is well behaved. Insofar as the guest promises and maintains “good behavior” he can hope to receive the “right of temporary visitation” (today known to us as visa). Derrida (1999, 2001),

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though drawing from the Kantian definition, is also dissatisfied with it, especially in its application to “Others” in modern European culture. Derrida presents his turn to hospitality as a result of the urgency to respond to what is happening in what has come to be called “Fortress Europe.” Within this new political reality, tolerance is perceived as insufficient and even hypocritical.6 While a discussion of the conceptual distinctions between tolerance and hospitality is beyond the scope of this chapter (Aristarkhova 2005; Brown 2006; Borradori 2004), it is important to stress that hospitality is introduced in Derrida as a radical concept that offers alternative ways to treat others and therefore as a movement beyond tolerance.7 The central argument in Derrida’s conception is what he calls the “aporia of hospitality,” which has two main elements: one of owning and being empowered by that ownership and another of giving ownership away and being vulnerable. Derrida points out that etymologically the term hospitality is related to the notion of “hostility” since the root of the former, hospes, is allied to an earlier root of the latter, hostis, which interestingly meant both “stranger” and “enemy.” Thus, hospitality, as in hostilis (stranger/enemy) + potes ([having] power), originally meant the power the host has over the stranger/enemy.8 It is clear that the “host” is in a necessary position of power insofar as he circumscribes the parameters within which the needs and comforts of the stranger/enemy are attended to. In addition, the host’s “power over” the stranger, Derrida suggests, results from his ownership of the premises thus offered up. Because hospitality is dependent on ownership before it is offered to the other, Derrida argues, an essential tension is built into its structure: it is difficult to give to the other what you continue to own. The aporia for the giver is the tension of wanting to give but also of having to have what is given away, for it is having that makes the giving possible. Derrida says that this aporia, which could well paralyze any efforts at hosting the other, is exactly what needs to be worked through rather than be denied. In fact, hospitality is possible only when one resists this paralysis by moving toward what Derrida calls a “hospitality beyond hospitality,” wherein the very impossibility of a hospitality based on ownership as limit condition is pushed to/at the limits. According to Derrida, in having erected its possibilities on their very impossibility, hospitality, like deconstruction, is a to come (avenir). The aporia of hospitality to come is constituted by one’s inability to know entirely, or with certainty, its specific qualities; therefore hospitality is to be struggled with performatively.

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The terms of ownership create a contradiction, an impossibility of hospitality: how can one give away what one owns if one wants to continue to be hospitable, to give away?9 This contradiction is solved through and as acts of hospitality that confirm ownership of property (house, cow, wife, daughter, servants, slaves, things, body) even while questioning it. Therefore hospitality for Derrida and Levinas comes before any property: “Hospitality thus precedes property, and this will not be without consequence, as we will see, for the taking-place of the gift of the law, for the extremely enigmatic relationship between refuge and the Torah, the city of refuge, the land of asylum, Jerusalem, and the Sinai” (Derrida 1999:45). It is possible to argue, however, that the contradiction arises mainly because of the way in which ownership and property are defined: one owns a house in order to keep it, claim it, and protect it from others. This idea obscures other possibilities: that having something does not necessarily have to be defined in terms of defending it as one would defend a fortress, but can also be understood nonoppositionally, as a possibility of having something to be given away. What needs to be redefined, then, is the relation of private property, that will allow for a different, not so aporetic, conception of hospitality. Giving and having, or having and giving, are essentially opposed to each other only if property is assumed as a relation of private ownership and all other possibilities of having and giving remain unthought and therefore unacknowledged.10

Hospitality and Femininity There is general consensus that sexual difference plays a central role in current theories of hospitality: “whatever we might speak about later, and whatever we might say about it, we would do well to remember, even if silently, that this thought of welcome, there at the opening of ethics, is indeed marked by sexual difference” (Derrida 1999:44–45). This section presents and critiques the way in which hospitality has been tied to femininity and, drawing on the works of Luce Irigaray, denaturalizes this connection by reading this particular discourse of hospitality as a topological incorporation of the feminine.11 The connection between femininity and hospitality is often assumed as “natural” and “given” in many traditions and primary texts.12 Kant himself distinguished national characters according to their treatment of

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strangers: the “stronger” or “weaker” femininity of a nation could directly affect its hospitality. Thus he claimed that the French are a very hospitable nation because French nobility adopted “femininity” and “lady-like” qualities such as readiness to serve and please: “the language of ladies has become the language shared by all high society. It cannot be disputed at all that an inclination of such a nature must also have influence on the ready willingness in rendering services, helpful benevolence, and the gradual development of human kindness according to principle” (Kant 1974:228). Femininity itself is defined by these behavioral characteristics, which are at various points taken as natural, morally correct, or Godgiven traits. While we can see that definite benefits for the discourse of hospitality are produced by these appeals to femininity, it is rarely clear what the benefits are for women themselves or for alternative readings of hospitality. In Levinas and Derrida hospitality and femininity are so intimately connected that it is difficult to conceive any characteristic of hospitality that is not derived from a particular way in which they imagine femininity. And it is noteworthy that both thinkers primarily connect femininity to multiple spatial references: interiority, home, house, field, feeling at home inside oneself, and so on. Though Levinas and Derrida both refer to “feeling at home with oneself,” this feeling does not seem to be achieved by anything more than by being welcomed and spoken to with a smile, in a soft, passive voice. Practices of pregnancy, for example, or nursing, do not figure in these accounts of hospitality. If the femininity of hospitality is guaranteed without any food, water, bed, or touch, but only through a memory of that first welcoming smile from a wet nurse of all becoming—chora—then that hospitality is only recollection. And this leaves us wondering what this welcoming smile is made of; in short, what is the matter of femininity in/as hospitality? The rationale for this startling persistence of idealized and dematerialized femininity in definitions of hospitality, I suggest, is that femininity has been defined (from what Derrida calls “a masculine point of view”) as the foundation, or precondition, of any hospitality, thus rendering its materiality and empirical presence necessarily superfluous. The feminine provides Derrida with this “first” hospitality, insofar as she (it?) welcomes the (male) owner of the house even before any question of ownership is posed. Thus the male host is always already welcomed by an “interiority as femininity” that itself remains obscured:

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The home that founds possession is not a possession in the same sense as the movable goods it can collect and keep. It is possessed because it already and henceforth is hospitable for its owner. This refers us to its essential interiority, and to the inhabitant that inhabits it before every inhabitant, the welcoming one par excellence, welcoming in itself—the feminine being. (Levinas 1969:89) The home is not owned. Or at least it is owned, in a very singular sense of this word, only insofar as it is already hospitable to its owner. The head of the household, the master of the house, is already . . . a guest in his own home. This absolute precedence of the welcoming . . . would be precisely the femininity of “Woman,” interiority as femininity—and as “feminine alterity.” (Derrida 1999:42–43) Thus, even while asserting this preoriginary and foundational status of the femininity in/of hospitality, both Levinas and Derrida define this “feminine being” or “feminine alterity” as having nothing to do with empirical women.13 We face here the same logic that was discussed in the previous chapter in relation to the definition of matrix/chora. That is, the actual presence of a woman in a given house does not determine or undermine the feminine essence of hospitality. In other words, it is essentially feminine. It is interesting that Derrida even asserts that he is pointing out this “masculine point of view” on hospitality not to question the framework itself but to read an “androcentric hyperbole and a feminist one” together. Derrida suggests that this foundational status of femininity should lead one to “a sort of feminist manifesto” that (supposedly) explores the implications of this conception: For this text defines the welcome par excellence, the welcome or welcoming of absolute, absolutely originary, or even pre-originary hospitality, nothing less than the pre-ethical origin of ethics, on the basis of femininity. That gesture reaches a depth of essential or meta-empirical radicality that takes sexual difference into account in an ethics emancipated from ontology. It confers the opening of the welcome upon the “feminine being” and not upon the fact of empirical women. The welcome, the anarchic origin of ethics, belongs to “the dimension of femininity” and not to the empirical presence of a human being of the “feminine sex.” (Derrida 1999:44)

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Clearly, while Derrida is uncomfortable with certain ways in which Levinas employs the feminine/Woman, as well as with concepts of fraternity and brotherhood (1999:67), he too positions the idealized feminine at the center of hospitality, as if there was no other way of defining hospitality. Their continual return to mine the feminine to explain hospitality, while undermining the empirical implications of this move, is indeed what makes my current project that much more urgent insofar as I seek to explore (or, more accurately, reclaim) hospitality as a feminist concept. In this light it is strangely prophetic that Derrida conceived of his positioning of femininity in hospitality as, in his words, a “feminist” gesture. However, the problem of presenting femininity as located inside a man or a house or as magically explaining any kind of hospitable relation while itself remaining nonmaterial and nonempirical continues to obscure the materiality of actual women and therefore their acts of hospitality. And even while femininity and the woman as host(ess) are being deempiricized, the male host is clearly part of the ontological vocabulary: he is in place, in the space of his home, he is there, not as a “dimension of masculinity” or “masculine being” but as the master of the house, with his empirical presence of the human being of “the masculine sex.” Ironically, Derrida’s position raises a question about the “empirical” status of the male host, since he, the master of the house, is the one who himself is welcomed in his own home by this “dimension of femininity.” What is his role in hospitality? And what is this “feminine sex” of a human being? Levinas and Derrida open up the discourse of hospitality as founded on sexual difference. The next step requires that we keep it open and welcoming to those who are implicated in its founding. It is useful at this point to also note that some of the terms Levinas proposes—passivity beyond passivity, interiority, intimacy, discreetness, and so on—draw parallels to the Platonic universal receptacle, chora: a perfect receptacle, a wet nurse, a third kind. Why is the precondition of hospitality called the feminine at all? If ethics and hospitality are possible only on the basis of femininity, what, then, we might ask, is the basis of this femininity? It appears that femininity is still defined through Kantian ideas about “lady-like language”: “the ready willingness in rendering services, helpful benevolence, and the gradual development of human kindness according to principles” (Kant 1974:228). Acts of hospitality are unaccounted for, or even denied existence, since it is difficult to imagine how this nonempirical “dimension of femininity” can cook, clean, and

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make a bed. However, these acts of hospitality are the ones that count in “cities of refuge.” Diprose, in her study on generosity, questions this “ethics emancipated from ontology.” If ethics is primary to social justice and politics, there is a danger of excluding what Diprose calls “corporeal generosity” from the discussion on giving: “if ethical openness to the other is prior to the political as a passive, unconditional generosity, and if the political is a repression of the ethical relation, as Levinas sometimes suggests, so that every perception, action, and judgment is equally a closure to the other that provokes it, then it is difficult to envisage how transformation of meaning and therefore of the social could occur in such a way as to remain open to other ways of being” (Diprose 2002:185–86). Femininity coincides with welcoming to the point of becoming an impotent tautology: femininity is feminine because it welcomes, and it welcomes because it is feminine. And it is toward an alternative to this tautology that we will move next. A key aspect of hospitality, its aporetic quality of needing to negotiate giving while owning, is very differently conceivable for the feminine vis-àvis the masculine, insofar as they have very different relations and claims to ownership. In the case of the feminine/woman (whether conceived in terms of metaphors and/or functions within this hospitality structure), it is crucial to frame the questions, not in terms of how to give what one owns (the master of the house) or how to simultaneously have and give at the same time (as Derrida does in identifying the aporetic condition of hospitality) but, rather, in terms of how to give without giving, how and what to give when one owns nothing oneself. As ancient stories of hospitality tell us, many of which Derrida and others recite, women do not themselves own anything (they do not even own their very selves, for that matter), and therefore they cannot, supposedly, give themselves in any form that could be described as hospitality; as Irigaray describes it, “gift gives itself” (1999:93).14 Thus, according to the traditional structures and rites of hospitality, the feminine/woman cannot be either an acknowledged giver or a receiver of hospitality (Jamison 1995). Although we can celebrate this in-between, mobile, and shifting status of femininity as potentially liberating or subversive, we cannot ignore that this very femininity as constitutive metaphor is effectively employed to exclude women and their acts of hospitality. If ancient stories of hospitality teach us anything, it is that its foundation needs to be rethought, as Derrida himself acknowledges, specifically when the other is not welcomed as other but only as the founding term of a system that instanti-

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ates its own exclusion. This is not a question of a simple restoration of the same ownership to this “feminine” that the male owner of the house has. After all, he owns and hosts because of her dispossession. He relies on her not owning or, at least, not claiming the house. He relies on her discretion and passivity, which he recollects and values more than anything else. She is the reason he “feel[s] at home with [him]self,” even if he does not answer the question of her foundation/donation and her feeling at home with herself. The cost to the “feminine” is high: “The (female) other is nothing more than the assimilation of the mourning of the other” (Irigaray 1999:23–24). The issue at stake here, however, is not simply the cost to the woman, who needs to uphold the system while secretly acknowledging, as many thinkers tell us, how important she is, being this Gestell, envelope—“the feminine”—that frames and feeds the philosophical system. The issue is that according to this system she cannot know. Her knowledge would contradict the position of the feminine function in hospitality relations; it would suggest too closely the lives of “empirical women.” The game should be played by both: the feminine and the master of the house. This “feminine alterity,” “feminine being,” that (who?) is ephemeral and omnipotent, passive and fundamental, silent and human, metaphorical and generative, all at the same time, has to accept whatever happens to her: “If the at home with oneself of the dwelling is an ‘at home with oneself as in a land of asylum and refuge,’ this would mean that the inhabitant also dwells there as a refugee or an exile, a guest and not a proprietor. That is the humanism of this ‘feminine alterity,’ the humanism of the other woman, of the other (as) woman. If woman, in the silence of her ‘feminine being,’ is not a man, she remains human” (Derrida 1999:37). This nonempirical feminine, haunted by the maternal imaginary, nevertheless leads us to questions of community, to legal, ethical, and transcendental dimensions. She silently prepares the ground for hospitality between men, only to pretend to disappear (even from the sciences of generation, as discussed in the next chapter). The platform for this disappearance, however, remains this idealism of philosophical language that manages to ignore thinking through that which supports it and gives it life. That bloodless, effortless hospitality of the passive, ephemeral welcoming smile that Levinas and Derrida imagine is where the feminine resides; hospitality/the feminine never says “no” and has no language or thought of her own. The endless insistence on her to remain silent, to be discreet, to understand without words, to welcome effortlessly, to almost

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become one with the walls of the house, with interiority, problematizes the possibility of hospitality, because this stance remains allergic and hostile to sexual difference even as sexual difference is praised limitlessly. Thus, Derrida’s aporetic argument, after Levinas, that “hospitality precedes property” is based on a sexual division of ownership, where the hospitality of the feminine is defined as an involuntary, automatic quality, independent from any acts of hospitality. More important, the feminine does not own anything because it cannot own anything. The term, the metaphor, the function of the feminine cannot own property. Following Derrida’s analysis, then, if one does not own, one cannot give away, in any imperfect and impure act of hospitality. And if there is no act of hospitality, then there can be no acknowledgment of the feminine as a producer of hospitality.15 Masculine, fraternal hospitality, on the other hand, is defined in terms of ownership, which necessarily “contaminates” the pure hospitality of the preproperty relation. This contamination, however, is conceived to be necessary for acts of hospitality to occur. The contradiction or aporia of the impossibility of hospitality is resolved performatively, if only temporarily, in the act itself. This resolution is based on sexual difference and a simultaneously instantiated communal relation (for both Levinas and Derrida): feminine hospitality precedes property and establishes the precondition for dealing with the contradiction so that the masculine “gift of the law” can resolve this contradiction on earth by providing refuge to strangers and, on high, in the community under God(s). Thus this analysis of the feminine as the foundation of hospitality not only reveals the “masculine” (as Derrida acknowledged) point of view of current theories of hospitality but also opens a space for examining what constitutes the empirical specificities of this femininity.

Hospitality and the Matrixial/Maternal Relation The aforementioned equation between femininity and interiority/house/home rests on an underlying confusion of the feminine and the maternal in Levinas and Derrida.16 But rather than simply disconnecting them and arguing that the feminine has nothing to do with the maternal, and despite the risk of essentialism that thinking through the matrixial/ maternal might bring into the discourse on hospitality, I seek to focus on and recover the maternal that has been there, in the feminine and

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in the house, all along. Thinking through the matrixial/maternal unveils the eternal possibility of hospitality as always already here. It challenges Derrida’s status of hospitality as “always to come,” as a future-oriented, not-yet-possible ethic as well as always an impure, conditional, and, therefore, contaminated hospitality. Here I question accounts of the maternal relation that are based on a one-way and essential giving as passive and involuntary and argue instead that, with all its ambivalence and various possibilities, the maternal relation needs to be refigured as an act of hospitality. My analysis is inspired by feminist thinkers of the last decades who have risked charges of essentialism, reductionism, separatism, or obsolescence as they continued to welcome the mother into philosophy. Longing for the Other who comes, preparing for this event, but always being taken by surprise when this coming actually occurs and the guest enters the house or crosses the border of one’s territory—all this highlights the intentional, highly involved, and proactive character of hospitality. Hosting is a culturally organized way of relating to others, and there is little about it that happens by itself. It is especially important and radical exactly because it is difficult and takes effort and time.17 Levinas and Derrida seem to be systematically unaware of and unable (and, one assumes in good faith, not unwilling) to acknowledge the matrixial/maternal as a foundation for their thinking on hospitality, even when their language and the logic of their arguments tend toward it (Irigaray 1993b; Oliver 1997a, 1998). It is possible to claim that the contemporary vocabulary and structure of hospitality are based on the matrixial/ maternal relation as its founding model. When Levinas refers to the He “in the depth of the You” as the third person, it can be both read as an acknowledgment of the maternal body or as its philosophical appropriation: “The desirable is intangible and separates itself from the relationship with Desire which it calls for; through this separation and holiness it remains a third person, the he in the depth of the You” (Levinas 1996:141).18 Levinas and Derrida structure their discourse on hospitality on femininity/Woman, her openness, her ability to expect and welcome unconditionally. However, just as intentionality and mutual agency are integral elements of their structure of hospitality as they progress, this cycle, although starting with the feminine/woman and being born with her, does not include feminine agency. The maternal, confused with and metaphorically replaced by the feminine, gives matter to hospitality, makes it possible, produces its interiority and exteriority, but has no empirical place or role in hospitality. This might be because the maternal is dis-

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turbing, but only “for one who does not name his sources, who silences the mediating moments of his thought, who, too single-mindedly, wants to make ‘man-ness’ for himself so as to build the material world and to make it flourish” (Irigaray 1999:11). In the absence of a clearly developed concept of how the maternal figures as a constitutive element of hospitality, the whole discourse becomes entangled and engulfed in the matrix as an abyss, as a kind of invisible glue that holds the elements of hospitality together: passivity, discreetness, equation of femininity and interiority, and hospitality as expectancy.19 I have demonstrated here that the “man-made” characteristic of hospitality rests on its treatment of “the maternal.” The question now is how to start thinking hospitality more explicitly through the maternal, to determine what it would take to be able to acknowledge it as a relation and not as a schema, a formula, for any discourse on hospitality.20 The strategy that I pursue here is to disarticulate the dematerialized concepts of the maternal, matrixial, and feminine from the discourse of hospitality so that they can be rearticulated in relation to the acts of matrixial/maternal hospitality. When the maternal in the matrix is replaced by terms that deny it its agency, language takes over the whole space of becoming. In Irigaray’s words, “Matrix [womb] of words/lyrics that forever distances him from she who brought the day to light, matrix [womb] in which she no longer knows or recognizes herself, where she has disappeared into a protective surrounding where ‘brothers’ reply to each other in one same tone. With no contradiction coming from a female other whose voice would be different” (1999:140).21 Before this “voice” can be inserted, the issue of the maternal as the unthought of hospitality needs to be discussed further. This is not just another problem of recognizing the place of the maternal; it is a problem of the maternal being out of place in hospitality as such. The maternal and hospitality have been so entangled that any connection is either feared or presumed uncritically, which means that it remains unthought. How else can we explain the reappearance of the feminine whenever questions of interiority, habitation/ dwelling, or home are raised? The question here is whether it would be more productive to orient the fundamental connection made between hospitality and femininity toward the matrixial/maternal relation as a specific and empirical instantiation of this femininity, which thus far has been deployed only as a metaphor. The maternal, in fact, already serves as a model for hospitality. The connection to the first home, the home of the matrix, the place of

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an original welcoming and hosting, will allow hospitality to be embodied as an act, to reconnect it and reactualize it. The matrix makes hospitality possible exactly contrary to those terms that Derrida and Levinas assign to idealized femininity: the matrix and the maternal relation sustain life through/as the specific acts of hospitality performed by so-called empirical women. These acts of hospitality reactivate and empirically instantiate this “welcome or welcoming of absolute, absolutely originary, or even pre-originary hospitality, nothing less than the pre-ethical origin of ethics” that Derrida promises but never associates with the maternal (1999:44). It is the matrixial and the maternal that embody hospitality even before the hosted one, the master of the house, can articulate it; but just because the one who is hosted does not know about it does not mean that the maternal relation, as “absolutely originary, or even pre-originary hospitality,” is outside community and agency. A simple statement of the fact that we need to be born before we can think is not yet enough to account for the veracity of maternal hospitality, because it requires a more significant reorientation of hospitality toward the maternal. This reorientation requires us to critically reevaluate the “preoriginary” (Derrida 1999:44) hospitality of femininity on the basis of the maternal acts. If it is only the host, the master of the house, who is “ontological” in this moment of preoriginary hospitality, then there is no place for hospitality as a relation. If the feminine is just a term and the host is a man, there is no hospitality, be it discursive or actual. Thus, if hospitality is not to be aborted at its conception, it needs to be actualized at least as a possibility. The matrix, injected into hospitality, restores it as potentiality, since this first home, where one is welcomed unconditionally, is not always “to come” but is always already here and can be acknowledged for its constitutive influence on the ethic of hospitality. The burden of hospitality is shared between the two partners rather than placed socially and spiritually on the “master of the house” while woman is dissolved in femininity only as a welcoming nothingness. Hospitality is a radical relation, especially when compared with tolerance, because it provides a framework to account for the treatment of others with limitless attention and expectation and because it entails an active gesture of welcoming, greeting, sheltering, and, in many cases, nourishing. A mere acknowledgment of the matrixial/maternal through a welcoming smile as an essential naturalization or metaphorical neutralization of the feminine hospitality does not do justice to matrixial/maternal hospitality as a Derridean radical relation, with its limitless attention,

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expectation, and active gestures of welcoming. One prepares oneself, as Derrida and Levinas write, even before there is a call or a need; one is always expecting, even though the arrival of the guest is always unexpected. The moment of coming, as the moment of birthing, is not the end of hospitality but rather one of its many instantiations. The generational, productive character of hospitality opens up language to reactualize the matrix, reconnect it with the womb, with pregnancy, with generation and nourishment of life, with the mother and matter, “material-matrixial” (Irigaray 1983, 1999, also see introduction, note 1). Home does not stop being home even after a guest is long gone. The work of hospitality continues, as it sustains and nourishes both the host and the hosted. If it fails, both might die. It is Levinas who stressed, and this is crucial for reactualizing the matrix, that hospitality is about intentionality; it is a proactive waiting, a preparation, expectation and expectancy. This notion of expectancy and the intentionality and preparation that issue from it complicate the reduction of the matrix to a passive container that merely provides space for generation.22 Indeed, if hospitality is performative, it is about the work of hospitality: its decision making, its labor, and its handling of unexpected outcomes. The supposed passivity of the maternal relation that is often employed to marginalize the role of the matrixial/maternal needs to be understood as requiring “work,” as a way of letting the other be, become, breathe. This passivity, which is beyond passivity, as Levinas demands, cannot simply imply inactivity or appeal to some “natural” passivity of the feminine. When positioning the matrix as a hospitable space, passivity is rendered as another intentional gesture of hospitality, as willingness to contain and to produce space for the other out of one’s own flesh and blood or to provide one’s own flesh and blood through the acts/labor of hospitality. It is the possibility of hospitality that the matrix delivers. If one assimilates maternal flesh and blood in the matrix only to forget her, he still remains her. As Irigaray states, “she who has become man, through that assimilation of her to him that made him living . . . she has always already become him, without any demonstration” (1999:44). Whereas for many authors the maternal seems to be primarily a relation of giving,23 and it is an important gesture in the articulation of the maternal hosting, I argue that positioning it as a relation of hospitality means acknowledging that the matrixial/maternal not only receives (her guest) but is also hosted herself, when she is “at home with herself” in her maternal relation. She should be hosted first, and not only host. She should be hosted

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in order to be able to host. Hospitality requires both giving and receiving, and it is important to note that there is more to this relation than the mother’s receipt of the rejected waste from the guest of the matrix. Thus, positioning the matrix as a hospitable space also means reconsidering the gifts of that relationship, their sources, and their possibilities. Conceived thus as a hospitality relation, she, the mother, also takes and does not only give. Certainly, there is a further question here about where she takes from and what: after all, she is not a closed system, and maternal hosting is not the only hosting that she knows and does. While saying that “she gives, he takes” is employed by some, like Irigaray, as a strategic gesture that validates her agency and participation in this relation, a framing of this relation as one of hospitality complicates both the insistence on the division between Her and non-Her and the collapse of her into “one” self, as if there is no difference between the maternal relation and other modalities of subjectivity. The distinction between Me and non-Me as opposed and unrelated entities cannot be framed effectively in the matrix (or, for that matter, in any other case), but that does not mean that they are one and the same or fused forever indistinguishably. Hospitality, like any relation, requires at least two, along with the requisite durational and spatial dimensions of the process: matter, expectancy, habitation, and generation. The connection between the matrix and hospitality can be neither simply dismissed nor any longer left unthought. The lack of thinking through this connection is symptomatic, however, of the need for a shift in our approaches to understanding the maternal body as a site and a model for conceptualizing all types of social relation: be they hostile or hospitable, welcoming or tolerating. Reading the maternal with hospitality is by no means the most “natural” thing to do.24 The fear of invoking the maternal in discussions on hospitality seems to come from at least two sources: first, the fear of essentializing hospitality and equating it with the maternal, which is a legitimate feminist concern;25 second, the fear of losing the paradigm and foundation on which current discussions of hospitality are built. In both these positions, the problem seems to have been resolved by not addressing the maternal at all and invoking femininity as a metaphorical placeholder for the maternal.26 Here I am laying the foundation for the next chapter’s discussion of the “immunological paradox” of pregnancy and its radical reinterpretation in terms of hospitality. It is important to note that neither in this chapter nor in subsequent chapters do I attempt to

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equalize or homogenize all acts of hospitality. I am also not proposing that any relation is only a relation of hospitality, especially the maternal one. But since I consider the concept of hospitality to have a very powerful potential for alternative understandings of concepts of self and other (in philosophy, biomedicine, and art), I am proposing that we consider the maternal relation first in these philosophical terms. For feminists, leaving the maternal purposefully out of discussions on hospitality does not necessarily provide the maternal or hospitality with a more nonessentialized or less stereotyped meaning. For thinkers like Levinas and Derrida, who try to imagine a more positive paradigm for the relation to others, including immigrants and refugees, in post-Holocaust Europe, it ironically ends up making them begin their deliberations with an inhospitable gesture toward the matrixial/maternal that denies it any place and acknowledgment within hospitality. The matrix radicalizes hospitality as a possibility also because it presents a case of unconditional hospitality beyond the usual appeals to selfsacrifice and self-annihilation. This moment of sacrifice, which is demanded as the only meaning of the maternal, is questioned when the matrix is welcomed in its full potential, as representing both the interiority of the home and the exteriority of connection to the community. Hospitality as it has been conceived thus far is theoretically arrested by its own aporia of impossibility. If these theories of hospitality can be turned toward the matrixial and can welcome the matrix/mother in all her acts of hospitality, there is hope that discourses and practices of hospitality can live up to their potential of creating a shift in our approach to ethics, as Levinas and Derrida envisioned.

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3

The Matter of the Matrix in Biomedicine

This chapter examines biomedical notions of the matrixial/maternal with a particular focus on reproductive immunology and its study of the so-called maternal-fetal interface, namely, the placenta and fetal membranes that connect the maternal and embryonic/fetal tissues. I focus on reproductive immunology for three main reasons. First, this field has most carefully and recently studied pregnancy as a relation between maternal and embryonic tissues, with increasing attention given to the maternal aspects of embryonic development. Second, the immunological discourse on the nature of the relation between the maternal and the embryonic has been formative of and informed by biomedical discourses on how an organism relates to other organisms and to its environment. Third, while contemporary immunological theorists are trying to move beyond the historically adopted Kantian terminology of hostility and tolerance (discussed in the previous chapter), the immunological discourse of the “body at war” has become part of popular culture and now often shapes the way we think of who we are as embodied selves.1 Instead of playing a conceptual “catchup game” with immunologists and biologists as they borrow less “hostile” terminology to account for each piece of new evidence in the study of the maternal-fetal interface, I propose that we approach this matter more systematically and situate

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what we see as the “new” contextually. We need a wider dialogue on how one imagines the maternal relation between self and other, how this relation is achieved, and why the previous immunological vision of the body does not work in contemporary research. The concept of hospitality, as accommodation and expectancy/expectation, better addresses and resolves the current crisis of such hostility/tolerance paradigms in reproductive immunology. It is, thus, extremely useful in the search for and development of this new paradigm where the matrix is reconceived not as a preexisting space of and for generation but rather as one that produces, in that it supports generation as a welcoming expectancy of the other.

The Maternal-Fetal Interface The Maternal Role in Generation: An Embryological/ Philosophical Preamble If there is one discipline in the history of science that has influenced the way in which biomedical researchers think about generation today, and especially about the maternal role in generation and development, it is embryology.2 Given the excellent historical and theoretical research in this area, including critical perspectives that focus on issues of race, gender, class, disability, and sexuality as they play out in the history of ideas and practices of generation, my interest will be specific. I will present only those interpretations of this long history of research and scholarship on generation that directly relate to my larger argument on the connection between conceptions of the matrix in philosophy and biomedicine and where these conceptions stand in relation to the mother and her role in generation. In 1970 Frederick B. Churchill, a prominent historian of science, wrote a review essay of five publications on the history of generation sciences and embryology titled “The History of Embryology as Intellectual History.” His selection of books to review included what were to become classic works in the history of embryological science such as Elizabeth Gasking’s Investigations Into Generation: 1651–1828 (1966) and Jane M. Oppenheimer’s Essays in the History of Embryology and Biology (1967). Churchill used his review of these fine works as an opportunity to reflect on the place of embryology in the history of ideas, especially in the Western scientific tradition. His review essay is worth closer attention because

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it outlines the legacy of the study of generation in its various permutations and articulates (or fails to) the matrixial/maternal relation of hospitality within this legacy. Churchill noticed a curious connection between philosophy and embryology: every major historical figure who studied generation has had an important place in the history of philosophy, including exemplars like Plato and Aristotle, for one who “ponders” philosophical questions like “What is life?” “Where do we come from?” and “Who/what makes us?” is also inevitably led back to the more embryological aspects of these questions. In Churchill’s words, “the study of generation does, in fact, encompass the sciences of Life. It is the study of the origin of form, the meaning of vitality, the distinction between the inert and the animate, and the manner and moment of the appearance of the soul, as well as the more obvious questions, such as the possibility of spontaneous generation, the significance of monstrous births and hybrids, the definition of species, and the coming-to-be of diversity” (1970:157). Churchill claimed that an ambivalent relation eventually developed between the “biological technicalities” of embryological study and the philosophical concerns that once influenced the scope of embryology as a discipline and the questions it asked. Through careful study of the literature, Churchill showed that, along with increased possibilities for anatomical study enabled by more advanced tools and techniques, the aspirations of the scientists and, most important, what they were looking for changed. Indeed, many embryologists tried to avoid philosophical questions on generation altogether, as if attention to their “empirical” work was sufficient. It is not surprising therefore that Joseph Needham concluded his fascinating book A History of Embryology by bemoaning the discipline’s lack of a metatheoretical umbrella for the various branches of embryology, which reduced the discipline to pure observation and experiment-based research, specializing endlessly without any “single unifying hypothesis” (Needham 1975 [1959]:240). Others, however, saw in this diversity of intellectual positions, or even the refusal to take a position, not a meaningless relativism of information collection but a reflection of the so-called natural diversity that scientists study and that cannot be subsumed under one unifying hypothesis (Keller 2002, 20010).3 We might therefore disagree with Needham about the benefit of having a unifying theoretical umbrella. His own desire to have such an umbrella of “mathematico-logical nature” (1975 [1959]:240) reflects an ancient philosophical commitment to “decipher Life” by means of pure logic, where

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natural laws should be expressed in a formal language that explains “matter” idealistically.4 Embryology, until very recently, has dealt with only one part of generation, with the “embryo.” However, the etymological meaning of embryo as a “swelling inside,” a growth inside, forces one to ask “inside what/ whom”?5 One contemporary response to this question is to claim that this “inside” is the “Fetal Matrix” (Gluckman and Hanson 2005), yet again materializing generation in terms of the fetus while dematerializing the maternal body. This dematerialization of the mother in biomedical ideas on life and generation has been particularly stark in relation to the continuing challenges of explaining the form and development of an organism in relation to its environment—that is, of directly addressing the question of “where” generation happens and what impact, if any, it has on development. This dematerialization should not be misunderstood as a simple case of denial of maternal matter; rather, it is a question of marginalizing the maternal role in generation. The mother’s “disappearance” from the study of generation has been well documented in feminist theory of science, medicine, and technology, particularly embryology, gynecology, and, most recently, biomedical sciences and reproductive technologies.6 This disappearance has at least two aspects: the political and social aspect, where the denial of the significance of the maternal body/role forms the basis for denying the mother as a citizen that does not “matter” legally, politically, socially, economically, and a philosophical-scientific aspect, where science and philosophy systematically treat the maternal body as a mere receptacle in generation by emphasizing instead the primacy of the soul and form, themselves coded as paternal/masculine elements, in the formation of the embryo. Joseph Needham, as early as 1934 (the year  the first edition of History of Embryology was published), connected these two aspects when he proposed that scientific and political claims are intertwined: “the physical denial of maternity” corresponding to patriarchy, and denial of paternity corresponding to matriarchy (1975 [1959]:43–46). Needham traced this tendency in our own patriarchal system from ancient texts on embryology, such as the foundational Aristotelian text On the Generation of Animals, to nineteenth-century embryology.7 The views of Aristotle are particularly telling, since he seems to acknowledge the maternal input of matter in generation while at the same time denying matter any significance as such, following Plato’s emphasis on form over matter. The mother contributes “matter,” as material to/for the

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embryo, as well as “provides a receptacle”; she contributes “the material” (which still needs) to be “worked upon” (Aristotle 2004:25). If she contributes matter and space, then what does the male contribute? For Aristotle, the male contributes the very reason/cause of generation: “for there must need be that which generates and that from which it generates: even if these be one, still they must be distinct in form and their essence must be different” (2004:30). And since Aristotle does not question what the nature of this difference is (passive female and active male), he goes so far as to argue: “It is plain then that it is not necessary that anything at all should come away from the male [materially], and if anything does come away it does not follow that which gives rise to the embryo as being in the embryo [matter, understood as blood, nourishment, etc.], but only as that which imparts the motion and the form . . . architecture is in the buildings it makes” (2004:33). What could be more simple, asks Aristotle, than to understand that, of course, the male has no “primitive matter” to contribute, since he is an architect, while the female is the brick/clay? For Aristotle, the carpenter does not contribute timber or the potter clay, but it is he who is the maker of the furniture and the pots, not the trees and the clay. “Because the female is the material from which is made the resulting product. Not only must the mass of material exist there from which the embryo is formed in the first instance, but further material must constantly be added that it may increase in size. Therefore the birth must take place in the female” (33). The point is not whether mother/ matter is present, or required, for generation and life, but that it is “only” matter, while “form” matters much more, as design, as (genetic?) code, as a reason/cause of development. Aristotle dismisses the possibility that “that which generates [the embryo] and that from which it generates” might be one and the same—the mother; and this indeed requires a reconsideration of the “passive-active” aporia. Needham presents the following quotation from 1805 as the “most illuminating” in summing up the physical denial of maternity in the history of science and medicine: “Every naturalist, and indeed every man who pretended to the smallest portion of medical science, was convinced that his children were no more related, in point of actual generation, to his own wife, than they were to his neighbors” (Good, quoted in Needham 1975 [1959]:46), a view that obviously derives from and resonates with Aristotle’s.8 The growing popularity of the matrix as a concept in reproductive biomedicine corresponds, I would suggest, to this desire to bridge the Aristotelian divide between “where” and “how” generation occurs, evok-

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ing, in turn, the maternal as that which holds together, in one concept, both the generator and the place of generation (what generates and where generation takes place). In the twentieth century there have been several attempts to overcome the Aristotelian legacy with regard to what moves/ acts and what is moved and acted upon in generation and development. In the next sections these efforts from immunological and immunologyrelated fields, which have taken at least two forms, will be examined. First is the attempt to include the so-called maternal effects in generation and development as not only “indifferent” or “hostile” to the embryo but also “beneficial and nourishing.” The second involves a reconsideration and reformulation of the relation between the “environment” and an “organism” as a whole, as it is presented in contemporary immunological thought as well as attempts to synthesize evolutionary and developmental theories into the discipline of evo-devo.

Medawar’s Immunological Paradox of Pregnancy and the Maternal Effects on Development During the twentieth century, several researchers proposed that embryonic development and pregnancy are crucial to deciphering many other biological processes in the body insofar as they exemplify the basic operational elements of these processes. With the increased focus on pregnancy, and, therefore, the role of the mother in embryonic development, it almost seemed as if no one could argue seriously anymore that a mother was not more related to her child in matters of “actual generation” than her neighbor.9 And even if there were diverse views about the specific ways in which the mother’s body figured in embryonic development, there was little doubt that she had a role and that there was some type of relationship between fetus and mother. In this section, I focus on a particular framing of this maternal-fetal relationship, specifically, the “immunological paradox of pregnancy” proposed by Peter Medawar, which implies that the relationship is necessarily one of hostility and that pregnancy itself is a paradoxical event insofar as it happens in spite of the fundamental immunological tensions that make it almost impossible. In 1953 Medawar published a rather obscure (or so it seemed at first) article, “Some Immunological and Endocrinological Problems Raised by the Evolution of Viviparity in Vertebrates,” in a volume devoted to evolution. His research team also published their major study of immunologi-

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cal tolerance that same year (for which he and his collaborators received a Nobel Prize in 1962), an important concept for tissue transplantation. Medawar’s conception of pregnancy as “immunological paradox” has become, arguably, as influential (in the subsequent development of immunology) as his tissue transplantation research. As a result of this 1953 article Medawar is widely considered to be the “father” of a growing and important field of reproductive immunology, and his formulation of the maternal-fetal interface has framed contemporary immunological discussions (Billington 2003). Medawar focused on the evolution of viviparity vis-à-vis oviparity. Viviparity involves embryonic development inside the mother, while in oviparity development occurs outside the body in an egg. Human viviparity is placental (i.e., mother and fetus are connected through placenta and fetal membranes); placental viviparity is very rare in the animal kingdom. In fact, human viviparity is the most “fused” of mammalian pregnancies, since the embryo buries itself inside the maternal uterine wall and grows from the depth of her tissue, within the wall, rather than next to it, within the uterine cavity. Thus from the very beginning the “architecture” of human pregnancy is unique because of the proximity, intimacy, and dependency between fetus and mother—or so it seemed.10 Medawar, however, had a totally different take on this “intimacy.” Rather than seeing maternal-fetal proximity as a positive development (after all, humanity in general has had no problems with generating more humans thus far), Medawar considered pregnancy to be a grave evolutionary mistake (from the embryo’s point of view). He chose instead to emphasize viviparity as constituting an evolutionary division between the mother and her embryo. Drawing on hormonal evolutionary development, Medawar considered its “unmistakable” direction “towards a complete endocrinological self-sufficiency of the foetus and its membranes—in short, towards the evolution of a self-maintaining system enjoying the highest possible degree of independence of its environment” (1953:324).11 Central to this notion of endocrinological self-sufficiency is a related conceptualization of the fetus as an allograft. The term allograft essentially constituted the fetus as something foreign (allo meaning “foreign” and “other”) and grafted (cut into, connected, and growing out of; like a shoot inserted into another plant) into the maternal body. Drawing on his work in the immunology of transplantation, Medawar chose to conceive of the “body at war” with foreign elements, as protecting itself from nonselves, an idea that was gaining currency at the time.12

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For Medawar, “the immunological problem of pregnancy may be formulated thus: how does the pregnant mother contrive to nourish within itself, for many weeks or months, a foetus that is an antigenically foreign body?” (1953:324). He offered the following three hypotheses: “(a) the anatomical separation of foetus from mother; (b) the antigenic immaturity of the foetus; and (c) the immunological indolence or inertness of the mother” (1953:324).13 His first hypothesis has received the most attention in biomedical research, and it is possible to argue that it is not very different from previous notions of the mother as a “temporary” space for the fetus, which itself is as much her “neighbor’s” as it is “hers.” With the assumption of this striving toward autonomy and self-sufficiency on the part of the embryo, the immunological paradox of pregnancy, however, generated more research into the specific nature of the maternal-fetal interaction and on the maternal body as one that influences embryonic and fetal development (this research was initially focused almost exclusively on the negative impacts of teratogenic agents such as smoking or the lack of vitamins). Another result of this emphasis on the anatomical separation from the mother as a path to embryologic survival in an otherwise hostile environment was the growing body of knowledge about placenta as separator. What divided mother and fetus became the central focus of such research. The scientific and medical attention given to the separation between mother and fetus is not new and preceded Medawar. Twenty years before his formulation of the anatomical separation between mother and fetus through the placenta, as early as 1932, Witebsky argued that the trophoblast (i.e., the early embryonic cells that proliferate in the uterine wall after implantation to form the fetal part of the placenta and attach fetal membranes to the uterine wall) acts as a barrier between mother and fetus. David Billington, another influential researcher, praised Witebsky’s and his colleagues’ hypothesis about the nature of the trophoblast in terms of “divine” providence. Billington affirmed the doctrine of the “hostile” maternal environment from which the embryo protects itself by creating, by itself and for itself, an autonomous barrier: trophoblast/ placenta. When Witebsky and his colleagues “suggested that human trophoblast might be non-antigenic and able to act as a barrier between mother and fetus,” Billington writes, “could they perhaps have developed this idea from the psalmist David who centuries earlier—Psalm 139, Verse 13—gave credit to the Creator for the protection of the fetus with the words ‘Thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb’!” (Billington

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2003:4). While Billington compared trophoblast to God’s protection, Beer and Billingham provided a different metaphor, saying that trophoblasts “amount to Nature’s carefully coordinated preparation of her grafts and the ‘beds’ intended to receive them” (1989:3).14 The embryo is a graft, like a branch that is grafted onto another tree, with the placenta serving as a separator. Medawar’s essay proved to be foundational for the evolution of the biomedical discipline of reproductive immunology. It is only recently that Medawar’s theoretical framework in relation to the immunological paradox of pregnancy has come under serious question. First of all, the intimate viviparity of human pregnancy led to the research emphasis on the trophoblast (meaning “feeding germinator,” cells that become placenta, developing inside the uterine wall), which involves study of spatial arrangement and interaction. The fact that human pregnancy is so much about the mother and her body is not yet accounted for in biomedical sciences. This disregard involves a fundamental misunderstanding of the full potential of the maternal-fetal interface and the interaction it enables. Precisely because human pregnancy is so “messy,” where one and another are so intertwined, biomedical researchers thus far have mostly seen it as a danger and as a problem and, since Medawar, have presented it as an evolutionary puzzle. In their comparative analysis, Burton and Jauniaux reinforce this biomedical unease with human pregnancy: “The interstitial form of implantation displayed by the human conceptus is almost unique, shared only with the great apes. . . . At present the evolutionary advantage this mode of implantation confers is unknown, but it must be considerable because such early and intimate interactions with the maternal endometrium present the conceptus with special challenges. There is mounting evidence that failure of the trophoblastic tissues to meet these challenges underlies the pathogenesis of complications of pregnancy almost unique to the human, such as spontaneous miscarriage and pre-eclampsia” (2005:5). Burton and Jauniaux refer to the growing evidence that the failure of the embryo to implant deep enough into maternal tissue leads to miscarriages and dangerous side effects such as extremely high maternal blood pressure (preeclampsia). Again, the discovery of implantation and the importance of this close, intimate level of tissue mingling between mother and fetus, the authors argue, must surely have some advantages; why risk maternal and fetal lives through such intimate viviparity otherwise?15 Medawar considered these questions too, stating: “The relationship between mother and foetus is still in some degree teleologically in-

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ept, and it will be argued that certain trends in the evolution of viviparity raise special immunological difficulties of the foetus,” which Medawar in certain cases calls “the mother’s immunological intolerance of its foetus” (Medawar 1953:321). However, pregnancy is puzzling in evolutionary terms only if the mother is understood primarily as an obstacle to generation: her barely tolerant immune system, her lack of space for the embryo, the metabolic primacy of her survival over that of the fetus, her bad habits, her ignorance of prenatal care, her employment that might be a detriment to her pregnancy, and so on. Medawar himself, however, understood that one could problematize pregnancy only to a certain extent, since in the majority of cases the maternal body does not reject the embryo, leading to a socalled successful pregnancy. This intriguing “conundrum” of pregnancy needed to be explained by/in terms other than those of “immunological risk.” Initially, the question of why the mother does not eliminate the “other” within was explained by “immunological tolerance.” The use of the concept of tolerance here is itself an interesting choice to describe biological processes.16 This research on immunological tolerance led to significant developments in skin and other transplants. The need to reconsider immunity came from an understanding that the body does not always attack “non-selves” but can build up “tolerance” toward “others,” signaling a more complex relation between the body and what constitutes an immunological “self.”17 Tolerance, similar to the way in which Kant described it (as discussed in the previous chapter), was seen as a “temporary peace” between the embryo and the maternal immune system. In most of the studies that followed Medawar, the embryo continued to be presented as an allograft, or semi-allograft: half “foreign” material (from a father) and half “the self” (from a mother).18 Even though current biological knowledge does not support conceiving of the maternal-fetal interface as akin to a transplant into the maternal body, this language of hostility and of pregnancy as a disease involving foreign tissue that elicits rejection responses continues to be predominant in biomedical literature. Some even suggest that labor and the birthing process itself are moments of rejection of the “transplant” from the maternal body that can be explained in terms of hostility and expulsion.19 The hypothesis that from the time of conception the woman’s body tries to get rid of the embryo, which is a parasite, “eating off the mother,” can explain only a minority of pregnancies. Rejection,

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hostility, or even tolerance cannot adequately account for the majority of cases. Maternal hospitality, I argue, understood through accommodation and expectancy/expectation, has to be thought through seriously as an alternative to the conventional paradigms of hostility, tolerance, and neutrality we have inherited. After all, one needs an explanatory framework that helps us make sense of not only why a majority of pregnancies are not rejected but also why they are welcomed and nourished, and this has to be studied and accounted for in biomedical terms as well. As presented earlier, the most important part of Medawar’s formulation of the immunological paradox of pregnancy is the assumption that anatomical separation of the mother and fetus is necessary. The placenta and, to a lesser extent, fetal membranes were presented by researchers as natural shields that prevent maternal and fetal blood channels from mixing (Moffett and Loke 2004). The fact of the placenta, its material presence, seemed to reinforce the maternal-hostility hypothesis, which in turn was supported by positioning the embryo as an allograft, an alien to its mother. The discovery of microchimerism has challenged this hypothesis of an anatomical separation. It has been shown that “bidirectional cell trafficking occurs routinely during pregnancy with the long-term persistence of fetal cells in the mother (fetal microchimerism) and maternal cells in her progeny (maternal microchimerism)” (Shope and Adams 2007:331). The presence of fetal cells in the mother’s blood makes it possible to test the fetal cells without intervention in the intrauterine environment. Long after the child is born, its mother retains fetal genetic material inside her body. It is noteworthy that the amount of maternal genetic material in a child depends on the mode of delivery: vaginal delivery will lead to more maternal cells crossing into the child’s body (Gleicher 2007:341– 45). Some argue that it is this exchange of blood that is responsible for the beneficial effects of pregnancy to certain women with autoimmune diseases, while it could precipitate such diseases or their complication in others. Microchimerism has enjoyed special attention from feminist scholars and biologists, who see this phenomenon as supporting arguments against mainstream individualism and autonomy and in favor of hybrid identities and heterogeneity in the approach to pregnancy. Thus, in an interesting collection, Le corps, entre sexe et genre, biologists and well-known scholars on immunology Hélène Rouch (2005:120–24) and Ilana Löwy (2005:127–38) directly incorporate microchimerism into their theories.

