Thinking with the uterine

Abstract

This commentary on Sophie Lewis’s essay, ‘Cyborg uterine geography: complicating care and social reproduction’ considers what a ‘uterine geography’ could offer for thinking about the body, sex, reproduction, pregnancy, birth, afterbirth, care, pain and love in new ways. While affirming the efforts in the text to generate a more complex, more-than-human and queer account of reproduction, it also raises several questions. How do narratives of maternal–fetal ‘violence’ or ‘generosity’ or ‘hospitality’ work in a broader social and political field, and more generally, how can scientific or evolutionary accounts of bodies be put to critical use in social theory? How does a ‘cyborg uterine geography’ differ from other feminist accounts of care? What are the possibilities of drawing on the ‘uterine’ as both a new material and symbolic figure, in the light of recent works that emphasize the potential for thinking feminist politics through the brain, the heart or the gut? And finally, what are the limits of a