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The Fetus Is Not an Allograft Trowsdale and Betz (2006), leaders in the study of placenta and the maternal-fetal interface, argue that all Medawar’s hypotheses concerning the causes behind maternal immunological tolerance have to be questioned, while, at the same time, they pay tribute to Medawar for laying the foundation of reproductive immunology. First, there is an obvious cellular exchange between mother and fetus, as in microchimerism, which suggests that the mother and fetus are not as anatomically separate as Medawar’s first hypothesis proposed. Second, the mother’s immune system is as active (or more active) during pregnancy as it is in a nonpregnancy situation, thus questioning Medawar’s second hypothesis on the possibility of maternal immunological “anergy.” And, third, the fetus is not immunologically inert or “invisible,” but is recognized and attended to by the maternal body from conception, so it is not immunologically immature as Medawar proposed. The fetus is an active participant in placenta formation and function. According to Trowsdale and Betz, what needs to be understood, then, is “how an immune response directed against the paternal antigens is prevented” (2006:242). However, in mobilizing terms like prevention they still remain within a discursive framework of “tolerance,” which relies on suspension of the immunologic attack. The fetus is treated as a “temporary self” by the maternal body rather than as an allograft. The second major hypothesis by Trowsdale and Betz proposes that the uterus is an “immune-privileged site,” together with the testes, eyes, and brain, meaning that “they express factors that promote ‘immunological ignorance’ by nonspecific suppression of the cells of both the innate and the adaptive immune system” (242). However, it is only a pregnant, gravid uterus that becomes such an immunologically privileged site, unlike the cornea, for example, which is always immunologically privileged (Streilein and Wegmann 1987). The maternal body is conceived to be in a more “proactive” and complex relationship with the fetus than a simple binary mode of acceptance-rejection. Even maternal anergy (the absence of immunological response even with the recognition of the allograft) is seen as an aspect of maternal-fetal tolerance. Thus the underlying assumption of the concept of maternal-fetal tolerance continues to treat the fetus as just “tolerated,” and, when it is not actively rejected through miscarriage and developmental damage, it is perceived as being given a temporary right of visitation: an immunological visa.

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This notion of immunological tolerance is captured well in the title of an essay by Alan E. Beer, a prominent American doctor who pioneered immunologic (and controversial) treatment of infertility at his Center for Reproductive Immunology and Genetics: “How Did Your Mother Not Reject You?” (1984). While reproductive immunology has developed rapidly since the 1960s, the scientific community as a whole, including Medawar himself, moved away from studying the maternal-fetal interface. “After Medawar, interest in placental tolerance decreased. For the past few decades, with a few exceptions, it has received scant attention. . . . Now that tools are available and regulatory T cells are accepted, perhaps it is time to take a fresh look at placental tolerance” (Trowsdale and Betz 2006:245).20 Indeed, scientific, academic, and commercial interest in placentas (as evidenced by cord blood banks and in stem cell research) is increasing rapidly. The University of Cambridge, where Trowsdale, Moffett, and Betz are collaborating, is currently offering new graduate fellowships and positions at the Center for Trophoblast Research (2009), which emphasizes “placental and trophoblast biology.” One of the courses taught is “History of the Placenta Since 1750,” for which researchers from the center have teamed up with Nick Hopwood of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, a well-known historian of embryology. Even though the biomedical definition of the embryo as an allograft, or a transplant, is still widely used in the literature, a growing number of studies have questioned Medawar’s paradigm. These developments signal an important shift in research focus toward new paradigms. These paradigms still use the language of “tolerance,” but they follow Polly Matzinger (1994) and others in addressing coexistence, rather than mutual rejection, in the maternal-fetal relation and have added other terms to the discussion, such as “nourishment and benefit.” As Moffett and Loke summarize in their important 2004 article, which inspired a feminist interpretation of the maternal-fetal relation: The local decidual [uterine] immune system must contribute to the nurturing environment of the uterus which functions to mould the placental cells as they migrate, allowing the optimum delivery of nutrients to the fetus without endangering the mother. . . . Our conclusion is that it is unwise to design experiments exploring the nature of the immunological paradox of pregnancy based on any of

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the existing paradigms. The pregnant situation is a biological conundrum that should be studied with an open mind exploring further the unusual features of both the trophoblast and the maternal uterine immune system. It is particularly important to move away from the view that the trophoblast is like a conventional allograft that must resist rejection. Instead, we should consider that the maternal immune response may be providing a nurturing balanced environment which curbs excessive or unsocial behaviour by both placenta and mother leading to a state of peaceful coexistence between the two allogeneic tissues. (2004:7) Thus, the Cambridge group of maternal-fetal interaction researchers adopts the terms of symbiotic, peaceful coexistence as a paradigm of pregnancy. It is seen as a unique phenomenon, “not found in any other immunological situation” (Moffett and Loke 2004:1). Medawar himself acknowledged that immunological dangers of pregnancy should not be overstated: “It will be as well to be aware of these dangers, even if there is an inclination to make too much of them: for even if we set down all the known causes of antenatal mortality or miscarriage, the unexplained residue is of stirring proportions.” (Medawar 1953:321). Therefore, rather than trying to study why fetuses get miscarried in some pregnancies, Medawar questioned why not all fetuses get rejected. Matzinger, Moffett, Loke, Trowsdale, Betz, and others today are trying to refocus their study toward why most fetuses are accepted, kept, nourished, grown, and even enjoyed by the mother. The paradigm is shifting from seeing the maternal body as a site of potential danger toward seeing it as a site of nourishment and positive becoming.

Feminist Responses and “Placental Economy” In the last few decades there have been various attempts to incorporate immunological research, especially on the placenta, into feminist theory. Immunology, especially reproductive immunology, is a difficult territory for critical analysis or any search for alternative visions of the self/other relation, since, as Donna Haraway (1991) and Emily Martin (1994), among others, have shown, immunological language and its history coincide in various ways with the language and history of Western militarism and imperialism. My focus here, however, is on the question of generation and the maternal role within the immunologically defined

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notion of the maternal-fetal interface. Despite the growing importance of placenta studies in modern science and medicine, particularly in embryology, developmental and evolutionary biology, genetics, immunology, regenerative and transplant medicine, and cancer research, feminists have been to a large extent, and rightly so, suspicious of human and animal research in these areas and of discussions of the maternal-fetal interface and pregnancy as such. Pregnancy in feminist scholarship has often been presented within the context of a future mother’s struggle with medical and social/cultural institutions that are mostly hostile to the mother herself, seeing her as a means to an end: a child (Rowland 1992; Clarke 1998; Duden 1993; Martin 1987). In addition, numerous groundbreaking studies outline visions and practices that differ from those of mainstream gynecology and obstetrics and the ways in which these position the mother (Balsamo 1996; Haraway 1991; Jordanova 1993; Newman 1996; Griffin 1994; Rich 1986 [1976]; Franklin and Ragoné 1998; Kapsalis 1997). Moreover, feminist historians of these scientific and biomedical disciplines have deconstructed the patriarchal discourses of these disciplines, uncovering the hidden (and often repressed) histories of women on both ends: as patients and as helpers, doctors, midwives and scientists. The role of kin, especially husbands and female family members, has also been highlighted (Müller-Wille and Rheinberger 2007; Draper 2002; Morgan and Michaels 1999; Furst 1999; Green 2005; King 2007; Loudon 2000; Sissa 1989; Vanja 2004). The feminist responses to research in reproductive immunology, placental biology, and the maternal-fetal interface have generally followed the state-of-the-art scientific discourses of the times and have often anticipated scientific paradigm shifts in these areas (Haraway 1976, 1989, 1991). Several feminist thinkers have privileged the concept of the maternal as a basis for thinking about all other symbiotic relations, presenting the maternal-fetal interaction as a fundamental relation of peaceful coexistence based on intrauterine experience (Ettinger 2006; Irigaray 1993a; Oliver 1997a; Howes 2007; Fouque 2008; Rouch 2005; Cimitile and Miller 2006; Ziarek 2006). Some of these authors have directly targeted the placenta as the central aspect of this relation. I focus here only and briefly on two feminist discussions that have been influential for my own thinking about the subject: Luce Irigaray’s “placental economy” of peaceful coexistence between the mother and the fetus and Kelly Oliver’s proposal of the “maternal model” and the relation between the maternal body and placenta in the Kristeva-inspired theory of “subjectivity as intersub-

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jectivity.” Hélène Rouch (Irigaray 1993a; Rouch 2005) and Moira Howes (2007) offer other important discussions on the “beneficial” character of the maternal-fetal interface, which will be discussed subsequently. In 1987 Irigaray described her concept of the placental economy as the “tolerance of the other’s growth within itself without incurring illness or death for either one of the living organisms” (1993a:45). It is a placental economy insofar as the mother and the child live through an exchange of bodily fluids, tissue, air, and so on. She also refers to this model of the tolerance of the other “in and with oneself” as a “placental relation” (38) that she suggests provides the placenta with “autonomy” from the maternal body.21 Irigaray argues that, from the very beginning, there is no fusion between the mother and the fetus but, rather, a relation, which is “strangely organized and respectful of the life of both” (1993a:38). To develop and exemplify her ideas on this “placental relation,” Irigaray interviews Hélène Rouch, who had studied the relation between mother and child in utero.22 Rouch and Irigaray, following the standard biomedical definition of the placenta, present placental function as a “marketplace” where mother and fetus place their “goods” for exchange: nutrients, oxygen, hormones. They place them “next” to each other, since the placenta, according to Irigaray and Rouch, allows no direct contact between maternal and fetal tissue. Based on the posited “biomedical accuracy” of these observations, Irigaray further champions her insistence that mother and fetus are not “fused” in some kind of preoedipal “primitive” matter. While I fully appreciate the Irigarayan concern that the mother has been denied her own “self” in pregnancy and that the placenta might serve as a kind of a tool that will reinstate the mother in this relation as a separate being, there is a serious problem in presenting the placenta as “belonging to neither one nor the other” and as enabling a “peaceful coexistence” (Irigaray 1993a:38, 40). The first supposition, no matter how theoretically interesting it might prove to be, seems to follow the biomedical insistence that the placenta is separate from the maternal body and is formed by the embryo. However, it is separate from the embryo too or, as Rouch puts it, “it behaves like an organ that is practically independent of it [the embryo]” (cited in Irigaray 1993a:39). Such language comes from the explosion of placenta studies in the 1980s that defined the placenta as an “experimental animal” and “the largest human biopsy,” resulting in the proliferation of placentology, placenta studies, and trophoblast research (Ramsey 1982; Genbacev, Klopper, and Beaconsfield 1989; Daunter 1992; Loke and King 1995; Sibbons and Wade 2005). Iriga-

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ray’s characterization, after Rouch, recalls the biomedical language of anatomical separation championed by Medawar to account for the “immunological paradox.” “This relative autonomy of the placenta,” says Rouch, “cannot be reduced either to a mechanism of fusion (an ineffable mixture of the bodies or blood of mother and fetus) or, conversely, of aggression (the fetus as foreign body devouring from the inside, a vampire in the maternal body). These descriptions are of imaginary reality and appear quite poor indeed—and obviously extremely culturally determined—in comparison to the complexity of biological reality” (Rouch, cited in Irigaray 1993a:39). Rouch goes on to repeat Medawar’s definition of “embryo” as an allograft, again based on a belief that this too is consistent with “biological reality”: “You could say that pregnancy constitutes a successful transplant. We have great difficulty successfully transplanting an organ from one individual to another, yet here it’s done naturally” (40). It is a problem, I argue, to propose a bad “imaginary reality” and a proper “biological reality,” especially since it is clear that all our ideas are predicated upon what we can embrace intelligibly, in other words, what we have language for. And, while it might be strategic to position the placenta as belonging to neither mother nor fetus, this gesture not only repeats the biomedical problematization of pregnancy as a biological “conundrum” but also inserts a relation of exchange as happening “naturally,” in “biological reality,” completely independent of the mother. In her important book Family Values (1997a) Kelly Oliver provides an excellent critique of representations of the placenta as a barrier between mother and fetus, which are in turn presented in opposition to each other. Oliver presents a short “history” of the placenta within Western science to point out that “many biologists continue to describe the placenta as an extension of the fetal circulatory system and figure the relationship between the maternal body and the fetus as a hostile relation” (1997a:26). Oliver favors, instead, a definition of the placenta as “a complex placental circulatory system which acts as an exchange between the maternal body and the fetus” (26). The alternative that Oliver proposes—“The economy of gestation” as “a cooperative exchange” (161)—is in line with the Irigarayan concept of “peaceful coexistence.” Oliver importantly argues that “the woman is constituted as pregnant and gestating through her relation to the fetus” and that “the fetus is constituted as a viable individual through its relationship to the maternal body. Through their shared experience of birth, the woman becomes a mother and the fetus becomes an infant” (Oliver 1997a:34). This is in

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contrast with the “scientific representations” where the maternal body is seen as a passive container: “As the fetus or fetal-placental unit is constructed through the medical gaze as an active individual, the maternal body is constructed as a passive container or environment” (32). What interests me here is to draw from this analysis the question of who or what enables this situation to become a “relation” in the first place. That is, what do we mean here by the “relation” of the maternal body and placenta, by the “relationship” of the fetus and the “shared experience” with the fetus? While it is indeed through the process of pregnancy that one becomes a mother, and the child becomes and is born, this seeming equality of the maternal-fetal couple in generation and birthing presents us with a challenge. The challenge consists in the assumption that in this relationship the mother and the fetus are on the same ontological plane. Oliver proposes, based on her reading of Kristeva, among others, “the maternal model” of “subjectivity as intersubjectivity” (162). This intersubjectivity is not based on intentionality or consciousness where “neither the maternal body nor fetus is conscious or constituting the other. This is not a conscious relation and therefore not an intentional relation” (161). From the fetal point of view, there is a phenomenological level of the intrauterine life “within which the possibility of our experience, both physically and ontologically, is set up” (Oliver 1997a:162). Later in this book Oliver discusses responsibility as openness toward the other and love as a way toward “peace” between men and women (232–33). What interests me in particular is Oliver’s positioning of “the relation of the maternal body to the placenta” in terms of communication and cooperative exchange being the foundation for the possibility of openness towards others, of a “social relation.” I build on Oliver’s analysis and argue further that the openness to the Other is in fact made possible by matrixial/maternal acts of hospitality that are not totally unconscious and unintentional. On the one hand, I agree with Oliver and Kristeva that the exchange between the mother and the fetus is nonintentional and thus it happens almost in spite of the mother (this point was argued very strongly by Kristeva in “Stabat Mater,” 1986). But I would like to suggest that it also happens intentionally and because of the hospitality of the matrixial/ maternal. Unlike Oliver, other feminist thinkers approached the maternal relation without reference to pregnancy. One such example is Sara Ruddick, who proposed the maternal model of “being two” and “maternal thinking” as a possible foundation and model for understanding relations with others and social situations. For Ruddick’s project (1995), maternal think-

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ing, however, is divorced from pregnancy, as she focuses on the “nonbiological” work that mothers do, such as material investments in the work of caring for others (and, therefore, the notion of the mother is inclusive rather than exclusive in terms of pregnancy). Many theorists, on the other hand, focus exclusively on pregnancy when they discuss the maternal relation. For example, in her very interesting article on the maternalfetal relation Moira Howes suggests understanding pregnancy as a totally singular phenomenon, uniquely “beneficial and nourishing” in an otherwise inhospitable immunological body. Howes desires to positively and actively reformulate the current attitude of “maternal-fetal immunological conflict” into “potentially protective, transformational, and cooperative activities,” where “pregnancy poses no paradox” (2007:195). In order to avoid the charge of essentialized “goodness” of the mother, Howes claims that her arguments about “immunological relationships” say nothing about the “social and psychological maternal-fetal relationship” (180–81). I argue that it is problematic to theorize the placenta in such isolation even if it might help us unravel the immunological complexities posed by pregnancy. The danger lies in theorizing the mother as always already alien to her body and perpetually “unconscious” of her body and self. I am not suggesting the use of hospitality as a (yet another even if useful) metaphor for all pregnancies and the extrapolation of the hospitality relationship to other relations of the already presupposed “foreignness.”23 Rather, I propose to think through the question of generation that accounts for the facts of maternal hospitality, seeing the maternal-fetal relation as something “achieved” rather than as a given. Building on the work of thinkers previously discussed in this chapter, I argue that the challenge is to recognize the complexities of the maternal relation of hospitality and its role in studies of generation without presenting the mother as “sacrificial” by definition. Further, I argue that generation is enabled through a process of accommodation. Thus the maternal-fetal relation cannot be assumed, but can only be anticipated and produced. In short, there is no space or matter in the matrix/womb/mother waiting to be used by the fetus. It needs to be made and accommodated each time anew.

From Self to Ecology and Environment The difficulties that biomedical scientists have in approaching the question of the maternal-fetal interface are not specific to reproductive immunology. The maternal-fetal interface is a puzzle only insofar

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as pregnancy is interpreted as an exception, a “conundrum,” in relation to the “norm” of the immunological paradigm. However, today the maternal-fetal interface is just one of the many situations where the old immunological ideas do not account for new data. The next important step, then, is to situate the current explanatory challenges of reproductive immunology in general immunological theory, from its classical “norms” to contemporary quests for new ideas. This theory presents a philosophical concept of the self and how this already “immunological” self is defined and recognized. Leading figures in immunological theory point to this concept of the self as a problem and propose alternative frameworks. These new frameworks are of particular importance to my argument in regard to where they situate themselves. Arguably, this search leads biomedical scientists to desire more interdisciplinarity as they struggle to capture the meaning of phenomena under observation, not simply to document them. Hospitality has not yet been mentioned in this search for a new framework. One way to understand why it has taken so long to think about hospitality is to discover where immunologists looked for their meaning in the past and where they are looking for it today.

Self/Nonself Recognition Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet, a biomedical scholar who was trained as a doctor but quickly moved into research, is considered the “father” of the self and nonself theory of the immune system. His monograph The Production of Antibodies introduced the preliminary elements of his doctrine and was first published in 1941. It was later revised, and the second edition was published with a coauthor, Frank Fenner, in 1949. This is the edition that is most widely known and referred to, as the authors present there what they called their “self-marker hypothesis” (1949:vi), a foundation of the self and nonself doctrine. In the introduction Burnet and Fenner praise immunology as a discipline that targets the “practical problems of medical and veterinary practice,” but complain about the excessive emphasis on practical concerns and the chemistry of immunology, which in their opinion left immunological theory “almost wholly unrelated to the general pattern of biological knowledge” (1949:1). Before introducing their “self-marker hypothesis,” the authors, predating Medawar, state that they are especially interested in “the failure of mammalian or avian embryos to produce antibody” (1949:vi). Framed as “failure,” maternal-fetal “tolerance explains why the embryo so often

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“fails” to act as a “foreign” body and “fails” to be attacked by the maternal immune system. It is possible to argue here, then, that the question of the maternal-fetal interface is at the heart of Burnet’s formulation of the self and nonself doctrine. It is also at the heart of Burnet’s, Owen’s, and Medawar’s theories of immunological tolerance. The significance of their research cannot be overstated: if we can understand how and why the mother does not reject her fetus, or twins of the same mother do not reject skin grafts from each other, we can induce immunological tolerance for organ transplantations or potentially control autoimmune diseases, when “self” attacks “itself.” Immunosuppressant drugs that are used today come from that early research, which concluded that the “attack” is suppressed by these drugs because they disrupt the recognition of “self-markers.” If a body does not recognize something as “foreign,” if its “attack” can be suppressed, then it is immunologically “neutral” or “silenced.” The self-marker hypothesis tries to account for what Burnet called “a problem of information and .  .  . recognition” between self and foreign elements in the body (Burnet 1964:691). The self-marker is something like a “code” that has to be matched during interaction between a cell and another entity. If the match does not happen, then the body will react to the other entity as a nonself, as an invader or a foreign element, and produce antibodies and other “defense” mechanisms. This is how, according to the self-marker hypothesis, immunological reaction occurs. Selfmarkers, for Burnet, are both part of the innate immune system formed during embryonic development and part of the adaptive immune system. In the adaptive immune system, through constant interaction with other entities, cells learn various markers/codes and then develop “immunity” against certain pathogens. Immunity occurs when cells “remember” the last encounter with that particular pathogen/antigen, which triggers production of a very specific antibody. Burnet wrote about this process in terms of pattern recognition, or of knowing an alphabet and then using its different combinations for self-marker development, very much like asking for a password or creating a new password.24 The idea of a “self”marker helped connect cellular processes with the larger question of how the body “recognizes” its own tissues as a whole and not just on the level of specific immunological response. It reinforced the interconnectedness of the processes within the body as a whole, as an “organism,” and thus presented immunology as an essential aspect of biological sciences in their quest to study living “organisms” from the “very beginning,” from their embryonic and evolutionary development.

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The explanatory framework of the self and nonself interaction has been very influential in the development of immunology. As Polly Matzinger from the Laboratory of Cellular and Molecular Immunology, National Institutes of Health, suggests, “some of the most creative thinking in immunology has evolved in the search for practical definitions of self and non-self” (1994:994). Matzinger is one of the most well-known immunologists today because of her proposal of a “Danger Theory” of immunity in her groundbreaking “Tolerance, Danger, and the Extended Family” (1994).25 In this paper she summarizes the various definitions of self and nonself in immunology, stating: “Ultimately they all boil down to variations of the view that the immune system makes its own definitions. It regards a certain subset of the body as self and a particular fraction of the rest of the universe as foreign. In short, it doesn’t really discriminate self from non-self, but some self from some non-self” (1994:994). Thus the question of self and nonself assumes a level of spatial understanding (inside and outside) as well as a level of interaction where nonself is defined through recognition of “foreignness” of sorts. These definitions may include various levels of the organism: everything “under the skin” is self, or everything inside a cell, “everything encoded by the genome,” and so forth (Matzinger 1994:992). Matzinger’s definition of self is both highly specific and very broad. She defines it in the specific context of her study of T cells, a type of white blood cells produced by the thymus. However, she also extends it to the whole body, defining self and nonself as “one” and “the rest”: “I call ‘self’ any part of the body, and ‘non-self’ any part of the rest of the universe. I also assume that the immune system doesn’t really care about these categories, but that its primary goal is to recognize danger. Therefore, when I mention ‘self,’ I am not necessarily talking about a structure to which the immune system ought to be tolerant. I simply mean some structure that is a normal part of the individual’s body” (1994:995). This definition supports my argument that the matrixial/maternal serves a productive function in immunological-philosophical discourses, as a model of any relation, when there is a need to image a formation of a “thing” (self) and its “environment” (nonself). Alfred Tauber, an influential theorist of immunity and himself an immunologist, has argued that, despite its past usefulness, as we attempt to understand the nature of the immune system today, self/nonself terminology is more confusing than helpful. Like Matzinger and other previous researchers on the maternal-fetal interface, Tauber emphasizes the

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numerous cases of “neutrality” (anergy) and nonresponsiveness found in the immune system. In these cases, as in pregnancy, it is obvious that the body is aware of the presence of foreign organisms, but chooses not to react or ignores them. Tauber thinks that Burnet’s self/nonself doctrine does not account for this kind of relation, or lack of relation, between self and nonself. After all, it is the reactivity of the immune system triggered by the fact of some relation that operationalizes the self-marker in a process of recognition and subsequent rejection or nonreaction and tolerance. Today, when immune tolerance and neutrality are considered to be “normal” immunological states (similar to pregnancy), they have to be studied and understood differently and not in terms of the self. Tauber and his coauthor Scott Podolsky (2000) have “attacked” the concept of self, first, as a “metaphor” that impedes a proper “scientific” approach to data and, second, as a notion that is out of place in postmodern theories of identity, where self and nonself, even if such exist, are relative and often interchangeable and what really matters is the context within which such terms operate. First, Tauber and Podolsky argue, as a metaphor, the self is not the most useful, since it is “external” to the space of scientific knowledge insofar as it is a philosophical and ontological category that is external to the “experiment.” The foreign elements (nonself), however, are not metaphorical for Tauber and Podolsky, since “the foreign can be truly damaging or predatorial” and thus, we assume, corresponds to what the authors see as a “literal” meaning of the immune system. “Self” interferes in “the efforts to model immune function directly, without metaphoric constructions,” and “the immune system is not a self, it does not protect a self, nor does it define a self, just as protons are not tiny ‘balls’ and the origin of the universe did not occur as a ‘bang’” (Tauber and Podolsky 2000:377). It is baffling that Tauber proposes that the “foreign,” which can be “truly damaging or predatorial,” is not a metaphor. As concepts, the universe and protons do not have more or less of an existence than the “foreign”; however, they seem to be always more “literal” than “metaphorical.” In addition, in his later works Tauber seems to read too much into the metaphysical and philosophical “self” of Burnet and his followers and too little into the philosophical underpinnings and metaphors of the systems and information theory so popular in the life sciences (for a detailed critical discussion, see Haraway 1976; Keller 2002, 2010). While appreciating Tauber and Podolsky’s argument with regard to the contrast between a “genetically formulated notion of immune self” and a “decon-

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structed immune identity” (2000:327) as part of the effort to bring about a less reductive and genetically deterministic understanding of biological processes, the alternative, it seems, is based mainly on how the self is achieved, whether it is pregiven in a genome or produced here and now, contextually, rather than in the concept of the “self” as such. Years earlier, in her important article “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies” (1989), Donna Haraway developed her influential cyborg metaphor further to propose a coupling of immunology with network theory and an emerging postmodern, vulnerable, and shared self, where “immunity can also be conceived in terms of shared specificities; of the semipermeable self able to engage with others (human and non-human), but always with finite consequences; of situated possibilities and impossibilities of individuation and identification; and of partial fusion and dangers. The problematic multiplicities of postmodern selves, so potently figured and repressed in the lumpy discourses of immunology, must be brought into other emergent western and multi-cultural discourses on health, sickness, individuality, humanity, and death” (1989:32). Like Tauber, Haraway celebrates the “deconstructed immune identity” and subscribes to biomedical theories that question the immunological concept of the self and its separation from nonself. Unlike Tauber, Haraway goes much further to show how various biomedical discourses, including network theory, are connected to a larger cultural and social context. It is important to note, however, that both Haraway and Tauber have little interest in the “immunological paradox of pregnancy,” or even in pregnancy as such, since, at least for Haraway, the discourse of human reproduction needs to be reframed in terms of cyborg replication and regeneration (Haraway 1991). In Haraway and Tauber, we clearly see a steering toward a more symbiotic and cooperative model for understanding the body. There are currently two alternative perspectives on presenting the immune system as not always a potentially hostile or defensive “self”: one presents it in neutral terms, as ideally nonresponsive and “switched off,”26 and the other presents it in positive terms, as nourishing, protective, and generative (as noted earlier in relation to skin and placenta studies). That is, even if the immune system is “on,” it does not necessarily try to defend itself, but rather it negotiates, builds alliances, and seeks peace. We are moving toward the political terminology of peaceful coexistence and what has come to be understood as an “ecological” notion of the body. Undoubtedly, however, in this new vision, choices still have to be made regarding what is self and what is cognizant when seeking

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peace. It is noteworthy that these alternative views of immunity have increasingly evoked a cooperative and contextual body as a network of information and communication channels, as that which informs its own form, and immunology may be regarded as a science of self-organization.  .  .  . One might argue that the immune system continuously seeks its own eidos or steady state of immune identity. In this sense, identity as an ongoing self-seeking, self-organizing activity becomes the eidos of immunity. . . . An obvious challenge for a more comprehensive biology reiterates the problem of defining the principles of information, which grounds the self-organization of organic systems. How to articulate that problem and its solution should hold the attention of systems biologists and their critics, for without a philosophy and accompanying language to address the nature of form, one cannot proceed to establish a truly novel science. (Tauber 2008:280–81) First, what is important for my analysis in this discussion is not the self and nonself categories but rather the way in which their relation has been a crucial element in introducing and discussing them in the first place. Their relation, even in the most updated form, is still framed mostly in terms of pathology or danger; otherwise there is no relation, just silence, for an absence of anything “bad” is seen as “good” and “cooperative” by default. Although neither Burnet nor Medawar had as stable a concept of the “self” as their critiques often present, the relation between self and nonself and its discursive articulations remain largely understood in the same terms today as in their time. And this relation very much corresponds to a larger understanding of the body as a “body at war”; it suffices to cite a Nobel committee’s framing of Burnet’s and Medawar’s contributions during the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine ceremony: “Immunity is our perhaps most important defense against a hostile surrounding world. By penetrating analysis of existing data and brilliant deduction, and by painstaking experimental research you have unveiled a fundamental law governing the development and maintenance of this vital mechanism” (Gard 1964:685–88). Second, I doubt that what Tauber calls “inner aspects” of science— that is, the “methodological and theoretical boundaries” constructed by the scientific question, “narrowly construed, as contrasted to broader influences”—can be sustained (2008:379). Tauber, Podolsky, and Har-

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away seem to accept the so-called postmodern concept of the dispersed, networked, interchangeable, open-system body as a temporary, situated self always in motion. There is no “center” and “periphery,” and one cannot be fixed as either self or other. Ironically, however, the desire for this seeming “equality” of selves in network theory reintroduces an old problem for studies of generation when researchers suggest that the self can organize itself without reference to the “foreign.” The other, “the foreign,” is not on equal terms with the self, as it is always more “literal” than “metaphoric” and in its literalness it is never “the same” as self and can be reaffirmed as different through the formation of the relation itself (as in the maternal-fetal immunological relation). Thus the other seems to disappear in this most crucial moment in studies of generation when the notion of form is framed in terms of information.

Information Theory of Immunity Immunologists deal with “immunological phenomena,” such as “immunological information.”27 What does it mean to “deal with”? It means setting up experiments, observing, describing, and explaining what is being observed and described. One can be more systematic in one’s theory of immunology because it is not as messy, or even as vulnerable to testing and questioning, as an explanatory framework. Tauber problematically suggests that, armed with a new explanatory framework of “systems,” we can overcome the self and nonself paradigm if we think systematically about “information” and apply such thinking to immunological phenomena. That is, we must think about how the meaning we attribute to a phenomenon actually works—how, for example, what we name as “cells” make sense to what we call “other cells.” In contemporary immunology, the question of “how” various immunological entities communicate and understand each other is of central importance, especially if the distinction between self and nonself no longer provides that explanation. Thus the central metaphor of information and systems theory becomes (according to Tauber) one of “cognition.” It helps in explaining “immunological information flows.” But what does it mean, one might ask, to present the immune system as “possessing cognitive functions” (Tauber 2008:375) or as recognizing danger (Matzinger 1994)? This positioning of the immune system has to leave the burden of recognition on only one entity (such as maternal or fetal cells); only one “recognizes,” while the other’s “cognition” is omitted or simply inconse-

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quential. But is this theory new? The same formulation of the immune system was already present when Burnet called for an understanding of the connection between the nature of form (morphogenesis) and an organic system such as an organism. On closer study of Burnet’s theory of “immunological information,” it becomes clear that what he called “the process of self-recognition” is an information exchange, and its evolutionary and developmental role in “the processes of differentiation and morphogenesis” is not fundamentally different from Tauber’s proposal of the information theory of the immune system as a self-organizing process (2008). Many of the terms of Tauber’s proposal resonate with the ideas from the Nobel lectures given by Burnet (1964) and Medawar (1964). Burnet proposed a rather radical concept of immunological information, affirming himself as a significant theorist able to combine a variety of disciplines. Immunological information, for Burnet, is that which holds things together, what allows an organism to become an organism, by the negotiation and exchange of information with others. In his Nobel lecture Burnet privileged immunological tolerance and self-recognition rather than hostility and self-defense and drew on contemporary information theory: The faculty of immunological recognition becomes an intrinsic part of the homeostatic controls that maintain the body as a going concern. . . . Here there is an obvious suggestion that immunological recognition is an inevitable derivative of the basic requirement for any integrally organized multicellular organism—the existence of an elaborate system of information and control, of receptor, effector and feed-back mechanisms, that is needed to maintain morphological and functional relationship between cells. . . . There is an insistent suggestion that immunological self-recognition is derived from the processes by which morphological and functional integrity is maintained in large and long-lived multicellular organisms. (1964:699–700) Burnet’s concept of form as redefined by Tauber provided a useful reference point for Tauber to explore the nature of information as such, specifically, to explore the etymology of information. In a gesture that connects various parts of this book, Tauber’s systematic thinking about information brings us back to the matrix and the previously discussed Aristotelian view that the mother provides matter to be shaped, molded,

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by the paternal “idea,” design, eidos. Tauber comes very close to Plato and Aristotle in their discussions about form. He assumes the presence, thematter-of-factness, the given quality of that which is to be formed (the “wood,” in Aristotle’s account): Another way of characterizing information is to consider its etymology. In a simple derivative, information or in-formation is “the infusion of form on some previously unformed entity, just as de-, con-, trans-, and re-formation refer to the undoing, copying, changing, and renewing of forms. Information refers to moulding or shaping a formless heap—imposing a form on something” (von Baeyer 2003:20). In the shorthand of our language, information is the transfer of “form” from one medium to another (von Baeyer 2003:25), where “form” is derived from eidos, which in turn connotes arrangement, configuration, order, organization, pattern, shape, structure, and relationship—the last being the most general (Young 1987:52). Information then literally means “form making.” Keeping within this linguistic analysis, the next pertinent question may be posed: what provides the form that must be formed? (Tauber 2008:279) Indeed, the question of form and how/what it in-forms (i.e., in a biomedical context, morphology) in information theory is often left unexplored, and, once again, Tauber goes further than many other theorists of immunology and comes closer to Burnet, who believed that the study of immunological processes would lead scientists to an understanding of the most difficult topic in biology, differentiation (Burnet 1964:700). It is interesting that these questions of differentiation and morphology continue to be answered mostly in Platonic and Aristotelian terms, which still structure scientific approaches to biological forms. Their discussions on the body and especially on embryology are profoundly gendered, as the maternal plays the role of “ground substance” (the matrix), and eidos (the forming quality) belongs to the paternal.28 The question of the relation of form to matter, as it pertains to my discussion of the matrix in biomedical sciences, needs to be analyzed further. The evolution of form as a biomedical question was clearly demonstrated by Shigehisa Kuriyama in his brilliant book The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (2002). Kuriyama’s analysis of the concepts of form and matter as they passed from

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Plato to Aristotle supports Irigaray’s earlier argument, which I explored in chapter 1 when highlighting the idealistic underpinnings of Western materialism. It appeals to matter and, at the same time, denies its relevance to knowledge. He discusses how the Platonic cave metaphor morphed into Aristotle’s “form” as “separate from matter” while becoming inseparable from it (Kuriyama 2002:126–27). Similar to Plato’s “projections” in the metaphor of the cave, which deny the importance of maternal knowledge (Irigaray 1985), the history of medicine privileged a particular way of looking as “dealing with” biological phenomena: dissection. Kuriyama highlights how one can look and see only what one is looking for, especially if one is working within a highly prescriptive medical and scientific tradition: As long as one trains one’s eyes somehow to see beyond the matter of which animals are composed and to apprehend the whole configuration (heholēmorphē)—the form as it reflects Nature’s ends—then this gruesome enterprise of dissection can even be called beautiful.29 . . . And it recommends itself to the philosopher by its convenience. . . . This is the task of the scientist: to scrutinize these not in their perishable materiality but in their formal design, as refracted images of the divine. . . . [Dissection] entails a special manner of seeing and requires an educated eye. The dissector must learn to discern order, through repeated practice, guided by teachers and texts. Without training and long experience, Galen insists, one sees nothing at all. That is, one sees just a cadaver.  .  .  . Anatomy properly began when one learned to see through inchoate flesh and envision in theoria  .  .  . the purposive design. Seeing anatomically meant overcoming the blindness caused by the immediately visible. One had to see, and yet not see; see the form, but not the matter. See what, ultimately, can’t be seen. (2002:127–28) Here we are already presented with a teleology of what to look for based on a schema and design. Such questions are rarely simply “scientific” or totally disconnected from their social, political, and economic context. Questions of “form,” and of what and who “inform” embryonic development and how they do so, are political and relate to the larger question of claiming power through “explanatory frameworks.” It is possible to argue that the only reason so much attention is paid to the question of form is to disable

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the maternal role in generation as a question of “empirical materialism.” Or, in Kuriyama’s words, “one had to see, and yet not see; see the form, but not the matter” (2002:127–28). Refusing the false choice between “cultural” and “biological” interpretation, I argue that current biomedical discourses (similar to, and partaking from, the philosophical ones) are at least in need of a paradigm shift in understanding the self-other relation through a proper philosophical and biomedical reformulation of the maternal-fetal interface. And the issue of “cognition” in in-formation, if not reconsidered in maternal terms, might once again reproduce the eidos of Plato, as something that “causes” development of the self through some self-organizing principle that informs it without actually acknowledging its material instances. To put it differently: although the matrix is where everything ostensibly comes from, it is only recently that the biomedical sciences have begun to study the actual work of the matrixial/maternal. It is framed today as “maternal effects in development” of an organism/ embryo (Newth and Balls 1979). This immunological study of maternal effects is presented through the updated concepts of ecology and environment, once again with a problematic relation to the matrixial/maternal.

The Ecological Theory of Immunity Tauber combines the study of information and environment in the most illuminating and, at the same time, problematic ways. Simply put, information represents for him biological “relationships.” If one wonders what governs those relationships, why they interact, and what their overall purpose is, fundamentally it is evolution.30 However, if, in conventional immunological theories, the evolutionary emphasis was on the “survival of the fittest” and their “natural” selection through reproduction, today, argues Tauber, we are witnessing an emphasis on the cooperative function, where “information transfer” is understood “ecologically.” Tauber refers to “the original definition given by Ernst Haeckel in 1870”: “By ecology we mean the body of knowledge concerning the economy of nature—the investigation of the total relations of the animal both to its inorganic and organic environment; including, above all, its friendly and inimical relations with those animals and plants with which it comes directly or indirectly into contact—in a word, ecology is the study of all those complex interrelations referred to by Darwin as the conditions of the struggle for existence” (Haeckel, cited in Tauber 2008:278). It is noteworthy that, unlike the hostility and competition that characterize the

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supposed logic of evolution, here the terms of friendliness and inimicality are highlighted in relation to the “economy of nature.” Thus the ecological from its very beginning was at odds with the “struggle.” Although I do not deny that the systems approach and mathematical modeling have achieved significant results biomedically, we do not seem to be any closer to an “alternate theoretical path” (Tauber 2008:276) in immunology if we merely replace nonself with the environment or the context. Contemporary scientists of this “environmental” and cooperative turn in immunology often borrow from Heidegger, citing his notions of Dasein, “Being in the World,” and “standing reserve.” Thus, in his most recent book, Defending Life (2007), Ulvestad interprets immunology “from a Heideggerian perspective, in which the organism is understood as a composite product of the organism (as traditionally studied) and its larger environment. In what he calls ‘adaptive plasticity,’ Ulvestad structures the immune self as a product of its own inner states and the world in which it encounters the other” (Tauber 2008:276). The concept of plasticity is also evoked as fetal “developmental plasticity” by Gluckman and Hanson (2005). Moreover, this “ecological view” of immunity parallels Gluckman’s and Hanson’s evolutionary-developmental theory of the fetal “predictive adaptive responses” that I analyze later in this chapter. The similarities are a symptom of an ongoing reformulation of the interaction between the organism and its environment, where the interaction is seen in formative, generative terms. It is remarkable that even though both the classical and the most recent alternative approaches to the self/ nonself paradigm and the study of the immune system are based on embryological study, Podolsky and Tauber, as well as Ulvestad, manage to create theories of ecology with practically no reference to the maternalfetal interface or the maternal body. It seems, once again, that the mother, while becoming more and more important as the “environment” and “context” of immunologic embryonic development, plays no role in the production of either knowledge about or the “environment” itself. While Tauber agrees with many others that the separation between the internal and external forces acting on the organism and its environment can no longer be sustained and “presents a barrier for further progress” (Lewontin and Levins 2007:31),31 it is not immediately clear how this ecological expansion of immunology changes or challenges that separation, except in the nature of the relation. We still have the conventional appeals to “self” and to “identity,” even if it is now not a pregiven, but rather produced through the “self-organizing principle” that includes co-

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operative function. The point of view is still focused on the “organism,” an “individual,” versus its “environment.” When organisms “do not experience or fit into an environment, they construct it,” argue Lewontin and Levins (2007:33). But can the “environment” construct “organisms”? How broadly the self is defined and where one situates the other become matters of convenience. When there is no more nonself, then everything serves this eidos of the self-organizing principle.

The “Fetal Matrix” and Other Environments The young science of evo-devo, which, together with epigenetics, is becoming a prominent fixture in biology, has heralded a new approach to the organism. Slowly but steadily it has made the question of environment, especially the maternal environment, into its research priority in the study of the organism. This is not surprising, since one of its sources is comparative embryology (Wourms 2007), which fosters a particular fixation on development as a question of form. “At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the causal analysis of organismal form has taken on a new label: Evo-Devo” (Müller 2007:499). The new discipline seeks to combine, primarily, the questions of ontogeny, or development (individual embryonic development), and phylogeny, or evolution (evolutionary development of the species). Thus, form and morphology are central in this new discipline, and their consideration is seen as possibly the most important contribution that evo-devo will provide to biology: “Today . . . we are swimming in data, yet the fundamental biological problems of morphogenesis and development of form remain as challenging and exciting as ever. It is important not to lose sight of the cells or of morphogenesis as we embrace Evo-Devo enthusiasm for other levels of analysis. Joining evo (and with it molecular genetics) with devo surely offers the greatest promise for achieving greatest advances in understanding the problem of development . . . and also in giving us the microstructural account of development” (Maienschein 2007:119). Thus the continuing concern with form seems to drive contemporary biology. But how does it envisage the relation between the “organism” and its “environment”? In what terms? The embryonic environment has been the subject of a number of recent publications in the field of evo-devo (Amundson 2005; Sansom and Brandon 2007). Evo-devo philosopher Ron Amundson, in The Changing Role of the Embryo in Evolutionary Thought: Roots of Evo-Devo, explains that

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development occurs not only through genes alone, or even interactions between these genes, but also from the interactions between the physical body parts within the embryo and “even of the interactions between the developing organism and its external environment” (Amundson 2005:255). The word even here is noteworthy, since for many scientists and theorists of science the very idea that environment plays a role in development runs against the conventional paradigm on generation. This paradigm, clearly, is related to Platonic and Aristotelian views on generation, where the matrixial/maternal environment, while producing space and matter for the embryo, has no bearing on the “form” it takes. The most important challenge, then, is how much researchers of evo-devo can reformulate the role of the maternal environment. “Heredity is intertwined with development,” writes Amundson (2005: 255), and there is an urgent need to understand the organism as a synthesis between genotype and phenotype development. Amundson suggests that the challenge is not to dismiss this dichotomy or resolve it but rather not to see it as a dichotomy, as an either/or situation (except as a historical problem in the formulation of sciences). One can notice a clear dialectical methodology adopted by evo-devo researchers (Allen 2007: 127–29)—an attempt at overcoming this particular habit of “looking” at an organism in either genetically predetermined or environmentally predetermined ways. There is a growing understanding today that it is important to pay serious attention to what happens between cells, genes, and various biological entities, how they interact, what enables this interaction, and how all this helps us understand what gets expressed. What is important, suddenly, is not what “program” was “encoded” but what is actually realized or not and why. Knowing the genetic program seems to have become subordinated to the issue of knowing how to achieve a desired outcome from all possible expressions and variations of possibilities. What and how something actually “happens,” what “external” factors play a role, is more important than what might have happened according to some “program.” And what happens can be understood only through study of the unfolding interactions with and through the “environment.” In their book, purposefully titled The Fetal Matrix: Evolution, Development, and Disease (2005), Peter Gluckman and Mark Hanson put forward their theory of “predictive adaptive responses.” They argue that what happens during embryonic life, especially what environment the embryo/fetus finds itself in, has a major impact on its future life, hence

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the reference to the matrix in their book title. Based on the conditions of embryonic life, the fetus will form itself with emphasis on “predicting” its future environment, and, therefore, whether these predictions are accurate or off the mark will lead to the fetus’s succumbing to or surviving particular diseases or problems. The fetus is understood to make “adaptive choices,” termed “fetal choices.” But exactly what is the matrix here? “The environment of the fetus,” write Gluckman and Hanson, “is created at several levels—at one level it is the environment in which the mother finds herself—food plentiful or scarce, high or low altitude, hot or cold, the presence of infectious agents, and so forth. In turn these environmental stimuli determine the physiological and health status of the mother, which thus determines her body temperature, the level of oxygen and nutrients in her blood, and the rate of flow of blood to the placental bed” (2005:35). The authors name other factors, such as toxins and nicotine, that might cross the placenta and affect the fetus, ultimately posing the question: is the fetus a passive receiver? For the authors it is a question of fetal agency, its cognitive function, in relation to its environment. “Can we say that the fetus is thus ‘aware’ of its environment? In some aspects we can, and this is a direct awareness. For example, it can sense maternal movements and can hear some sounds through the uterine and abdominal wall. But most of the fetus’s sense of the external environment is determined by placental function” (2005:35). The authors also highlight a still poorly understood relation between fetal development and the so-called maternal constraint, specifically, a group of bodily factors and mechanisms with which the maternal body manages the size of the fetus, especially in the later stages of gestation (however, there are studies that suggest that this size management starts from conception). This is a very important factor, as it affects the form (shape) of the fetus as well as its weight. As weight is one of the major predictors of birth outcomes, fetal survivability, and future health, this particular aspect of the “maternal environment,” though clearly of crucial importance for growth and development, is seen by the authors in negative terms, as one of the “conflicts” between mother and fetus (2005:40). Another conflict identified is “maternal-paternal conflict,” based on the paternal genes conflicting with those of the mother. There are seven points in Gluckman and Hanson’s theory of predictive adaptive responses (PARs). First, unlike many other researchers, Gluckman and Hanson investigate the maternal environment; however, in retaining the fetus as their primary focus they weaken some of their

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arguments about the importance of the environmental, “ecological,” and “interactive” factors.32 As “biological processes,” PARs are “induced by environmental factors acting in early life, most often in pre-embryonic, embryonic or fetal life, not as an immediate physiological adaptation, but as a predictive response in expectation of some future environment” (2005:144). Second, these responses “permanently change physiology or structure of the organism.” Third, various factors at various times of development affect PARs through diverse channels (placenta, maternal constraint, etc.). Fourth, “PARs are not restricted in direction, and occur across the full range of fetal environments.” Fifth and sixth, PARs are evolutionary, because they “confer a survival advantage in the predicted reproductive environment . . . and this will be manifest as increased fitness,” thus defining “the environmental range in which the organism can optimally thrive until and through the reproductive phase of its postnatal life.” Finally, however, if the fetus does not predict correctly, PARs “may well lead to disease or disadvantage” (2005:144). It is noteworthy that all references to the mother have been omitted in their account of “environment,” leading one to suspect that this theory cannot adequately explain the relevance of the role of the maternal body as “environment” for the study of fetal development; for example, there are no parallel concepts like “maternal awareness” and “maternal choices.” But, taken together with earlier studies of maternal effects on development (Newth and Balls 1979), this new theory is symptomatic of the growing emphasis on the environment and, hence, is an opening toward, even if not a completely articulated understanding of, the matrixial/maternal. Wimsatt and Griesemer (2007), in their interesting chapter “Reproducing Entrenchments to Scaffold Culture: The Central Role of Development in Cultural Evolution,” propose a seemingly radical argument that mothers are scaffolds that allow generative learning in children to occur during their nesting. This “nesting” behavior promotes expressions of genes in a particular way, thus imbuing the maternal environment with a “programming” capacity for supporting development, when mothers (animal or human) make and arrange spaces for their offspring. That is, the form is produced by the mother, the eidos behind the development of an organism is her nest, and the environment is of her making. Can we suggest, then, that her acts of hosting are part of development and generation? Not so fast, since the eidos is still not hers. It is not her design, though the form that she is (uterus) or that she makes (egg, nest) are of central importance now. Without any serious consideration given to the

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possible “maternal choices” or to “cognitive” information and communication processes related to mothers (be they human or not), the emphasis is on the unique individual experience of the offspring, which carries in itself, or becomes, an “imprint” of the mother-scaffold (Wimsatt and Griesemer 2007:266). Once again, we learn that human mothers are just like animal mothers: they are all part of a larger scaffold for development. Moreover, as the authors suggest, “cultural reproduction could be possibly seen through . . . patterning and scaffolding,” and “human children come literally to carry the forms of their dwellings in their bodies” (2007:266). This could surely become a radically new approach to the maternal environment, provided the matrixial/maternal becomes a systematic matter in and focus of biomedical knowledge seeking to understand generation and development. However, what we have seen in recent developments in immunology, embryology, and evolutionary biology with reference to the maternal-fetal relation is the reformulation of the matrix and the maternal as “environment” in the most idealistic sense, relayering one metaphor onto another (matrix-environment-scaffold-dwelling), with a level of abstraction that shows a systematic disregard for the actual matter of maternal-fetal interaction, with the emphasis continuing to be on “form.” How, then, are we to account for the matrixial/maternal in biomedicine and understand generation?

Hospitality: Beyond Tolerance The study of the maternal-fetal interface and the interaction or relation that it instantiates has been examined with specific reference to discourses in reproductive immunology via two principal means: first, through the lens of an immunological understanding of the body where self and nonself recognition and distinction mediate the relation and, second, through a deliberation on the notion of environment as the context within which an organism develops. Medawar, and many researchers after him, have been puzzled by the “immunological paradox of pregnancy,” during which the embryo, despite carrying some nonself elements from the father, is not rejected by the maternal body. Medawar used the doctrine of self/nonself to develop a notion of “immunological tolerance,” which supposedly mediated between the maternal self and the embryonic nonself. The systematic questioning of this notion of tolerance and of the immunological self/nonself doctrine as a whole led to greater atten-

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tion being paid to the specific nature of the relation that operated at the maternal-fetal interface. These alternatives to the conventional wisdom of immunology drew on a variety of influences ranging from network theory, systems theory, neurosciences, symbiotic biological theories, and contemporary philosophy (especially Heidegger and postmodern theories of identity). The shortfalls of conventional accounts of the self/nonself doctrine paved the way for a more “ecological” approach to understanding the organism’s relation to its environment. In all these accounts I have traced the fundamental erasure and diminution of the maternal. And, even when it is raised, it is presented, similar to the way in which frustrated Schwartz presented the immune system, in the form of “there is” (“the mother simply is,” to paraphrase Robert Schwartz’s phrase “the immune system simply is,” quoted in Tauber and Podolsky 2000:376). I propose that the need for a paradigm shift in biomedical conceptions of the maternal-fetal interface requires a radical reimagining and understanding of the nature of the relation between the matrixial/maternal and the fetus through the concept of hospitality. It is not the concept of self that is the main problem, but rather the way in which the relation that produces and defines self and nonself is imagined that needs radical reformulation. It is particularly remarkable that even the attempts that seemingly had potential to engage the role of the maternal (e.g., the organismenvironment perspective) have produced new ways to renovate the old Platonic and Aristotelian definitions of the matrixial/maternal. Also, while the newfound interest within immunology in embracing new biomedical paradigms of the self/nonself relation is encouraging, the simple move away from “hostility” and “defense” toward the equally problematic “tolerance” and “neutrality” is not sufficient. The concepts we generate to replace the inadequacies of conventional immunological terms need to engage the materiality of maternal accommodation to the fetus. We need to move more systematically from scattered references to acts of maternal accommodation (e.g., “beneficial,” “protective,” “cooperative,” “tolerant,” and “nurturing”), and from mere recognition of the significant role of the “maternal environment” in embryonic development, to the engendering of a more grounded biomedical theory of maternal hospitality. My analysis, therefore, joins those of many others who have similarly called for incorporating the maternal in biomedical studies of generation: through concepts of generosity, care, maternal thinking, symbiotic and cooperative coexistence, maternal biological agency, and so forth. Building on the work of previous thinkers, nevertheless, I argue that impor-

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tant problems are still to be addressed as far as the available theoretical frameworks of the maternal-fetal interface are concerned. And one such problem is the current biomedical formulation of the maternal body as separate both from maternal acts of hospitality as well as from the fetal tissue (which is often presented in language that makes us forget that there is no fetal tissue without the mother). It is important to emphasize again that I do not consider these hospitality aspects as innate capacities of/in the matrixial/maternal. I thus refuse the neat separation between the “philosophical” and the “biomedical” and recognize the dangers of essentializing the maternal as fundamentally hospitable. For example, I am wary of theorizing the placenta as an organ of maternal-fetal “cooperation,” employed to support a larger feminist project arguing for maternal generosity or care. Hospitality, for me, is not the general “order of things” when it comes to the maternal; it is always specific and based on actual acts of hospitality, as realization of a concrete situation and of a concrete opportunity. The challenge, I believe, is to keep hospitality and the matrixial/maternal disconnected sufficiently (unlike femininity and hospitality, which are essentially connected in Levinas and Derrida), so that they are not simply collapsed into and associated with each other by default. This discontinuity will provide us with sufficient distance between them in order that we may begin thinking anew about the maternal environment and acknowledge that hospitality is one of the practices that enables the matrixial/maternal to become a foundational aspect in development and generation. Pregnancy and hospitality, as well as such characteristics as “cooperation” or “generosity,” are not connected in some predetermined, biological, “unconscious” way. I choose to acknowledge them or connect them based on concrete acts of hospitality. I am not suggesting that hospitality is the only way and/or the “innate,” automatic way through which the matrixial/maternal operates. However, the notion of hospitality has an amazing theoretical efficacy in helping make sense of the specificities of human generation and development, especially of the “immunological paradox of pregnancy,” and might help us reformulate questions about viviparity and the maternal-fetal interface.

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4

Mother-Machine and the Hospitality of Nursing

The path to exploring the matrix as nutrix (as that which nurtures) lies through the improbable topic of ectogenesis, or mother as machine. Ectogenesis forces us to decide what we consider the mother to be. There is nothing more revealing about (our understanding of) a phenomenon or a thing than its reproduction in a narrative or an artifact. What does Plato mean when he talks about receptacle/chora/matrix as a wet nurse of all being and becoming? What does Aristotle mean when he says that mother is a “nutritive,” nourishing matter that “adds” to development? To approach these questions, I turn to the attempts to create artificial matrices, since they bring us, surprisingly but also inevitably, to the issue of nursing. By studying the discourses, practices, failures, and successes of ectogenetic technologies such as the artificial matrix, artificial womb, artificial placenta, and incubator for premature infants, I seek to show that the precise moment in which we try to re-create the mother technologically, to make an artificial environment that carries the burden of caring, is the moment when the question of nursing comes to the forefront, allowing us, in turn, new insights into matrixial/maternal practices.

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Ectogenesis Ectogenesis is a genesis “outside” the maternal body. The “outside” can be artificial (machine), which I address in this chapter, or another bodily environment (man or animal), which I will address in the next chapter. Ectogenetic technologies have historically drawn from and continue to drive developments in neonatal acute care, incubation, tissue engineering and regeneration (e.g., where embryonic tissue is grown in an artificial womb, usually a scaffold/matrix), and assisted-reproductive technologies. Ectogenesis is one of those “frontiers of science” that stimulate debate and controversy because it relates to fundamental notions of the “natural,” “normal,” “human,” and, particularly, gender, sexuality, and procreation. As Susan Squier demonstrates in her well-known book Babies in Bottles: Twentieth Century Visions of Reproductive Technologies (1994), an engaged debate on ectogenesis occurred in the early part of the twentieth century. Publications that directly addressed ectogenesis (e.g., by the geneticist J. B. S. Haldane in 1923) reveal that while, for men, “the image of ectogenesis fed a fantasy of male agency and autonomy, acquired through denigration of the image of the gestating woman,” for women, ectogenesis could potentially “empower women, particularly mothers” (Squier 1994:131). Eugenics, often indirectly, contributed to the ideal of making “healthier” babies in scientifically managed artificial wombs. This is the context in which Aldous Huxley published his novel Brave New World (1998 [1932]). The book became a cultural icon, cited by researchers and cultural figures alike, and for many represented all that can go wrong with technology, especially with making “artificial” and “improved” babies. Not everyone had such a negative image of ectogenesis, however. As Rosemarie Tong points out, for several authors “ectogenesis was to help women escape from ‘Eve’s curse.’ . . . They saw in ectogenesis not a repudiation of the body, but a possible way to free the body—particularly woman’s body—for more pleasure” (2006:63). This specific train of thought—that women want and need to have a choice to be “liberated” from giving birth to or nursing children—continues to be one of the enduring rationales for ectogenetic technologies. The biomedical research into ectogenesis has been justified thus far by reference to three main objectives: 1. disconnecting the maternal body from gestation; 2. relieving mothers of the “reproductive function” in-

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sofar as women thus freed of their maternal obligation would be able to spend more time and energy on their professional development and other business; and finally 3. affording access to and control of the processes of conception, gestation, and birth at any stage through chemical intervention, monitoring of prenatal development, scientific observation and analysis, and other means, potentially resulting in an uncomplicated gestation. While these arguments have enjoyed intermittent and mixed currency within both scientific and academic circles, it is more pertinent for our purposes here to understand how these diverse and somewhat problematic discourses cohere, even if tenuously. I suggest that an “ectogenetic desire” substantiates, informs, and sustains these discourses, practices, and technologies of ectogenesis and that there is an urgency to chart the operations and topographies of this desire. This ectogenetic desire is arguably aligned with, and instantiated by, a larger cultural “anxiety with/of the maternal” that I outlined in chapter 1 and that can be summarized here as an anxiety that usually manifests itself in philosophical, literary, and scientific aspirations toward “selfcreation.” Michelle Boulous Walker, in her book Philosophy and the Maternal Body, critically analyzes “the philosophical phantasy of self-generation . . . which is specifically the masculine imaginary structured by a desire to displace the maternal in order to speak both in and from the mother’s place” (1998:28). Ectogenetic desire aims at fulfilling this philosophical “phantasy of self-generation” through scientific and technological means and has been historically aligned with an autogenetic desire.1 While the topography of the ectogenetic desire includes and complicates a variety of debates currently raging in philosophical and scientific circles (e.g., legal definitions of personhood, maternal ownership and rights over the unborn child, surrogacy, paternal body, the human-animal distinction, etc.), a proper and systematic engagement with these debates is well beyond the scope of this chapter. It is also important to note that the rhetoric of “saving life” and the desire for immortality (understanding/controlling birth seen as a gateway to discovering how to regenerate ourselves/our cells) obscure the larger epistemological problems of embryology, as defined in its history (Churchill 1970), which I discussed in the previous chapter. A classic modern text that has reinvigorated debates surrounding ectogenesis since the 1980s was written by philosopher Peter Singer and Australian Member of Parliament Deane Wells, called “The Reproduction Revolution: New Ways of Making Babies” (1984). According to them, ectogenesis, if achieved, can

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• provide couples with their own child without the complications of in vitro fertilization (IVF) and surrogate motherhood; • create a pool of spare parts for transplantation (livers, lungs, etc.) and provide material for medical research; • eliminate wastage of embryonic life caused by abortion; • stop the burdening of women with being “reproductive machines” and hence achieve more equality in childbearing; • and, last, reduce the possessiveness of natural mothers. Roger Gosden, a research director in reproductive biology at the School of Medicine at McGill University in Canada, follows the logic of Singer and Wells’s arguments. While Gosden is just one figure among the biomedical proponents of ectogenesis, his personal connection to the ectogenetic technology of incubators and women who might want to use that technology makes him particularly relevant to my chapter. Unlike his predecessors, Gosden goes beyond utilitarian and pragmatic reasons and seems to most fully embrace and exemplify the ectogenetic desire discussed here. In his book Designing Babies: The Brave New World of Reproductive Technology (2000), Gosden treats ectogenetic research as a question of deciphering “life and nature’s last secrets”: Ectogenesis would provide a great opportunity to increase knowledge of what is one of nature’s last great secrets, and it would greatly benefit fetal medicine in general. There is perhaps no subject in biology that fills us with greater awe or of which we are more ignorant than the molding of a baby in the womb. Some people may prefer us to leave nature alone, as they did when antisera and organ transplants first became available for treating ailing children and adults, but the chance to at last understand the most tender period of existence and, even more important, to cure diseases and help with the creation of life will surely prove irresistible. (199–200) According to Gosden, women might seek ectogenesis for reasons of “social or professional convenience” (182), meaning that women freed from the “burdens” of bearing children could more easily engage in their own professional and social pursuits. Gosden also proposes some biomedical grounds for ectogenesis. These include the risk posed by gestation in the uterus, since “anything could go wrong” there (182). He argues that not only is the uterus “just a clever incubator,” but it is a very dangerous

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apparatus that can endanger the growing fetus with maternal viruses and bacteria, as well as diabetic by-products, through the placenta. Gosden calls the placenta “a leaky sieve” (186) in relation to drugs, medicines, and carbon monoxide. His ideas on ectogenesis are particularly relevant to my forthcoming examples of how early incubators were rationalized by some doctors and scientists as “artificial wombs” that were safer than a “real” uterus. This line of thought, therefore, is persistent in the history of ectogenetic desire. Obviously, many researchers, unlike Gosden, propose a cautious approach to advanced reproductive technology—for financial, ethical, religious, and medical reasons. Others dismiss this topic completely as a frivolous subject more suitable for science fiction novels than for reality, seeing it as somewhat irresponsible in terms of the time and resources devoted to it. The question of ectogenesis, however, is difficult to dismiss, especially as new reproductive technologies and neonatal biomedicine clearly deal with the materialization of “ectogenetic” environments for gestation. What is important for me here is that those who are for or against ectogenesis agree that the maternal body is the model for further research in the new reproductive technologies and the biomedical studies and engineering that support them. The maternal model is defined primarily in terms of the “exchange” metaphors of the maternalfetal interface or in spatial terms of “incubation.” Thus at this stage of the ectogenetic project it does not represent the complexity of factors surrounding the genesis of a new life, including especially the “nurturing environment” (a problematic notion in itself, as I argued in the previous chapter). Simplification of intrauterine processes and the disconnect between gestational, genetic, and nursing maternal bodies are invoked to argue that genes are what makes us, whereas the uterus only provides a more or less provisional space for fetal development (Gosden 2000). Here the machine works as a metaphor to simplify the workings of the body as well as to establish the illusion that the process of development can be managed.

Egg Architecture and the History of the Incubator Modern neonatal incubators and ectogenetic desire are directly linked. Incubators from the very beginning were seen as the first “ectogenetic technology,” and in this section I use the history of incubators

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to analyze how the makers of this technology imagined the mother. I do not use this history to argue for a particular teleological line in incubator development as indicative of the inevitable movement of scientific progress. Rather, I show that from the midst of the differences and inconsistencies of the various incubation histories it is possible to tease out the conflation of woman and chicken, of poultry incubator and maternal body. In other words, I show that, by relying on the “egg architecture” of brooding, the makers of incubators have imagined and technologically responded to viviparity in terms of oviparity. Incubators of the nineteenth century were rather modest in their ability to maintain life and had no ability to generate it. However, this did not stop European doctors and scientists (and even poultry producers) from quickly arguing in favor of the incubator in its full ectogenetic potential as an “artificial womb” (Baker 1996). Gosden turned this around and gave primacy to the discourse of incubators by reinscribing the womb as an incubator: “Nothing is more awesome than the emergence in these early weeks of a recognizable human form from a tiny, undifferentiated mass. Such unique events might be expected to need a special environment, but the uterus is just a clever incubator, and rather less sophisticated than either the ovary or the placenta. Nature’s real genius is being wrought within” (2000:183–84). Incubators were modeled on the womb—but which one? One paragraph played a curious role in the written history of incubators. It is often cited as the earliest evidence of neonatal incubator technology. I am particularly interested in this rather obscure paragraph because it allows me to trace the persistence of a certain way of imagining and rationalizing the mother-machine. It is a story that was originally told by Michael Giustinian, a member of a prominent Italian family, and embedded in a well-studied satirical novel by Lawrence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (2004). Sterne preferred to call his work “political romance” or “comic romance” (Folkenflik, in Sterne 2004:xi), but it has also been widely interpreted as “obstetrical” satire. Its protagonist, Tristram Shandy, reports from inside his mother’s womb, just before his birth, on what is happening around him and what thoughts he has in relation to these events as well as the larger political, cultural, sociological, scientific, and medical context.2 One of these thoughts concerns an Aristotelian scholar and scientist, Fortunio Liceti, or Fortunius Licetus (1577–1657). Fortunio wrote books on spontaneous generation and monstrous births. The paragraph in question relates, however, to Fortunio’s

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own remarkable birth. Fortunio (we learn from Sterne’s/Shandy’s appropriation of Giustinian’s account) was born a “fetus,” premature, and was incubated in the oven, like an egg in a chicken incubator. This story provides us with the first recorded glimpse of “human incubator technology”: This foetus was no bigger than the palm of the hand, but his father, having examined him as a doctor and having found that he was something more than an embryo, transported him living to Rapallo [Italy], where he was seen by Jerome Bardi and other physicians. They found that he was missing nothing essential to life, and his father, in order to make an experiment of his experience, undertook to achieve the work of nature, and to work at the formation of the infant with the same artifice as that with which chickens are hatched in Egypt. He instructed a nurse in everything that she had to do, and having put his son in a properly accommodated oven, he successfully raised him and made him achieve his necessary growth by the uniformity of a foreign heat measured exactly by the degrees of a thermometer, or another equivalent instrument. (See Mich[ael] Giustinian, in the Scritt[ori] Liguri, 223.488.) One would certainly still be very satisfied at the industry of a father so experienced in the art of generation even if had been able to prolong the life of his son for only a few months or a few years. But when one recognizes that the infant lived nearly eightyfive years, and that he composed eighty different works, all fruits of long reading—one ought to realize that everything which is incredible is not always false, and that Appearance is not always on the side of truth. He was only nineteen when he composed Gonopsychanthropologia, on the Origin of the Human Soul. (Celebrated Children [1723], reviewed and corrected by M. [Bernard] de la Monnoye of the French Academy.)3 Although these paragraphs were omitted in many editions of Tristram Shandy (but retained in the first French edition), they were destined to take a special place in the history of incubators. The story solidified the connection between embryological science and biomedical technology: from chicken embryos to human incubators. In one of the most influential texts in the history of neonatology (which deals with prematurity),

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The Nursling (1907), Pierre Budin, professor of obstetrics at the University of Paris, quotes the same passage from Sterne to place himself in this lineage of human incubation technology. Moreover, we learn that Étienne Stéphane Tarnier, Budin’s mentor, chief obstetrician of the Maternity Hospital in Paris and a “public intellectual” of the time, was influenced by new poultry incubators in the Paris zoo. Tarnier named his first incubator a couveuse, which means “brooding hen”: “Tarnier claimed that he came upon the idea for his incubator as a result of a walk he had in the Jardin d’Acclimation in early 1878 where he saw an incubator (modified from older Egyptian and Chinese models and constructed by Odile Martin) to hatch hens’ eggs. He immediately had the idea to replace the egg with a premature infant. The first model, based on the chicken incubator, was tried at the Maternite of Port-Royal in 1880” (Cone 1980). Baker points out that this account of Tarnier’s encounter with the incubator has to be understood with some caution, since Tarnier made his incubator not immediately after his visit to the zoo but almost two years later, after learning more about incubators from other countries (Baker 1996). Nevertheless, when Tarnier needed technical help two years later, he asked the same Odile Martin (designer of poultry incubators) to make a human incubator for him. I am not arguing that chicken incubators were the only inspiration (see my discussion later in this chapter on wet nurses and their incubators); what interests me is how doctors confess to having been inspired by them. These various references make clear that the memory of the story related by Sterne persisted, presenting Egyptian and Chinese chicken incubators as inspiration for European obstetricians and, later, American neonatologists, inherently and problematically connecting oviparity and viviparity. Although incubator makers did not cite chicken incubators as their inspiration, most early incubators for “weak” infants, nevertheless, conformed to the metaphor of brooding by emphasizing warmth. Thus warming baths in German and Russian maternity and children’s hospitals were not very different in that respect from Tarnier’s incubator and were used from the middle of the nineteenth century. This emphasis on temperature in early incubators seems to have been framed by the imaginary of brooding, which is modeled on hen behavior and the needs of chicks rather than acknowledging the peculiarities of human viviparity, where a neonate’s temperature is often not more, and often less, important than underdeveloped lungs, inability to absorb nutrients, or susceptibility to infection.

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The metaphor of a shell or an egg corresponds to the abstracted matrix/womb as a receptacle, here reproduced through technology. One person who openly combined the ectogenetic and oviparous imaginaries was Thomas Morgan Rotch. He was an influential figure, the first professor of pediatrics at Harvard University, and was interested in artificial feeding of infants and also in prematurity. Aware of experiments with warm baths for premature infants in Germany and Russia, he presented his incubator in 1893, only a decade after the introduction of Tarnier’s “brooding hen.” But rather than focusing on the connection between the incubator and the mother-chicken, he framed his incubator as a machine, as a technology of ectogenesis. Since he believed in “scientific mothering,” versus a rather “unstable and uncontrollable” “natural” mothering, his own studies of milk formulas and incubators gave him confidence to imagine that a machinic substitution of the mother was imminent and desirable.4 He bravely presented his incubator as such an ectogenetic technology (interestingly, the discussion on ectogenesis that Squier explores happened just after Rotch’s claims were made—as if ectogenesis was “in the air”).5 Rotch’s incubator was not framed, Baker (1996) argues, as a complement to the mother (as Tarnier’s was) but was intentionally presented as something that could potentially replace her. But they were not that different. The connection to oviparity remained even in this moment of “machinic” independence: Rotch called his incubator a brooder. But unlike the “brooding hen” of Tarnier, which took its place along the chain of mother-infant-nurse-mother, Rotch’s brooder asserted itself as an ectogenetic artifact, a construct, an industrial product. This machine was the new “home” of the infant and was intended to replace the mother in more ways than being “just” the receptacle (Rotch 1895:309). What made Rotch and those who inspired him and were inspired by him claim the status of “artificial womb” for their incubators was the devices’ perceived similarity to the intrauterine environment, defined as darkness, fluid, and, more importantly, enclosure: “The premature infant should, so far as is possible, be restored to the condition that it has been forced out of—namely a condition of darkness, silence and warmth” (Rotch 1895:299). Rotch, like Tarnier, collaborated with a technical expert to build his brooder, John Pickering Putnam. It is not known, however, if he collaborated with any nurses and midwives as Tarnier did with Madame Henry, the head nurse at Maternity Hospital, Paris. A small window in Rotch’s incubator allowed observation of the infant. Although his incubator did not incorporate much new technology

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(in addition, it was not very user-friendly), the “enclosure” was claimed as a major development toward mimicking the intrauterine environment. This was the main shift—to imagine the machine as based on the model of a human uterus rather than a brooding hen. While some experimented with immersing the infant in water and even suspending it (thus presenting the uterus as a space of “free floating”), Rotch went for the metaphor of a hole. The argument that a totally artificial environment for gestation means a closed environment defined the intrauterine environment as a closed system and corresponded to a long-standing tradition of evoking the matrix as a “space holder,” an envelope. Since Rotch-Putnam’s brooder was supposed to be closed, there was no attention paid to waste products or nursing the infant. What this enclosed environment represented was the shell rather than the porous, intimate connection between viviparous mother and fetus. The analogy with the egg thus remained and meant that the material realities of viviparity were dismissed. These images of the egg as the matrixial/maternal architecture persist in public presentations of artificial environments/artificial wombs (famously depicted in the movie The Matrix), as well as in fetal intrauterine representations.6 The mimicry of the fixed enclosure of the egg leaves no room for accommodating and absolutely negates any potential for the production of space in relation to the development of the fetus. It is not clear whether Rotch was aware of Fortunio’s story. However, the story about Tarnier’s inspiration from poultry incubators is not only well known (after all, his device was called a “brooding hen”) but has stimulated others to continue imitating chicken incubators. The production of chicken incubators developed rapidly, and, in a remarkable twist, the very same entrepreneurs entered the infant incubator “market.” Baker describes how poultry manufacturers, such as W. G. Robinson and George Stahl in the United States and Charles Edward Hearson in Britain, “attempted to modify their devices” for infants. Thus Stahl “advertised an ‘infant nursery’ for sixty dollars in 1895 touting that it is identical in principle to his successful Excelsior incubator for eggs” (76). Baker claims that inclusion of more automated functions like a thermostat for temperature control and ventilation systems made incubators into a sort of “mechanical nurse” (74). However, it is not clear what nursing functions the incubators could legitimately claim to have taken over. I will show later in this chapter that the failure to address the question of nursing is central to ectogenetic technologies, especially as their promoters equate machinic “autonomy” and functional automation with nursing.

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The multidisciplinary link that has been established between eggs and infants and between chickens and mothers is strong. Thus, Sterne’s use of Fortunio’s story was remembered by biomedical researchers long after these early incubators were constructed. The 1977 issue of Pediatrics published an article entitled “On the Care of the Premature Infant by Laurence Sterne as Described in His Novel Tristram Shandy (1760).” The author, T. E. C. Jr., did not seem too worried that the story was embedded in a novel when arguing that “one of the earliest descriptions of the care of the premature infant is that of the English clergyman and novelist Laurence Sterne (1713–1768) in his preposterously comic novel, Tristram Shandy. Sterne described the case of Licetus Fortunio (1577–1657), an Italian physician who was born prematurely” (1977:809). In fact, he presented the story as originating with Sterne himself. In 1980 Thomas E. Cone (the same person as T. E. C. Jr.) cited the story related by Sterne as the first example of human incubator technology. These examples demonstrate that Sterne’s story has become a staple in biomedical literature on incubators for premature babies. The link between eggs and embryos is often taken for granted as a path to technological progress in the care of human neonates and given very little analytical attention. This link is so pervasive, and historians are so used to documenting it, that, insofar as it has become pervasive and naturalized, the impact of “egg architecture” on ectogenetic technologies of the artificial womb/mother/matrix has largely gone unnoticed.7 Another aspect of Fortunio’s story worthy of attention is that he owes his “fortune” to his father rather than his mother, who is conspicuously absent from the story. However, rather than the survival of his son, the reason we are given for the father’s action of placing him in an incubator is that he wanted “to make an experiment of his experience” (Giustinian, cited in Sterne 2004:588). It was an opportunity to “test” his ideas about chicken incubators from Egypt and China, about which he had a longstanding interest. Once again, it seems that the possibility and notion of human incubation were already part of the imaginary of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century embryology and philosophy. The fact that Fortunio himself became such an important embryologist only adds moral significance to his father’s ectogenetic effort, as a retrospective reading that supports his initial scientific desire to use this occasion to “experiment.” Most researchers and historians of embryology and biomedical studies of generation have come to experience the link between chicken and human embryos as natural and as a part of embryological history that

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“naturally” led to developments in incubator form and technologies. This “naturalized” link, however, had led to a few glaring misunderstandings and confusions (Needham 1975 [1959]; Ramsey 1989).

The Case for Human Technological Oviparity Aristotle famously relied on his study of chick embryos for his theories of generation and, more important, performed anatomical studies on them. Thus, a prominent twentieth-century embryologist, Elizabeth Ramsey, narrates in her article on the study of the uterus that “Aristotle’s research in an indirectly related field, that of the development of the chick embryo, should be mentioned because it laid the basis for embryological investigation for centuries to come. Subsequently, as other types of embryos became available for study, investigators used the classic chick terminology to describe them, often causing confusion, some of which persists to our day” (1989:2). Another historian of embryology, Charles Bodemer (1973), also describes certain confusions that have persisted due to basing ideas about human procreation and gestation on observations of and experiments on other animals. I opened this book with a quotation from Needham that connects metaphysical and embryological history. He, however, refers to the chicken egg rather than a human embryo: “For of all the strange things in biology surely the most striking of all is the transmutation inside the developing egg, when in three weeks the white and the yolk give place to the animal with its tissues and organs, its batteries of enzymes and its delicately regulated endocrine system. This coming-to-be can hardly have failed to lead, in the minds of those most intimately acquainted with it, to thoughts of a metaphysical character” (Needham 1931:7–8). But why a chicken egg? Is it only because of its constant supply, its availability? Can this be the only underlying reason for a long-standing embryological argument about the similarity between a woman and a chicken? Is the human fetus born or laid like an egg? Does the human mother or father brood it until it is hatched? What is the basis for this analogy, especially since it was not until the early nineteenth century that the mammalian “egg” (ova) was finally “discovered” by van Baer?8 This analogy is so strong that even those who point to the glaring differences between oviparity and viviparity still continue to rely on the analogy as an experimental base for their understanding of embryology. It is not surprising, then, that even as European scientists, doctors, and poultry producers

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were finally solving the problem of chicken incubation on a large scale, in the nineteenth century, they quickly moved to materializing the dream of “incubating” a human. It is not obvious what came first in this rationale: positioning the woman as a chicken or positioning the embryo as an egg. But, clearly, the uterus is presented in major biology textbooks as part of the “oviduct,” which specializes in “retention of eggs” or “implantation” in mammals (Bodemer 1968:142). In embryology at least, it seems, it is the positioning of the embryo as an egg that in turn leads to perceiving the mother as akin to a chicken and therefore the incubator, which works for the chicken, as a viable substitute mother. My argument here is that the desire for machine gestation of humans reflects a long-standing embryological assumption that successful artificial incubation of chickens will eventually lead to human incubation. In the previous chapter I highlighted the immunological paradox of pregnancy that is distinctly associated with viviparity. The intimate viviparity of human pregnancy, where the maternal and embryonic tissue are almost indistinguishable, poses significant challenges not only to the survival of the fetus, which was understood to be in constant danger of being rejected, but to systematic scientific understanding of what occurs in utero. The oviparous relationship between the egg and the hen ends as soon as the hen lays the egg, establishing mother and offspring as distinct entities and in some ways, therefore, their relationship as already “ectogenetic.” Thus, it is not surprising that oviparity became a sort of “golden standard” for the study of generation and that many scholars assumed the desirability of replicating it in humans. Biomedical studies on fetal membranes, however, have continued to undermine the applicability of oviparity-based conclusions to viviparous gestation. For example, the shell is not external to the embryo, as it is made out to be in ectogenetic discourses. The shell is a fetal membrane and thus part of the embryo. Mossman argues that “we are likely to overlook the fact that [ fetal membranes] are genetically as much a part of the individual as the tissues and organs of its body proper. The fetal membranes are the earlier parts of the individual to differentiate. From the first, they are composed of the same germ layers, and later of the same combination of these layers . . . involved in the fundamental architecture of the body” (1987:3–4). However, even if one assumes that chicken and human “ova” are the same, and the first few hours and days of development of the embryo are

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the same, the most important difference is precisely what happens to the “shell” of the ovum. The ovum’s outer layer becomes layered with calcium deposits that become the shell of the egg subsequently laid by the chicken, but the situation with the fertilized human egg is different. The human “equivalent” of “hatching” (if one plays out the chicken-human analogy) occurs around the seventh day after conception when the conceptus moves to the uterus. That is, the outer layer of the fertilized “egg” is left behind and is metabolized by the maternal body. The shell-less, “hatched” embryo is positioned next to the uterine wall (a process called apposition), manipulated by the maternal body in a particular way, fed by the so-called uterine milk, and then implanted in the maternal tissue. Thus the connection with maternal tissue and establishment of communication with the mother occur “much faster than the embryo body, for the obvious reason that the [development of the] embryo body is dependent upon the membrane system for nutrition, respiration, excretion, and, to some extent, a favorable and protective immediate environment” (Mossman 1987:4).9 The “immediacy” of the maternal-embryonic connection is peculiar to human viviparity, since the embryo does not float “inside” the cavity of the womb but is part of and lodged in the maternal tissue. This further complicates the demands on an ectogenetic solution, which will need to technologically and spatially mimic this viviparous “immediacy.” In the case of chickens, however, from the moment the egg is laid to the moment of hatching—being born—there is no direct exchange of tissues or fluids. The “food” is inside the egg, mainly in the yolk. The brooding process is about providing heat and occasional movement and therefore can be mimicked by incubators and their operators with relative ease. To date, however, the egg itself is still made only by chickens, and we have no incubators for premature chicks or ectogenetic systems that generate eggs. Therefore, it would be problematic to present the chicken as representing a “simpler” model for technological replication (Landauer 1967). Viviparity itself is hugely diverse, since differences between placental mammals in terms of fetal membranes are remarkable. This diversity is a “major challenge from evolutionary, genetic, and physiological viewpoints to ascertain the reasons for such differences in structure of an organ system that performs essentially the same basic functions in all”—procreation (Mossman 1987:59). Thus many biomedical scholars frame viviparity as a multilevel “challenge” when they present pregnancy through the language of problems and inexplicable marvels (see the pre-

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vious chapter). The intimacy and intensity of the “exact cooperation,” “interchange,” and “mutual interaction” between maternal and embryonic tissues are presented as in constant danger of failure, while laying and incubating eggs is viewed as a much simpler solution. “In fact,” writes Mossman, “one cannot help but wonder why viviparity has become so popular! Certainly oviposition with external incubation appears to pose less complex physiological problems than does gestation” (1987:xiii, also 60). After privileging oviparity as an “easier way to procreate,” it is enough to position the human embryo in terms of that of the chicken to argue for the possibility or even desirability of “external incubation” of humans. Although today we do not hear of poultry incubators inspiring developments in human ectogenetic technology, many ideas from Tarnier and from Rotch and Putnam that were indeed inspired by chicken incubators continue to be reproduced in ectogenetic technologies. The most obvious one is the idea that technology can “push back time” by sustaining increasingly premature infants and permitting longer survival of embryos “in vitro” after artificial fertilization. Full ectogenesis (i.e., the complete substitution of the maternal body to gestate a child) is thus presented as possible in the relatively near future, with the maternal role narrowly defined as a nine-month-long gestation “project.” The two examples of ectogenetic technologies that I will present demonstrate how the two goals of promoting the survival of premature infants and in vitro embryos are connected in contemporary biomedicine. They also demonstrate how the space/environment of ectogenesis continues to be imagined and constructed as a “shell.” Incubator technologies continued to be developed throughout the twentieth century, on a parallel track with blue-sky research in ectogenesis and applied research in assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) and acute neonatal care in NICUs. Documented scientific experiments in full ectogenesis began to appear in the 1950s in Europe, Canada, and the United States, but rapidly encountered problems related to the specificities of viviparity, as the animal fetuses employed for research did not live long. Unno (2000) provides a useful bibliography of these earlier attempts to incubate embryos by simulating intrauterine and placental environments. The more these attempts tried to simulate the maternal environment and maternal-fetal interfaces, the less the uterus seemed like “just a clever incubator.” Though briefly abandoned for a variety of reasons (mainly due to the development of much cheaper and effective

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ways of ventilating the lungs of premature babies), ectogenetic research resumed in the 1980s, led by a Japanese scientist, Yoshinori Kuwabara (Unno et al. 1999). He developed what was to become the most publicized and widely exhibited ectogenetic machine, using goat fetuses— though it is noteworthy that other animals have been used in similar experiments, such as sheep and mice (Zapol et al. 1969; Reoma et al. 2009; Ivascu et al. 2005). His study was conducted with more than fifty goat fetuses (Unno 2000:62).10 The removal of the embryo from the maternal goat body was achieved through a cesarean section, which customarily resulted in hysterectomy and often the death of the mother goat due to heavy bleeding. A blood reservoir with both fetal and maternal blood was used, as well as a synthetic lung and a waste product filter. It is noteworthy here that effective ectogenesis requires immobilization of the fetus, as any movement complicates the procedures. Thus, very often, prematurely born babies or goat fetuses had to be heavily sedated so as not to move too much within ectogenetic environments (though movement deficiency usually results in serious side effects for their future development—most of the goat fetuses died shortly after being disconnected from the machine).11 If the Kuwabara team tried to “push back” the age at which the fetus could survive outside the maternal body, as Tarnier tried to do, my next example shows how others are attempting to move it as far back as the “beginning” of the fetus, to the time of conception. This is achieved through technologies of artificial fertilization and in vitro gestation of the embryo. The work done by Helen Hung-Ching Liu, a leading expert in ectogenetic technologies and assisted reproduction in the United States, represents one such effort in ectogenetic research. She said in an online interview in 2001: “My final goal is what I call ‘artificial uterus.’ I want to see whether I can develop an actual external device with the endometrial cell and then probably with a computer system simulate the feed in medium, feed out medium, simulating the abrupt stream and also have a chip controlling the hormonal level. . . . So I want to use a computer to help me do this, and I believe if this can be achieved we could possibly have an artificial uterus so then you could grow a baby to term” (Liu and van der Slikke 2001). Once again, after the initial “sensationalist” claims about developing artificial uteruses, we have not heard from Liu about where her research into ectogenesis stands today. There is thus an obvious disconnect between what the researchers publish in the popular press and their more scientific publications.

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The primary “medical” reason often cited for ectogenetic research in biomedical literature is the need to incubate prematurely born babies, ideally closing the current gap in the ability to medically support the embryo outside the maternal womb, that is, between sixteen and twentythree weeks (when the placenta develops). For Liu, however, it is IVF that offers full ectogenesis. My interest here is not in arguing that this gap— between early embryonic development in vitro and postnatal gestation of premature infants in incubators—will never be closed because it is too complex or too difficult. Neither am I interested in claiming that these technologies are not “really” artificial since they use tissue from “bodies” (such as eggs, sperm, animal tissue of the nutrients that support in vivo growth). What interests me is what they imagine generation and gestation to be when they claim to be replicating it, since through that replication and emphases they also define it. Another interesting reason cited for the resumption of ectogenetic research in Japan was “curiosity”—to observe how the fetus looks and behaves before being born. It is interesting that this intellectual curiosity to have continuous visual access to the growing fetus has a long history in biomedical imaging research, which has been variously justified by a concern for maternal and fetal health (Petchesky 1987; Newman 1996; Dijck 2005; Oaks 2000; Taylor 1998; Stabile 1994). If we combine Liu’s research with that of Kuwabara, it becomes clear that it goes well beyond the question of helping premature babies to survive or couples who want “their own” child. The ectogenetic desire for making a child “outside” the mother faces formidable challenges as soon as it accepts the intimate level of viviparity in the maternal-human interface, which it has barely approached theoretically. It becomes clear that those who invest time, money, and effort in full ectogenesis do not want to accept defeat. On the contrary, we hear that the reasons we do not have more or better ectogenetic technologies are not “scientific” or “technological” but rather a matter of the cheapness of and ready accessibility to maternal gestation. Unno, thus, does not refer to the deaths of the mothers or of all the embryos in his research when he analyzes probable reasons for not pursuing ectogenesis: “At this stage of investigation, all we can say is that long-term extrauterine fetal incubation using extracorporeal circulation would be destructively expensive as an alternative for natural intrauterine pregnancy” (2000:69–70). He implies that extrauterine fetal incubation is only a matter of time and financial resources.

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Feminism and Ectogenesis The feminist literature on ectogenetic and ARTs is diverse and plentiful and represents probably the most consistent and systematic set of interrogations of technology engaged in by feminist researchers.12 One might assume this is due to the fact that the maternal body is most directly related to women, and therefore feminist writers have a particular passion and, moreover, responsibility with respect to reproductive sciences and technologies. The point is often made that if we do not engage in such critique then it will be left to patriarchal medical institutions, with their misogynistic history. However, a problem (ontological, epistemological, and political) arises when feminist literature, just as biomedical literature, positions reproductive technology as a separate object, as something that stands external to women and their experiences. I am particularly inspired here by Rosalind Petchesky (1995), who challenges us to use a wider range of epistemologies and approaches in understanding the human-machine nexus. In some sense, treating us (women) and them (machines) as essentially distinct seems to have led to the formation of this “separateness” itself as feminist doxa. Such doxa, however, does not take into account different histories, genealogies, and possibilities of reproductive technology and embryology as interconnected fields of knowledge. It also obscures women’s differences and their continuing involvement and investments in the formation and development of such histories, genealogies, and possibilities. In a very interesting and revealing article published in Ctheory—a leading cyberculture electronic magazine—Jaimie Smith-Windsor (2004) recounts her experience of “sharing” her newborn daughter with a machine, a sort of external mother-machine. Her daughter was born prematurely and was put into an incubator—an artificial-placenta environment. Throughout her article Smith-Windsor positions herself as an observer of the workings of the “life-support machine” on her baby. What is important for us here is how the author, in an attempt to think of herself through the notions of “fractured identities and broken boundaries,” reinstates and even desires to distinguish her experience of mothering from reproductive technologies. Smith-Windsor’s language counterposes and differentiates the natural warmth of the maternal body and the cold organs of the machine, which she carefully names the “incubator,” “cords of the support machine,”

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“Drager 2000 Ventilator,” “artificial umbilical line,” and “the electrodes.” As the narrative continues, we are introduced to an evolving oppositional anxiety of a “human” mother, on the one hand, and a machine incapable of love and caring, on the other. Throughout the text Smith-Windsor denies the machine most of the things she claims for herself—love, physical body, reality, and, ultimately, goodness—almost defining it by the absence of these characteristics and herself by their presence. First, the machine is not capable of “real” love or “real” breathing— it merely simulates such actions. Everything is simulated: breathing through the pipes as if it were real breathing, simulating symbiosis as if it were natural, etc. Simulation that was once attributed to “Woman” (Smith-Windsor’s usage), defining her as a pure “simulation” of feeling and thought—all in order to disqualify her from participating in matters of state and society as well as decisions over her own life—is now attributed to a machine: “Technology is capable of simulating vital signs, of supporting life, of becoming Mother. The child of the techno-Mother is, essentially, a virtual body” (Smith-Windsor 2004:2). It is a living simulacrum, according to Smith-Windsor. Second, the machine aims to replace the Mother by creating a fissure in the child-mother relationship: “The relationship between mother and child itself is mediated by technology. Technology interrupts the relation, intercepts the exchange of nurturing and needing of the infantile language. The Mother becomes redundant: technology becomes the external womb” (Smith-Windsor 2004:3). Here we face the same rhetoric that was mobilized during the Industrial Revolution—of dangerous machines replacing workers—“cold” machines as substitutes for human labor. However, much more than the question of livelihood is at stake. SmithWindsor draws on psychoanalytic theory (Kristeva in particular) to support her claim of why the use of incubators is psychically problematic: the child does not go through the “normal” process of entering the symbolic order and learning human communication. Third, the incubator is “evil” since, unlike a good Mother with her “natural” protective body, the artificial womb is defined as the external womb. As a result, it makes the child’s body more “available” for interference from the outside world, including the medical profession. Here the traditional medical imaginary of interior/exterior is reversed: whereas in medical literature the maternal body is an unstable and dangerous place (as conceived by Gosden), potentially harmful for an infant, here the machine is seen as the dangerous place. Nevertheless, the “internal/

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external” opposition is sustained in both cases, and both positions substitute for each other, since they derive from the same “safe/dangerous” opposition. For Smith-Windsor, rather than being in an enclosed protected home—the maternal body—the child’s body in the artificial womb becomes a cyborg of virtual “nonspace.” The machine, hence, cannot protect the child’s body as naturally as the Mother can from harmful effects and others (doctors), who are claiming the child as their object of study/ interference. Fourth, for Smith-Windsor, it is ultimately a question of a power struggle between life and death, good and evil: “Through the body, the machine performs the dichotomy of living and killing, life and death. It gives life only to overtake it. The technology that sustains life is ultimately nihilistic. . . . To become cyborg is to commit a slow-suicide. Ultimately, it is the nihilation of the human body, of autonomous human consciousness” (2004:3–4). Smith-Windsor’s conclusion leaves us with despair, drained of any options and opportunities to fight “evil” machines, leading to the total cybernetic control of the individual: “To locate ‘being’ outside of technology becomes an impossibility. . . . Becoming cyborg is ultimately about the sublimation of the human identity and the political imaginary” (6). Smith-Windsor’s writing might seem like a critique of the cyberfeminist flirting with the notion of the female cyborg derived from the ideas of Sadie Plant (1995), among others. There is very little in our culture that helps mothers to come to terms with their experiences vis-à-vis ectogenetic technologies. If pregnancy is taken as the most natural function of a woman, it is no surprise that the maternal body and experience of motherhood seem fundamentally opposed to and dissonant with such machinic substitutes as incubators. As I empathize with Smith-Windsor’s painful and difficult experience, it is also important to ask what narrative or theoretical purpose is served by her reinstatement of mothering in essential opposition to the technological and the machinic. The concept of the cyborg, as used by Smith-Windsor—even if seen in terms of the “next step in evolution”—still reinforces “natural” versus “artificial” distinctions. However, this distinction is suspect, since the “cyborg” is a story of the machine that is framed discursively as replacing the mother. Squier points out, however, that “(t)he cyborg originates in ectogenesis. Foundational to the fantasy of the cyborg, with its denial of the mind/body link, is an earlier denial of the relationship between fetus and gestating woman” (1994:95). The potentiality of alternative visions

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seems to come from the mother-machine nexus. If negative definitions of the machine represent misogynist tendencies within European philosophy (devaluing the mother as a “breeding” machine and just a “clever incubator”—that is, as less than human), then feminist thought has to imagine and set forth alternative conceptions of the machine and thus of the maternal body. We need to reconsider our traditional “denigration of the machine,” especially with reference to new reproductive technologies and ectogenesis in particular. At the same time, any new evaluation of the maternal and its relation to machines needs to be informed by the feminist critique of assisted reproductive and ectogenetic technologies, which I explore next. Many feminist researchers have articulated negative attitudes toward “reproductive machines,” mostly on the grounds that women are already being exploited as “wombs” and “machines for reproduction.” It is certain that most of the previously discussed researchers who champion ectogenesis often see women as both obstacles and valued suppliers of materials to their research needs. What is often missing in critical accounts is the heterogeneity of women’s positions, especially as informed by class and race differences (Corea 1985; Ginsburg and Rapp 1995). Marxist, nonWestern, and radical feminist analyses of reproductive technologies seem most informed by the differences among women and the role played by power relations and material conditions in women’s lives. For example, Ann Oakley, in her excellent and suggestively titled book The Captured Womb: A History of the Medical Care of Pregnant Women, consistently tries to show that the “womb” has become a kind of contested terrain among scientists and doctors who vie for control over the female body and its reproductive power. Oakley’s attitude to ectogenesis is negative, positioning the “womb” as a “safe sanctuary” versus inferior machines: “nowhere, quite yet, is the spectre of an entirely laboratorymade human pregnancy.  .  .  . We may .  .  . confidently say that the intensive care provided by the human uterus will continue for some time in the antenatal world of the future to provide a sanctuary for the fetus which is technically superior to that of any man-made [sic] substitute” (1984:282). It is noteworthy, however, that Oakley conceives of the medical establishment only through their desire for control over reproduction and women. While announcing that “the absolute removal of pregnancy from women’s uteruses to laboratories could either be liberating or oppressive for women” (282), Oakley rightly argues that this is a question of “Who controls it?” The problem remains, however, whether the terminol-

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ogy of control and ownership should be our conceptual framework. The fact that machines are “man-made” appears to have made them suspect, by default, as extensions of male domination. This position is symptomatic. Robyn Rowland (1992) seems to have divided “us” and “them” from the beginning as well, though she implies that women had control over their reproduction and that this is being taken over by men operating new technologies with the purpose of controlling “maternal procreative ability.” Here, presenting gestation and birthing from within the maternal body as “natural” supports the problematic opposition between maternal body and technology as aligned to that between “natural” and “man-controlled” once again: “Subtly, step by step, we are changing the nature of being human and eroding the control which women have had over procreation. In its place, male-controlled technological intervention is beginning to determine how children will be conceived, what kind of children will be born, and who is worthy of receiving these new products of our science” (Rowland 1992:3). Here ectogenetic technology is aligned with men not only historically (with which I agree) but also essentially, ahistorically. Rowland’s defense of the “nature of being human” then risks presenting women in an essentialized opposition to technology that is in itself contrary to feminized “human nature.” However, we do ourselves a disservice as feminists if we present all men who work in medical professions today as using the development and deployment of ARTs and ectogenesis to assert control over “captured wombs.” By positioning women who use those technologies as passive, duped receivers, we assume them to be in a state of “false consciousness” and to be victims who betray their own bodies. Through such assumptions we also obscure the realities of predominantly globally mobile middle-class women who remain the main consumers of the discourses as well as the services of artificial reproduction, surrogate motherhood, and technological research in ectogenesis (Cooper 2006; Mitchell, Burgess, and Thurtle 2008; Sandelowski 1990; Marsh and Ronner 1996). The fundamentally negative attitude to reproductive technologies also makes those “guilty” women who buy into such technologies and practices into “complacent victims” of patriarchal structures of family and community, rendering them unaccountable for their decisions. Without denying the presence of discrimination and outlined earlier “ectogenetic desire,” I consider calls to “take our natural power back” misleading and implicated in the very power structures of patriarchy that operate through

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the same discourses of control and ownership. More disturbing are references to some kind of “natural” maternal goodness, which does not account for the actual maternal labor and hospitality required or the fact that not all women are inherently more nurturing than men. Several attempts have been made to redefine the status of women by valorizing and embracing the technological and the machinic, notably through the notion of the cyborg (Haraway 1991) and in cyberfeminism (Plant 1995).13 It is useful next to examine one path to ectogenesis that involves making the embryo into a cyborg: it tries to adapt the embryo to its new environment rather than the environment (incubator, artificial womb, artificial placenta) to the embryo. For example, for Sarah Franklin the embryo of modern science is both “one of us”—a part of humanity in general—and a “cyborg,” which for her means being technological and organic at the same time. The cyborg-embryo is not “born and bred” or “born and made” but is first “made” and then “born,” for the sake of “an improved human future” (Franklin 2006:171, 178; Franklin and Roberts 2006). It is connected to us through “genes” and communal feelings, but it is also born “out of science,” as it “inhabits the timeless ice land of liquid-nitrogen storage tanks, and feeds on special (pure) culture in its petri dish. At once potential research material (scientific object), quasicitizen (it has legal rights), and potential person (human subject), the embryo has a cyborg liminality in its contested location between science and nature” (Franklin 1995:337). Probably the most engaged contemporary interpreter of current biotechnologies and their science, Franklin develops an idea of transbiology and presents the “cyborg-embryo” as the main exemplar of her concept. While she too uses the terminology of control, she critically refers to the control and management of living cells in the quest to make healthier humans at the genetic and embryonic stage. She states in her article “The Cyborg Embryo: Our Path to Transbiology,” following Haraway, that “from ‘the translation of the world into the problem of coding’” there is a shift toward “a translation of the problem of coding into one of context (a key point throughout all of Haraway’s work, and one that could be described as thoroughly embryological)” (Franklin 2006:179). Franklin uses Haraway’s language of networks and context (which I discussed in the previous chapter) to explore the genealogy of contemporary transbiology. I consider the cybernetic notions of “control” and “management” of biological systems and their contexts to be reflective of “ectogenetic desire,” and thus, indeed, they need to be placed in their specific contexts.

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A feminist anthropological approach allows us to understand that we have had reproductive technologies for as long as we have had social forms of living together. What might seem today to be the intervention of machines into human existence is not that unusual after all: “anthropological and historical evidence reminds us that technological interventions into reproduction are ubiquitous and have been around for thousands of years” (Ginsburg and Rapp 1995:291). Rosalind Petchesky also argues for a wider range of epistemologies and approaches in understanding the human-machine nexus. In her article “The Body as Property: A Feminist Revision” (1995) she states that she is troubled by the ongoing exploitations of women’s bodies and uteruses and their reduction to objects for sale or rent. However, her intention is to raise critical questions concerning the language in which feminist accounts of those exploitative practices are formulated and “to challenge the narrow conceptual frameworks in which some feminists criticize these transactions” (1995:388). Arguing against views that feminists should, as far as possible, avoid “the language of the individual,” since it fashions women according to a male model, Petchesky acknowledges problems with Western conceptions of property but also argues for alternative visions rather than rejection. For one alternative vision, Petchesky turns to African American women’s experiences with motherhood under conditions of slavery: “The African American slave women’s body was deeply enmeshed in the ties of household, kin, community, and maternity. . . . Out of this experience, black feminist theory points to an ethic of women’s bodily integrity that is communal and extended rather than individualized and privatized” (Petchesky 1995:398; see also Willett 1995). The comparative refiguring of mothering as “communal” proposed by Petchesky enables us to situate the Western white middle-class model of mothering that emerged in the twentieth century as culturally and historically specific to particular norms of family, economy, law, and politics. In relation to reproductive technologies, Sarah-Vaughan Brakman and Sally J. Scholz proposed what they called “feminist embodied maternity,” which is “nurturing, communal, and emphasizes the physical relations of the subjective lived-body over genetic or biological connections.” They claim that this notion has been inspired by “existential phenomenology,” Iris Marion Young’s writing on motherhood, and Joan Mahoney’s nonownership-based model of parenting (Brakman and Scholz 2006:65). Writing against the “biological model of mothering,” which privileges technologies that seek genetic connections between parents and children

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(ectogenesis would mostly fall into this category as well), Brakman and Scholz reconstitute “mothering as a communal event” (68). I certainly agree with the important benefits of “communal mothering.” However, I find their proposition of nurturing as “physical bonds that ultimately unite parents with their children,” without attending to the more communal, temporary situations of nurturing, somewhat problematic. It seems to be substituting one model of a single family, arising from “biological connection,” with another model, this one based on “adoptive connection.” In both, nurturing is dependent on and enacted via the “physical” bonds “that ultimately unite parents with children” (67). Thus, in their article, the negative attitude to ARTs seems to be based on parents’ search for “genetic,” biological connection. It is interesting that, although these authors champion adoption (including transnational adoption), they assume and work from adoption into a Western model of parenting (a parent and a child), without proper regard for the history of parenting in cultural settings where communal mothering is practiced. It leaves us with the possibility of further considering how modern Western parents could “adopt” different forms of parenting, including a communal form, from the social contexts of their adopted children. The negative aspects of global adoption as a business should not be disregarded as well: its high legal fees, its psychological costs, “shopping” for international children, and race issues. Brakman and Scholz do, however, highlight the economic costs of ARTs vis-à-vis adoption.14 Much in line with Irigaray, Petchesky examines “control” and “ownership” in relation to an ethics of the maternal body even further by claiming that we should not abandon the notion of female subjectivity just because the male subject is in crisis: “For many other women’s movements around the globe, the idea of women owning their bodies is similarly not an individualist, exclusionary interest but rather a fundamental condition for women’s development and strength as a social group and thus for their full participation as citizens” (1995:403). I would argue that this “ideal” is somewhat problematic if we take it as a utopian feminist goal of full ownership rather than a specific claim in a specific situation. There is no such thing as “full ownership” of one’s body. And even if we look at the burden of the Western definition of reproductive freedom that is based on the split between the self and community, body and society, the challenges to this split are indeed accelerated by reproductive technologies. How to empower mothers through these changes is the question I am mostly concerned with, especially since the maternal-fetal relation

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is now placed at the heart of the new biomedical research. Karen Newman, in her important book Fetal Positions: Individualism, Science, Visuality, argues that it is not advisable to seek to restore any kind of “subject” position for the mother, since this would feed into the Western liberal humanist project. Responding to the way in which women’s bodies have been rendered invisible or muted in the history of art and medicine, she argues against “restoring” the image of the maternal body in the representation of fetuses. As much as we would like to build up a “self” for the mother, it would be an unproductive, even destructive move as soon as such notions of the self follow the problematic notions of fixed identity and individualism (Newman 1996:68). Newman’s position does not lead to disempowerment if we simultaneously support the call for reproductive freedom. The necessity to work with the legal framework that exists in each specific case does not diminish the need for a new framework that will provide alternative legal recognition to the maternal relations that are outside the current legal notions of ownership and private property. Without such a new framework, matrixial/maternal relations that are outside the legal framework of private property continue to be assumed and even demanded as “gifts” and “donations” on only the side of the matrix/mother, thus being capitalized and exploited by the biomedical for-profit industry. Janice Raymond has examined technologies of assisted reproduction with reference to the complex relations of power that are implied in them. In her book, titled similarly to Oakley’s, Women as Wombs: Reproductive Technologies and the Battle Over Women’s Freedom (1993), she presents an interesting analysis of reproductive technologies and sexual exploitation, clearly demonstrating that the issue of reproductive technologies is directly connected to questions of class, race, and power. Most surrogate mothers come from minority or lower-class families. Moreover, the demand by middle-class parents in first world countries breeds supply in the third world, causing previously unheard of exploitation of maternal bodies. She describes in detail how “baby farms” and “gestational houses” have been operating across South America and Asia (and, according to the most recent reports, in Eastern Europe). I might add here that, despite her obvious sensitivity to the first world’s demand for “fair-skinned babies” (she describes cases where “dark-skinned” girls were forced to have sex with white men in the hope of producing “fairer” children for the illegal baby market), Raymond merely refers to women-consumers

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of reproductive technologies such as IVF and embryo transplantation as “complacent” within the system of oppression, assuming that they are not actively seeking to exploit third world women as “wombs.” They are, problematically, seen as “passive” participants rather than active producers, promoters, and citizen-consumers of these practices. It is important, however, not to oversimplify the diversity and heterogeneity of situations into a simple binary between “unnecessary waste of money on ectogenesis by rich, white, and privileged” families and “poor minorities and countries with no basic health care and so no need for ectogenesis.” The biomedical rationale for pursuing ectogenesis is mostly presented by its supporters as a path to help those dealing with infertility and to save embryos and fetuses who otherwise would die or be aborted.15 The feminist accounts of ectogenesis and ARTs I have presented have pointed out that factors of class, race, and national origin are embedded in biomedical technologies no less than in other areas of human activity. For a growing number of feminist researchers, the current ectogenetic technologies open up new opportunities in practice, theory, and criticism (Haraway 1991; Smelik and Lykke 2008; Franklin and Roberts 2006; Squier 1994). Thus, for Maria Ferreira, ectogenesis is desirable, especially if it is combined with cloning. In her book I Am the Other she writes: “With human cloning and ectogenesis, as well as the sharing of the reproductive capacity with men, I believe that instead of relinquishing the source of power that motherhood has been perceived in some respects as yielding, as some critics would argue, women would, on the contrary, achieve a greater equality by dint of that very interchange of roles, in particular if and when ectogenesis became the norm” (2005:227). If a woman chooses to have a cloned child “inside her own womb or in an artificial one,” it “would potentially and gradually lead to a greater parity with men and equality of opportunities with women in the social structure” (228). However, these opportunities can be achieved only if women actively participate “in the scientific and medical arenas” (229), with the freedom to choose whatever reproductive strategy they desire (within the ethical limits of the socialist-feminist framework that Ferreira adopts). Moreover, there is a need to equally distribute “women’s almost exclusive source of power—pregnancy and lactation”—to allow “a more just society” to emerge, “a postpatriarchal one where phallologocentric psychoanalytic structures would no longer apply” (240). This right to choose ectogenesis (or some other future technology of procreation) was also the

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main argument for the biomedical theorists Gosden, Singer, and Wells. Here Ferreira extends to men this right to choose, an opportunity she sees as “liberating” from men’s “dependence” on women. Rather than insisting that the mother and the machine are essentially separate, it is important to read critically the mother-machine as coextensive, and possibly mutually reinforcing, sides of the same ectogenetic desire. Focus on the oft-neglected question of nursing might provide us with another path to discuss and understand ectogenesis as a matrixial/ maternal technology. This path, I argue, would allow contemporary feminist conceptions of ectogenesis to move beyond ideological divides where postmodern or posthuman visions of the body and technology are found “guilty” of political apathy and contrasted with a more “materialist” and “embodied” feminist approach.16

Nursing/Machine In her narrative account, Smith-Windsor does not mention others in the room—nurses, family members, doctors—but focuses on positioning herself as the “human” and the machine as the “technological” mother of the cyborg-child. As I discussed earlier, many scholars present ectogenetic technologies as a conflict between mother and machine, especially since machines are usually made by men, who have demonstrated their ectogenetic desire as control over gestation and women’s “reproductive abilities.” While these accounts are important, I am interested here specifically in one, thus far minor, figure in these juxtapositions of mothers, doctors, and machines: the figure of the nurse. Her virtual absence in previous discussions on mothers and machines is almost unnoticeable. The nurse is, however, there. There are accounts of incubators and modern NICUs that emphasize the role of nurses (Tracey and Maroney 1999). I will show in this section that ectogenetic machines as autonomous “incubators” of fetuses have not lived up to their makers’ expectations (to become fully autonomous “brooders”) primarily due to their failure to be substitutes for nursing. Sterne, Tarnier, Budin, and more recent authors claim that the central figure who makes the difference between mortality and survival of the fetus/infant is often not the mother, another family member, or the doctor. It is the person who most frequently and directly takes care of incubators and their “guests”: the so-called primary nurse of each infant in each incubator, today called the NICU (level III) and neonatal nurse.

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The human neonate (newborn), especially premature, is one of the most dependent newborns in the animal kingdom in terms of both the length of time it needs direct nursing and its extent. By nursing I understand all those practices that must be enacted for the survival of the premature infant (the candidate for future full ectogenesis). The neonatal nurse has become an indispensable part of incubation.17 Midwives, wet nurses, mothers, poor women working part-time, obstetricians and pediatricians, inventors, poultry producers, engineers, technicians, resident physicians, neonatal nurses with doctorates in neonatal nursing, family members, adoptive parents, strangers—all have participated in taking care of incubators and infants. Nursing the infant also means taking care of the incubator. The definition of nursing, which will indeed be something to result from my discussion here, is that it is an assemblage of practices that have been developed to mimic the maternal-fetal interface within the “incubator environment.” In Fortunio’s premature birth, the father, who was interested in medicine and obstetrics, and doctors “instructed the wet nurse” to place the infant into the oven, after enveloping him, like a hen with her egg, according to another rendering of this story, in a cotton-padded box. Though in some editions the original French word nourrisse is translated simply as a “nurse” (Folkenflik, in Sterne 2004), most translations render it as “wet nurse.” No mention is made of the mother or the midwife in the story in Sterne’s book. As the legend goes, Fortunio was born on a boat between two cities, after six months of gestation, and his father had to rush him to his friends in the nearest city, where they “incubated” him in the oven. The wet nurse, thus, from the very beginning became a default member of the imaginary and infrastructure of human-incubator technology. Although she was crucial in implementing the father’s brilliant idea of incubating babies as “they do it with chickens in Egypt and China,” her “matter of fact” presence may be exactly what provides the illusion of her absence. Although she was necessary for the development and deployment of ectogenesis and incubation, she was “just there” (just like the “feminine” in/of hospitality). There seems to be no reason for Fortunio’s father to use another person, since he could have placed his son into the oven for incubation by himself, which would, presumably, have given him greater claim to and authority over his “invention.” We are told that he gave the nurse “orders” about what to do (Reverby 1987; Andrist, Nicholas, and Wolf 2006). Nothing prevented him from following the orders given by his doctor-friends and from placing the embryo into the

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oven himself. Did he even need doctors? For, we are told, it was his idea all along. He just needed the oven. That leads one to suggest that perhaps Fortunio’s father gave orders to a wet nurse (une nourrisse), unnamed, simply because she was already there and not because he needed her. We can assume that the “embryo” was old enough and healthy enough to take milk, to suckle. Otherwise, why would a wet nurse be hired, or did she just happen to be present along with the doctors?18 Thus, before the oven-incubator, the embryo had a wet nurse. Viviparity requires more than the heat of the brooding body. The embryo is not an egg, and matters of feeding and washing away waste, among many others, require a level of attention that is not supplied by an incubator providing merely warmth. Many researchers continue to quote this story as “one of the earliest descriptions of the care of the premature infant” (T. E. C. Jr. 1977:809; see also Budin 1907; Cone 1980), connecting the biomedical past with its present. I also consider this story to be an important indicator of the centrality of nursing in the quest for and development of ectogenetic technology. Researchers and doctors who acknowledged the fundamental differences between a chicken brooding (couveuse) over her egg and the long-term nursing needs of viviparous human neonates achieved remarkably better results in survival and quality-of-life outcomes (Toubas and Nelson 2002). Acknowledgment of the primacy of nursing, however, has had little impact so far on ectogenetic desire and technologies of artificial mothering. This is demonstrated by the rather limited space that is provided for nurses and those who nurse neonates in NICUs.19 It is remarkable how many women have been involved with the design and running of incubators and special neonatal units. Moreover, those hospitals and doctors that provided experienced nurses with greater responsibilities and oversight of “incubator nurseries” had some of the best survival rates for infants and created important collaborative teams. Three nurses noteworthy here were Madame Henry, who worked with Tarnier at Maternity Hospital in Paris (late nineteenth century); Emma Koch (later DeLee), an early contributor to the textbook Obstetrics for Nurses (DeLee 1904) who worked with Joseph DeLee in the Chicago Lying-in Hospital; and Evelyn Lundeen, who coauthored, with Julius Hess, The Premature Infant: Its Medical and Nursing Care (Hess and Lundeen 1941). Though Tarnier was credited with the invention of the couveuse, the head nurse of the Maternity Hospital, Madame Henry, was instrumental

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in its development, management, and progress. She provided expertise on incubators to other hospitals and doctors and, more remarkably, left a trace of herself in medical history. “The so-called Tarnier incubator was improved by Madame Henry, midwife-in-chief of the Paris Maternite,” writes Cone (1980). Though Budin disliked nurses in general, especially wet nurses, he had to rely on Madame Henry’s expertise to make his own incubator (Budin 1907).20 It was under Madame Henry’s supervision that the first ward for premature infants was established. She lobbied for a separate building for this ward and was awarded municipal funding. It had a dormitory for sixteen wet nurses, a separate room for washing and dressing infants, and several isolated rooms to reduce infection and to house infants with mothers. This building, Pavillon des Debiles, “immediately became the most extensive special care nursery for premature infants of its day. . . . The pavilion of weaklings symbolized the culmination of the previous decade of caring for premature infants in the maternity hospital setting, as well as a dividing line introducing a new phase of newborn medicine” (Baker 1996:48). Baker also points out that this was the time when the concept of the “premature” infant started to develop, one that had its own needs and problems compared with a full-term infant, who might be “weak,” sick, or have a low birth weight but was not “premature.” It probably helped Henry that Maternity Hospital had been run by midwives before the arrival of male physicians, who were often not welcomed. Rather than being confrontational, Tarnier persistently tried to involve midwives in his own clinical practice and realized very early how dependent he was on them to initiate and sustain any change. Henry, who was hired by Tarnier, was interested in the care of newborns and a talented administrator. It was under her supervision that Tarnier conducted his famous statistical analysis of premature infant mortality and showed that the use of incubators reduced it significantly. The incubator, thus, became an overnight sensation. When Budin succeeded him, his dislike of midwives and wet nurses and his preference for mothers, as well as his attempts to take power away from midwives, led to Henry’s departure. After being opened in 1893, the first neonate facility came under Budin’s control in 1895, when Henry resigned. The outcomes that Tarnier and Henry had reported quickly deteriorated from a 41 percent mortality rate in 1893 to 77 percent in 1903 (Toubas and Nelson 2002). Though Budin was instrumental in the institutionalization of maternity benefits, such as paid leave, free care under maternal insurance, and oth-

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ers, his failure to collaborate with midwives and wet nurses was a possible factor in the increased mortality. Henry can also be credited with an early scientific approach to the incubator and the outcomes of its usage. Her writing shows how systematically she approached infant care (Henry 1908). Contemporary doctors of neonatology praise her record keeping and approach, suggesting that “many of our NICUs would envy today the concise manner in which nurses graphed the weight and temperature of the infants on a daily basis. Studies were made about the digestion of milk. Complications of feedings, including gastro-esophageal reflux, as well as obstructive cyanotic apneic spells, are very well described. Infection of the nasal cavity or eyes and pneumonia were some of the major preoccupations of the caretakers of these infants” (Toubas and Nelson 2002:76). Henry made observations about the long-term outcomes for premature infants and, like Budin, considered the chances for long-term survival and quality of life as important as the initial benefits of the incubator. These factors are also often omitted in discussions of ectogenesis, since the issue of nursing is rarely discussed, as if there is a global availability of universal health care with special provisions for the nursing of artificially incubated children. Neither is there unlimited financial and personal support for the immediate family: much of the research shows that the long-term impact of experience with an NICU on family members is comparable to posttraumatic stress disorder. Unlike Henry’s lobbying for special spatial accommodation for the nurses, the examples of artificial-womb or artificial-placenta rooms by Unno or Gosden presented earlier in this chapter do not seem to account for such nursing needs or mention the amount of human input these “artificial” wombs require because they are such inadequate “interfaces.” While more recent designs of incubators try to take nursing into account (mobility, easy approach, ability to access an infant without fully opening the incubator), nursing itself remains subsumed rather than deliberated and articulated in the quest for and development of more autonomous systems of ectogenesis. I argue that unless the machine can nurse, or we acknowledge that it will never nurse, ectogenesis will remain a misleading research project. If a machine cannot deal with organic waste, wipe mucus from an infant’s nose without damaging already-bleeding air passages, swaddle, turn, observe changes in skin color, and so forth, the supply of regulated heat, nutrients, and oxygen will not be enough to sustain this new life. The mother-machine will need so many “empirical” nurses

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(wet nurses, animals for providing milk and tissue for various surgeries, immediate family members or institutional substitutes, just to name a few) that calling it an “artificial womb,” a matrix-incubator, will remain an example of ectogenetic desire that is indeed divorced from the real conditions that make ectogenesis possible. The mother-machines described currently lack another much-needed capacity: the ability to deal with the metabolic by-products of human life. Viviparity ensures that the maternal and fetal products of apoptosis (natural cell death, to put it simply), fetal excrement, and other “dead” tissue are reabsorbed, kept at bay, or used as building blocks for new tissue. But the premature human fetus has problems with its environment; for example, its lungs cannot breathe air without help.21 It is nursing—with its constant attention to the metabolic rhythms and needs of the fetus—that supports and substantiates the incubation environment. Many parents, including nurses, whose children were placed in an NICU have written about their experiences.22 These authors rarely mention doctors in relation to the NICU, but they always mention the nurse who takes care of their infant. This is not the place to fully discuss the dynamics of the relationship between parents, doctors, and nurses in NICUs. The relations are often tense, as has been well documented (Baum and Howat 1978; Maroney 2009; Thompson and Thompson 1981; Tracey and Maroney 1999). Nurses and some parents observe that often incubator infants do not have any visitors for days, and the nurses thus become the only meaningful social and caring relation that the fetus encounters.23 With the lack of paid maternity and paternity leave, the lack of health insurance, the need to care for other children at home, or severe emotional stress and avoidance behavior, many parents are not able to spend a lot of time in the NICU, and thus nurses become even more important. The spread of so-called Kangaroo Care has helped to make a case for more parental (especially maternal) involvement in NICU. In the early 1960s and 1970s many NICUs did not let parents in,24 but since the 1980s questions of family empowerment have made their way into neonatology, and today parents are mostly welcome. Kangaroo Care was first established by Edgar Rey Sanabria, professor of neonatology at the Department of Pediatrics (Universidad Nacional de Colombia), and doctor Hector Martinez, at the NICU of Instituto Materno Infantil, Bogotá, Colombia, in 1978. Today it is practiced in many NICUs in the United States (over 80 percent according to one estimate). The care involves placing a naked infant on one’s bare chest to allow for as much skin-to-skin and

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face-to-face contact as possible. This should be done, ideally in a rocking chair, for at least one or two hours per day during breast, bottle, or tube feeding. Some researchers argue that this method of care reduces the time the infant needs to be in an incubator/NICU and leads to faster weight gain (Martinez, Navarette, and Navarette 1990). What is important to me here is that this Kangaroo Care adds an element of viviparity to the NICU, and while the warmth of the body could be easily replaced by that of an incubator (as a brooder), the physical intimacy that is the target of this method includes viviparous elements of the maternal-fetal interface (such as heartbeat, smell, skin-to-skin tactility) that acknowledge the outcomes of nursing. One needs to keep in mind, however, that Kangaroo Care as it is currently promoted does not yet include neonatal nurses or social workers, being framed heavily in terms of the “biological maternal” connection. Initiated with the vocabulary of the “natural” connection to the mother, it envisions the mother as the primary provider of Kangaroo Care, which reinforces the domestic ideals of housewife and stay-at-home moms. It also reinforces the terms of “ownership” between mother and her child. She is framed as more responsible because she is also the one who is in control. As one may imagine, it is likely that nurses provide Kangaroo Care without the parents knowing about it and that in the future others might be encouraged to provide this “rocking” and “skin-to-skin” contact as well, independent of their “biological” relation to the infants. The main obstacles, however, to this transition might be legal and social rather than medical. Mothers already may feel disempowered by seeing their children in an NICU, as Smith-Windsor was vis-à-vis the machine, and additional “walls” are created between mothers and nurses in educational textbooks and biomedical literature. They reinforce the culture of “ownership,” which is based on private property as the primary framework of the relation between the maternal “self” and her “others.” Thus, the involvement of nurses is framed as “danger,” and they are supposed to keep their distance so that parents do not feel “threatened” as “owners” of the child (Kitzinger and Davis 1978). These kinds of assumptions have been criticized in the feminist literature discussed earlier, as based on the “ownership” concept of parenting, which does not address the practices of hospitality of nursing and nourishing, as well as generating, which are always already there, alongside the practices of legal claims to “having” and “being in control.”

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Thus, the success of incubation depends largely on the commitment of those who nurse the infant. An entire ecosystem of individuals and roles—neonatal nurses, doctors, community members, parents and extended family, siblings, material, financial, psychological, and educational advisers and helpers, social workers, specialists, and others, paid by society as a whole—help sustain this infant’s (quality of) life. If any or many of these factors are absent, the chances are that life will be poor in quality or end early. Specifically here though, the primacy of nurses in the success of ectogenetic technologies shows us that some ectogenetic technologies are merely mimicking the most basic elements in the total “nursing” that the infant will need. My point is that as artificial wombs and placentas are discussed as a coming reality, the question of who or what will provide nursing before, during, and long after this neonatal period becomes central. While an increasing awareness of the role of the nurse was being recognized in the emerging years of the incubator, nurses, parents, and physicians were still finding themselves in a problematic situation of “ownership” and “control” over machines and infants. As Baker points out: The tension between the machine and the mother was eventually reconciled by introducing the professional nurse. This development for the most part awaited the years after 1922 but was already anticipated in the incubator stations with DeLee and Hess. Such physicians rejected the pretensions of the incubator itself to be a “mechanical nurse” but affirmed that it required the attention and expertise of a genuine professional nurse. During much of the second quarter of the century, as the Hess incubator station rose in prominence and began to be imitated, nurses consolidated control of the premature infant nursery. Their rise to power within this institution was notable when set against mothers as well as physicians. It raises the possibility, yet to be explored, that the professional nurse made possible what the incubator had not: the usurpation of maternal responsibility for the critically ill newborn. (Baker 1996:180) The figure of the nurse as foundational to the incubator and ectogenetic technologies can be traced throughout the history of incubators, certainly not only with the arrival of the “professional nurse.” While I appreciate Baker’s insight into the importance of the nurse, his specific

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time frame might have played a role in his analysis and conclusions. Indeed, NICUs in the 1970s and 1980s were not particularly parent friendly, but this was not only due to the presence and actions of the nurses. The biomedical parameters of what constituted an appropriate environment for the newborn were set by doctors. After all, nurses follow “orders.” But, more important, I do not share Baker’s confrontational terminology as such. It frames the mother-machine-nurse-physician ensemble through the lens of competition for power over the infant. As he himself shows in his study of the history of incubators, the best survival rates were achieved in those institutions where as much “nursing,” even if not by “nurses” per se, was provided as possible in a collaborative fashion. Consistent with this vision, Baker argues in conclusion that there is an urgent need to incorporate NICUs into a larger shift in health care toward a public health policy of “preventing premature birth or supporting infants after leaving the hospital,” as practiced in France (1996:181). Many NICU nurses note that the relation between nurses and doctors is not equal (especially in terms of pay and social status), and therefore it is hardly possible to speak of some “usurpation” of power and control by nurses (Andrist et al. 2006). With clear evidence of specialist doctors’ limited presence during labor and in the NICUs, and the inability of many mothers and other family members to nurse the infants and look after incubators around the clock, the nurses have been hired to take responsibility in very stressful and emotional situations. Certainly, parents feel very vulnerable and possessive when they see their children inside a machine and have to rely constantly on nurses and doctors. This is often a disempowering situation. To assume that nurses usurp this power is to assume that the NICU environment is a power game with the infant as prize.25 As more recent studies demonstrate, neonatal nurses, based upon parental ability and request, increasingly delegate the neonate’s care to parents and family members, and such examples as Kangaroo Care and new facilities for parents to stay overnight at NICUs are testimony to this. Although, certainly, nurses have enormous power in these units, this power is a result of the failed promises and structural limits of ectogenetic technology, which has neglected to address the question of nursing. Thus, rather than seeing this situation in terms of control over the infant, the NICU today seems focused on becoming a nursing technological environment where success depends on the ability of everyone involved to respond to a call. Mothers’ dependence on nurses does not make them

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“enemies” by default. After birth, every infant needs constant care, and mortality rates in the first year of life are even more important indicators of nursing quality and availability than they are in the first week of life.26 The power of nurses is thus derived, I would argue, from their being left to contend with the infant’s powerlessness and vulnerability, one on one. They have more responsibility for the infant than doctors do at this point, and their responsibility is not diminished by the adjective professional. Rather than appreciating the emotional input of nurses as a part of total care, the modern social context, however, mostly sees any feelings that nurses might form for the infants in terms of “control.” As Baum and Howat describe: Neonatal intensive care has resulted in a change in the traditional role of the clinical nurse. During the time of the baby’s acute illness the nurse is acting as a highly skilled technician playing a central role in maintaining the baby’s life support system. During periods of intense work it is difficult for even the most experienced nurse to avoid feelings that visits from the parents are an intrusion. Over the days of intensive care many nurses become attached to their patients; this adds to the problems of preserving for the parents their feelings that the baby belongs to them and not to the specialcare baby unit and its staff. Providing such problems are recognized, we believe they can effectively be dealt with by discussion among the staff and by including the whole of the family group as being in need of intensive care. (1978:222) Feelings of attachment here are positioned as contradicting, rather than contributing to and forming, the nurse’s professional abilities to be a “highly skilled technician.” Nurses have to take care not only of the machine and the infant, but also be welcoming to “the whole of the family group.” Often viewed as the last “refuge” for tiny and dependent infants, NICUs create a situation that is as much disempowering as it is demanding and intense, since many infants do not survive. Infants sometimes do not move out of the NICU for months, and sometimes they die at home shortly thereafter. Intensive care, NICU, and geriatric hospice care are the most “advanced” specialties in nursing today.27 But, although parents have access to psychological help and social workers, the nurses are mostly left to themselves. Nurses are also grossly underpaid compared to the times of Madame Henry. The challenge is to think through nurs-

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ing as an important aspect of/in generating life and thus not separate mother, machine, and nurse in terms of ownership and control. An example of some change in these conceptions of “nursing” is the fact that new NICUs (such as at Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital in Ohio) are constructed based on the input from parents of the “incubator” babies, who serve as advisers on the committees that plan new units. These new units provide surgery facilities and more privacy and space for each family, right next to the infant, which indicates that society is starting to acknowledge the amount of care that the NICU stay requires as well as those who provide it. However, the material and emotional needs of neonatal nurses remain as invisible as in the times of Fortunio. It points to the importance of a systematic class analysis not only of mothers (NICUs are famously expensive both to set up and to use) but also of nurses.28

Hospitality, Mother-Machine, and Nursing The neonate arrives, in a most unexpected fashion, not as an egg in a hard shell, but in a state of nakedness and total vulnerability, which calls for much more than a welcoming smile. Without food, without warmth, often unable to breathe, this unexpected arrival calls for unconditional hospitality, even though a “happy end” and reward are not assured.29 What does arrival mean in the case of ectogenesis? Being unplugged (Botting 1999)? Plato defines chora as a wet nurse of generation, which “rocks” the world into being, adding this “nursing” quality to the “receptacle of all,” but he also insisted that she does not belong to the “race of women” (see chapters 1 and 2). She is a quality, an element, a neuter. When the matrix is defined through nourishing and nutritive references, the matrixial/maternal nourishment and nursing are abstracted once again, leaving the mother out of the “matrix” as a concept of imprint bearer that leaves no imprint herself. A place of birth that has no effect on it. A receptacle that produces the body and space of the embryo but not its soul. Ectogenetic desire, thus, while trying to mimic the mother, often presents the maternal as a mere occasion for the exchange of “matter”— fats, amino acids, immune cells, and so on—through the maternal-fetal interface. The design for development, that is, the genome, is all already there, so it would be easy to replace her with “just a clever incubator.” In biomedical practices though, this abstraction cannot stand, and we are left with a set of constant references to nurses as being the most important

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elements of incubator technology; there seems to be an undeniable need for someone be “around” to provide the nurturing environment. The question of sustaining life, then, becomes one not so much of an individual but rather of communal matrixial/maternal hospitality, here understood as expectation, accommodation, and nursing: Who is here waiting for this particular infant? Who will expect and accommodate her/him after conception, after premature birth, and throughout the early, critical stages of life? In other words: can the machine nurse? “Feminine-par-excellence,” this ephemeral, idealistic character of primordial hospitality cannot be easily translated into breast or bottle-feeding machine. The image of the Platonic “wet nurse” is transformed here from the one who abstractly rocks the world into existence to the one who also needs to change a diaper and make sure that the monitor of the incubator is working properly. The welcoming smile, a sense of being “at home with oneself,” that hospitality presupposes, is a reflection of the smile of another while she or he was rocking us in a nursery or holding us in the close embrace of Kangaroo Care in a NICU or in her womb or in his arms. Whether smiling or not, someone had to expect you and me enough to feed, wipe, hold, and want us and to not harm, neglect, or let us die.30 We will be unable to configure a machine as a nutrix until and unless the question of nursing in/via the machine is addressed anew. I believe that this, and not a technological or biomedical impediment/capacity, will determine how and if ectogenesis will be achieved as soon as many predict (several decades for Ferreira 2005 or just a few years for Gelfand and Shook 2006). I am not in favor of dismissing ectogenesis on the grounds that it is not a fully “autonomous” artificial womb and is, therefore, a “science fiction,” irrelevant to “serious” researchers. I do see incubators and NICUs as ectogenetic technologies. They are also powerful in what they represent and what they teach us about our ectogenetic desire and our desire to have “biological” children at all costs and for various reasons (Brakman and Scholz 2006). I argue that nursing is not a question external to these deliberations but is constitutive in relation to ectogenesis, which further questions the aporia of hospitality as “impossible” on account of the tensions of “ownership.” Nursing, when thought through the concept of hospitality, challenges the architectural model of hospitality and the matrix. It is not about “environment,” egg, home, or hospital and their juxtaposition; it is not about a “where,” because it is already there. Nursing is a dangerous topic for con-

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sidering the mother-matrix, even more so than hospitality, due to the way in which nursing and women have been conflated on essential grounds as a sign of “femininity.” However, as contemporary nursing theory and feminist theory show, just because women (especially poor and minority women) have been historically “confused” with an army of “free or devalued professional labor of care,” there is no need to suppress questions of nursing and hospitality in current debates on ectogenetic technology. On the contrary, nursing needs to be decoupled from the matrixial/maternal as a default condition of abstract, essential femininity. Our dependence on nurses needs to be acknowledged in various ways. When Peter Medawar, the theorist of the “immunological paradox of pregnancy” and of maternal-fetal studies (see chapter 3), had a stroke and was recovering in a hospital, he summarized his observations as aphorisms that were published in London’s Sunday Times. He suggested doing “something to show your appreciation” to nurses, “this overworked and underpaid profession.” His recommendation was not flowers or gratitude but food: “nurses are often ravenously hungry after a long day’s duty on the wards” and thus “a supply of biscuits and cheese” is much better than nonedible flowers (Medawar 1986:165–66). Noticing the (hungry?) nurse between the mother and the machine opens a new space for us to address the matrix as nutrix and to pose the question of the nursing machine.

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5

Male Pregnancy, Matrix, and Hospitality

POP! The First Male Pregnancy, or Male Pregnancy, is an art project created by Lee Mingwei and Virgil Wong that exists today mostly as an interactive Web site, www.malepregnancy.com. When I first presented a lecture on this project to my class and later to wider audiences, almost half my listeners thought it was an actual case—that a man had become pregnant. However, at the same time that I was giving these lectures in 2008, the topic of male pregnancy became a global media sensation, embodied in the figure of Thomas Beatie. He is a transgender man who kept his uterus and became successfully pregnant not once but twice. His pregnancy attracted a lot of attention, to the extent that for many months in 2008 the entry “male pregnancy” was one of the top ten searches on multiple search engines, and his name still generates over two million entries on Google. The historical coincidence of these cases led to some intriguing slippages: some of those who learned about the two examples via the media (online and mass media) believed that they were both either fictional or real, and thus these cases reinforced or negated each other’s veracity. In a way, Thomas Beatie provided the Male Pregnancy project with its “second birth,” leading to renewed interest in the artwork as evidenced by increased visits to the Web site. The site, in turn, has a reference to Beatie,

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congratulating him on giving birth to his first baby, acknowledging camaraderie with a fellow pregnant man. The point I am making here is that the general public no longer discusses this topic as a distant biomedical possibility. They seem to be much more willing to accept male pregnancy as just another biomedical “breakthrough” than a skeptical researcher like myself is; for example, although my audience was willing to accept that the artist Lee Mingwei was pregnant, I felt compelled to check whether Thomas Beatie’s pregnancy was not another art project. What interests us here is how an idea and the practice of male pregnancy, far from being an “exotic,” fiction-driven, and even somewhat irresponsible research topic, can help reveal what is at stake in our definitions of generation and the matrix. Thus, if the previous chapter dealt with what seemed like a somewhat “fictional” and “frivolous” topic—the artificial womb, the mother as machine, as one example of ectogenesis— this chapter deals with an even less, at first glance, pertinent issue: male pregnancy. No matter how hard one tries to avoid this seemingly ridiculous and somewhat “embarrassing” topic of male pregnancy (who needs to study that? ), it does not go away.1 On the contrary, research on male pregnancy is gaining momentum, with respected members of the biomedical community and the public at large considering this subject for serious investigation, especially since Thomas Beatie has given interviews and written a book (2008). Thus, while male pregnancy is often discussed in sensationalist and controversial terms or simply dismissed as a joke, a growing number see it as just another step in the biomedical revolution and, moreover, argue that it needs to be understood within a framework of men’s rights to pregnancy, prompting once again a reconsideration of what is “normal” and “natural” and who should be included or excluded in reproduction and why. I explore here the potential of this topic to raise questions that have eluded us thus far: questions concerning the male body and its hospitality. This exploration of male pregnancy concludes my project of reorienting the matrix from a dematerialized definition of space toward a more considered regard for the maternal relation. The matrixial/maternal as a relation of hospitality, I have argued thus far, can be reoriented as a foundation for rethinking not only the concept of space but, more pertinently, how we can imagine a relation between self and other that is open to hospitality. Susan Squier points out that one of the central issues of what she calls the “trio” of the ectogenetic fetus, surrogate mother, and pregnant man is that their representations are all defined spatially: for example,

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“the fetus is separated from the gestating mother-to-be” (1995:114). When one considers the fetus as being out of its proper place (ec-topic to the matrixwomb), one views the matrix only in terms of its containing function and hence as a function reproducible outside the maternal body. The drive to re-place the mother by re-placing the matrix was outlined in the previous chapter under the rubric of “ectogenetic desire.” What interests me here is whether male pregnancy is just another instance of such a desire for ectogenesis, or whether there is something more to it that might be useful for the study of the matrix and hospitality. This more could be understood within the framework of a growing number of cultural and biomedical practices and discourses that question the definitions of “men” and “masculinity” that are posed, on the one hand, as distinct from birthing, mothering, nurturing, and femininity and, on the other, as automatically connected to and equated with them. If the female body has been articulated anew as a generative, material, and life-giving body, the male body has remained relatively absent in critical discussions of new reproductive technologies and masculinity.2 The male body, proposed as solid and impenetrable, immortal and opaque (Theweleit 1985; Irigaray 1985; Oliver 1997a, 1998), opens itself up to new vulnerabilities and potentialities as men mainstream the socalled alternative practices of relation between self and other, including fatherhood, disability, birthing, and mothering (Tuana et al. 2002; Reed 2005; Theweleit 2003; Squier 2004). The question to be asked, then, is: what does it mean for a man to embody himself as open to the other, to be expectant and welcoming of the other in his own body?

The Science of Male Pregnancy Biomedical Discourses of Male Pregnancy In the last two decades some prominent and mainstream biomedical experts in various parts of the world have made a case for human male pregnancy or considered its feasibility seriously (Walters 1991; Teresi and Mcauliffe 1998; Winston 1998; Gosden 2000). Biomedically speaking, male pregnancy can be understood as another form of ectogenesis.3 Following the long history of support for ectogenetic research, male pregnancy too is seen as a solution to infertility and, increasingly and more specifically, as an issue of the legal right of men (especially homosexual

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and transsexual men) to procreate. William Walters is executive clinical director at the Royal Hospital for Women in Melbourne and has coauthored a book with Peter Singer (Walters and Singer 1982), a famous supporter of ectogenesis. Walters specializes in transsexuality and has described who might be interested in male pregnancy: “[Biological males] who have expressed interest or intense desire to bear a child of their own include (i) male transsexuals reassigned as females, (ii) homosexuals in a monogamous relationship, (iii) single heterosexual men with a strong maternal instinct, and (iv) married men whose wives are infertile or, though fertile, have a serious medical illness inimical to childbearing” (Walters 1991:739).4 Two main ways are currently cited as scientifically feasible for achieving human male pregnancy in the future: abdominal pregnancy and uterine transplant.5 Before we consider both these possibilities for human male pregnancy in more detail, I will summarize the current biomedical research on animal male pregnancy. Teresi and Mcauliffe (1998) collected extensive information on Australian, New Zealand, and British animal-based studies of male pregnancy. Most of this research has been justified through biomedical benefits that have nothing to do with male pregnancy but rather concern issues in fetal development, evolutionary biology, infertility treatments, and so forth. These examples, however, support my larger claim that the main question remains the “where” of pregnancy: where an embryo can be implanted, in a male baboon or a male mouse, and for how long that embryo can survive inside the abdomen without being absorbed or rejected. The limitation of space for embryonic lodging and development observed in animals is cited as one objection to the feasibility of male pregnancy: “It’s apparent. The placental sac and the baby, at term, are going to weigh on the order of twenty-five pounds. And all of the months this is growing, this bag may be twisting and turning” (Hallatt, cited in Teresi and Mcauliffe 1998:180). Those constraints notwithstanding, a male baboon carried an implanted embryo for four months, as was reported by Dr. Jacobsen, a famous reproductive specialist credited with developing an amniotic fluid test for checking for genetic abnormalities. Jacobsen concluded that the “marvel of our discovery” was the realization that “the fertilized egg may be autonomous, producing all the hormones it needs for its own development” (Teresi and Mcauliffe 1998:177). Jacobsen also reported a successful abdominal pregnancy in a male chimpanzee (Andrews 1984:261). A pregnant male mouse carried an embryo for twelve

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days in his testes to “a perfect condition,” as reported by David Kirby, at Oxford University, and only a lack of space inside and the elasticity of the testes, he argued, arrested the embryo’s development (Teresi and Mcauliffe 1998:177). Upon successful implantation and gestation in a male baboon and a male mouse, Harding concluded, that: “On a hormonal level, the fetus appears to be totally autonomous” (Harding, cited in Teresi and Mcauliffe 1998:179). This means that a human male might not even need hormonal treatment to go through gestation. Once the placenta develops, that “autonomous” being will secrete its own steroids. The biomedical community therefore assumes that if male pregnancy is ever possible, it will take place in the abdomen. There is little discussion about the impact of this growth on surrounding organs. When it comes to pregnancy the male body, like the female body, is seen as a passive “bag of tissue” and an emptied space that is just waiting to be “impregnated” through IVF or another type of assisted reproductive technology. The possibility of abdominal pregnancy in men is based not just on a limited number of animal male pregnancies but on successful abdominal pregnancies in women (i.e., extrauterine pregnancies). Abdominal pregnancies in women are out of their “proper” place—that is, they are ectopic. Today more researchers are calling for a wait-and-see approach with respect to ectopic pregnancies in previously infertile women or in those who have passed the stage of placental attachment without complications: “as it is impossible to predict which spontaneous abdominal pregnancies will progress in a relatively benign manner to result in a normal healthy infant, an argument can be made for treating all abdominal pregnancies expectantly, particularly when the host has a long history of infertility” (Walters 1991:738–39). The wording here is significant: rather than focusing on the majority of failed, life-threatening cases, the focus is shifted to the minority of successful examples that pave the way for the biomedical future of male pregnancy. For Roger Gosden, another researcher who considered human male pregnancy seriously, it is a definite, though risky, possibility (Gosden 2000: 193–97). Gosden proposes various reasons for male pregnancy: a father could become a host for the fetus until the maternal womb is ready to accept the fetus; male pregnancy would replace surrogate or artificial pregnancy, which would mean cutting costs and avoiding legal problems;6 it would bond father and child at the very early stages of development. Gosden concludes, however, that “considering the availability of safe alternatives, there is no case for engineering a male ectopic preg-

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nancy” at this moment (197), where the “safe alternatives” refer to conventional maternal pregnancy. This hesitation about safety with regard to male pregnancy notwithstanding, Gosden seems to posit the participation of the father in gestation as one of serious scientific probability. He also shows in his work that the lack of research in this area compared to (other means of) ectogenesis is more the result of a “cultural lacuna” that refuses to acknowledge its possibility rather than a result of its biological improbability: it is obviously much easier to receive financial support for research in ectogenetic systems, than for research in male pregnancy as such (Gosden 2000:193–97). The “place” that is usually cited as a possible site for implantation in the abdominal cavity is the omentum (one of the tissue folds of the peritoneum, a membrane that supports and lines abdominal organs), because it is not advisable to allow a fertilized embryo to wander around in the body. The human embryo needs to be buried in tissue, rather than be superficially attached to it (and it is noteworthy that the implantation is deeper in humans compared to most other animals). Since men might not provide the right amount of hormones for successful embryo development, they would probably need to undergo hormonal therapy. Apart from many other medications to augment their bodies to facilitate this process, they might need to take immunosuppressant drugs, especially before the placenta develops fully. As presented earlier in relation to animal male pregnancies, researchers suggest that it should not be a serious problem, since, they claim, the embryo is more or less self-sufficient entity in the first few weeks of development. And just as it develops outside the body after in vitro fertilization and before implantation, it will do the same inside a man. The second option for male pregnancy is found in the science of transplantology and is based on research in animal and human uterine transplants (Altchek 2003; Bedaiwy, Shahin, and Falcone 2008; Gauthier et al. 2008). One remarkable feature of transplanting a uterus is that researchers consider and present this as a rare case of temporary transplantation since the uterus is not seen as an essential, life-supporting organ, unlike the liver, kidneys, or even eyes. That means that after a child’s delivery the uterus could be removed. In addition, there is a steady supply of “available” human uteruses harvested as a result of hysterectomies, and they could be utilized for transplantation relatively “cheaply.” Gosden suggests that transplanting a uterus within a father’s body would be advantageous for the child, since the thick uterine walls provide a “safe” environment,

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and the risk of birth defects in ectopic pregnancies is over 50 percent (Gosden 2000:196). The relative merit of research on uterine transplantation stems from the fact that not all cultural and religious contexts consider surrogacy or assisted reproduction as options. Thus one known uterine transplant attempt has been reported in Saudi Arabia, and some argue that it is not surprising given the negative cultural attitudes toward surrogacy and assisted reproduction (Fageeh et al. 2002). Since postmenopausal women with ovaries, as well as women without ovarian tissue, are benefiting from ovarian tissue transplantation and IVF technology, there is a biomedical consensus that it is only a matter of time before a uterus is transplanted to a woman with an embryo implanted and carried to term. Thus the rationale is that if a female animal or a woman can carry a baby to term in a transplanted uterus so can a man. It is noticeable that the scientific language frames these problems very straightforwardly, which serves to elevate the biomedical possibility of male pregnancy. Uterine transplant is read as cut, remove, insert, connect, take drugs, gestate, cut, and become a mother. Egg donation and implantation are read as take drugs, inject, cut, remove, mix, grow, remove, insert, take drugs, gestate, cut, and become a mother. The male body is just another abdominal cavity, a mere incubator for implantation. However, many problems and complications surround both abdominal and transplanted uterine pregnancies. Just as in abdominal pregnancies in women, the risk to a pregnant man’s life would be great. The overwhelming majority of ectopic pregnancies result in surgeries if the pregnancy is detected early and surgery is still an option. Otherwise, ectopic pregnancy often results in the loss of life. Other common complications are genetic and developmental abnormalities and, if the child survives, a severely reduced quality of life. Because the child is restricted by nearby organs, the head and body may become malformed. Once again, however, we are told that since there have been cases of healthy, normal babies born as a result of extrauterine pregnancies, there is a (however slim) possibility of a successful pregnancy in a man (Walters 1991). Both the proponents of male pregnancy discussed here (Gosden 2000; Walters 1991) connect potential cases of male pregnancy to some men’s “strong maternal instincts” and “lady-like” behavior—whether understood in terms of being “transsexual,” “feminine,” or being influenced by the hormones during pregnancy.7 This perspective demonstrates anxiety that any pregnancy presents for traditional notions of masculin-

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ity and male behaviour, and unpacks pregnancy as a maternal relation (even when discussing male pregnancy) and as a relation of hospitality. Thus, besides the need for an internal tissue that is “like the womb” (the omentum) or the need for a uterine transplant, that is, apart from looking for an “empty space” inside the male body, the idea of male pregnancy has the potential to change the perception of what it means to be a man through the maternal relation of hospitality and what this relation enables. In summary, biomedical professionals who see male pregnancy as an outgrowth of and the next (logical?) step in their practice locate it in the same category as the research in uterine transplantation and severely premature birth, while they agree that, bioethically, it is a much more complicated issue. It has become a more pertinent and openly discussed topic in the homosexual and transsexual communities (Walters 1991; Sparrow 2008). Although Gosden never mentions homosexuality and suggests male pregnancy as a solution to fulfill a heterosexual family’s natural destiny when a woman cannot or does not want to bear children by herself, in other discourses the terminology of reproductive “rights” and “freedom” for homosexual and transsexual men has significantly influenced the debate, changing the emphasis from the sanctity or a default necessity of nuclear heterosexual reproduction to men’s right to bear children.

Bioethical Discourses on the Possibilities of Male Pregnancy and the Case of Thomas Beatie The issue of male pregnancy in bioethical literature is associated with the discourse of the “right” to receive assisted reproductive services. The logic is simple: if we spend so much time and effort on helping women, who otherwise would never be able to do so, conceive and carry to term, we should be doing the same for men. Assisted reproductive technologies should not discriminate between those whom they assist: poor or rich, able or disabled, white or black, women or men. This argument seems to hold up well, especially in cases where those who seek such treatment have to pay for it out of their own pockets, reinforcing “autonomy” and “freedom to choose” as an individual right. Another rationale for male pregnancy in bioethics is the market economy model. According to its logic, male pregnancy, similar to other assisted reproductive services, will fit a basic business model that serves a particular function for families and individuals—like an adoption agency

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or an assisted reproduction clinic.8 Currently, single men can pay for a surrogate service in some U.S. states. Walters (1991) and Gosden (2000) both argue that male pregnancy might reduce complications from surrogacy (specifically, the emotional, legal, and financial complications). If a single woman (homosexual or not) wishes to undergo IVF treatment with a frozen sperm to have her own child, she can do so, and so can a man, whose wish to have a biological child, within this system, is granted through an egg donation and a surrogacy (provided, of course, he is wealthy enough and IVF for a gestational carrier works). As the male/female definition gets more and more complicated in biomedical and bioethical discourses, it still relies, interestingly enough, on what it sees as the “science” of “sex differentiation.” The legal terminology of sex identification has shifted from primary and secondary “sexual organs,” such as penis/testicles and uterus/vagina/breasts, to “behaviorally male” to “biologically male” to “chromosomally male” (Walters 1991:199; Sparrow 2008). Each new definition tries to overcome the inadequacies that surfaced in previous definitions. The problem of definition usually arises when economic, political, and medical inequalities for transgender, transsexual, biogender, biosexual, intergender, intersexual, and homosexual communities and individuals are perceived (Roscoe 1991). Sparrow (2008) has written an excellent essay that finally considers male pregnancy seriously from a bioethical perspective. However, although Sparrow recognizes legal, economic, and medical inequalities, his main bioethical argument against male pregnancy is still based on the notion of biology as “destiny.” Thus, for Sparrow, the proposal that a man has a right to become pregnant mocks the “natural order of things,” especially when some women cannot but still want to become pregnant. However, this stance, in turn, also undermines women’s claims to these technologies as a “natural” right that supports their “cultural” rights. Thus, Sparrow argues, such reasoning is a perversion of the concept of “reproductive freedom” and “right” and makes a joke out of women’s rights, especially as male pregnancy is not based on a “normal human life cycle,” “facts of biology of reproduction,” or a “normal context of reproduction” and represents “frivolous, or trivial projects” (Sparrow 2008:287). His reasoning against male pregnancy reveals that women’s claims of fundamental “rights” to assisted reproduction are often based on cultural and political arguments, even as they use “nature” to support them, and champion the specific rights of women at the expense of others (animals included). When it comes to men, however, the social and

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collective needs and contexts surrounding pregnancy are often evoked, and the “collective” and the “social” are privileged over an individual’s right to pregnancy (Squier 1995). As Walters, among others, has stressed (1991), (white) wealthy women have benefited the most from IVF research and assisted reproductive biomedicine. Squier (1994, 1995) points out too that we often forget that current biomedical research is not politically and culturally neutral. Therefore, Sparrow’s argument that male pregnancy is not the normal context of reproduction and therefore should not be supported is not valid, since the same charge could be made against current biomedical research on infertility as a whole: a good portion of scientific and governmental resources supports infertility treatments for privileged women, who, in turn, can generate support for such research through social, cultural, scientific, and political pressures on relevant institutions.9 What is so “natural” about that? Sparrow’s challenge to male pregnancy as a right (which leads to questioning the same right in women) reinforces the previously presented biomedical discourses on male pregnancy as just a matter of a “biomedical fix.” Resorting to the arguments about the “natural order of reproduction” and “normal sex identity,” Sparrow adopts the biomedical model of the matrixial/maternal as naturally available once impregnation occurs, mocking the idea that men might feel “barren” while reinforcing the same notion for infertile women (Sparrow 2008). Missing here is a consideration of the maternal relation that men might want to experience in their own bodies or enact through empathic relation with others.10 The bioethical approach to male pregnancy frames pregnancy by distinguishing various pregnancies in terms of ethics. The next example highlights these bioethical choices and constraints. The case of Thomas Beatie has been touted, at least in popular media, as the realization of the scientific possibility of male pregnancy. Beatie’s own account of his pregnancy (Beatie 2008) contains many contradictions with regard to what is “natural” (as he claims, his ability to become pregnant) or “cultural” (his willingness to fulfill all the legal and social demands of becoming a man). Thomas Beatie is a transgender man who kept his uterus and ovaries. He is legally male (his identity documents designate him as “male”) and is married to his wife, Nancy. Beatie claims that he is the first legally pregnant male, at least according to his research. His wife had a hysterectomy, and so he fits, seemingly, Walter’s description of one biomedical and bioethical scenario for male pregnancy: a man carries a baby when his wife is unable to do so. Beatie (2008) provides

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four main responses to those who question his pregnancy as a mere insistence on “biological” parenthood just because it was possible for him to become pregnant. First, his transgender status might have complicated an adoption as well as a surrogacy service; second, they could not afford an adoption or a “gestational carrier”; third, he wanted to have a biological child and to go through pregnancy; and, fourth, no one asks the majority of women and couples why they do not consider adoption and surrogacy as their first choice before becoming pregnant themselves or—the question Beatie was often asked—why they want to have children in the first place. Beatie stopped taking testosterone so that his ovaries could start ovulating again. Beatie and his wife ordered sperm from a sperm bank, and his wife helped him to inject it into his vagina. He describes how the couple paid a little more to obtain the sperm donor’s childhood picture, which Beatie placed on his computer: “a happy, attractive blond boy” (2008:203). His first pregnancy was ectopic; the embryo was growing in his fallopian tube, and, though Beatie waited for as long as he could, the danger to his life meant that he had to have surgery to remove his fallopian tube along with the embryo. The couple, however, was successful the second and third times. Throughout the book, it becomes clear that Beatie is attached to his weight training (after all, his wife was a bodybuilder herself) and was concerned with how his hormonal “feminization” to facilitate his pregnancy would affect the ostensible signs of his “masculinity” (such as beard, muscles, physical strength): “I wasn’t sure how I would handle the loss of a certain portion of my masculinity. . . . I saw signs of muscle atrophy, and at the gym I had nowhere near the same strength and vitality as I was used to” (2008:196). Throughout the pregnancy, his goal was to remain a “man” not only legally, on paper, but also in his appearance, in a “mirror.” Beatie visibly tried (Discovery Health Channel’s Pregnant Man, 2008) to behave like a “man” during his delivery, which seemed to mean for him, based on the documentary, to remain “cool” throughout his delivery, not to scream, and generally remain not very emotional: at least on camera. Even though transgender men have been pregnant before and delivered children (as showcased in the documentary film Transparent, 2005), Beatie’s case created an unprecedented public response after he wrote his first text about his pregnancy experience for a gay magazine, the Advocate. The news about the “first male pregnancy” proliferated on the Internet: as Beatie reports (2008:308), the story of the birth of his daughter Susan

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on June 29, 2008, was more popular on People magazine’s Web site than the cover story about Barack Obama’s electoral campaign. Beatie was interviewed, with his wife, by major news channels and newsmakers, including his appearances on Oprah and Larry King. His wife, however, remained in the shadow of that limelight, and, compared to Beatie, she did not seem to fit or attain the “celebrity” profile (because she looked “older” than her husband and “not pregnant”?). Her role, however, was important, as Nancy’s presence legitimized the “normal family” image that Walters and Sparrow referred to earlier. Thomas, on the other hand, displayed his pregnancy through celebrity style photo shoots of his growing belly. He participated in a Discovery channel documentary and later became pregnant again (appearing on Larry King show to discuss it). While his case might seem to be a relevant example of a realized biomedical male pregnancy, I will argue that insofar as Beatie relied on appearance-based markers of masculinity and femininity, on what it means to be a “man” and a “woman,” his example reenacts the very categories it purports to complicate. He claims that ideally a person should decide on who one is—man or woman—and these categories are not stable (as mentioned above, they fluctuate from “biological” to “hormonal” to “chromosomal” to “legal” and “psychological”), but, at the same time, Beatie uses these same categories to claim his own status as a man (legally, psychologically, physically). His legal status as male, as many have claimed, is his only basis for claiming to be the “first pregnant man”; in other respects (chromosomally, genitally) he is a woman. The problem with this reasoning is that it forces a particular definition against Beatie’s self-determination. However, his own reliance on the same biological or social-legal markers of masculinity and femininity closes the very interpretation that his situation has potentially enabled. Thus, in a drive to sustain his “male” status, which has taken him much time and effort to achieve, Beatie presents his relation to pregnancy as one of “renting his body.” He reproduces the conventional biomedical discourses of the matrix/womb as a “clever incubator” and an empty “vessel.” However, in the same argument of the “body as a hotel,” Beatie deploys the notion of human, arguing that men have as much right to give birth to children as women: “I didn’t feel that carrying a child would compromise my identification as a male. I was a man who was renting out his body to perform this one miraculous feat. I was not switching back to being a female; I was still, in my mind, fully male. I’ve always felt

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that the desire to have a child is neither a male nor a female desire—it is a human one. So why not carry the child as a male? Why couldn’t I be a pregnant man?” (Beatie 2008:197). While Beatie’s statements might seem contrary to Sparrow’s bioethical argument against male pregnancy, his actions, actually, reinforce it, by relying on the language of “natural” reproduction. They also reinforce the biomedical discourse that presents “normal” pregnancies as “cheap” compared to potentially very expensive male pregnancies. All the discussion surrounding Beatie’s case still focuses on the question of “where,” defining his pregnancy for the public: his uterus made this pregnancy possible, and it is the uterus and his “rental of his body” as a container for the child that still make him, for many, a “woman.” Beatie reiterated his attitude to his pregnancy in terms of surrogacy, of just being a gestational carrier. He called himself a “vessel” for his child, visibly anxious to make sure his “maleness” was not compromised by his pregnancy (Pregnant Man 2008). Similar to the biomedical discourses on uterine transplant and abdominal pregnancy in men, Thomas Beatie, a man, adopts the biomedical language of functionality and matter-offactness about his pregnancy, anxious to eliminate any danger to his masculinity and, therefore, to the “normality” of his “heterosexual nuclear suburban family.” Thus, despite his purported intent to question the categories of male and female, his performative juggling between masculinity as toughness and femininity as softness throughout his pregnancy instead reinforces the definitions that maintain the status quo of the “natural order of reproduction” Sparrow appeals to. The pregnancy itself is still presented as the performance of a sort of “temporary visitation” (as in the biomedical language of uterine transplant) or as a “rental” service so as to underscore its temporariness and superfluity and allow his masculinity to remain intact in and after this process. Like the biomedical discourses about and bioethical objections to male pregnancy discussed above, cultural imaginaries of male pregnancy and their interpretation often display a latent anxiety over homosexuality, threats to masculinity, and lapses into effeminacy, while reinforcing an understanding of women as “bags of tissue” and “gestational carriers”— as passive, empty matrices. The next section reveals, however, that these cultural instances also provide a glimpse of a “hidden history” of male pregnancy that might reveal a maternal relation of hospitality enacted by men.

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Cultures of Male Pregnancy To a large extent the phenomenon of male pregnancy has been primarily circulated and instantiated in cultural discourses and practices, exemplified most visibly in folklore, science fiction, and popular culture. This section shows that male pregnancy provides a rich basis for thinking about the maternal relation as a hospitality relation of preparing and caring for the other. Folk practices such as couvade and sympathetic pregnancy complicate Western approaches to “normal” sexual identity. Western scholars have read these cultural examples of male pregnancy in other societies as symbolic rituals and/or psychosomatic symptoms. Manifestations of such behaviors in “modern” societies have been termed couvade syndrome, phantom pregnancy, and, more recently, sympathetic pregnancy, thus appropriating and reconstituting an anthropological phenomenon as a psychomedical one. At the end of this section I present current discourses on the “new father” that resonate with and mobilize couvade as enacting the modern transformation of fatherhood in terms of “birthing fathers” (Reed 2005) and examine “male pregnancy” technologies, such as the Empathy Belly, as performative instances of this transformation.

Performing Pregnancy Male pregnancy covers a range of cultural phenomena, and it is useful at the very outset to at least heuristically distinguish between two kinds of male pregnancy, “mental” and “physical,” with the two blending into each other in different contexts and articulations. By “mental” male pregnancies, I understand those cases when pregnancy and birth are used as metaphors for creativity and creative processes: men give birth to ideas, objects, texts, architecture, and so forth. In such cases, the language of expectancy and nurturing of ideas within recalls the language of pregnancy, while the emotions of elation and relief at the successful birth of an idea are related to the joys of the birth of a child. By “physical” male pregnancy I refer to men becoming pregnant (even if in fiction or feigned) with another (child, woman, animal, alien, the world, and so forth); in this category I include images of pregnant men (hermaphrodites, transsexuals, heterosexuals) in popular culture, philosophy, literature (especially comedy and science fiction), and art. I will concentrate on the latter while referring to the former where relevant. Examples of male pregnancies have

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appeared throughout the ages and in many diverse cultures. Mythology (Zeus giving birth from his head to Athena and from his thigh to Dionysus), religion (Eve’s birth from Adam), philosophy (Plato and Aristotle, among many others), and literature (Octavia Butler) all have served up examples of male pregnancy, mental and physical. Thus, the biomedical discourses on male pregnancy presented earlier might well be seen, as Braidotti has also argued (2002), to be a logical continuation of this long discursive history of male pregnancy in folklore, mythology, and popular culture. As the cultural examples of male pregnancy in popular culture, mythology, religion, and literature have been documented elsewhere, this section will focus more on highlighting one specific type of male pregnancy—the performative male pregnancy—so as to develop this notion of performance in the ensuing discussions on the cultural practices of couvade and the Male Pregnancy art project.11 One well-discussed example of male pregnancy as “performance” is provided by Sherry Marie Velasco (2006). She examines a Spanish seventeenth-century play that describes a case of male pregnancy, El parto de Juan Rana. It is a one-act comedy that showcases many social and political anxieties surrounding the topic of male pregnancy. Juan Rana, the play’s protagonist, is supposedly pregnant by his domineering wife. The play is infused with jokes about his pregnancy referring to his latent homosexuality and effeminacy: his pregnancy is presented as the result of him being dominated sexually and culturally, including being sodomized. On stage Juan Rana also experiences “embarrassing” pregnancy symptoms—morning sickness, weight gain, and pains in childbirth—that are meant to further undermine his masculinity. Velasco points out, however, that in return he gains certainty about paternity—since he gives birth by himself, he can be assured that it is his child and not his neighbor’s. Being both a man and a woman, he can also choose sexual experience that is fluid and indeterminable, experiencing the best of both worlds. Male pregnancy as performance is achieved here through the comical representations of protruding bellies and a male spectacle of mimicry and parody (through dress, exaggerated gestures, and references to sex), especially in the public display of labor and delivery. This play/text plays out anxieties specific not only to the social situation it poses but also, as Velasco points out, to its times: seventeenth-century concerns about monstrous births; the politics of the medical profession vis-à-vis midwives and female power in reproduction; uncertainties about paternity at the moment when the microscope enabled the discovery of spermatozoa; and the renewed concern about

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homosexuality and effeminacy in men, as evidenced by newly established laws against sodomy. Velasco interprets this text by reconceiving it in terms of a modern-day “drag-queen” performance, that is, both “a carnivalesque representation of man’s desire to appropriate reproduction by eliminating the woman and an insightful precursor to other new reproductive technologies that force us to reconsider how we view women’s bodies in procreation” (2006:49). Modern examples of male pregnancy as farce and performances are different, I argue, in adding an aspect of popular science that is often overlooked in the various studies of male pregnancy in popular culture and film. The comedy feature Junior, where a character played by Arnold Schwarzenegger becomes pregnant and has a child, has been often discussed as one example of male pregnancy as “comic entertainment” (Velasco 2006). While it is true that male pregnancy performances such as these often rely on the comical and satirical, thus revealing anxieties about effeminate men and pregnant women at the same time, such performances today are presented within a popular-science context of biomedicine that rationalizes and mediates the very notion of male pregnancy as itself credible and possible. The relevance of this biomedical rationalization should not be underestimated, as it accommodates the idea of male pregnancy to the public, making the audience feel that male pregnancy is already a reality or, if not currently possible, very possible in the near future (a plausibility I underscored earlier when describing my students’ response to my lecture on male pregnancy). Thus it is noteworthy that at least two science museums (one in the United Kingdom and one in Australia) presented performances of male pregnancy to teach about female pregnancy, its processes, and relevant technologies. The play put on by the museum in the United Kingdom, tellingly entitled Adam Jones, prompted a further discussion on the possibility of male pregnancy (Sellanthurai 2007:23). The animated cartoon series South Park also addressed the topic of male pregnancy. One of the cartoon’s main characters, Mr. Garrison, undergoes sex-change surgery to become Mrs. Garrison. After s/he watches Thomas Beatie on Oprah s/he “learns” that s/he is not a real woman, as s/he cannot become pregnant and give birth. Frustrated, Mrs. Garrison demands a reverse sex-change surgery to become a man once again by opting to grow an artificial penis for himself in a laboratory, as a graft on a mouse’s back. The same mix of public education and entertainment is visible in another episode of South Park, but, rather than focusing on the “biomedical

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fix” in man, it questions male “procreation” as a desire for self-validation and as a source of individualistic competition. This episode, titled “More Crap,” first aired on October 10, 2007 (www.southparkstudios.com). The male body of one of the characters is presented as a host to a large fecal object (“crap”) that is delivered with lots of “labor” pains. The object is so large and beautiful that it prompts the man to feel “proud” of his “creation”: “This was something I made. Something that came from me and was a part of me. The only thing that I ever made that was any good” (South Park 2007). His wife is frustrated that her husband is so obsessed with the size of his “crap” and that he equates her acts of making dinner and bringing up a child with his creation. It happens also that the “European Fecal Standards and Measurements” office in Zurich provides services to men that include the “legitimization,” “measurement,” “cesarean section/extraction,” and recognition of their achievements through “awards and medals.” Men compete to deliver the largest and most beautiful object and go to doctors to assess the progress of their “creation” through ultrasound images, while the background music evokes lullabies as “father” looks at his “baby.” The doctor even advises the man not to travel in his “third trimester.” Public delivery, in the presence of officials from the European Fecal Standards and Measurements office, is supposed to authenticate the “paternity” of the creation, while a cesarean delivery is not counted as real delivery: “If you cannot crap out a crap, it is not really a crap,” the poor man is told, as he cries “No, no. . . . I want to see my wife. I am sorry I let you down” (South Park, 2007). This association of male digestive processes and products with pregnancy and birth enacts a comic conflation of the mental and physical male pregnancies referred to earlier. While similar to El parto de Juan Rana in its comic aesthetic, this episode provides a subtle critique of men’s claims to (pro)creation. The abdominal references, ultrasound images, and pangs of delivery all target the question of male pregnancy as an issue of male embodiment and its capacities to accommodate and procreate, apart from the obvious mockery of male anxieties about their procreative roles or lack thereof.

Couvade as Male Pregnancy Edward B. Tylor, one of the fathers of anthropology, is usually credited with the introduction of the term couvade to account for various practices related to male pregnancy rituals and symptoms. This term was first used in his anthropological classic Researches into the Early His-

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tory of Mankind and the Development of Civilization (1878 [1865]), where he positions couvade within a section entitled “Some Remarkable Customs,” that is, customs that seemed to him particularly “alien” and thus worthy of special remarks. He suggests the use of “an existing European name, the couvade, or ‘hatching,’ and this term it may be convenient to use for the whole set [of customs]” (1878 [1865]:291). These “brooding and hatching” customs among males were described by various authors, including Strabo (see Rouse 1897; Polo 1938; Roth 1893; Munroe 1980; Munroe, Munroe, and Whiting 1973). The word couvade was used to describe rituals and practices adopted or displayed by men in relation to pregnancy before Tylor by French colonial travelers and missionaries;12 however, he proposed couvade as an umbrella term for a variety of practices that differed geographically, culturally, and historically. These customs and practices, in turn, could then be explained/interpreted as a whole, and such interpretations have indeed flourished.13 Authors narrate multiple couvade stories. Here is a selection that helps us understand how couvade was understood especially through references to farce and theater. The stories also manifest European men’s surprise at the fact that men remained in confinement while women resumed their normal duties after giving birth: 1. In 1759 Venegas reported that Californian women “went about their duties as usual” after giving birth, while the husband of a pregnant wife lay under a tree or “in his cave,” “affecting to be extremely weak and ill; and this farce continued for three or four days.”14 2. In Ecuador a “husband quietly reclines in the house, coddling and dieting himself for some days until he has recovered from the shock produced upon his system by the increased weight of his responsibility as a father” (Simson 1880, cited in Roth 1893:217). 3. In Surinam “no sooner do you hear that the wife has born a child, than you will see the Abipone husband lying in bed . . . ; you would swear it was he who had had the child. . . . I had read about this in old times, and laughed at it, never thinking I could believe such madness. . . . And in truth [the Abipones] observe this ancestral custom, troublesome as it is, the more willingly and diligently from their being altogether persuaded that the sobriety and quiet of the fathers is effectual for the well-being of the new-born offspring, and is even necessary.”15 In other accounts, fathers subject themselves to food restrictions and confinement rituals, both before and after a child’s birth (Munroe, Mun-

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roe, and Whiting 1973); they lie with their newborn in a hut for a month or more, feeding their child and being treated just like the new mother would be (Polo 1938; Munroe and Munroe 1973; Munroe, Munroe, and Whiting 1973; Munroe 1980); fathers hold their child very tightly so that their bodily fluids and matter (sweat, breath) mix with those of the child (Hall and Dawson 1989); they do not hunt or eat meat and do not do anything “violent” to avoid adversely affecting their child (Rival 1998; Doja 2005); husbands dress as women and “act” as pregnant women with vomiting and fatigue; during their wives’ labor, they scream and roll about in agony (Munroe 1980; Money and Hosta 1968); men must take care not to become pregnant by contact with menstruation and have miscarriages of monstrous births (Meigs 1976); men make an incision on their penises to represent the womb that has just given birth (Hall and Dawson 1989).16 Two issues puzzled the early interpreters of couvade: the resilience of the women in such societies against the pains of pregnancy and labor and their ability to be active immediately after birth, even taking care of their suffering “postpartum” husbands;17 and how to understand European instances of the couvade (Roth 1893; Rudkin 1934) in relation to European definitions of masculinity that, as Kelly Oliver has observed, insist on keeping fathers’ bodies “absent” (Oliver 1997a). The “extraordinary” (in the eyes of European anthropologists) couvade responses of men to their wives’ pregnancies were contextualized as issuing from what was conceived as the relatively stoic ways in which women in these cultures dealt with the pains of pregnancy, labor, and birth. It was assumed that “native women,” like “lower classes,” have “very easy” labor and delivery without complications. This ease of labor was explained, in turn, by the smaller heads of uncivilized children and the wider hips and accommodating pelvises of uncivilized mothers. Roth quotes others who “convinced” him that in Australia, the Americas, India, and Africa there are almost no deaths and suffering among “natives” from pregnancy and childbirth (Roth 1893:204–5). In conclusion, Roth states that we can “safely put on one side any reflections as to the apparent indifference of the husband with regard to his wife’s sufferings, for the treatment she puts up with is practically no special hardship for her, and keeping our minds free from all considerations as to the woman’s share in the custom we shall be better able to understand the peculiar ideas which cause the father to act in so extraordinary of a fashion—judged according to our notions” (206). The explanatory framework for couvade interestingly is supposed to issue not from husbands’ empathy for their wives and children but from

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their “understandable” indifference.18 Although this text was written in 1894, as recently as 2005, in an attempt to critique the Eurocentric reception of couvade, Doja normalizes “native” pregnant women’s labor and delivery as demonstrating their strength and courage, contrary to the relatively “spoilt” Western women, who presumably want too much attention: “He [the husband] is seen as passive, cowardly and shocking [ for European researchers], especially when contrasted with the swift recovery of the mother, who, far from convalescing as a European woman would, resumes her domestic work immediately after delivery” (Doja 2005:927). In relatively recent studies, though (Browner 1983), anthropologists have tried to incorporate the “woman’s perspective” when studying couvade, instead of complacently accepting the “objectivity” of their studies. With reference to the ways in which couvade complicated European notions of masculinity, framing these practices as farce and as “comic entertainment” might have helped to alleviate anxiety about the seeming indications of homosexuality and effeminacy in cases of male pregnancy. Recently, however, there has been a revisionist turn in discussions surrounding the “norms” of fathering in relation to the domestic sphere and pregnancy, and other practices of masculinity have been co-opted in discourses of the “birthing father” (Reed 2005). Empathy Belly (a garment that simulates the symptoms of pregnancy), sympathetic and phantom pregnancy, together with statements like “we are pregnant” by the couple, and “couvade syndrome” symptoms are all related to various interpretations of couvade. Before we explore these new developments and connections, I will briefly outline existing interpretations of the couvade, as they will be helpful when analyzing the artwork dealing with male pregnancy.

Sympathetic Magic Tylor first explained couvade through the theory of “sympathetic magic” (1878 [1865]:298). Couvade rituals were based on belief in magical connection and required men to abstain from doing things that could harm their unborn or newly born children. Thus, if a father was not careful and did not take the necessary precautions (through diet and modified behavior), his child might become ill and die, and the father would be blamed for the death. For Tylor, couvade rituals fit well with a “barbaric” understanding of a “collective” connection, which was unlike the European emphasis on the “individual” as physically autonomous and separate from others: “The couvade implicitly denies that physical sepa-

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ration of ‘individuals,’ which a civilized man would probably set forth as a first principle. . . . It shows us a number of distinct and distant tribes deliberately holding the opinion that the connection between father and child is not only, as we think, a mere relation of parentage, affection, duty, but that their very bodies are joined by a physical bond, so that what is done to the one acts directly upon the other” (Tylor 1878 [1865]:295–96). The notion that “savage” men, through various customs of couvade and male pregnancy, might be encouraged to express sympathy toward, or empathy with, mothers and children did not gain much currency in anthropology, even if only as mere “magic.” Moreover, this notion of sympathetic magic was extended only to the connection between fathers and children, whether inside or outside the maternal bodies, and not to the connection between fathers and mothers. Although the theory of sympathetic magic was rejected as the primary explanatory framework early on in interpretations of the couvade, the idea of sympathy has found its way into recent medical discourses.19 Today couvade syndrome stands for modern men’s symptoms of pregnancy.

Evolutionary and Functionalist Interpretations Another popular explanation positions the couvade within a larger framework of evolutionary and macrocultural or macroeconomic theories. These theories rely on social Darwinism that explain how society progresses from one form to another politically, culturally, and economically. Thus Tylor changed his original framework by reconciling the “sympathetic magic” of the couvade with the evolutionary theory of Bachofen’s “mother right” (Tylor 1878 [1865]; Bachofen 1992 [1861]). According to Bachofen, the couvade is a transitional social practice on the road from matriarchy (“mother right”) to patriarchy (“father right”): where we observe the couvade, we observe a unique moment of this transition from an earlier, “underdeveloped” social system of matriarchy to a newer, more “developed and civilized” system of patriarchy and with it the establishment of paternal authority (patrilocality, patrimony, paternal ownership rights, and so on). More recently, Munroe and others championed evolutionary ideas with a psychological twist: this transitional role of the couvade applied not only to society as a whole but also within each family and individual life (Munroe, Munroe, and Whiting 1973; Munroe and Munroe 1973; Munroe 1980). Munroe asserted that if a child is brought up among women, in women’s quarters, and sleeps with women,

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the couvade and circumcision serve as rights of passage to manhood, especially in those societies that have male-dominated communal space and female-dominated domestic space (Munroe, Munroe, and Whiting 1973, Munroe 1980). The couvade came to be seen as a functional resolution of matrilocal childhood. Today this explanation remains popular and is still connected to the perception of couvade as marking the transition (individually or culturally) from a matriarchal to a patriarchal social order or, as Doja puts it, “as a paternity ritual institutionalizing the father’s right, as a rite of adoption that a woman’s husband performed in order to gain social recognition of his legal rights over her offspring, and finally as an expression of the equal values between mother and father in the procreation of their child” (2005:922). This “evolutionary” explanation varies in form through its emphasis on functionality and survival. For Rival, the couple is understood through its function within larger communal goals of survival through reproduction.20 Hidden within this explanation we find an anxiety not only over the definitions of “normal” sex identity, which supposedly requires a “resolution” through the performance/ritual of the couvade, but also over the rationale of why people have children in general. Often, unable to explain couvade practices through empathy, sympathy, or some other “nontransitory” framework, Western researchers continued to focus on the “pathological” practice of male “confinement” in association with pregnancy as a resolution of some kind of “problem”: individual psychological, collective psychological, social, or cultural.

Psychoanalytic Interpretations: Womb Envy and Sexual Anxiety The most widespread interpretation of the couvade to date has been influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis that incorporates some evolutionary elements of “resolution” and “transition” (Dundes 2003). It is well known that Freud and his followers relied not only on psychiatric but also on anthropological writings and studies. The couvade, psychoanalytically, is seen as a symptom and proof of “womb envy” (Bettelheim 1962) or “castration anxiety” that could at first be mistaken for paternal “solidarity” with a pregnant partner but in reality is nothing more and nothing less than a paternal anxiety and even hostility toward pregnancy (Reik 1931). Male envy for women’s ability to give birth manifests through misogyny and even violence, Reik argued, and therefore one should be careful about

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valorizing the couvade. Despite its negative connotation, such framing of the couvade allowed its incorporation within certain trends of mainstream Western European psychoanalytic theory. No longer a concern of the “savage man” and, therefore, only anthropological literature, the couvade became a sign of (more or less) repressed matricide and/or infanticide. Overcoming the legacy of Reik’s warning, psychoanalytic interpretations have brought the couvade out of its anthropological “closet.” Thus Velasco (2006) and Ferreira (2005) frame both mental and representational male pregnancy examples with reference to “womb envy” theories, as the (unconscious or not) desire for patriarchal control over women’s power in procreation. In addition, fears of gender bending are explained psychoanalytically too, thus positioning couvade within the more general feminist analysis of womb envy by scholars whose interpretive framework is largely psychoanalytic (Irigaray 1985; Walker 1998; Ferreira 2005; Barzilai 1999). This critique and explanation of the couvade and cultural examples of male pregnancy present an evolution-inspired teleology of individual and institutional behavior, which is, though not necessarily rational and conscious, still seen as deeply rooted in the psyche and structure of individual male identity; where “castration anxiety” meets “womb envy.” However, this framework also allows couvade to be taken more seriously within contemporary discussions on male pregnancy and male embodiment in relation to birthing and mothering (Theweleit 2003).

Couvade and the “New American Fatherhood” As noted, discussions on couvade and other cultural examples of male pregnancy have, until very recently, tried to carefully distinguish between the “strange” practices of “native, foreign, uncivilized or homosexual/transsexual” men and “normal” Western men. Thus, for Munroe, Munroe, and Whiting (1973), the main difference between the cultures of couvade and male pregnancy symptoms is that in the former couvade is a sociocultural ritual and performance and in the latter the symptoms are noncognitive and psychosomatic. However, both are positioned by Munroe, Munroe, and Whiting in terms of a “normal,” resolved sexual identity versus abnormal, what they call “cross-sexed,” identities (1973). Thomas Beatie, therefore, and his pregnancy would be categorized as “cross-sexed” and pathological. Munroe, Munroe, and Whiting approached symptoms of male pregnancy in the United States as a manifestation of “sex identity problems” (1973:492), as the psychosomatic pathology of an individual

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modern man who has unresolved (ritually/culturally) issues concerning his sexuality that often steer him away from a heterosexual, normal sex identity, based on his individual childhood experience, which deviated from Munroe’s and his colleagues’ “norm.” The attempts to carefully distinguish between the couvade as cultural and male pregnancy as psychosomatic in origin are indicative of an argument about the “norms” of femininity and masculinity that also characterizes responses to biomedical discourses on the possibility of male pregnancy. This neat distinction between the collective ritual of couvade and the individual psychosomatic symptoms of male pregnancy is ultimately untenable. Western men, it appears in the most recent literature (read “white, middle-class, heterosexual married men”) are not that different from their “foreign” brothers with respect to their responses to pregnancy and fatherhood (Doja 2005; Reed 2005). These responses have been discussed and studied by scholars in various disciplines. In psychology a new terminology has been created, derived from “native” men’s practices: as in the couvade syndrome (Brennan et al. 2007a, 2007b). Sympathetic pregnancy and phantom pregnancy are other terms that are used today in cases where men in so-called developed countries display symptoms associated with male pregnancy. These reported symptoms range from weight gain and mood swings to morning sickness and galactorrhea (milk flow). Just as anthropologists created “measuring” scales for couvade in “foreign” men, psychologists developed such scales and formulae for “modern” men (Munroe, Munroe, and Whiting 1973; Malik and Coulson 2008). Today couvade is slowly becoming a metaphor for male birth or any type of creation, thus appropriating the maternal relation without articulating its specifics or acknowledging it. It crosses boundaries of anthropological and biomedical terminology to enter academic cultural vocabulary (Hall and Dawson 1989; Rancour-Laferriere 1993; Boyarin 1994; Dundes 2003). In that regard, the number of such “male pregnancy” examples would be unlimited, since, as I demonstrate in chapter 1 and earlier in this chapter, these follow metaphors of the matrix, birthing, and mothering as universal metaphors for mythological and folk imaginaries of male generation. That is the primary reason, one might argue, why feminist scholars (Irigaray 1985; Tuana 1993; Walker 1998; Barzilai 1999) oppose pregnancy becoming a metaphor for any type of (male) generation. Thus there are at least three ways in which couvade is reappropriated today, often problematically equating the performative, mental, sympa-

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thetic, and potential hospitality aspects of couvade. First is the argument that men have always been concerned with pregnancy, and all that they have done so far is a kind of couvade.21 This argument uses the maternal once again as a metaphor for any type of creation, reproducing, as feminists have shown, this “fantasy of generation” in patriarchal culture. Second, couvade has been reappropriated to argue for a “responsible father” paradigm, based on a father’s biological investment in his child. This argument often reproduces the claim for the “norm/ality” of the nuclear family as a superior path to survival and civilization (Doja 2005). The third way of appropriating couvade concerns what a man and a father could potentially be without anxieties over the undermining of their masculinity or biological claims to paternity. These examples are based on the “hidden history” of fatherhood represented by couvade as discussed by Richard Reed in his book Birthing Fathers: The Transformation of Men in American Rites of Birth (2005). It could be argued that this opens up the possibility of discussing male hospitality and alternative visions of masculinity, an opportunity to recognize alternative, not so neatly separated realities of mothering and fathering. The couvade, therefore, could be seen as a way toward a different type of male pregnancy that does not appropriate either the mother or the child to establish its own authority. I am not claiming here that couvade will solve all maternal problems and reform cultural, social, and political anxieties surrounding the matrixial/ maternal. Rather, couvade has the potential to account for a hidden history of hospitality as an ethic that supports the maternal relation through acts of expectancy and expectation as welcoming. According to Reed, the medical profession, based on a “biomedical model” of separation between hospital births and home births, has taken over the power of not only midwives and mothers but also fathers, who are even more than others treated as “outsiders” (2005). Their role is confined to being “sperm donors” and “breadwinners.” Fathers started being admitted to labor wards only in the 1970s, after the demands put forward by the parental movement the decade before (Coltrane 1997:49). The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists allowed the presence of fathers during labor in hospitals in 1974, when about one in four fathers were present at birth. This figure today is well above 90 percent (Coltrane 1997).22 More important, the father’s presence has become more noticeable outside the hospital as well, a sign of slowly changing norms of masculinity (Reed 2005; Humington 2002; Theweleit 2003). Reed, however, seems to overemphasize the power play between moth-

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ers, doctors, nurses, and fathers as a zero-sum game, appropriating couvade examples to argue for a larger place for the father before, during, and after pregnancy. Reed is careful to recognize that many fathers he interviewed still rely too much on the vocabulary of “control over situation” when increasing their involvement with pregnancy and delivery. However, he mostly blames “American society,” “popular culture,” and the “biomedical model” of birthing (hospitals, doctors, nurses) for not providing men with a “new kind of birthing rituals” (2005:231–32). Reed’s analysis, which calls for a “New American Fatherhood,” highlights the tension with which we began our discussion of cultures of male pregnancy. Potentially, as a relation of hospitality, it demands “passivity beyond passivity,” expectation and expectancy, openness to the other. On the other hand, performances and rituals of male pregnancy that are focused on the male body, on man himself, his feelings and his transformation, render him vulnerable not only to social critique and ridicule within traditional patriarchal society but also to being seen as narcissistic and possessive of pregnancy as an experience of the other, as in “womb envy.” Another example of this tension between hospitality and hostility represented by discourses and practices of the couvade is arguably articulated by the technologies of pregnancy that allow us to “experience” what pregnancy “feels like.” The Empathy Belly is an interesting example of a “couvade technology” that tries to create a bond with the pregnant body through empathy.23 The difference between empathy and sympathy is mainly defined through the difference between imagination and experience: to sympathize is “to feel for you,” based on imagination, while to empathize is “to feel like and thus with you,” based on similar experience. In both cases, though, one needs to initiate the relation, and neither imagination nor experience can guarantee either sympathy or empathy: they require the material instantiation of this experience. The Empathy Belly was created and patented by Linda Ware, the founder and executive director of Birthways Childbirth Resource Center as well as a teacher and a prenatal educator. The Empathy Belly is distributed exclusively to educational and medical institutions and is not available for individual sale. It is a “multi-component, weighted ‘garment’ that will, through accurate simulation, enable female and male wearers to temporarily ‘experience’ more than twenty of the so-called ‘typical symptoms’ and effects of pregnancy. Through this hands-on experiential type of learning, wearers find out what it feels like to be pregnant and gain a realistic understanding of the changes and demands imposed by the

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pregnant condition” (Ware 2009). The Empathy Belly is remarkable, for, as the sellers claim, it can make a wearer feel over twenty “symptoms” of pregnancy in just a few hours, thus making it the ultimate technology of empathetic pregnancy or couvade syndrome. These symptoms target spatial and embodied aspects of pregnancy such as weight (thirty pounds), changes in the center of gravity, and pressure on internal organs. This “garment” is meant not only for husbands and doctors, to appreciate better what their wives and patients go through, but also for high-school students and teenagers, as a deterrent to “unsafe sex,” and for women who want to be “prepared” for their future motherhood. The “safe-sex” message would be achieved, presumably, by scaring teenagers with a “pregnant profile of enlarged breasts and protruding abdominal belly,” back pain and “pelvic tilt/lordosis,” “shallow breathing capacity and shortness of breath” as a result of the “increase in body temperature, pulse and blood pressure” and “pressure on the bladder, with increased sense of urgency and frequency of urination” (Birthways Inc. 2009). In line with the symptoms and rituals of couvade, as well as other cultural performances of male pregnancy, the Empathy Belly targets the performance of the experience of pregnancy. It also risks reinstating pregnancy as primarily a “pathological burden.” Thus, while the technology claims to create empathy, it treats pregnancy as an abnormal and “awkward” embodiment that results in “restricted activity” and “changes in sexual self-image and abilities” (Birthways Inc. 2009). The question remains, however, whether such (prosthetic) performances of pregnancy that still frame it as a “symptom” bring us closer to understanding the maternal relation and matrixial acts of hospitality.

The Male Pregnancy Art Project Male Pregnancy has multiple conceptual and aesthetic levels and was conceived and realized by two very different artists, Lee Mingwei and Virgil Wong, as a onetime collaboration. The numerous cultural examples of male pregnancy, as discussed in the previous section, provide a rich cultural context for this work.24 Lee (2009b) referred to the collaboration between himself and Wong as a “two dads” project. This description, it is possible to argue, alludes to at least two major dimensions of this project that are highly distinct and do not necessarily interact with each other. The first dimension deals with questions of biomedical and biotechno-

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logical representation and mediation of the pregnant male body, based on what I call biomedical realism. This part of the collaboration, it seems, was mostly produced by Wong, whose work tends to critically address the aesthetics of the biotechnological and biomedical (Wong 2009). The other aspect of the project is less concerned with the science of male pregnancy and more with the ecology of male pregnancy, that is, with the interconnectedness of a pregnant man with a fetus inside him, with other people around him, especially women, and with the world that surrounds him and nourishes his pregnant body. This part of the project is led by Lee, as he situates his “pregnant” self in New York City’s public spaces (video documented) and through the text of his interviews, which emphasize his expectancy and expectation of pregnancy as well as his empathy with his sister and mother. With respect to the general aesthetic approach, Wong and Lee employed “biomedical realism” to make the public believe that male pregnancy is already a reality and that Lee’s pregnancy was actually happening. The artwork—especially communicated through its Internet presence— was supposed to be so “real” and “believable” that it would obviate the sensationalist and comic representational clichés of male pregnancy discussed in the previous section (Lee 2009b). The public was supposed to start asking further questions, beyond the usual “Is he really pregnant?” As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, many of the audience members during my lectures on this project indeed believed that Lee was pregnant and asked other questions rather than those about the authenticity of his pregnancy. In addition, Thomas Beatie’s case seemed to reinforce the Male Pregnancy art project’s “realist aesthetic,” despite the fact that Wong and Lee, as well as Beatie, all claimed their pregnancy to be the “first male pregnancy.” This connection between them, however, conceals a more important difference. While the aesthetic of “biomedical realism” succeeded in “fooling” the audience, it obscured, I argue, a much more important challenge to the art of male pregnancy: how is one to articulate the maternal relation of hospitality without evacuating the materialities of pregnancy by a simplistic, obsessive demonstration of male “protruding bellies” and “abdominal cavities”?

The Work The project consists of a set of multimedia, performance, and interactive works, which have been shown since 1999. On several occa-

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sions the project was presented as an installation that featured medical imaging, photographs, and a narrative on the medical plausibility of male pregnancy, including hospital data, video documentation of Lee’s “hospital” visits, and a computer with Web links to the research on male pregnancy. When it is not shown in a physical space, the project “lives” permanently on the Web site www.malepregnancy.com, which presents most of the biomedical aspects involved in a successful pregnancy in men. The use of various technologies, especially the Internet, allows the project to be updated and supplemented and allows Lee Mingwei to remain “permanently” pregnant, frozen in time. Home videos on pregnancy that are circulated on the Internet and YouTube often end in the climax of delivery and birth, when an image of a newborn “validates” the pregnancy (unless something goes “wrong”); in Male Pregnancy the delivery is not the main point; rather, expectancy and hosting are given the most prominence. Multiple images of Lee Mingwei are available online, as well as his diary, a video of the future mother/father navigating Manhattan and interacting with passersby, a taxi driver, his doctor, and the documentary makers—and ultimately, with us, the audience. This material can also be accessed on Wong’s and Lee’s personal Web pages (www.virgilwong.com and www.leemingwei.com). These separate presentations of the work by these two artists underscore my earlier point that they approach this project very differently. Wong embeds the project within his main page, linking it immediately to his other works that are concerned with biomedical technologies and their representation of the body; he creates a “total package” of the hospital environment (where new research is being conducted and presented to the public). Lee, on the other hand, seems to “hide” the project by providing a Web link to it in a rather obscure manner and steers viewers’ attention to his other works in more depth and detail. I will develop this point further in the following discussion, when I attempt to show the connection between Lee’s reluctance to embrace the “spectacular” side of this project and his wider artistic concern with welcoming and hospitality, which are not necessarily revealed through the “biomedical realism” of Male Pregnancy.25 In one of the installation versions of the project “visitors to the gallery can monitor Mr. Lee’s vitals, learn about the science of male pregnancy, participate in online chats about the social implications of pregnant men, and leave messages for him” (Wong 2009). In another installation view, from 2002, we notice a pink baby cradle, inviting and cozy, sur-

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rounded by chairs and a table with a computer on it displaying the project’s Web site. Again, the sense of anticipation of a coming baby (girl?), conveyed in the simplest fashion with the cradle and chairs, juxtaposed to sophisticated new reproductive technologies, represented by the computer, creates a sense that male pregnancy is already mundane and not primarily about “technology.” In the beginning of the project, when it was first shown in a New York gallery, it notably was presented as part of one same-sex couple’s desire to have a child: “The First Male Pregnancy. Amid cries of joy (and anguish) around the world, parents Lee Mingwei and Virgil Wong cross the final gender barrier and make it possible for men to have babies” (Wong and Lee Mingwei 2002 [1999]). This point, once again, connects us to the previous discussions on biomedical, bioethical, and cultural discourses on male pregnancy and the way in which they challenge (or not) normative heterosexuality with respect to the maternal relation.

The Experience of “Male Pregnancy” The irony and satire of the modern Western imaginary of male pregnancy (Velasco 2006) seem to engulf all possible readings of Wong’s and Lee’s images of male pregnancy and reinforce the anthropological interpretations of the couvade as a performance of womb envy or the matrix/womb as a metaphor of enveloping (Hall and Dawson 1989). All these representations engage in the spatial mimicry of pregnant embodiment: enlarged, protruding stomach, heavy walk, simulation of pain, food restrictions, morning sickness, and physical confinement. The doctor in this artwork plays the role of a couvade consultant or another master of the ritual—teaching what one should feel, what pregnancy “symptoms” are normal, whether it is for a man or a woman. In the video documentary Lee is visibly “awkward” and “heavy,” as if he is undergoing Empathy Belly training. The discourse of medical normalization and regulation of pregnancy that has been extensively studied in feminist literature (Martin 1987; Ruhl 2002) is exploited in the Male Pregnancy performance through a convincing simulation of the medical environment. The images of Lee’s ultrasound again point to the abdominal region, where we are supposed to see the embryo (as in the previously discussed South Park episode on male pregnancy), as if, once, again, the matrix is only a question of the availability of space (figure 5.1). The images reinforce our mediated relation to the other as the only relation we

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figure 5.1 Lee Mingwei and Virgil Wong, Male Pregnancy Project, 1999–2002. Image courtesy of the artists. Copyright © Lee Mingwei and Virgil Wong. All Rights Reserved.

supposedly have (Kirkman and Fishe 2008; Stormer 2008), as we become accustomed to the cultural overexposure of the intrauterine environment as “nothingness” where the baby grows. In a seven-minute video documentary of the project,26 Lee performs as a “very” pregnant man walking around Manhattan. His pregnancy is portrayed, as couvade practices are, through physical, social, and psychological references. His belly protrudes, and his walk imitates a cliché image of a pregnant woman nearing delivery. Two encounters are remarkable and stand out. In the first, he meets a woman, who is happy about his pregnancy and (somewhat ironically) says, “It’s about time!” She remarks that her sister has had many children and would love to have her husband “carry the next one” (Lepault and Lafait 2005). Her reaction testi-

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fies to a position, which, if not accepting of male pregnancy as a reality, is certainly prepared to accept it as a possibility. In that sense, the work succeeds in going beyond the question “is he really pregnant?” Another encounter happens in a taxi. The driver remarks that he wishes Lee well, but his own religion (a monotheistic religion) would not allow male pregnancy, unlike Lee’s religion—Buddhism. Apart from the facts that Lee was not pregnant and that Buddhism is not, strictly speaking, a religion, the taxi driver’s reaction is very telling on at least two levels. First, it once again testifies to the general acceptance of the possibility of male pregnancy. Second, it shows that the public at large seems to have already formed complex responses to male pregnancy (as one of the “soon-tocome” biomedical “miracles”) that are often framed with reference to their own cultural and social contexts. Just as the couvade was unacceptable to early European observers based on their definitions of “normal” and “civilized” man/father and woman/mother, the American public is increasingly engaged with the subject of male pregnancy not simply as a comic performance and a farce but as a subject with which to engage. Thus, with all those markers of pregnancy exposed, represented, and reproduced, the art project Male Pregnancy, in its biomedical manifestation, has many elements found in the scientific literature and in couvade rituals and practices. What connects them is their approach to male pregnancy as a question of “where”—the male pregnant body is a passive container in which growth occurs—and the various performative strategies that they use. There is a tension, however, between the images that seem to position the audience as passive observers of the “biomedical reality” of male pregnancy and people’s responses to the “pregnant” Lee as he travels about in Manhattan. This tension is between the representation of pregnancy as merely a question of where and the ecology of pregnancy, that is, its social, political, and environmental context. In her “Reproducing the Posthuman Body: Ectogenetic Fetus, Surrogate Mother, Pregnant Man,” Susan Squier departs from the comfort of certainties about right/wrong and natural/artificial when studying images of male pregnancy and points out that the images under scrutiny are “neither inherently oppressive nor inherently liberatory” (1995:113). What is important, Squier asserts, is that “posthumanity is not only oppressive (though it can be that!) but can also affirm linkages: to other psyches, other species (animal and vegetable), and other agencies, from technological to the multiple and intrapsychic” (128). A rare example of cultural analysis that cautions us against

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f igure 5.2 Lee Mingwei and Virgil Wong, Male Pregnancy Project, 1999–2002. Image courtesy of the artists. Copyright © Lee Mingwei and Virgil Wong. All Rights Reserved.

a universal application of the theories of oppression (seeing power relations only in oppressive terms of domination and control) and full liberation of “rights” and “freedoms,” Squier’s analysis of concrete, productive, and shifting power relations is particularly useful in approaching this artwork. The visibility of pregnancy, as a spectacle of a container as space,

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is sometimes all that is positioned as central about pregnancy. But how does one represent a maternal relation? In other words, do we need to see a man pregnant, such as Lee Mingwei and Thomas Beatie, to start addressing the question of man as mother?

The “Social Conceptualism” of Lee Mingwei: Hospitality as an Artistic “Method” All references to biomedical possibilities and biotechnological representations of male pregnancy can certainly lead one to assume that this work is just another example of sensationalism that tries to attract attention through a reversal of “normal sex roles.” Wong and Lee’s digital manipulation of Time and USA Today covers show Lee’s protruding belly feed and simultaneously mock such assumptions, joining a long line of sensationalist real magazine covers (figure 5.2). In her book Male Delivery Velasco discusses this project, in a section titled “Pregnant Man as Comic Entertainment,” along with the movie Junior (1994), in which a character played by Arnold Schwarzenegger becomes pregnant, various tabloid covers with “shocking” news about male pregnancy, and recent television medical dramas such as Grey’s Anatomy. Velasco agrees with David Emery’s judgment that this art project is “just the same old joke retold in a brand-new medium” (cited in Velasco 2006:17). This reaction is the result of the artists’ use of the aesthetic of “biomedical realism”: no matter how hard they may have tried to avoid sensationalizing the topic, the project might easily be accused of trying to attract attention to itself through its “curious” subject matter. As discussed earlier, what often gets emphasized in representations of pregnant men in popular culture, folklore, and mythology is the absurdity and monstrosity of (male) pregnancy, revealing anxieties about the female body as well as challenges to normative heterosexuality. However, this work cannot be so easily categorized as “the same old joke.” Moreover, such an assessment testifies to our own scholarly blindness in considering pregnancy mostly through its images and representations. Attending to the tension between the images and his walk in New York, and to Lee’s art practice as a whole, reveals a different picture of this work. In one of his interviews, Lee informs us (ironically) that he is aware of such “jokes” and media representations of male pregnancy; when he does something different than “putting up a show” of male pregnancy, it is still seen in dismissive terms.27 Lee questions male pregnancy as

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theater, however transgressive and subversive, while Velasco in her book privileges the Bakhtinian concept of “laughter” and transgressive deconstructions of the feminine/masculine opposition through the drag queen theater of male pregnancy. Lee questions the paradigm of Western man by refusing to see his work on male pregnancy in either ironic or liberatory sexual terms. Moreover, he tells us, his work has been about anything but irony and laughter: It’s interesting that some people believe the definition of being a man is so precarious! And unlike the men who feel this strong desire to physically become women, I’ve never wished for that . . . and I haven’t done that. I have, however, always wanted to have a much stronger empathy with women. I love my mother and sister very much, and I’m very happy to share in something they have both experienced. Being pregnant is a wonderful feeling. It’s something that all human beings—both men and women—should experience before they die. This process has been a spiritual rebirth for me. . . . Actually, I see this pregnancy as being very much in keeping with Buddhist philosophical thought. There is a strong connection I feel between myself, the child within my body, and the world around us both. And I think there is a greater awareness and empathy I now share with my mother and sister as a result of my pregnancy. Most of all, there is a level of insight and understanding about being alive—of sharing your life—in ways that I’ve never realized before. (Lee and Versalius 2002) Here, I am arguing, is where Lee Mingwei’s artwork departs from a traditional representational path: first, it approaches the question of male pregnancy not only or primarily as a question of a biomedical “fix” of the male body in terms of looking for a passive containing space (if we can manage it in the abdominal cavity or in a transplanted uterus, as scientists ponder); second, his performance of male pregnancy, similar to couvade rituals and practices, goes beyond merely imitating the cultural clichés and signs of pregnancy as a “growing belly” and ponders the question of pregnancy as a welcoming of the other. Lee, I argue, positions male pregnancy as an expectation of and toward the other, thus connecting hospitality and the maternal relation as the potentiality of the materiality of pregnancy rather than its natural occurrence. His walk in Manhattan, reflecting a desire to connect to others while he is “pregnant,” is echoed

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by, as he says, his desire to connect to his mother and his sister. Evoking empathy is not something new or different in Lee’s work. His artist’s statement claims that his method is “hospitality” and his art is “social conceptualism” (Lee 2009a). The challenge, however, is that this element of hospitality has been the hardest to achieve in this work, inasmuch as it is so easily misunderstood as a “gimmick.” Along with the image/performance tension, this work uncovers a conceptual tension: on the one hand, the work seeks experience of pregnancy as something important, something that “all human beings . . . should experience before they die,” and, on the other hand, this work is about the maternal relation and connection to others, through the acts of hospitality that his mother, his sister, and others who nourished him throughout his life have granted him. The following gestures/artworks by Lee position his Male Pregnancy performance at the nexus of man and hospitality: feeding others and inviting others as a way of introducing himself to a new place and a new place to himself (The Dining Project, 1997–2005); inviting another person to spend the night with him versus being alone in the exhibition space (The Sleeping Project, 2000, 2003); creating architectural spaces, as in his Living Room Project (2000), to emphasize “hospitality and collection” (Lee Mingwei and Lee 2000); writing letters to those we always wanted to write to but never have (The Letter Writing Project, 1998–2003); paying respect to his grandmother by taking care of lilies, even as they die, for three months (100 Days with Lily, 1995, 1998); being attentive to the most “minute” acts of the day, to the ecology of the self in an environment of an artwork, and looking for a change in oneself as a result of being hosted by others and providing hospitality to them through cleaning, cooking, and sharing the experiences of his grandparents’ lives (Artists as Residents, 2006). Many of Lee’s projects are repeated in various locations at different times. If we list his concerns, it becomes clear that for Lee hospitality is very concrete and minute rather than abstract and ephemeral: cooking for and dining with others, making their sleeping arrangements, and inviting them to his space; expecting others after cleaning residences and preparing for guests in a myriad of other ways; exploring public space by walking with strangers as a tourist. In most of Lee’s works he does not make new things or objects (though such works exist as well) but rather uses the opportunity to host others in spaces or situations where he himself is often a guest. Throughout his work certain elements remain: his connection to his grandmother, his emphasis on the Buddhist

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(specifically, Chan/Zen) attitude to life, and his concern for and interest in strangers. One of the installations of The Sleeping Project was part of the 2003 Venice Biennale. Two beds were placed in a palatial room. Visitors were invited (through a lottery) to spend a night with the artist. In the morning, the visitor would be asked to leave one of their personal possessions behind, and that object would become part of the work’s collection. Sometimes the writing and conversation that took place during the night were also collected and presented in the gallery space. In a different setting, this time in a New York gallery, one of the visitors reported on what happened the previous nights and what was left by the visitors: “Sandra arrived at 9.42 p.m. and left at 10.30 a.m., depositing a pile of magazines topped off by The Economist. She added a gentle thank you note. Mary came at 11.27 p.m. and left at 11.45 p.m., taking Mr. Lee bar-hopping with her. He begged off at 1.30, he said, after seeing a side of New York he rarely encounters. Mary came back at 4.25 a.m. and left at 9.06 a.m. Her table holds an unopened bottle of wine, an open overnight kit, a necklace, a gift pendant of the Virgin and Child, and a wilted flower from a dot-com company” (Larson 2000:3). This work requires Lee to be prepared for the unexpected, but not in a masochistic way. His vulnerability is not sacrificial; neither is he inviting violence by distributing “tools and weapons.” On the contrary, Lee creates a situation of mutual vulnerability that is often the very structure of hospitality. In a culture and a city where hospitality is not necessarily the main concern, Lee evokes his childhood experience of sleeping with “10 cousins in the same room. The adults would turn out the lights and we’d all start talking” (Larson 2000:3). Missing the overall theme of hospitality in Lee’s work, this project is too easily framed in sensationalist terms of “sexual humor, punning on the meaning of the phrase ‘sleeping with’ the artist.” (Hawkins 2007:2). In line with the above-mentioned approaches to the Male Pregnancy project, our own forgetting of hospitality can overpower our interpretation, directing it toward the “sensationalism of comic entertainment, satire, and irony.” The 100 Days with Lily project seems to be a more straightforward work (figure 5.3). Lee carried a lily plant with him for one hundred days, even after the plant had died on the seventy-ninth day. Lee carefully documented his activities in photographs: eating with the lily, sleeping with the lily, walking with the lily. The work is about impermanence, an important concept in Buddhism. But it is also about Lee’s respect for and memory of his late grandmother. Lee welcomes his grandmother through

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figure 5.3 Lee Mingwei, 100 Days With Lily (1995, 1998). Image courtesy of the artist and Lombard Fried Projects, New York. Copyright © Lee Mingwei 1995–2011. All Rights Reserved.

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extending hospitality to a flower. And this is not the only project where he directly evokes her presence. The Letter Writing Project is also a tribute to his grandmother and grew out of his experience of her death; it involved “composing long epistles to her containing everything he could not say during life to this forceful woman who studied Western medicine and lived in Japan” (Larson 1998:2). Resonating with the Buddhist notion of the equality of all life forms and therefore the need to welcome and care for all life to the same degree, 100 Days with Lily is a powerful reactivation of the maternal relation at the heart of hospitality, as Lee welcomes both the plant and the grandmother. The Buddhist references in Lee’s work are meant to clear a space for a different definition of man and masculinity that redefines the existing connection between men and virility (see especially Lingis 2002; Oliver 1997a). He is a man, and he is “passive beyond passivity” (Levinas 1969): this is a powerful message of Lee’s artworks.28 Positioning Male Pregnancy alongside other works by Lee helps us recognize him as an artist concerned with his hospitality toward and welcoming of others, including his grandmother, mother, and sister. Thus his art of male pregnancy stands out both aesthetically and ethically in relation to the matrix and hospitality. Lee’s empathic pregnancy questions the psychological interpretation by Munroe and others of the couvade syndrome/male pregnancy symptoms in “modern” men as a pathological overidentification with the female body. Lee’s performance also provides alternatives to the artistic and cultural examples of male pregnancy as uniformly based on mimicking the mother for the ultimate purpose of appropriating women’s ability to procreate. Though always in danger of forgetting the maternal relation, man’s hospitality is enacted when it acknowledges “empirical” women and their acts of hospitality and, in return, opens itself up and becomes vulnerable and, even at the risk of being misunderstood, does not close itself off in silence. Thus, this work is a challenge for us, as Lee calls for our hospitality to welcome his desire to experience pregnancy, and for the artist, as Lee extends his hospitality to mothers. In both cases the question of “where” a child might “fit” does not seem to be as important as the question of what this process of welcoming another within oneself and being welcomed by others, within and without, means. Lee is not concerned with performing/becoming a woman as a precondition to becoming pregnant (as in Velasco’s examples, 2006). Neither is he concerned with performing/ becoming a man, as Thomas Beatie is. The central question is whether

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Lee needs to be pregnant to extend hospitality to others and to receive our hospitality. This question can be answered only by examining Lee’s whole body of work, I argue, since this one artwork has proved to be more challenging to his “method of hospitality” than others. The work, in a sense, is still continuing, as a project, and has different lives for each of its “dads,” Virgil Wong and Lee Mingwei. But it is the connection between all the different parts of male pregnancy that makes this work so unique: the biomedical discourses on male pregnancy as the question of where; cultural discourses on and performances of male pregnancy in the couvade, sympathetic pregnancies, and Empathy Belly technology; questions of trans- and homosexuality, effeminacy, and Western definitions of masculinity; and the awareness of the “hospitality” of the maternal relation as the foundation for other relations of hospitalitybased material acts.29 Lee Mingwei’s art articulates the maternal relation of hospitality by connecting hospitality toward strangers with hospitality toward and from “empirical women” in his own life: his grandmother, mother, and sister.

Man/Father, Matrix, and Hospitality Cultural examples of male pregnancy potentially challenge what Kelly Oliver calls “absent body father.” “The absent father is fundamental to our image of fatherhood and paternity,” writes Oliver (1997a:4). It means that his absence is necessary and important for the reproduction of patriarchal culture, which sees itself as natural in relation to the maternal nature. This dialectic also implies that, philosophically and psychoanalytically, men were first naturalized as stronger and more aggressive so that their paternal authority is legitimized as natural, grounding their symbolic and legal authority. Women, on the other hand, as the “weaker sex,” naturally do not reach cultural authority, remaining at the level of the maternal function—that is understood only naturally. Even when the father is present, he is disembodied in his presence, for he represents the law and authority of culture. This, argues Oliver, means that he cannot provide love, since “love is concrete and embodied” (1997a:5, see also 1998). What is important here is not so much how the definitions of fatherhood and motherhood are connected to either nature or culture but what these connections achieve: what purpose they serve, what power relations they produce. Thus, when trying to reinscribe embodied and responsible fatherhood back into debates on artificial and assisted reproduction, Daniel Callahan (1998) uses the argument of “biological fatherhood” as

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a basis for the father’s moral responsibility. Moreover, the “biological” is evoked in order to renaturalize the bond between the father and the child as a question of morality and duty within the framework of a nuclear heterosexual family. Such a family, once again, is reproduced as both natural (by defining the maternal/paternal connection as primarily “biological”) and also morally right. While Callahan raises a few important questions about current commercial and disembodying attitude to sperm banks,30 he argues his point by equating sperm donation and pregnancy as resulting in “perfectly real, and conventional biological,” parenthood (1998:101). Callahan implicitly endorses normative heterosexuality and paternal authority by claiming that the “magical” connection between father and child is based on biological fatherhood, which is challenged by biomedical professionals and, potentially, by single mothers and “feminists” who are, we assume from Callahan’s writing, to be blamed for reinforcing the absence of fatherhood. Callahan’s position is an illuminating example of an attempt to embody the father back into a bioethical discussion that ends up downplaying the mother once again, reinforcing the “biological” father-child connection as the primary foundation for paternal care. It is not a question of hospitality, then, toward a mother or an interactive relation between a man and a woman; it is a question of moral duty on the mother’s part: “Far too much is made of the fact that the woman actually carries the fetus. That does not make the child more hers than his, and in the lifetime span of procreation, childbearing, and childrearing, the nine-month period of gestation is a minute portion. Only very young parents who have not experienced the troubles of teenage children or an adult child’s marital breakup could think of the woman’s pregnancy as an especially significant or difficult time compared with other phases of parenthood” (Callahan 1998: 105). Callahan’s demand that the woman not make “much” of her “gestation” (we are back to biomedical terminology, but this time to play down pregnancy by treating it as a passive container service) is a closure of any possible relation of hospitality. On the other hand, it naturalizes the maternal relation of hospitality as essentially feminine or as what comes from the biological experience of pregnancy. As an alternative to this position of “father’s body presence,” in his beautifully written article “Male Ways of Giving Birth” (2003), Claus Theweleit explores Sara Ruddick’s concepts of “maternal thinking” and “caring labor” as something that men can learn from women. His own experience of his wife’s labor was an important embodied experience for Theweleit that (though it borders

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on essentializing male hostility and female nonviolence) demonstrates what male hospitality might look like: Theweleit’s writing weaves his own presence as an opening toward and a welcoming of his wife, his newborn child, and Sara Ruddick. This is what Lee Mingwei’s work, alternatively, achieves: it does not claim that it is not a “big deal” to go through pregnancy, that anyone can do it (anyone with a sufficiently large abdominal cavity and proper amount of hormones). Lee Mingwei shows that pregnancy is a very big deal, not due to the so-called biological (read: automatic) connection, understood through twentieth-century biomedical terminology of chromosomes and medical visualizations that create a sense of passive containment, but rather as a work of expectation, of welcoming, as a fully embodied act. It is a matter of our explanatory framework that could systematically acknowledge and engage with the maternal acts of hospitality or downplay and deny them. Making space for the other radically—that is, without preconditions, without preconceptions—is the hard work of hospitality. As a host, Lee prepares himself and expects anyone to visit him, including his mother and his sister. He is not interested in reenveloping himself in another “matrix”—be it language, machine, or nature—from which, subsequently, he breaks free. This would close the possibility of hospitality, as discussed in chapter 2. Lee’s projects reveal the hospitality of (maternal) relation through his art of social conceptualism. When viewed in the context of Lee Mingwei’s body of work as a whole and of biomedical and cultural discourses and practices of male pregnancy, Virgil Wong and Lee Mingwei’s Male Pregnancy articulates the maternal relation as a relation of hospitality, through a male body’s enactment (as opposed to simulation) of a hospitable relation between self and other. This project, through its desire for biomedical “realism” and refusal to present male pregnancy as a “biomedical fix” of the male body to create a “where,” has the potential to question the view of the maternal relation as a sacrificial containing, stressing instead the maternal agency of hospitality as expectancy and expectation. Other art projects by Lee that explore hospitality support my claim that the matrixial/maternal relation is not an automatic, involuntary service of sacrifice and care (often they are not) but rather should be acknowledged as providing the potential for all other relations of hospitality. Finally, Lee’s art is most powerful in its ultimate unease with being a de-monstration of pregnancy. His refusal to show this particular artwork anymore enables him to articulate the ethical failure of (re)presenting male pregnancy as a biomedical fix.

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Conclusion Hosting the Mother

This book embarked on an effort to reintroduce the maternal back into the cultural, biomedical, and technological imaginaries of generation and reproduction through the notion of hospitality. Throughout the book I have argued that it is not what the matrix is but rather what it enables that empowers a critical engagement with the maternal. And what it enables is hospitality through the generative and nursing practices of the matrixial/maternal. These practices are not tied to some essentialized notions of the feminine or the maternal, whereby what is hospitable is so because it is essentially feminine or maternal or whereby the feminine or the maternal is so because it is essentially hospitable. Rather, I believe that hospitality will remain an impossible and even missed opportunity unless we systematically theorize and acknowledge the maternal practices of generating and nursing that are not based on some assumed matrixial/maternal goodness or readiness to serve and welcome. This book has sought to offer a new conceptual framework from which we can approach and potentially reformulate the discussions on the nature of generation, the relation between the organism and its environment, maternal-fetal and placental-fetal interface, and technological and cultural questions surrounding ectogenesis and male pregnancy.

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Hospitality of the Matrix began by collating the different meanings and uses of the matrix, showing that the concept is often invoked in various disciplines and discourses in a form that is emptied of its genealogical and semantic relation to mothers and nurses and by those gestures posited as a neutral and desexualized metaphor of space and as a receptacle that contains and out of which things and beings arise. The critical relevance of the matrix, however, is its relation to the maternal, even if it is a repressed relevance, and what such a reconstituted notion of the matrix enables—what it does rather than what it is. This analysis explored an underlying link between the matrix and another concept, chora, from Western metaphysics. Exemplified by the story of the origin of the world in the Timaeus, we can recognize in Plato’s account the founding gestures of connecting the matrixial to the maternal and also to nursing even as that account downplays those very connections. I discussed a feminist critique of theories of the chora (and thus of the matrix), in their systematic exclusion of the maternal body and “actual” mothers, as an example of what Irigaray calls the economy of metaphor. With an analysis of the currency of the “matrix,” the book shows that the matrix derives its philosophical, cultural and scientific relevance to a larger extent from what it “does/produces,” rather than from what it “is” or is defined to be (for example, as a space where generation occurs). Such an understanding helps us recognize in the current scientific and cultural permutations of the matrix a veritable, albeit unacknowledged, search for hospitality. In these usages, however, the matrixial/maternal and its associated aspects of hosting are conceptually appropriated while the relevance of actual mothers to these maternal acts of hospitality is presented as largely incidental and irrelevant. It creates an epistemological and ethical problem that the book attempts to address. The concept of hospitality as it relates to the matrix is substantiated by my discussion of what the matrix “does.” The matrix enables (as genetrix and nutrix) the very possibility of hospitality, and hospitality is the active gesture that embodies the matrix. I presented the conceptual foundation for the connection between the matrix and hospitality, showing how each one radicalizes and reactivates the other: the matrix becomes a space of intentionality, a hospitable space, rather than a passive receptacle, while hospitality is no more that idealized impossibility, as it is turned toward welcoming the mother, its thus far unthought foundation. After a brief outline of the conventional conceptions of hospitality we have inherited that continue to have currency in critical debates, specifically those of

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Kant, Levinas, and Derrida, I went on to critically analyze the founding, even if continuously downplayed, place of femininity in these definitions of hospitality. Questioning what constitutes femininity and its slippages with notions of interiority and home in these conceptions of hospitality led me to move on to propose that the missing foundation of the concept of hospitality that it thus far fails to account for or welcome is the matrixial/maternal act of generation and nursing. I therefore renew my call for a parallel reading of hospitality and the matrixial/maternal, as they reactivate each other, opening the possibility of finally welcoming the matrixial/maternal. This matrixial/maternal hospitality, I have shown, instantiates itself and opens productive redefinitions of related discourses in biomedicine, reproductive technology and culture. In chapter 3, on biomedical approaches to the matrix, I argued for a fruitful parallel between the ongoing search for a new theoretical paradigm in the studies of generation and discussions about the nature of interactions between the embryo and its maternal environment in reproductive immunology. My focus however is not so much on the problem of dualism or unity, or how one and the other are defined, but on how certain terms of scientific inquiry such as hostility, survival, tolerance, indifference, immunity, and neutrality figure in the description and analysis of pregnancy and thus of the matrix. The centrality of the study of the maternal-fetal interface for developing a new paradigm in the immunological understanding of the relation between the growing organism and its environment adds to the urgency of the need of a reimagining of the matrix that I had set out to enact in this book. Following an explication of the conventional immunological paradigm to understand pregnancy and therefore of the matrix as its generative context, especially focusing on how the maternal-fetal interface and the interactions are represented therein, my analysis presented some key feminist attempts to understand the nature of the maternal-fetal interface vis-à-vis the conventional paradigms of reproductive biomedicine, particularly, Irigaray’s concept of “placental economy” and Kelly Oliver’s discussion of the relation of the maternal body to the placenta. In connecting and counterposing conventional approaches to the maternal-fetal interface with wider, contemporary discourses and theories of life and generation, drawing on embryology, developmental biology, as well as the emerging discipline of “evo-devo” (evolutionary developmental biology), I have also highlighted the value of a paradigm shift that clarifies and em-

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phasizes the importance of the generative environment of development; pointing in turn to the necessity of reconceptualizing the matrixial and the maternal. The study of the maternal-fetal interface might now be understood in relation to the larger biomedical and conceptual paradigms in immunology that inform its conception as well as the implications of such paradigms for an understanding of such notions as self and other. By showing that conventional biomedical discourses of the maternal-fetal interface are framed by what I expose as problematic immunological notions of hostility and tolerance—as in Medawar’s immunological paradox of pregnancy—I propose instead that the concept of hospitality, as accommodation and expectancy/expectation, better addresses and resolves the current crisis of such hostility/tolerance paradigms in reproductive immunology and points toward a more comprehensive framework of reckoning with the “environment,” intra- and extrauterine, in relation to embryonic development. This critical approach allows us to reconsider the questions of what it would mean for a machine or a man to generate and gestate. And thus the second part of this study has examined in depth what I call ectogenetic desire and its machinic permutations. Through careful deliberation of the main arguments and related cultural, biomedical, and technological discourses, I went on to identify ectogenetic desire as a culturally pervasive disposition to conceive and develop alternative means to achieve generation where only some of these means are technological. I focused on the historical ideas and practices surrounding incubators, as one of the principal examples of ectogenetic technologies and insofar as they exemplify the questions of “space” and “matter” of generation that have been central to my deliberations on the matrix. My account of the historical development of incubators teases out two thrusts: one, the connection between conceptions of incubators and embryological research on oviparity, the other an equally strong ectogenetic desire to reproduce viviparity in a machine. As I have shown, the technological development of incubators depended on a problematic logic that “if we can incubate chicks, we should be able to incubate children”; a logic that, while challenged, continued to remain a cornerstone of technological development of incubators insofar as it depended on a conception of the matrix as a containing space rather than a space of nursing. My subsequent analysis of the most recent examples of ectogenetic technologies, such as artificial placenta and intrauterine environments showed the continuing neglect

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of such technologies to properly account for the practices of nursing that are delivered through and complemented by them. Drawing on a rich and diverse body of historical and contemporary feminist critique of ectogenesis I specifically focused on how these thinkers theorized the nature of the relation between mother and machine. From experimental theoretical writings inspired by the cyborg imaginary to the radical feminist rejection of attempts to develop an artificial womb, the various interpretations of the impact and nature of ectogenesis highlighted questions of gender, race, and class. The question of the matrix as nutrix, I argued, could help us to approach the mother versus machine discussion in a new light, while building on existing feminist ideas. From early “warming baths” to the modern incubation technologies of severely premature infants in Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICUs), I presented their successes and failures in relation to infant development and survival as largely a story of nursing, a story of expectation and accommodation, a story about hospitality. In presenting several accounts of nursing as it impacted the successful development and/or use of incubators, I emphasized the relation of nursing to matrixial/maternal hospitality and therefore to its machinic instantiations. There remains the challenge for ectogenetic technologies: the lack of understanding and accounting for the practices of nursing in constructions of mother-machine. Disregard for the nurturing aspect of the matrix in the history of ectogenesis has meant that it continues to be ignored in biomedical studies and is the last aspect to become incorporated into the development of artificial maternal environments. The final chapter on male pregnancy discusses another aspect of this ectogenetic desire, by presenting biomedical, cultural, and artistic instantiations of the connection between the matrix, hospitality, and male pregnancy. Biomedical discourses that speculate on the possibilities of male pregnancy typically centered on one of its principle questions, the where: where a child can be located in a male body. I highlighted the tenuous relationship of the male body to hospitality, specifically showing how the culturally conceived “solidity” of the male body in Western traditional discourse makes the question of “where” such hosting would happen in such a body the most debated scientific and culturally telling issue. I also presented cultural accounts of male pregnancy drawing on anthropological and ethnographic literature, particularly on the so-called couvade (“male child-bed” and rituals of male pregnancy), its interpreta-

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tions, and its connection to the current theories of “birthing fathers” and the “couvade syndrome.” I argued that the issue of male pregnancy could be expanded to provide a rich basis for thinking about the maternal relation as a hospitality relation of expectation for and welcoming of the other, as is evidenced in the fascinating cultural examples of couvade and sympathetic pregnancy. My final section in this chapter presented an art project, Male Pregnancy, by Virgil Wong and Lee Mingwei, arguing for its relevance and importance to my exploration of hospitality and the matrix vis-à-vis the male body. In situating the matrix in its historical and cultural specificity, this book has sought to contribute to a rich genealogy of a concept of the matrix that traces its fundamental role in new theoretical configurations of spatial, technological, cultural, and biomedical possibilities. Emerging reproductive technologies and advances in the sciences of generation continue to challenge our notion of what it means to engender generation and reproduction. The cultural, technological, and philosophical assumptions of the so-called ectogenetic technologies (like the artificial womb and placenta, neonatal incubator, and male pregnancy) have historically framed the matrixial without acknowledging the related maternal acts of generating and nursing. This book proposes, therefore, that we open more productive ways of critically evaluating and potentially reconfiguring these technologies. Not everyone acts hospitably. Not every person who has the opportunity chooses to welcome others, to shelter, to feed, to sustain life. Hospitality is not essentially tied to anyone, neither the matrix nor the mother nor the woman or the feminine. And this remains the central argument of this book, that hospitality of the matrixial/maternal could therefore prompt new possibilities for hosting mothers in philosophy, biomedicine, and culture.

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Notes

Introduction 1. For example, as in “matériel-matriciel” (1983:85), translated by Mary Beth Mader as the “material/matrical” (Irigaray 1999:92) and especially in the text “Place, Interval: A Reading of Aristotle, Physics IV” (1993b). For an innovative psychoanalytic reading that develops the notion of the matrixial (gaze, borderspace) in relation to the maternal, see Bracha Ettinger (2006; 2007). My principal argument is to show how the mother remains the unarticulated background in philosophical and biomedical approaches to generation by reconnecting it to the concept of the matrix that has been historically employed to discuss generativity. I have sought in this genealogical analysis to reconnect the mother to the matrix and the matrix to the mother, the “matrixial/maternal” as a conceptual couple.

1. The Journeys of the Matrix 1. In many modern Indo-European languages, therefore, there are two separate words: one word is used for the womb (e.g., matka in Russian, which comes from the words for “mother” and “origin,” becoming “womb” much later) and another one for the matrix in its meaning of a mold or a number (matritsa). It is important to note, however, that matritsa in Russian (just as matrix in modern English) is not used to mean “womb,” and, though phonetic, semantic, and etymological connections between them exist, they are not used as synonyms (see further Chernykh 1999:515).

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2. In my subsequent discussions on the related concept of chora, this semantic association of female procreator—human, animal, or plant—with nursing and the provision of space and nourishment will be mined further. 3. A more detailed discussion of the meaning of matrix in biomedical sciences, and its distancing from the maternal body, is presented in chapter 3. 4. The etymology of uterus is uncertain; however, most sources link it to negative origins and connotations, including through the Greek word hystera, the etymological inspiration for the well-studied hysteria. It has been suggested that it derives from the Indo-European base udero, meaning “belly,” achieved through a process called “taboo deformation” (where a positive term is used in place of an object that has negative connotations), from the Latin venter, meaning “belly,” “abdomen.” This taboo deformation is an important suggestion, as it still points to a generally negative history of the uterus. It is interesting as well that the Russian word verdo (bucket) comes from venter (belly), again pointing to the spatial/enclosing character of the word that relates to pregnancy and the maternal body. I thank Professor Philip Baldi for pointing out to me the taboo deformation hypothesis for the etymology of uterus (private conversation, September 24, 2008, Pennsylvania State University). 5. Adams documents another, rarer usage of matrix in veterinary literature: as a vein “in the neck from which blood was let” (Adams 1982:108). This is not the place to discuss the recurring connection between the animal, plant, and human aspects of the matrix. It can only be noted for future research that this “crossspecies” etymology of the matrix might yield interesting consequences for our discussion of the maternal body and hospitality. 6. Sylvester introduced other terms too, but none of them seemed to have had such an impact well beyond mathematics—in computer science, engineering, computational biology, economics, business and finance, etc. Relating to geometry of curves and curved surfaces, the matrix has become very successful, branching out into matrix groups, passive matrices, and so on. Today various disciplines, such as biomedicine, geology, mining, and chemistry, combine at least two usages of the term: one as mathematical and another as a mold/support structure and imprint bearer. The “confusion” that the various meanings of matrix produce is by no means an exception in the scientific world. For example, Evelyn Fox Keller (2010) shows how the various ways in which the term heredity is used contributes to the survival of the “nature-nurture” debate even though epistemologically the debate does not correspond to contemporary understanding of biological phenomena. 7. By permission. From the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary copyright © 2008 Merriam-Webster, Incorporated. www.Merriam-Webster.com. 8. One of the exceptions is Reiner Emig’s “Sexing the Matrix” (2006), where he discusses the “heterosexual matrix” in the film, according to a psychoanalytic reading, as well as Butler’s and Foucault’s theories of the body. 9. Slavoj Žižek summed up the other definitions of the matrix from the movie by connecting it to the most abstract idea of a network, which still relates to a distant memory of “generative and generating” space: “What is Matrix? Simply . . . the ‘big Other,’ the virtual symbolic order, the network that structures reality for us” (Žižek

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1999). There are other attempts at reconfiguring the matrix (without reference to the movie) with the help of psychoanalytic theory. Bracha L. Ettinger (2006), among others, has worked on the theory of the matrix in relation to intrauterine space as an alternative to the Law of the Father. Though there is no space here to do justice to her insightful work on the “matrixial gaze” and “matrixial borderspace,” some aspects of it are incorporated in later chapters (Ettinger 2006, 2007). 10. Another project would be to show how it is also connected to “time,” in terms of waiting and unfolding; however, it is well beyond the scope of this undertaking and will be only briefly touched upon in chapter 2 when discussing “waiting” and “becoming” (see Irigaray 1985; Casey 1998, among others). 11. There are multiple instances where contemporary thinkers and scientists have used the maternal body in tackling fundamental problems of spatial reckoning. For example, in his article “Is It Out There?” Robert Kaplan asserts that various attitudes toward the concept of nothingness as vacuum, zero, and especially the search for an absolute vacuum were based on a fundamental cultural mistake that led to centuries of scientific angst. He tries to “maternalize” the Western concept of nothingness by evoking the Indian concept of the void (sunya) as it relates to pregnancy: “Following Kant, it is clear that we can imagine space without objects but never objects without space. But modern physics at its macroscopic and microscopic extremes seems to have shown that we cannot think of actual space as empty. Doesn’t its bending around to cradle galaxies, its acting as a matrix for particles spurting into and out of existence, accord well with our revised understanding of the Hindu void, sunya, not as empty but pregnant?” (Kaplan 2001:67). 12. Chora (a Greek term) has a number of written forms in English: chõra, khôra, chora. I keep the original form in quotations. Otherwise, I use chora in its accepted common form. 13. For example, see Derrida (1997). 14. As Plato’s Timaeus (1977) has been the subject of extensive philosophical explication and scrutiny, I will restrict myself to providing a rather rudimentary depiction of the central tenets of the story so as to move quickly to focus on how these tenets bear on specific aspects of my argument. For a more detailed review of the Timaeus in relation to Plato’s cosmology, see Cornford (1997 [1935]); and Sallis (1999); for an astute feminist reading of the Timaeus with reference to the chora, see Irigaray (1985, 1993b), among others. 15. Elizabeth Grosz presented a detailed feminist philosophical account of this connection between chora and territory in her article “Women, Chora, Dwelling” (1994a, also 2001). 16. Gendering the stages of creation—first, “maternal/material/sensory receptacle” and then “paternal/ideal/intellectual ordering”—ironically parallels many contemporary discussions on the maternal and chora that are inspired by the psychoanalytic structuring of subjectivity and stages of its generation/becoming: thus in Kristeva the maternal and chora (in Stabat Mater, 1986) strategically works as preoedipal, as well as in Lacan (through the matrix becoming a function of the visual; see Barzilai 1999) and Bracha Ettinger’s psychoanalytic reading of the “Matrix,” the matrixial and the maternal (see Ettinger 2006, 2007).

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17. One designation that Derrida gives to chora is “x” (which can mean any number). In this respect Derrida is echoing the representation of the matrix as a mathematical figure—in the case of an interval, it would be “zero.” After all, “unlimited possibilities” for the underlying structure of the matrix is what Sylvester considered to be important in the formulation of the matrix (Derrida 1997). 18. Kristeva is another feminist philosopher who has discussed the concept of chora (Kristeva 1986; Walker 1998; Barzilai 1999; Oliver 1997a). The maternal body in Kristeva’s work serves the purpose of disrupting the paternal logos and its powerful workings within the symbolic and semiotic. Michelle B. Walker notes, however, that “there is a slide between the maternal and the mother that is largely absent from Julia Kristeva’s work on chora” (1998:145). In chapter 3 I come back to this question through the work of Luce Irigaray. 19. For a succinct discussion of this issue, see Kelly Oliver 1998, particularly chapter 5. 20. It is noteworthy that the original meaning referred to the gesture of wiping tears and to a napkin or wiping cloth—opening an interpretive framework for thinking about ekmageion as perpetually moving between inscription and erasure (Sallis 1999; Bianchi 2006). 21. In a possibly distant but interesting connection for the purpose of our study, Heidegger’s “stretching” of Dasein between birth and death, like throwing a ball on a rubber string, could also be termed ekmageion (chora/matrix). Around the same time (Sein und Zeit was published in 1927) as Heidegger privileged plasticity, stretching, and “thrownness” in the world of temporal Being (as if still in the plasticity and formlessness of the womb/matrix), in mathematics and biology it was the spatial (and not temporal) character of ekmageion that linked it to the matrix. Bianchi also notes that “Aristotle, discussing Platonic doctrine in the Metaphysics, used ekmageion to describe the dyad of the Great and the Small qua its ability to generate numbers; Tredennick translated it [ekmageion] as ‘matrix’ (Aristotle 1933, 988a1)” (Bianchi 2006:143). 22. Interestingly, Persian and Arabic scholars and doctors addressed the question of women’s pleasure in detail. And it is this attention to women’s pleasure that made many of their texts unwelcome in Europe until the twentieth century on grounds of “indecency,” as narrated by Elgood (1968, 1970) in his fascinating article “Persian Gyneacology.”

2. Materializing Hospitality 1. E.g., see McNulty 2006. 2. In her chapter on hospitality and the French nation-state, Laachir (2007), inspired by Rosello (2001), questions the definition of the immigrant as guest, in which the authority of the host is assured by the continued distancing of the immigrant from the national polity and by not allowing the immigrant to become an “equal” part of the nation (the children of immigrants are still seen as “guests” even if they have been born in the country). For her this constant demand for im-

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migrants to behave as “good guests” is located in “relations between hospitality and capital and property” (2007:177). 3. Even though universality might serve us well as the opening gesture in making a case for hospitality, elsewhere I have demonstrated the key problems with this proposition, especially as it tends to mainstream and universalize the malecentered domestication and appropriation of the concept of hospitality (Aristarkhova 2005). See also Jamison 1995; Brown 2006; Still 2007; Rosello 2001; Laachir 2007; Schrift 1997. 4. A critique of the Kantian concept of hospitality has been presented by Levinas 1969; Derrida 1999; and Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000. For a critique of Kant that is relevant to this study, see especially McNulty 2006. It is important to note that Kant himself was critical of the colonial project when writing on European hospitality in “Perpetual Peace.” He did not develop his critical comments, however, into a critique of European colonialism and the law of private property (Derrida 1999). 5. This point has been developed further in relation to shared intrauterine memory by Ettinger 2006, who uses mostly psychoanalytic theory in her artwork and theoretical writings, and in a different manner, by McNulty 2006. 6. Giovanna Borradori (2004) carefully examines the tension between tolerance and hospitality. 7. This notion of tolerance vis-à-vis hospitality is especially important and will be examined in the next chapter with specific reference to the maternal-fetal interface and its concomitant relations. 8. John Caputo, in an interesting commentary on Derrida’s notion of hospitality notes that “the ‘host’ is someone who takes on or receives strangers, who gives to the stranger even while remaining in control” (1997:111). For a general introduction to Derrida’s work, including his concept of hospitality, see Lawlor (2002, 2006). 9. This situation of ownership understood as “property” in hospitality also creates problems for guests, who can never thus outgrow their status as guests and therefore remain disempowered with respect to a host who owns (Rosello 2001; Laachir 2007). 10. See Diprose (2009). Kelly Oliver also raises this point in relation to the body as property. Traces of the body (like blood in the ritual of circumcision or marriage) are reminders of “the living body that is not property” (1997a:64). Denying the property of one’s body to others does not mean an assertion of one’s body as one’s own property. Denying the property of one’s body to others is the first step toward an acknowledgment of another economy, which is not necessarily based on the terminology of property as either private property or communal property. The matrixial/maternal relation complicates these terms of ownership even further, as I will show in a discussion of the legal framework for contemporary reproductive technologies in a later chapter. 11. And this is certainly not an isolated gesture, as discovered by Irigaray, among others: “Place being only in virtue of its boundary: between a within and a without, an exterior and an interior. . . . Would space come into play only by way of this

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border developed by man? . . . The opening that is brought about by the modern prospecting of space is closed up again by a topo-logic that is still Aristotelian, and, to some extent, pre-Socratic” (1999:20). 12. For further reading on this point, see Jamison 1995; McNulty 2006; Molz and Gibson 2007; and Diprose 2002, among others. 13. “As for the femininity of the house, which was thematized in Levinas’s phenomenology of dwelling . . . there, too, ‘the feminine’ was used in a metaphorical sense (which, of course, does not yet answer the question of whether it is a good metaphor, and why or why not)” (Peperzak 1993:157–58, 195). 14. At the end of one of his texts on hospitality, Derrida recites two “founding scene[s] of Abrahamesque hospitality,” one from Genesis and another from Judges 19:23–30. In the second story the master of the house went out to the people who wanted to “penetrate” his pilgrim-guest and told them: “No, my brothers; I implore you, do not commit this crime. This man has become my guest; do not commit such an infamy. Here is my daughter; she is a virgin; I will give her to you. Possess her, do what you please with her, but do not commit such an infamy against this man.” The men would not listen to him. So the Levite took his concubine and brought her out to them. They had intercourse with her and outraged her all night till morning; when dawn was breaking they let her go. At daybreak the girl came and fell on the threshold of her husband’s host, and she stayed there till it was full day. In the morning her husband got up and opened the door of the house. . . . [He] picked up his knife, took hold of his concubine, and limb by limb cut her into twelve pieces; then he sent her all through the land of Israel. He instructed his messengers as follows, “This is what you are to say to all the Israelites, ‘Has any man seen such a thing from the day Israelites came out of the land of Egypt, until this very day? Ponder on this, discuss it; then give your verdict.’” And all who saw it declared, “Never such a thing been done or been seen since the Israelites came out of the land of Egypt.” (Judges, quoted in Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000:153–54) 15. This point, however abstract at the moment, is crucial for my analysis of the matrix as a place of generation, production, and reproduction and for the critical issues of ownership and property surrounding the maternal body in biomedical sciences. It opens the space for the presentation of a different kind of ownership that still needs to be properly thought through. See a particularly interesting and critical account of “surrogacy” in terms of generosity in Diprose 2002, which is developed further by Hird 2007. 16. This habit of collapsing the topological, topographical, and architectural into the maternal and vice versa (a womb/matrix as a reference point and a metaphor for any man-made environment and dwelling) cannot be analyzed in any detail in this section (for this specific connection, see Bloomer 1996; Grosz 1994a, 1994b, 2001, among many others). My focus here is on the way in which hospital-

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ity might reactivate the maternal so as to prevent the matrix from collapsing into a metaphor of nothingness, a space that provides a resource of space: an abstraction so abstracted that both thinker and the space he thinks are evacuated and suspended in a vacuum. I am also interested in how such thinking—viewing the matrixial/maternal as passive, empty, albeit generative, space—bolsters certain legal and cultural frameworks. 17. Levinas and Derrida focus much more on the demands of hosting, on what pure, unconditional hospitality would entail for the host, rather than on its implications for the guest. The position of guests is just as vulnerable and precarious, and, as other authors show, there are plenty of demands on them too: for one, they must look like, behave as, and remain guests, even if they desire a change in status (Rosello 2001; Molz and Gibson 2007). Being hosted entails more than being enveloped and welcomed with a smile into this cozy interiority of femininity or being pampered with services performed in utmost kindness. 18. These points are widely discussed, both in theological tradition and in feminism. For more recent philosophical examples, see Bevis 2007; and Guenther 2008. For a popular Christian reading of the relation between motherhood and hospitality, see Storkey 1993. 19. For the larger context of the relation between philosophy and maternal metaphors, see Oliver 1997a, 1997b; Walker 2000; Kristeva 1982, 1986; Sofia 2000; Bloomer 1996; Diprose 2002; Grosz 1994b; Butler 1993; Barzilai 1999; Irigaray 1985, 1999; Braidotti 2002; Guenther 2006, 2008; Žižek 1995, among many others. 20. While I focus here specifically on hospitality, this gesture—of assimilating the maternal in language—is not something specific to these two thinkers. This particular trope has been central to many key concepts in Western philosophy, such as “nature” in relation to “Being,” which only highlights the difficulties of reconnecting the matrix to the agency of generating and nourishing that sustain us: She is like a still-living tissue connected to the production of his language [sa langue]—to his tongue’s issue—and feeding this language, but herself being used in line with a project that is his own, and, by passing through his technology, losing the movement and breath of life. Joined to his shelter, as its still-material/matrical [matrixial] support, henceforth indistinguishable from this house of language [langage], in which he dwells, nature is indefinitely separated from herself and from him, through this assimilation of her to him in language [la langue]. . . . Always already separate in relation to nature that brings him into the world, in relation to the maternal whence he is born. . . . Discourse—the means by which man himself reproduces himself starting from the mystery of his begetting, about which he can say nothing. (Irigaray 1999:92, 166) 21. Here the French word matrice has been translated as “the matrix,” but it could also be rendered as “womb,” just as the “female other” could be translated as “she-other.” 22. The notion of the passive container as a problematic spatial concept has

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been discussed, albeit to draw very different conclusions, by many, including Heidegger in his famous discussion of the jug/vase. Sofia (2000) provides an interesting feminist reading of “container technologies” drawing on Heidegger. For problems of associating space with a passive receptacle, as applied to the matrix, see chapter 1, this volume. 23. “She gives first. She gives the possibility of that beginning from which the whole of man will be constituted. This gift is received with no possibility of a return. . . . The first gift remains without ‘response.’ . . . This debt of life seems natural and like it must remain unpaid. Unpayable. . . . Doesn’t this sort of gift remain for him an unthinkable beyond? This place of the first gift [du premier don]—or of the from which [ou dont]—will be closed up—folded up in an unthinkable beginning of Being” (Irigaray 1999:28–30). Guenther, in a similar reading of Heidegger, also frames the discussion in terms of the maternal, unconditional gift, introducing an interesting notion of “Being-from-others”: “Our Being-fromothers, our reception of existence as a gift that can never be reclaimed as a possession or choice but that precisely as such demands a response and perhaps even responsibility” (2008:113). 24. Even those who rely on this connection between the maternal and hospitality as “natural” present hospitality as an active, intentional relation of “expecting” another; thus, Storkey (1993) reads the Virgin Mary’s pregnancy as a relation of hosting (of Christ) and being hosted (by Christ and the Holy Spirit), while she herself is being hosted by an older pregnant woman—Ann. 25. See McNulty 2006; Diprose 2002; Aristarkhova 2005; Still 2007; Rosello 2001; and Laachir 2007. Rosalyn Diprose makes a particularly poignant case when she takes on the concept of generosity. Diprose sees danger in any essential connection between generosity and femininity or between generosity and the poor. Thus the generosity of those who are well-off is always remembered and praised more than the generosity of the poor or of women. This difference supports systems of inequality and domination (Diprose 2002:10–14). 26. It is critical to note, however, that the matrixial/maternal here are not meant to provide “matter” to hospitality, as if they are essentially embodied in opposition to linguistic turns and twists. It is in fact initially the language of hospitality in Levinas, and thereafter in Derrida, that relies so heavily on anti-ontological positioning of sexual difference as the main constitutive element. Thus, problematically, it connects hospitality to the matrix only superficially.

3. The Matter of the Matrix in Biomedicine 1. See Haraway 1989; Moulin 1991; Sinding 1991; Martin 1994; Nancy 2002. 2. The word “development” means different things to different people, including scientists. To the embryologist, it implies the processes of laying down the key components of the body—the genesis of limbs, the primitive brain, and the internal organs such as the heart and gut. The genetic code for

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these processes, and the ways in which it can be modified by environment, are actively researched areas. To the child psychologist, however, development suggests the stages of behavioural, physical and mental attainment that human infants and children go through, namely learning to walk, to utter their first words etc. These apparently distinct uses of the word “development” are not really contradictory, because development is a continuous process that starts with the inherited genotype and proceeds until the mature phenotype has been formed. (Gluckman and Hanson 2005:25) where genotype is a “total repertoire of genetic information in an individual’s genes” (11), and “phenotype is the term used to describe the actual appearance and function of an individual organism” (8). I am presenting here these particular views on what development is as symptomatic of their current biomedical usage, which readers might keep in mind while reading this chapter. Generation, as I use it in this chapter, is defined as “2 a: the action or process of producing offspring: procreation; b: the process of coming or bringing into being” (By permission. From the MerriamWebster Online Dictionary © 2009 by Merriam-Webster, Incorporated. www .Merriam-Webster.com). 3. This history is important since embryology (together with mathematics) has influenced the development of many twentieth-century disciplines, one of which is genetics. As Scott F. Gilbert (1978), among many others, has shown, modern genetics has its roots in embryology and the study of evolutionary development, especially sex differentiation. 4. For a critical analysis of this point, see Hayles 1999; and Mitchell and Thurtle 2004. 5. On the connection between embryos and tumors, as growths inside a body, see Medawar (1986:172–79). 6. Needham later acknowledged that the connection between a gendered political system of power distribution and ideas and beliefs about generation had been observed previously (for example, by Engels and influential early anthropologists). However, he made a much stronger (by today’s standards), feminist claim when he proposed a connection between social gender order and scientific knowledge production. It is noteworthy that we increasingly learn today about a “hidden” history of embryology and generation science that scientifically acknowledged the importance of the maternal role in generation (Needham especially referred to His 1870:93–220). However, the mainstream discourse can still be best characterized by this “physical denial of maternity,” particularly if one takes account of the embryological roots of genetics. See Duden 1993; Flemming 2001; Green 2002, 2005; Roe 1981; McClive 2002; and Traister 1991. 7. Excellent feminist critiques, from a variety of disciplinary approaches, of Aristotle’s gender biases have been presented by the following authors: Dean-Jones 1996; DuBois 1988; Tuana 1993; Lloyd 1983; King 1998; Irigaray 1985. 8. While my focus here is on the biomedical aspect of this legacy, it is important to note the wider implications of such scientific choices. In a footnote to this

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quotation Needham directly links this medico-scientific position to the arguments that supported denials of property and inheritance rights to women. No matter what the reasons behind such denials are (legal anxieties over paternity; philosophical claims of primacy of form over matter; political, economic, and social gains from denying women’s role and labor in generation; and policing/regulating women’s reproductive choices), this trend remains very strong, as the most recent critiques of reproductive technologies demonstrate, and should be kept in mind as it points to the interconnectedness (not necessarily linear, logical, or obvious) between the biomedical, philosophical, and political realms that has been well explored in the last few decades. For an example of such nuanced feminist exploration, see Diprose 2002, 2009. 9. Though, as I will show in the next chapter, the extent to which the mother can be replicated in another form (e.g., by a machine) is still a question of much debate and often presupposes that being inside a maternal body has no bearing on legal or physical issues (as, for example, in gestational surrogacy, which is discussed in the following chapters). 10. This argument, however, does not deny the fact that being inside the uterine cavity also means to be a part of the maternal body, and it would be problematic to argue that one type of pregnancy is “more intimate” than another. The question of the “separation” of the pregnant body into “mother” and “embryo,” from that point of view, is not as settled as it might seem, from various perspectives, including a biomedical one. I emphasize here the “intimacy” of human pregnancy only to make a larger point about the history of biomedical views that challenges the argument about autonomy of the embryo while being part of the maternal body. 11. Medawar’s conceptualization of the mother as an “environment” (drawing on systems theory, which was being developed at the time) is particularly noteworthy here. This representation will be examined in greater detail later in this chapter, while the question of “self-sufficiency” of the embryo will be closely investigated in the following chapters on ectogenesis and male pregnancy. 12. While one could argue that terms mean different things in different disciplines (e.g., immunological tolerance explains certain interactions between cells and not between legal subjects), the sociocultural contexts supporting and mobilized by the choice of these specific terms by the scientific community to make sense of their findings is what interests me here. For example, related terms, such as rejection, recognition, tolerance, and neutrality/anergy borrowed from legal and other disciplines, were deployed to explain embodiment in immunological terms, effectively crossing the biomedical disciplines of immunology and biology into transplantation and tissue engineering as well as popular culture. The wider discussion of this complex issue is well beyond the scope of my study. There have been many important studies on the cultural history of immunology and the concept of immunity, most recently, for example, by Edward Cohen (2009). In the second section of this chapter I address the particularly influential self and nonself doctrine in immunology and its replacement by information and network theories. 13. This framing of pregnancy as a biomedical puzzle is by many accounts a

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continuing trend insofar as pregnancy is still seen as a “conundrum” (Moffett and Loke 2004)—precisely because of viviparity—that seems to center on the challenges of spatially mediating the development of one inside another. 14. For an interesting study of this metaphor of the woman as a “soil” that needs to be “seeded,” see DuBois 1988. 15. Some researchers, especially sociobiologists, argue that we have evolved into “social” animals because of fetal and infants’ dependency on adults for survival. We developed social skills because we are most dependent on caregivers both before and for a number of years after birth. This train of thought could be extended to argue, in the light of Burton’s and Jauniaux’s ponderings, that these “intimate interactions” with the maternal body and later nursing bodies and all kinds of other interactions have provided an “evolutionary advantage” of becoming human and organizing life around the birth and survival of past, present, and future babies. A very close version of this argument is expressed by Hrdy (1999, 2009) and Elia (1988). And as with other arguments of this nature, this explanation suffers from being a retrospective reading: that is, we “see” in newly “discovered” biomedical observations the roots for existing social structures or already present “results” of evolution. 16. The concept of tolerance is especially interesting here as it closely aligns with and relates to discussions in the previous chapter on hostility, tolerance, and hospitality within the Western philosophical paradigm of the relation between self and other. 17. Leslie Brent, a student of Peter Medawar’s, summarized the discovery and explanatory framework of immunologic tolerance: The phenomenon of tolerance can be said to have begun with the seminal observations in 1945 by R. D. Owen that cattle dizygotic twins display red cell chimerism—mosaicism as he called it—in adult life. . . . Owen’s discovery came out of the blue and it was ignored by immunologists until F. M. Burnet and F. Fenner highlighted it four years later in their influential monograph The Production of Antibodies, in which they predicted the existence of tolerance as a general phenomenon and developed their notion of ‘self-markers’ to explain why the body does not react against self. . . . Following the work of Billingham, Brent, and Medawar, and of Hasek, tolerance became incorporated into general immunologic theory. (Brent 1997:75–81) 18. Full allograft is when an egg is from another woman (gestational surrogacy, which is the same as in vitro fertilization, IVF, with a donor egg). Another term used earlier (e.g., by Medawar) is homograft. They all refer to a transplant between different members of the same species. In immunology the embryo is often equated with a donor transplant, and only recently do we see major researchers critiquing this definition. Thus when a woman is “transplanted” with a fetus, she is supposed to mount an immunological attack. In return, the embryo might also, hypothetically, be able to mount its own immunological response. It is inter-

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esting that various researchers tend to overlook the fact that gestational surrogacy is closer in immunological terms to IVF with a donated egg than any other type of assisted reproduction, often because they do not consider gestational surrogacy as technically the same as IVF implantation with a donor egg (Gundogan et al. 2009; Kirk 1998). 19. See, e.g., Gleicher 2007, 2008. 20. T cells are cells that participate in the immune system response and are produced by the thymus. 21. “Le modèle de tolérance de l’autre en soi et avec soi” (Irigaray 1990:51). 22. Rouch continued to write on the topic until her passing in February 2009. In one of her more recent texts, she addressed the “immunological paradox of pregnancy” anew (Rouch 2005). 23. As, for example, does Antoinette Fouque in her volume of essays titled Pregnancies: Feminology, when she weaves the philosophical, the biomedical, and the political together: Gestation as generation, gesture, management [gestion] and inner experience, experience of the intimate, but also generosity, genius of the species, acceptance of a foreign body, hospitality, openness, will for the regenerative graft; integrating, a-conflictual, post-ambivalent gestation of differences, anthropocultural model, womb of the universality of the human kind, principle and origin of ethics; gestation, carnal and spiritual conception of the other, always already subject, rather than the Genesis, this autistic fable that men and the religions of the Book have substituted for it; gestation, the transformation of the present, towards a real, non-utopian future; gestation, living attention and heteronomous experience, that knows how to make a place within the self for the non-self; gestation, the promise of the being to be; gestation, finally, paradigm if “thinking the near/future other” [penser le prochain], paradigm of ethics and democracy. (2008:154–55) I thank Carolyn Sachs for referring me to Fouque’s argument. For another account that presents the maternal-fetal relation in terms of alternative ways of theorizing intersubjectivity, using writings by Frederick Douglass, among others, see a fascinating book by Cynthia Willett, Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities (1995). 24. For more on this theory, see Burnet and Fenner 1949; Burnet 1964; and, on its contemporary critique, see Tauber 1994; Tauber and Podolsky 2000. 25. In this theory, which Matzinger considers to be not new but merely a different way of looking at immunity, the immune system is far more concerned with danger and potential destruction than with the distinction between self and non-self. . . . So there are actually at least four classes of structures distinguished by the immune system: (i) “visible self,” structures toward which the immune system is tolerant, (ii) “visible non-self,” structures to which the immune system nor-

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mally responds, (iii) “invisible self,” bodily structures, like acetylcholine receptor or myelin basic protein, to which the immune system is not tolerant but to which it does not normally respond, and (iv) “non-immunogenic” structures, like isolated haptens or silicone, that the immune system simply ignores. If we accept that these categories exist, the logical next step is the question “by what criteria does the immune system define these subsets?” What features of a bodily antigen make it recognizably “self” (and an object of tolerance), and what characteristics distinguish a nonbodily structure as “non-self” (and an object to attack)? When put this way, there is no immediately obvious answer to the question; perhaps we could learn something by rephrasing it. For example, we could ask “what criteria does the immune system use when deciding to attack, to ignore, or to be tolerant of a particular structure?” I would suggest that the criteria have to do with what is dangerous rather than with what is “self.” (1994:992) For a feminist analysis of Matzinger’s theory, see, e.g., Weasel 2001; and Howes 2007. It is important for my study to note that Matzinger’s Danger Theory does not significantly change or challenge the hostility/tolerance paradigm; rather, it builds on it. 26. Thus Tauber and Podolsky write about the “silence” of the immune system and its nonaction state. One might wonder whether the concept of “passivity” explored in chapter 2 corresponds to this metaphor of silence, or nonaction, as Levinas defined it. But, interestingly enough, it does not seem to, since when the immune system is in action, this action is always presented in the book in pathological terms: “Foreign antigens then are recognized as ‘other’ not by their intrinsic foreignness (that is, their novelty) but because they are presented in a context that changes their shared ‘selfness’ to a signal indicating pathology” (Tauber and Podolsky 2000:356). The authors go on to explain that it is similar to contextual readings of artworks, for example, by Escher. 27. This section is devoted primarily to the most recent immunological theories of information by key authors in the field. The task here is the characterization of how immunologists deploy the concept of information through specific examples. I approach these theories critically, but only to the extent that they relate to my larger argument about the maternal-fetal interface and its relevance to my discussion of the matrixial/maternal relation of hospitality. What interests me in particular is how immunologists imagine new immunological entities/bodies, immunological information itself, and especially what kind of “relation” they ascribe to them: hostile, tolerant, neutral, beneficial, and so on. Other scholars have written excellent genealogies and histories of the concept of information; see, e.g., Hayles 1999. For a new study of information that also provides a rich bibliography on the subject, see Mitchell and Thurtle’s introduction to Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information (2004). The authors propose an interesting approach, which they identify as “materialistic information studies” (2). Such studies highlight how “information and flesh coconstitute one another” in various fields (2), including life sciences and biotechnology, art, literature, and popular culture.

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28. This leads one in turn to question the seeming gender neutrality of information theory or philosophy of information, which has been addressed by many feminist theorists and cannot be explored here at any length. For an account of the history of information in American biological science and how it shaped the “emergence of genetic rationality,” see Thurtle 2008. 29. This “beauty” was evoked as well during the dissection of embryos in the early twentieth century. See Morgan 2004, 2009. 30. In his overall account, Tauber is inspired by Ilya Mechnikov (see Tauber and Chernyak 1991), who proposed over a hundred years ago in a most original way a connective link between an organism’s metabolic and defensive responses to “otherness” from an evolutionary perspective. Mechnikov’s ideas still await feminist analysis, especially as they imply a relation between procreation and digestion: “Thus, one branch of zoology should devote itself to the study of a myriad of adaptations that an animal organism goes through in order to enter another animal organism and live in it. But more importantly, [zoology] should study the organs of defense and phenomena of reaction in the organism that is under attack by the parasites” (Mechnikov 1956 [1896]:266; my translation). 31. Lewontin and Levins 2007; Keller 2002; Mayr and Provine 1980; Sansom and Brandon 2007; Amundson 2005; Ulvestad 2007; Tauber 2008. 32. Gluckman is professor of pediatric and perinatal biology, director of the Ligginds Institute for Medical Research, and director of the National Centre for Growth and Development, at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Hanson is director of the Centre for Developmental Origins of Health and Disease at the University of Southampton Medical School, and British Heart Foundation Professor of Cardiovascular Science. Their affiliations represent the interdisciplinary character of biomedical science today, where concerns of evolutionary developmental biology and medicine intersect.

4. Mother-Machine and the Hospitality of Nursing 1. This topic was explored in more detail in chapter 1. On technology more specifically, see Braidotti 2002; Squier 1994, 2004; Ferreira 2005; Gelfand and Shook 2006. On male pregnancy, see chapter 5. 2. For an excellent account of Sterne’s text as “obstetrical satire,” with a special focus on the “time of delivery,” see Blackwell 2001. 3. Sterne 2004:588; the story about Fortunio’s birth was included in the novel as a footnote. This footnote, in fact, is a quotation from a French eighteenthcentury text. The French text is partially based on Giustinian’s Scrittori Liguri (1667). Though the novel is written in English, this footnote/quotation is either printed in its original French or omitted from various editions altogether. I am quoting from a 2004 edition, with introduction and notes by Robert Folkenflik. The translation of this footnote was provided by Folkenflik in his notes and is based on earlier translated versions of the French original (Sterne 2004:588). 4. Rotch (1895) was also developing “artificial milk,” arguing that it was safer and more “scientific” than maternal breast milk. Though the machine as a sub-

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stitute for the mother versus the machine as “helping” the mother might seem to be two very different projects, in reality and as far as the development of neonatal medicine is concerned, they have both helped researchers and doctors to keep more and more prematurely born infants alive. I cannot address the important question of “milk” in more detail here. It must suffice to say that wet-nursing and breast-nursing, artificial-milk research, and the new terminology of intrauterine mucus as “uterine milk” (it nourishes the embryo before implantation into the uterine wall) are all conflated to re-create a sense of the “natural” nourishing quality of the mother in ectogenesis. Although very different, their differences are downplayed through references to “milk.” See Hempstock 2004; McFarlane 1999; Schultz 2002; Zollner et al. 2004. As for my use of the word machinic here, I am employing it following along with its growing usage in contemporary technology and science theory as well as in posthuman and cyberculture studies: as something of a machine that blends with a human body without becoming it, thus producing a new state of embodiment. It refers to an increasingly interwoven field of human-machine interfaces, technological embodiments, and cyborg imaginary. Inspired initially by its use in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, machinic is now used more widely, growing in popularity in such fields as architecture, politics, and philosophical approaches to biomedicine (Johnston 2008). 5. Squier presents a critical account of a fascinating image of a “water-baby” from Charles Kingsley’s story for children called The Water Babies, published in 1863, before Tarnier presented his couveuse (Squier 1994:29–35). A discussion of “seeing” and transparency of the womb-“bottle” is well beyond the scope of this chapter and has been connected to questions of representation and control by other authors, including, to a large extent, Squier (1994). I agree with Squier that knowing the history of earlier discussions is useful for our contemporary take on ectogenesis. The question then is whether ectogenesis has ever been beyond scientific and medical concern or whether it lies at the heart of the biomedical enterprise as a whole, with its corresponding metaphysical foundations. 6. Jennifer Bloomer connects the architectural and maternal imageries of virtual reality and cyberspace (1996). Others have emphasized how new representational technologies portray the fetus as if floating in an empty space, with the mother disappearing from the “picture,” especially in intrauterine photography and sonography: Taylor 2000; Stormer 2008; Stabile 1994; Petchesky 1987; Oaks 2000; Mitchell 2001. I discuss some of the arguments in this ongoing debate in the later part of this chapter. 7. Fortunio’s story is also symbolic; otherwise, Sterne would not have quoted it at length. If Fortunio was not put into an incubator, Sterne suggests, we would not have had all those great books written by him. Ironically, Sterne, through Tristram Shandy’s mouth, connects Fortunio’s “fortune” of surviving and growing to become very tall to his tall stature intellectually. Despite his tiny body in the beginning, his father/doctor’s knowledge and instructions created Fortunio artificially: his father improved nature with science. It is not clear if Sterne was being ironic here in making this claim, but his framing and the narration of the story itself clearly point to Fortunio’s authority as an Aristotelian scholar, thus establishing

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a legacy and claim to the foundational validity of embryological studies. After all, Fortunio Liceti himself originated many texts that were devoted to generation and “fantastic births” (Liceti 1634 [1616]). In short, this paragraph claims that without incubation we would not have had Fortunio and all the knowledge that he has contributed. 8. For historical research on the search for “eggs,” see also Cohen 1973; and Pinto-Correia 1997. For the most recent account of the conceptual connection between women and chickens, see Squier 2011. 9. It is noteworthy here how the maternal environment is presented as “favorable” and “protective,” without a clear definition of what this implies biologically and as if these are essential characteristics of the maternal environment as such. 10. Like the babies in the incubators of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the incubated goat fetuses were also widely exhibited, but at the end of the twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries. Thus, Ars Electronica, an organization in Linz, Austria, presented Unno’s work at its annual festival of new media art and music, which in 2000 was titled The Next Sex (Unno 2000). If the exhibition of human infants in neonatal intensive care units as part of an art/ science event would be scandalous and possibly illegal today, the critical question of the “animal” in both the art and the science of ectogenetic technologies remains to be interrogated more systematically. 11. Plato wrote of the chora/matrix creating the world through movement (in a sort of rocking motion). The immobilization of the fetus in the ectogenetic environment provides an occasion to reflect on the relation between gestation/ generation and gravity as well as between generation and nursing (it is the nurse of generation who is “rocking the world into being” in Platonic genesis). While there is no space here to deliberate more on the question of movement and gravity in the mother/matrix, the section on nursing further on in this chapter does refer to the “rocking” of premature babies as an important step in the development of nursing practice in NICUs; Platonic views on chora are explored in chapter 1. 12. A nonexhaustive list includes Adams 1994; Murphy 1998; Balsamo 1996; Corea 1985; Dijck 1995; Squier 1994; Franklin 1995, 2006; Ferreira 2005; Haraway 1991; Smelik and Lykke 2008; Gelfand and Shook 2006; Plant 1995; Rowland 1992; Raymond 1993. 13. Cyborg (a cybernetic organism) is a concept that was introduced, arguably, by Kline and Clynes in the 1959 article “Drugs, Space, and Cybernetics: Evolution to Cyborgs.” It was supposed to be “the artificially extended homeostatic control system functioning unconsciously” (Kline and Clynes 1961:347). Inspired by the Soviet research on space travel, extraterrestrial survival, and psychedelic drugs such as LSD, the cyborg, thus, became another model of ectogenesis, when Earth’s environment was understood as a “space womb” (1961:358). Instead of creating an artificial “space womb” in outer space, Kline and Clynes proposed “participant evolution” for a “fetus”—so that the human body is changed enough to adapt to a new environment in outer space. The main research—to construct a cyborg through the use of “chemical and electronic means” in order to automate adaptation to a hostile environment—was underpinned by the “noble” desire to

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enhance the human dimension. The authors suggested “that such existence in space may provide a new, larger dimension for man’s spirit as well” (371). For other studies that discuss the concept of the cyborg in relation to Kline and Clynes’s original text and Donna Haraway’s vision, see Daly 1990; Gray 1995; Hacking 1998; Pickering 1995; Squier 1994. 14. It is also noteworthy that Brakman and Scholz problematically cite Mahoney: “women, as a rule, have tended to be less concerned with owning children and more concerned with nurturing them” (Mahoney, cited in Brakman and Scholz 2006:67). They do not contest this position although it complicates their intent to shy away from essentializing images of women’s relationship to the care of children. 15. This topic has been discussed at length; for more recent publications, see Coleman 2004; Gelfand and Shook 2006. 16. Thus, in her theory of transbiology, Sarah Franklin responds to those who “complain” that her analysis or Donna Haraway’s analysis is “‘merely discursive,’ or it represents a retreat from the ‘real’” (2006:168–69, 179). See also Braidotti 2002; and Botting 1999. For an example of a critique of the “postmodern” turn in feminist theory as less “embodied” or responding to concrete maternal needs, see Adams 1994. 17. One nurse would be ideally employed for one or two incubators, with enough nurses to provide twenty-four-hour care. Thus, at one exhibition in 1905, fourteen nurses were employed for twelve incubators with live infants, working in three shifts. The doctor responsible for this incubator station was John Zahorsky, clinical professor of pediatrics at Washington University (Zahorsky 1905). 18. After all, it is a legend, a story (and Sterne refers to Michael Giustinian, probably through a secondary source as well), and Fortunio may actually have been more mature than six months or born full term but with very low birth weight. That would explain his breast-feeding (infants born after only six months in the womb can rarely take milk). Whoever recounted this story in the first place seems to feed off already existing images that analogized human embryos to chicken eggs, even before European scholars and inventors could replicate a chicken incubator. 19. This situation is changing, albeit very slowly, as it is considered a “luxury” to have extra spaces for nurses and parents in hospitals; see Tracey and Maroney 1999; Andrist, Nicholas, and Wolf 2006. 20. An excellent example of nurses as innovators of gestation and generation strategies/technologies is detailed in the work of two neonatal nurses, Mary Neal and Kathryn Barnard. Neal initiated a study of the “growth and development of premature infants using a small motorized hammock placed inside the incubator” (Neal 1968:3–5). It was discovered that the rocking motion was associated with weight gain and improved motor and sensory functions. Barnard, when “studying infant sleep patterns, devised a mechanized rocking bed for incubators that also included a tape-recorded heartbeat. . . . Today, rocking chairs have become standard furniture in hospital nurseries and neonatal units, and parents and caregivers are encouraged to hold, talk to, and rock the tiny infants” (Mason et al. 2006:343).

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21. Thus the discovery and use of surfactant are credited with a major improvement in the survival rates of preterm infants whose lungs cannot yet breathe normal air. Synthetic surfactant helps prevent lung damage from mechanical ventilators and acts as a substitute for the natural protein-surfactant “lubricant” in the lungs (Knight 2002). 22. Tracey and Maroney 1999 is just one example. 23. Such children sometimes also get abandoned altogether, at a rate higher than full-term babies. 24. At that time many severely premature infants, especially those with mental disability, were sometimes not even treated to the full extent possible, out of “ethical” considerations; see Thompson and Thompson 1981. 25. There is also the question of whether the nurse-machine relation should be framed in the same manner as the mother-machine relation, as opposites, or only in terms of constituting a “nourishing environment.” For more on the general topic of nursing in relation to technology, see, e.g., Sandelowski 2002. 26. Prenatal and pediatric care is necessary both before and after the infant is in the NICU (Tracey and Maroney 1999). 27. It is noteworthy that home, hospital, and hospice all relate to the practices of hospitality. While the “hospital” was first established to care for the poor and provide them with refuge, today the hospitality element (at least, in the United States) has shifted to the emergency room, where many homeless find temporary relief and medical care (Rosenberg 1987; Rothman 1991). The modern hospice movement is a nursing innovation. In the 1970s Florence Wald quit her job as dean of the Yale School of Nursing to work and study with Cicely Saunders, a founder of the first hospice, St. Christopher’s, in London. After her apprenticeship with Saunders, she established the first hospice in the United States. “What people need most when they are dying is relief from distressing symptoms of the disease, the security of a caring environment, sustained expert care, and assurance that they and their families will not be abandoned” (Craven and Wald 1975:1816). It is obvious that nurses lead the way in modern health care that relates to the practice of hospitality. However, it would be very problematic to assume that nurses relate to hospitality essentially because they are in a “caring” profession. After all, the doctor is defined as the one who practices and teaches “healing.” Doctors, therefore, are as much related to the practice of hospitality, dealing with strangers in the hospital, as nurses. Therefore we should not assume that doctors are “less” hospitable. There is nothing more or less “natural” or “inherent” in nurses’ hospitality than in doctors’ hospitality. Recognizing this will allow us, I believe, to acknowledge the hospitality of nursing and theorize it as a practice rather than an abstract “feminine quality.” 28. I thank an anonymous reviewer for stressing the importance of the class dimension in my analysis. As I show in this chapter, the invisibility of nursing corresponds to, and in many ways issues from, the invisibility of hospitality nurses provide. The task of making nursing “visible” has thus to become as much a socioeconomic question as it should be a question of the desire for and research in ectogenetic technologies.

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29. Dianne I. Maroney wrote an excellent account of the full scope of the nursing required by the premature child. A neonatal nurse herself, she gave birth to an infant who was severely premature, and that makes her narrative even more nuanced in relation to these technologies (Maroney 2009). 30. I am not arguing here that neonatal nursing is the only nursing that is so special and privileged. On the contrary, I am proposing to expand the understanding of nursing as an important element of hospitality, which has yet to be addressed systematically without positioning women as essentially more inclined to “care” (Gilligan 1982). The question of the artificial womb-matrix, framed in terms of welcoming as nursing, opens up an opportunity to think of other situations of nursing in terms of hospitality.

5. Male Pregnancy, Matrix, and Hospitality 1. The topic is often treated with disdain and irony in “serious” scholarly literature and is often avoided. Thus, Dick Teresi and Kathleen Mcauliffe admit in their chapter “Male Pregnancy” (written in 1985): “We never wanted to write this article. . . . We took the assignment with the assumption that after a few phone calls and a couple of library searches we could honestly report back that there was no real future in, or scientific basis for, male pregnancy. We were wrong. Some important researchers convinced us the idea was altogether feasible” (1998:182). 2. For a selection of texts that contribute to this growing field, see, among others, Fung 1991; Stecopoulos and Uebel 1997; Callahan 1998; Brennan et al. 2007a, 2007b; Sparrow 2008; Malik and Coulson 2008. The work of Iris Marion Young (2005) serves as a classic example where the female body has been reconsidered in positive terms. 3. Insofar as ectogenesis is conceived principally as a means of genesis outside the womb. In chapter 4 I consider ectogenesis most specifically in terms of “machine pregnancy” via the artificial womb, while this chapter considers genesis in a male body. Animal-human, xenogenetic pregnancy, cloning, and various combinations, though equally interesting ectogenetic means, will not be discussed in this book in the interest of space and conceptual focus; for some useful discussions, see Haraway 1991; Squier 1995, 2004; and Ferreira 2005. 4. Walters either has not met or has omitted mentioning a heterosexual married man who is interested in becoming pregnant and whose wife can bear children. 5. Uterine regeneration would be another possibility; however, one would still need to harvest uterine cells for regenerating it and then implant it into the (male) body. This technology, ironically, relies on the terminology of the extracellular “matrix” as a frame within which or on which such uteri might grow. 6. Thus Thomas Beatie (2008) cites these reasons for deciding to become pregnant rather than choosing surrogacy or adoption. 7. Roger Gosden speculates that the pregnant man would experience food “fads,” constipation, and vomiting, and “he would probably succumb to the temp-

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tation to gaze into baby supply shop windows to complete the reversal of roles” (2000:195). 8. Waldby and Cooper (2008) pointed out that this model is by no means “simple,” as it relies on capitalist flows of global biomedical products and services, often exploitative of “cheap” East European and Asian biomedical “flesh” markets. 9. Waldby and Cooper (2008) discuss the economic realities of the biomedical infertility “industry.” With the majority of current solutions of infertility problems having race, nationality, class, and “species” dimensions to them (egg donation, IVF treatments, surrogate motherhood, human studies on ethnic minorities and poor women, animal experiments, etc.), it becomes clear that the discourse of natural hospitality of the maternal/feminine feeds opportunities for economic, political, and other types of exploitation. The more natural one’s pregnancy is perceived (in uneducated, poor, foreign women) and the less economically and symbolically valuable it seems to be, the more it is treated as a simple containing of a child. 10. Walters (1991) reports that after the public became aware of male pregnancy research in Australia, gay men went to assisted reproductive clinics and asked for more information on male pregnancy. Again, I argue, we have to consider such gestures, no matter how “ridiculous,” as possibly more and other than a desire for “control” over women’s power in reproduction or a manifestation of “womb envy.” 11. See Irigaray 1985; Gatens 1996; Cavarero 1995; Tuana 1993; Martin 1987; Walker 1998; Barzilai 1999; Ferreira 2005; Oliver 1997a, 1998, among many others. 12. Rochefort was probably the first person to use the term couvade. In 1665 he compared a custom in the Antilles to one practiced by “some peasants” in France that was called faire la couvade. The same custom was later described by others, who mention that a new mother carries on with her normal life while her husband lies in bed, secluded, and is taken care of by his wife and relatives as if he were the one who was pregnant (in Roth 1893:219). 13. This is a far from exhaustive but critical selection of the relevant literature that shows the scope of anthropological interest in couvade: Bachofen 1992 [1861]; Roth 1893; Reik 1931; Kupferer 1965; Bettelheim 1962; Money and Hosta 1968; Meigs 1976; Munroe 1980; Hall and Dawson 1989; Rival 1998; Riviere 1974; Browner 1983; Doja 2005. 14. “History of California,” 1759, quoted in Roth 1893:217 (emphasis mine). It is noteworthy that this notion of pregnant men as “putting on a show,” a farce, a performance, corresponds to European comical performances of pregnant men, as discussed by Velasco (2006). 15. The Jesuit missionary Dobrizhoffer, quoted in Tylor 1878 [1865]:294. 16. As early as 1893 Roth questioned the validity of some famous accounts of couvade (including one by Marco Polo), speculating that they were based on myths and hearsay (Roth 1893). 17. I am using the term husband here following anthropological convention. Later in the chapter I question normative heterosexual and nuclear family assumptions with regard to couvade and male pregnancy.

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18. It is worth reflecting here on how race plays out in configuring the maternal relation, where the extent of passivity of the matrix/womb is “graded” according to the class and race of the woman under study. “Savages, like animals, undoubtedly suffer much less from most of the ills that civilized flesh is heir to” (“an eminent London professor,” cited in Roth 1893:205), and Roth adds in a footnote: “As a side issue may we infer from the frequent allusions to painful labor in the Old Testament, especially in the book of Jeremiah, that the Jews have always held a high place in the scale of civilization?” (206). Civilization here is judged by the amount of women’s pain and effort in labor. Beginning with the works of Tylor and Bachofen, couvade has been denigrated as a “savage and ridiculous” practice and excluded from the worldview of European civilized man. Thus the problem of interpreting/understanding couvade was resolved by “othering” those places in Europe where it was practiced as backward either ethnically and culturally (southern Europe, the Basques especially) or economically and culturally (as a “peasant” practice, in the United Kingdom especially). Tylor saw couvade as an example of popular magic, concluding: “Popular magic is one of the subjects in which the intellect of the peasant is least removed from that of the savage, both representing early stages in the development of mind” (1878 [1865]:305). 19. The brief descriptions of interpretations of couvade that follow are not ordered chronologically. Even though it might seem as if these interpretations represent “progress” in our evaluations and characterizations, there is no evidence to support such a claim. For example, in 1893, when responding to Roth, anthropologist Brabrook questioned the characterization of couvade as “absurd,” pointing out that traces of couvade could be found in “our” modern societies and that it accords well with the concept of a “good” nuclear heterosexual family. He suggested instead a positive reading of couvade, because it demonstrates: “1. A condition of monogamy and conjugal fidelity. 2. The acknowledgment of hereditary succession through the father. 3. Domestic affection and self-sacrifice for the sake of the child. 4. Highly artificial religious and superstitious belief” (Brabrook cited in Roth 1893:242). Interestingly, many of the same reasons, albeit in an implicit form, are championed today by the “progressive” interpreters of couvade (Doja 2005). 20. Both psychosomatic and cultural practices of couvade are considered to “fit” better within an explanatory framework of “survival.” Even after a strong critique of previous couvade explanations, which often omitted the woman’s role and perspective in favor of male-centered and (male) child-centered approaches, Doja withdraws into the comfort of the “survival” explanation, presenting cross-cultural examples of couvade practices and approaches as fundamentally similar: “When children are born, it is in a solidary community’s best interest to integrate the nuclear family into the larger group since children are important for the survival of the group as a whole” (2005:930). Doja based his global theory of the couvade on Laura Rival’s argument that the couvade is about social reproduction where “incorporation of the newborn” plays a crucial role. He also seems to have adopted Rival’s ideological “postmodern” and what she calls “post-feminist” position that “gender is the effect of discourse and sex is the effect of gender” (Rival 1998:621).

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21. Thus, famous anthropologist and folklorist Alan Dundes reads couvade in Genesis, when God rests on the seventh day: “in the context of couvade it makes perfect sense for a male creator to rest after his creative act” (2003:158). 22. This is not to suggest that it should be seen as a norm and, in many cases, as a “norm,” it could even further socially and culturally marginalize single mothers and women delivering without the father’s presence. 23. Darren Garnick “tested” the Empathy Belly and described his experience in the Boston Herald (2007) and on his Web site in an entry notably titled “Labor of Love: 24 Hours of Male Pregnancy” (2008). 24. There are plentiful examples in contemporary art where artists explore the issues surrounding pregnancy and the maternal (Liss 2009; Kelly 1985), as well as biomedical discourses and technologies of reproduction (subRosa 2009; Catts, Zurr, and Ben-Ary 2000), but they are well beyond the scope of this study. 25. In a recent conversation, Lee remarked: “I never speak of Male Pregnancy when I talk about my [art] work. But after my talks the audience members almost always ask about it” (Lee 2009b). 26. This seven-minute video is a small portion of a longer feature documentary produced by Doc en Stock/Arte France and directed by Sophie Lepault and Capucine Lafait (When Men Are Pregnant, 2005). 27. “Men getting pregnant used to be a big joke—a point of ridicule. Someone was telling me about this popular American film where Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character became pregnant. The humor was based on the sheer absurdity of such a distinct feminine condition being imposed on someone who represented the ultimate paradigm of Western masculinity. It seems like something rooted in a preoccupation with very traditional gender role assumptions. There was also an episode of The Cosby Show, apparently, where the male characters dreamed they were all pregnant. . . . If you’re a man who actually wants to become pregnant, without the intent of performing or putting on a show, then you’re still considered weird” (Lee and Versalius 2002). 28. Lee mentions, I would argue intentionally, that his art has been considered by some as created by a “female artist” (Lee and Lee 2000). 29. It is interesting that Lee’s work seems to refer less to the men in his life and their work of hospitality. However, the attention that he pays to extending hospitality to women is very important for me here and makes his work unique in art by men. Particularly, it challenges the history of the “natural” association of hospitality with women, on the one hand, and the lack of cultural hospitality toward women and especially mothers as guests, on the other (see chapter 3). For a discussion on the element of “work” in the maternal relation that embodies the father, see Andrea Liss’s discussion connecting her father’s “maintenance labor” with “maintenance art” by Mierle Laderman Ukeles (Liss 2009:43–68). 30. For a fascinating discussion about “sperm donation” in relation to the cultural and scientific positioning of the male body, see Moore 2002.

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Index

Absent body father (Oliver), 166 Accommodation of the other, 50, 59, 67 Adams, J. N., 12 Adoption, 111, 134, 137, 148, 193n6 Aesthetics, of hospitality, 154 Allograft, 55, 60–62, 185n18 Amundson, Ron, 80–81 Anatomical maternal-fetal separation, 56, 59, 65 Anergy, 60, 71 Anthropomorphism, 20–21 Antibodies, 68–69 Apoptosis, 119 Aporia: of hospitality (Derrida), 35, 42; of passive-active maternal role in generation, 53 Apposition, 100 Architecture, egg, 91–98; see also Chicken incubators; Environment; Maternal-fetal interface; Oviparity Aristotle, 28, 51, 52–53, 76–77, 87 Artificial fertilization, 102 Artificial matrices, 87; see also Ectogenesis; Machinic

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Artificial milk, 188n4 Artificial womb, 92, 95, 118–19; see also Ectogenesis Artistic method of hospitality (Lee), 160, 165, 173 Art of male pregnancy, 154–55 Assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), 101, 108 Bachofen, Johann Jakob, 147 Baker, Jeffrey P., 94–96, 121–22 Baldi, Philip, 176n4 Balsamo, Ann, 63, 190n12 Bardi, Jerome, 93 Barnard, Kathryn, 191n20 Barzilai, Shuli, 149–50, 177n16, 178n18 Bataille, Georges, 26 Baum, J. D., 123 Beatie, Thomas, 127–28, 134–39, 154, 160 Beer, Alan E., 57, 61 Betz, Alexander G., 60–62 Bianchi, Emanuela, 5, 17–28, 21, 23–24 Billington, David, 56 Bioethics, 134–39

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index

Biological model of mothering, 110 Biomedical realism, 154–55, 160, 168 Biomedicine, 49; allograft and, 60–62; body at war model in, 49, 55, 73; embryology and, 50–54; feminist response and, 62–67; hospitality as alternative paradigm in, 185n16; hostility and tolerance notions in, 7, 49, 172; immunological paradox of pregnancy and, 54–59; male pregnancy and, 129–34; maternalfetal interface and, 50–67; placental economy and, 62–67; self/nonself relation in, 70–71, 79, 84–85; transplantology and, 132–33 Birthing fathers (Reed), 149, 151, 174 Birthways Childbirth Resource Center, 152 Bloomer, Jennifer, 189n6 Bodemer, Charles, 98 Body at war, 49, 55, 73 Borradori, Giovanna, 35, 179n3 Braidotti, Rosi, 141, 181n19, 188n1, 191n16 Brakman, Sarah-Vaughan, 110 Brent, Leslie, 185n17 Brooding, metaphor of, 94–96, 116, 144 Brown, Wendy, 35, 179n3 Buddhism, 158, 163, 165 Budin, Pierre, 94, 114, 117 Burnet, Frank Macfarlane, 63, 68, 71, 75 Burton, G. J., 57 Butler, Judith, 24, 176n8, 181n10 Butler, Octavia, 141 Callahan, Daniel, 166–67 Caputo, John, 179n8 Castration anxiety, 148–49 Cave metaphor, Platonic, 77 Cells, 74; T cells, 70, 186n20 Chicken incubators: in contemporary reproductive biomedicine, 97–101; egg architecture and, 91–96; in

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Egypt and China, 115; as model for human incubator, 97–101, 115–16; oviparity and, 92, 94–95, 98–99, 101, 172; in popular culture, 92–93, 190n10, 191n18 Chora, 5, 12, 170; as imprint bearer (Plato), 20; matrix as, 17–26; as not belonging to race of women (Derrida), 20–21; as space/receptacle (Plato, Derrida), 17–20; as third kind (Plato), 18–19, 23, 39; as wet nurse of all becoming (Plato), 9, 27, 37, 39, 87, 124–25; see also Ekmageion; Genos; Hupedochē Churchill, Frederick B., 50, 51 Class difference, 112–13; in anthropological studies of couvade and male pregnancy, 145, 150, 195n18; nurses and, 115, 117, 124–26, 192n28; reproductive technologies and, 107–13, 124, 173, 194n8, 194n9 Clynes, Manfred, 190n13 Cohen, Edward, 184n12 Community, 34, 41 Cone, Thomas E., Jr., 97, 117 Container, 14, 181n22; male body as, 139; matrix as, 24, 27; passive, 46; pregnant body as, 66 Control over reproduction, 107–9, 111, 121, 124 Cooper, Melinda, 194n9 Corea, Gina, 107, 190n12 Cosmology, Platonic, 22 Couvade, 140, 143–46, 156, 172–73; anxieties over sexuality and, 151–52; evolutionary and functionalist interpretations of, 147–48; male hospitality and, 151; masculinity and, 145–46; New American Fatherhood (Reed) and, 149–53; as performance, 140–43; psychoanalytic interpretations of, 148–49 Couveuse (incubator), 94, 116 Cyberculture, 104, 189n4 Cyberfeminism, 106, 109

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index Cyberspace, 15 Cyborg, 104–9, 190n13; imaginary of, 8, 173, 189n7; metaphor of (Haraway), 72; mother as (SmithWindsor), 104–6 Cyborg-embryo (Franklin), 109 Dasein (Heidegger), 79 DeLee, Emma Koch, 116 DeLee, Joseph, 116 Dematerialization, of mother, 52 Derrida, Jacques, 5–6; on chora, 17, 19–21, 23, 25, 177n13, 178n17; on hospitality, 29–30, 34–35, 37–43, 45–46, 48, 86, 171, 179n4, 179n8, 180n14, 181n17, 182n26 Development: embryonic, 182n2; in evolutionary developmental biology, 7, 54, 80, 171; maternal effects on, 54–59; plasticity and, 79; see also Embryology; Knowledge of generation; Maternal-fetal interface Diprose, Rosalyn, 40, 182n25 Discretion (Levinas), 32–33 Dissection, 77 Doja, Albert, 146, 150–51, 195n19, 195n20 Dualism, 25 Dundes, Alan, 196n21 Ecological theory of immunity, 78–80 Economy of metaphor (Irigaray), 22, 25, 170 Ectogenesis, 7–8, 87–88, 173; artificial matrix, womb and placenta as, 87, 92, 95, 118–19; class, ethnic, and racial differences in, 107–13, 115, 117, 124–26, 173, 192n28, 194n8, 194n9; cyborg as model for, 106, 190n13; dangers of, 102; ectogenetic desire and, 89, 108, 129; egg architecture and, 91–98; feminist responses to, 104–26; full, 101, 103; hospitality and, 124–26, 129; human technological oviparity and, 98–103;

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incubators and, 91–98; machine pregnancy and, 193n3; male pregnancy as, 129–32; nursing and, 114–24; uterine transplant as, 130–34, 139; veterinary literature on, 176n5; see also Chicken incubators; Gosden, Roger; Oviparity; Singer, Peter; Squier, Susan Egg: architecture, 91–98; metaphor of, 95; see also Chicken incubators; Oviparity Eidos, 76 Ekmageion (Bianchi), 19, 23–25; see also Chora; Hupedochē Elgood, Cyril, 178n22 Embryo, 52; as allograft, 55, 60–62, 185n18; as autonomous from mother, 56, 130; cyborg-embryo (Franklin), 109; embryonic development, 49, 54–55, 69, 77, 79–80, 89, 103, 172; embryonic tissues, 49, 101; environment of, 80–81; implantation of, 57; maternal relation to, 54, 61, 67, 84, 111, 171, 186n23; as parasite, 58; placenta and, 63–67; see also Ectogenesis; Fetus; Maternal-fetal interface; Non-self recognition Embryology: as gendered, 76; history of, 50–54, 98–99, 183n3, 183n6; matrix/mother in, 80–86; philosophy and, 1, 16; study of generation and, 50–54 Emery, David, 160 Empathy Belly, 140, 146, 152–53, 196n23 Endocrinological self-sufficiency of fetus/embryo, 55 Environment, 7; ectogenetic, 91; embryonic, 80–81; maternal, 82, 85 Epigenetics, 80 Essentialism: essentialized notions of feminine and maternal, critique of, 67, 169, 193n30; hospitality as not essentially feminine or maternal,

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Essentialism (continued) 174, 182n26, 192n27; risk of, 42– 43, 48 Ethics, 48; bioethics, 134–39; hospitality as foundation of, 29, 48; of maternal body, 111, 186n23; modern, 31; sexual difference and/of, 38, 40; see also Hospitality; Irigaray, Luce; Kant, Immanuel; Levinas, Emmanuel Ettinger, Bracha L., 63, 175n1, 177n9, 177n16, 179n5 Eugenics, 88 Evolution, 54; of viviparity, 55 Evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo), 7, 54, 80, 171 Evolutionary theory, 147–48 Exchange metaphors, 91 Expectancy: as act of hospitality, 9, 33, 44, 168, 174; expectancy/expectation, 46–47, 50, 59; welcoming and, 140, 151–55 Exploitation, 112 Fathers/fatherhood, 168; absent body (Oliver), 166; biological, 166–67; birthing (Reed), 174; New American (Reed), 149–53; paternity, 52, 141, 143, 148, 184; paternity leave, 119; see also Couvade; Male pregnancy; Masculinity Femininity, 6, 23, 25, 126, 138; cost of, 41; hospitality and, 36–42; language and, 37, 39, 41 Feminism/feminist theory, 3, 21, 48, 62–67; cyberfeminism, 106, 109; ectogenesis and, 104–26; literature, 104 Fenner, Frank, 68 Ferreira, Maria, 113–14, 149 “Fetal Matrix” (Gluckman and Hanson), 52, 80–85 Fetal membranes, 99 Fetus: as allograft, 60–62; as free floating, 96; of goat, 102; matrixial/

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maternal and, 85; mother and, 56–57, 82; as temporary self, 60; see also Embryo; Maternal-fetal interface Form, 15–16, 18, 20–26, 51–54, 73–74, 76–78, 80–86; see also Architecture, egg; Information Foucault, Michel, 5 Fouque, Antoinette, 186n23 Franklin, Sarah, 109, 191n16 Freud, Sigmund, 148 Functionalist interpretations, of couvade, 147–48 Garnick, Darren, 196n23 Gasking, Elizabeth, 50 Gender bending, 149 Genealogy, 5, 174 Generation, 1–2, 19, 28, 47; actual, 54; form and, 15–16, 18, 20–26, 51–54, 73–74, 76–78, 80–86; maternal role in, 50–54; matrixial/maternal and, 5; place of, 54; science, 50, 174, 183n6; space of, 3–4, 14; womb envy and, 148–49, 156 Generativity, 175n1; feminine (Bianchi), 25, 28; genetrix as, 5, 12; hospitality and, 17, 27; of matrix, 27–28; nursing and, 12, 27 Generosity, 40, 85–86, 180n15, 182n25, 186n23 Genesis, 1, 196n21 Genetrix, 3, 5–6, 12, 170 Genos (third kind), 18, 20, 23 Gestell, 41 Gilbert, Scott F., 183n3 Giustinian, Michael, 92 Giving and having, 36, 40, 43, 46–47 Gluckman, Peter, 79, 81–82 Goat fetuses, 102 Gosden, Roger, 90, 92, 105, 114, 131–32, 135 Griesemer, J. R., 83 Grosz, Elizabeth, 24, 177n15 Guenther, Lisa, 182n23

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index Habitation, 33–34, 47 Haeckel, Ernst, 78 Haldane, J. B. S., 88 Hanson, Mark, 79, 81, 82 Haraway, Donna, 62–63, 72, 109, 191n16 Hearson, Charles Edward, 96 Heidegger, Martin, 79 Henry (Madame), 95, 116, 117, 118 Hess, Julius, 116 Hird, Myra, 180n15 A History of Embryology (Needham), 51, 52 Hollier, Dennis, 26 Holocaust, hospitality and, 31 Homograft, 185n18 Homosexuality, 130, 134 Hopwood, Nick, 61 Hospitality, 4, 6, 17, 24, 163; acts of, 5, 8, 31, 36, 39–42, 45, 48, 86, 153, 162, 165, 168, 170; aporia of, 35, 42; as artistic method (Lee), 160, 165, 173; brotherhood and fraternity of, 32, 34, 39; communal, 24; definitions of, 29–36; discretion and, 32–33; ectogenesis and, 124–26; empirical women (Derrida) and, 38, 41, 45, 165–66; expectancy/ expectation and, 9, 33, 44, 46–47, 50, 59, 168, 174; femininity and, 36–42, 47–48; generosity and, 40, 85–86, 180n15, 182n25; giving and, 36, 40, 43, 46–47; habitation and, 33–34; home and, 6, 9, 24, 30–34, 37–42, 46–48, 121, 171; hostility and, 7, 30–35, 49–50, 58–59, 85, 152, 168, 171, 185n16; intentionality and, 32; intimacy and, 33; male, 151, 168; male pregnancy and, 127–29, 131, 153, 162, 166; man/father and, 166– 68; maternal, 5, 43, 47, 86; matrix and, 6, 17, 23, 29–30, 47; matrixial/ maternal relation and, 42–48, 170–71; nursing and, 124–26; ownership and, 31, 35–36, 40–41,

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111, 120–21, 124; paradigms of, 59; passivity and, 32, 39, 46, 152, 165; performative, 35, 42, 46; property and, 31, 36, 179n9; receptivity and, 32; recollection and, 33; as relation, 45; sexual difference and, 36, 39; smile and, 9, 32, 37, 41, 45, 124–25, 181n17; space and, 6, 17, 46–47, 170; tolerance and, 35, 84–86, 179n6; welcoming and, 7–9, 17, 19, 24, 29–33, 37–41, 45–46, 129, 151, 161, 165, 168–74, 193n30; work, labor of, 27–28, 46, 67, 78, 121, 168, 196n29; see also Derrida, Jacques; Levinas, Emmanuel Hospitals (as home and hospice), in relation to hospitality, 192n27 Hostility, paradigm of, 7, 30–35, 49– 50, 58–59, 85, 152, 168, 171, 185n16 Hosting, 35, 43, 45–47, 83, 155, 169–74, 181n17, 182n24 Howat, P., 123 Howes, Moira, 64, 67, 187n25 Human-machine, 104, 110, 189n4 Human technological oviparity, 98–103 Hupedochē (Bianchi), 19, 23–24; see also Chora; Ekmageion Huxley, Aldous, 88 Hysterectomies, 132 Immediacy, viviparous, 100 Immigrant, as guest, 178n2 Immortality, desire for, 89 Immune system, 187n26; adaptive, 60, 69, 79; body at war model of, 49, 55, 73; cognition of (Tauber), 74, 78; Danger theory of (Matzinger), 70, 186n25; evolutionary developmental biology and, 7, 54, 80, 171; hospitality and, 84–86; hostility and tolerance conceptions of, 7, 49, 172; information and, 69, 73, 75, 84; innate, 60, 69; maternal, 58, 60–62, 69; pregnancy and, 71,

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Immune system (continued) 84; self/nonself paradigm, 70–79; see also Burnet, Frank Macfarlane; Maternal-fetal interface; Matzinger, Polly; Placental relation; Tauber, Alfred; Ulvestad, Elling Immunity, 58; ecological theory of, 78–80; hospitality and, 84–86; information theory of, 74–78, 184n12, 187n27, 188n28 Immunology, reproductive, 49–50, 60–61 Immunological paradox, of pregnancy (Medawar), 47, 54–59, 99, 172 Immunological theory of the body, 68 Immunological tolerance, 58, 69, 85, 185n17 Implantation, of embryo, 57 Incubators, 8; of chickens, 93–94, 98–99; ectogenesis and, 91–98; history of, 91–98; hospitality and, 124–26; Kangaroo Care and, 119–20, 122, 125; matrix as, 14, 119; mothers and, 104–6, 120; neonatal, 114–15, 120–24, 191n20, 193n29; nursing, 114, 124–26; opposition to, 104–5 Incubator nurseries, 116 Information, 69, 84; theory of immunity, 74–78 Intentionality, 32, 46 Interfaces, 118; see also Humanmachine; Maternal-fetal interface Intersubjectivity, 63–64, 66 Intimacy, 33, 55 In vitro fertilization (IVF), 103, 131, 133, 135–36 In vitro gestation, 102 Irigaray, Luce, 3, 5, 7, 17–18, 21–26, 44–47, 63–65, 170–71, 175n1, 179n11, 181n20, 182n23 IVF, see In vitro fertilization Jacobsen (doctor), 130 Jauniaux, E., 57

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Johnston, 189n4 Judaism, 32 Junior (film), 142, 160 Kangaroo Care, infant, 119–20, 122, 125 Kant, Immanuel, 29–31, 34, 36, 58, 171, 179n4 Kaplan, Robert, 177n11 Keller, Evelyn Fox, 176n6 Kin, 63 Kingsley, Charles, 189n5 Kirby, David, 131 Klein, Melanie, 22 Kline, Nathan S., 190n13 Knowledge of generation: biomedical, 58, 68, 71, 84, 90; evolutionary developmental biology and, 7, 54, 80, 171; history of embryology and, 1–2, 183n6, 187n7; maternal, 26, 77; philosophical, 52, 77; woman’s, 41 Kristeva, Julia, 22, 66, 178n18 Kuriyama, Shigehisa, 76–77 Kuwabara, Yoshinori, 102 Laachir, Karima, 178n2, 179n9 Lafait, Capucine, 196n26 Language, 44; femininity and, 37, 39, 41; of hospitality, 182n26; IndoEuropean, 11, 175n1; Romance, 13; of tolerance, 61 Lee Mingwei, 8, 127–28, 153–55, 160–66, 168 Lepault, Sophie, 196n26 Levinas, Emmanuel, 6, 24, 29–48, 86, 165, 171, 180n13, 181n17, 182n26, 187n26 Levins, Richard, 80 Lewontin, Richard C., 80 Liceti, Fortunio (Fortunius Licetus), 92–93, 97, 115 Liu, Helen Hung-Ching, 102–3 Loke, Y. W., 61–62 Löwy, Ilana, 59 Lundeen, Evelyn, 116

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index Mcauliffe, Kathleen, 130, 193n1 Machine: ectogenetic, 28, 102, 114; mother as, 87, 128; pregnancy, 193n3 Machinic, 95–96, 106, 109, 172–73, 189n4 McNulty, Tracy, 178n1, 179n4, 179n5 Mader, Mary Beth, 175n1 Magic, sympathetic, 146–47 Mahoney, Joan, 110 Maienschein, Jane, 80 Male pregnancy, 8–9; bioethical discourses on, 134–39; biomedical discourses of, 129–34; couvade and, 143–48; cultures of, 140–53; as farce, 142, 144, 146, 158, 194n14; hospitality and, 127–29; performance of, 141, 161; sympathetic magic and, 146–47 Male Pregnancy (Lee and Wong), 8, 127, 153–68, 157, 159; experience of, 156–60; project details, 154–56; social conceptualism and, 160–66 Man/father, 166–68; control over reproduction, 107–9, 111, 149, 159; “father right” (Bachofen), 147; hospitality and, 166–68; as mother, 160; paternity, 141, 143, 148; paternity leave, 119; sexuality/masculinity of, 129, 133–34, 137–38, 145–46, 151; womb envy and, 148–49, 156; see also Couvade; Male pregnancy; Phantom pregnancy; Sympathetic pregnancy Maroney, Dianne I., 193n29 Martin, Emily, 62 Martin, Odile, 94 Martinez, Hector, 119 Masculine point of view on hospitality, 37–38 Masculinity, 129, 133–34, 137–38, 145–46, 151 Materiality, 19, 20, 23, 25, 37, 39, 161 Materialization, 27; dematerialization of mother/matrix, 52; of ectogenetic environments, 91

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Maternal, 2–3; acts, 5, 45, 86, 174; body, 2, 4, 10–26, 60–79, 82–129, 170–71; constraint, 82; contemporary art and, 196n24; development and, 54–59; environment, 82, 85; expectancy/expectation, 46, 47, 50, 59; as first home, 6; hospitality, 5; immunological anergy, 60; making space and matter, 9, 26, 168; metaphors, 25; passivity of, 46; role in generation, 50–54, 183n6; thinking (Ruddick), 66, 167; see also Matrixial/maternal Maternal-fetal interface, 7, 49, 68, 84–86, 171; allograft and, 60–62; embryology and, 50–54; feminist response and, 62–67; immunological paradox of pregnancy and, 54–59; placental economy and, 62–67 Maternal-fetal relation, 54, 61, 67, 84, 111, 171, 186n23 Maternity benefits, 117 Mathematical matrix theory, 14 Matriarchy, 52, 147–48 Matricidal, 3, 16 Matrix: artificial, 87; biomedical, 49; chora and, 17–26; as concept, 4; as container, 24, 27; definition of, 2; effect, 6; etymology of, 11–17; Fetal Matrix (Gluckman and Hanson), 52, 80–85; as genetrix, 3, 5–6, 12, 170; hospitality and, 6, 17, 23, 29–30, 47; male pregnancy and, 127–29; man/father and, 166–68; maternal body and, 10–11; metaphor and, 14; mother, matter and, 11; as nutrix, 3, 5, 27, 87, 170; popularity of, 53; production of space and matter by, 26; relevance of, 170; space and, 3, 26–28; as space holder, 96; as uterus, 11–13; welcoming, 17, 19, 24; as womb, 10–16; as zero/void, 2, 16, 177n11, 178n17 The Matrix (film), 10, 16, 96

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Matrixial/maternal, 2, 4; as conceptual couple, 175n1; definition of, 2–3, 175n1, 182n26; environment, 7; expectancy/expectation of, 46–47, 50, 59; fetus and, 85; generativity, 5, 27–28; hospitality and, 42–48, 170–71; meaning of, 5; reproductive immunology and, 49 Matter, 8, 47, 52, 124; generation of, 26; making of, 9, 26, 168; matrix and, 11; mother and, 11; space and, 4, 27–28, 81 Matzinger, Polly, 61–62, 70 Mechnikov, Ilya, 188n30 Medawar, Peter, 54–60, 65, 73, 75, 84, 126 Metaphors, 5, 14; of abyss, 22, 25–26, 44; of brooding, 94–96, 116, 144; of cave, 77; cyborg, 72; economy of, 25, 170; exchange, 91; of hole, 96; machine as, 91; maternal, 25; of nothingness, 45, 157, 177n11, 180n16; of scaffolding, 83–84; self and, 71; of shell/egg, 95; womb as, 21; of zero/void, 2, 16, 177n11, 178n16 Microchimerism, 59 Militarism, 62 Milk, artificial, 188n4 Miscarriage, 57, 62 Moffett, A., 61–62 Morality, 167 “More Crap” (South Park episode), 143 Morgan, Lynn, 188n29 Morphogenesis, 75 Morphology, 80 Mossman, H. W., 99, 101 Mother: “actual,” 4, 20–22, 25; dematerialization of, 52; desire of, 26; disappearance of, 52; eclipse of, 22; fetus and, 56–57, 82; hospitality and, 5, 43, 47, 86; as machine, 87, 128; materialization of, 27; matrix and, 6, 10–14; as scaffold, 83–84; as space, 26–27

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Movement, fetal/generative, 100, 102, 190n11 Munroe, Robert L., 147, 149–50 Munroe, Ruth H., 149–50 Mythology, 141 Neal, Mary, 191n20 Needham, Joseph, 1–2, 7, 51–53, 98 Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICUs), 114, 122–24, 173 Neonatal nursing, 114–15, 120–24, 191n20, 193n29 Neonatology, 93, 118 Nesting, 83; see also Brooding Network theory, 72, 74 Neutrality (immunology), 59, 71 New American Fatherhood (Reed), 149–53 Newman, Karen, 112 NICUs, see Neonatal Intensive Care Units Nonresponsiveness (immunology), 71 Nonself recognition, 68–74; see also Self Nothingness, 45, 157, 177n11, 180n16 Nurses: dependence on, 126; hospitality of, 124–26; incubators as, 114; neonatal, 114–15; power of, 123; professional, 121, 123; wet nurses, 115–16 Nursing, 27–28, 87, 114–24; chora and, 9, 27, 37, 39, 87, 124–25; definition of, 115; hospitality and, 124–26; matrix and, 3, 5, 27, 87, 170; primacy of, 116; theory, 126 Nutrix, 3, 5, 27, 87, 170 Oakley, Ann, 107, 112 Obsolescence, 43 Oliver, Kelly, 7, 63, 65–66, 145, 166, 171 On the Generation of Animals (Aristotle), 52 Ontogeny, 80 Ontology, 32 Oppenheimer, Jane M., 50

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index Other, relation between self and, 4, 7–9, 31, 34–35, 48, 50, 128–29, 168, 172, 185n16; see also Self/other relation Oviduct, 99 Oviparity, 55; chicken incubators and, 92, 94–95, 98–99, 101, 172; egg architecture and, 91–98; human technological, 98–103; see also Incubators; Viviparity Owen, R. D., 69 Ownership: hospitality and, 31, 35–36, 40–41, 111, 120–21, 124; as property, 179n9; sexual division of, 42 Parenting, 110–11, 120 PARs; see Predictive adaptive responses Parshall, Karen Hunger, 13–14 Passivity: class and racial differences, 195n18; hospitality (Levinas) and, 18, 32, 40, 46; immunology and, 187n26; man/masculinity and, 26, 131, 139, 152, 158, 165; matrix, maternal, feminine and, 41, 46, 66 Patriarchy, 22, 52, 108, 147 Peaceful coexistence between mother and fetus, 61–65, 72 Performance/ritual of male pregnancy, 140–43, 148, 161; see also Couvade; Male pregnancy; Sympathetic pregnancy Performativity, 35, 42, 46 Petchesky, Rosalind, 104, 110, 111 Phantom pregnancy, 140, 150 Phylogeny, 80 “Place, Interval: A Reading of Aristotle, Physics IV” (Irigaray), 175n1 Placenta, 57, 59, 86, 87; cooperative function of, 78–80; as marketplace, 64; as separator, 56, 59, 65 Placental economy, 62–67; peaceful coexistence and, 62–65 Placental relation, 7

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Plant, Sadie, 106 Plato, 5–6, 9, 17–18, 27–28, 76–77, 124, 170, 190n11 Platonic cosmology, 22 Pleasure, 26, 178n22 Podolsky, Scott, 71, 79 POP! The First Male Pregnancy (Lee and Wong); see Male Pregnancy Popular cultures, of male pregnancy, 11, 141–42, 152 Popular science, 142 Posthuman, 114, 158, 189n4 Postmodern concept of the body, 74 Power, over reproduction/generation, 107–9, 111, 121, 124, 183n6; see also Matriarchy; Patriarchy Predictive adaptive responses of the embryo (PARs, Gluckman and Hanson), 79, 81–83 Preeclampsia, 57 Pregnancy: abdominal, 130–31; as act of expectation and welcoming, 168; control over, 107–9, 111, 121, 124; ectogenetic, 87, 92, 95, 118–19; ectopic, 131, 133; as evolutionary mistake, 55; feminism and, 63; hospitality and, 44, 46, 47, 50, 59, 140, 151–55; immunological paradox of, 47, 54–59, 99, 172; performing, 140–43; phantom, 140, 150; philosophical considerations of, 22; rejection of, 58; as relation, 49; representation of, 66, 96, 112, 128–41, 158, 160–61; sympathetic, 140, 150; visibility of, 159–60; see also Male pregnancy; Maternal-fetal interface; Maternal-fetal relation Pregnant Man (documentary film), 137–38 Prematurity, 97, 103, 117 Priscianus, Theodorus, 12 The Production of Antibodies (Burnet), 68 Production of space and matter, 4, 15, 27–28, 81

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Programming, maternal environment (Wimsatt and Griesemer), 83 Property, private, 31, 36, 179n9 Psychoanalytic theory, of couvade, 105, 148–49 Putnam, John Pickering, 95 Racial difference, 173; in anthropology of couvade and male pregnancy, 145, 150, 195n18; reproductive technologies and, 107–13, 194n8, 194n9 Ramsey, Elizabeth, 98 Raymond, Janice, 112 Realism, biomedical, 154–55, 160, 168 “Receptacle/Chora: Figuring the Errant Feminine in Plato’s Timaeus” (Bianchi), 23 Receptivity (Levinas), 15, 32 Reed, Richard, 151–52 Religion, 141; Buddhism, 158, 163, 165; Judaism, 32 Reproduction: artificial, 87, 108; control over, 107–9, 111, 149, 159; imaginaries of, 11, 22; machinic, 95, 106; “normal context” of (Sparrow), 135–36; see also Assisted reproductive technologies; Generation Reproductive immunology, 49–50, 60–61 Reproductive technology; see Assisted reproductive technologies; Ectogenesis; Incubators Rich, Adrienne, 22 Rival, Laura, 148, 195n20 Robinson, W. G., 96 Rosello, Mireille, 178n2 Rotch, Thomas Morgan, 95 Roth, H. Ling, 145 Rouch, Hélène, 59, 64, 65, 186n20 Rowland, Robyn, 108 Ruddick, Sara, 66, 167–68 Sallis, John, 21 Sanabria, Edgar Rey, 119

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Saunders, Cicely, 192n27 Scholz, Sally J., 110–11 Schwartz, Ronert, 85 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 142, 160 Science: biomedical, 5–6, 15, 52, 57, 76, 78; epistemological problems of, 19, 89, 104, 170, 176n6; of generation, 58, 68, 71, 84, 90; inner aspects of (Tauber), 73; knowledge and, 73–78; mother and, 50–67; popular, 142 Self: immunological concept of, 70–73; as metaphor, 70; postmodern concept of, 74; self-marker hypothesis, 68; self/non-self relation in immunology, 67–74; self-organizing principle in immunology, 79; selfrecognition, 68–74; self-sufficiency, endocrinological, 55 Self/other relation, 4, 7–9, 31, 34–35, 48, 50, 128–29, 168, 172, 185n16 Self-sacrifice, maternal (Levinas), 48 Seneca the Elder, 12 Sensationalism, of male pregnancy, 160 Separation in viviparity, anatomical, 56, 59, 65 Sex identification, 135 Sexual anxiety, 148–49; see also Couvade; Male pregnancy Sexual difference, 36, 39; ethics and, 38, 40; ownership and, 42 Sexual identity, 149; homosexuality and transsexuality, 130, 134 Shell, metaphor of, 95; see also Architecture, egg Simulation, of pregnancy, 105 Singer, Peter, 89, 114, 130 Slavery, 110 Smith-Windsor, Jaimie, 104–5, 106, 120 Social conceptualism, art of (Lee), 160–66 Sofia, Zoe, 181n22 South Park (TV series), 142–43

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index Space, 3, 8, 96; availability of, 156; chora and, 17–20; cyberspace, 15; enveloping, 16, 115, 156; femininity and, 37; of generation, 3–4, 14; hospitable, 6, 8, 17, 23, 30, 46–47; making, 26–28; man/father as, 156; matrix and, 3, 26–28; mother as, 26–27; placing, 16; produced, 4, 27–28, 96; virtual, 15; welcoming, 17–20; of womb, 28 Sparrow, Robert, 135, 139 Sperm banks, 167 Squier, Susan, 88, 95, 128, 136, 158 Stahl, George, 96 Sterne, Lawrence, 92, 94, 114 Still, Judith, 30 Storkey, Elaine, 182n24 Subjectivity, 47; as intersubjectivity, 63–64, 66 SubRosa (cyberfeminist art collective), 196n24 Surrogacy, 89, 133, 135, 137, 139, 180n15, 184n9, 185n18, 186n18, 193n6; baby farms and gestational houses (Raymond), 112; class and racial differences in, 108, 112; ectogenesis and, 128, 131, 158, 189–90 Survival (fetal), 195n20 Sylvester, J. J., 11, 13–14 Sympathetic magic, 146–47 Sympathetic pregnancy, 140, 150 Tarnier, Étienne Stéphane, 94, 96, 114 Tauber, Alfred, 70–76, 79, 85, 186n26, 188n30 T cells, 70, 186n20 Teresi, Dick, 130, 193n1 Territoriality, chora as, 31 Theweleit, Claus, 167–68 Third kind (chora, genos), 18–21, 23, 39 Timaeus (Plato), 5, 18, 22, 170 Time, 177n10 Tolerance, 6, 7–9, 17, 31, 45, 49, 171–72, 179n3; foreignness in body and, 67; Fortress Europe and, 35; as

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hospitality, 31, 34–35; hospitality and, 84–86, 179n6; immigrants and, 178n2, 179n3; immunological, 58, 69, 85, 185n17; language of, 61; paradigms of, 59, 179n3 Tong, Rosemarie, 88 Totality and Infinity (Levinas), 32 Transbiology (Franklin), 109, 191n16 Transnational adoption, 111 Transparent (documentary film), 137 Transplantation, 55, 90; in Saudi Arabia, 133; temporary, 132; uterine, 130, 132–33 Transplantology, 132–33 Transsexuality, 130, 134 Trophoblast, 56–57 Trowsdale, John, 60–62 Tylor, Edward B., 143–44, 146 Ulvestad, Elling, 79 Universality, of hospitality, 30, 179n3 Unno, Nobuya, 101, 103, 190n10 Uterine transplant, 130, 132–33 Uterus, 12–13; artificial, 102; as dangerous for fetus, 90–91, 105–6; etymology of, 176n4; as immuneprivileged site, 60; as “just a clever incubator” (Gosden), 92, 101, 107; as metaphor of hole, 96; as model for incubators, 96; as part of oviduct, 99; as space of “free floating” fetus, 96; see also Chora; Environment; Matrix; Womb Velasco, Sherry Marie, 141–42, 149, 160 Veterinary literature on ectogenesis, 176n5 Virgin Mary, 182n24 Virtual reality, matrix/mother and, 2, 6, 10, 189n6 Virtual space, 15 Viviparity, 94, 96, 99, 116; diversity of, 100; evolution of, 55; immediacy and, 100; Immunological Paradox

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Viviparity (continued) of Pregnancy (Medawar) and, 47, 54–59, 99, 172; incubators and, 97–101, 115–16; intimate, 57; oviparity and, 91–96; see also Maternalfetal interface; Placenta Void, matrix as, 2, 16, 177n11, 178n17 Wald, Florence, 192n27 Waldby, Catherine, 194n9 Walker, Michelle Boulous, 22, 89 Walters, William, 130, 135, 136 Ware, Linda, 152 Welcoming, 32; expectancy, 140, 151–55; feminine, 36–42; hospitality, 7–9, 17, 19, 24, 29–33, 37–41, 45–46, 129, 151, 161, 165, 168–74, 193n30; matrix, 17, 19, 24; men and, 166–68; smile and, 9, 32, 37, 41, 45, 124–25, 181n17; space, 7, 17–20; women and, 20–21, 67, 169, 174, 182n26, 192n27, 193n30 Wells, Deane, 89, 114

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Wet nurses, 115–16; chora as (Plato), 9, 27, 37, 39, 87, 124–25 When Men Are Pregnant (documentary film), 155–57, 196n26 Whiting, John W. M., 149 Wimsatt, W. C., 83 Womb, 10; as abyss, 22, 25–26, 44; artificial, 92, 95, 118–19; envy, 148–49, 156; matrix and, 10–16; as metaphor of hole, 96; space of, 28; see also Chora; Matrix; Uterus Women: chora and, 20–21; “empirical” (Derrida), 38, 41, 45, 165–66; hospitality and, 20–21, 67, 169, 174, 182n26, 192n27, 193n30 Wong, Virgil, 8, 127, 153–55, 166 Work, of hospitality, 27–28, 46, 67, 78, 109, 121, 168, 196n29 Young, Iris Marion, 22, 110, 193n2 Zero, matrix as, 2, 16, 177n11, 178n17 Žižek, Slavoj, 16, 176n9

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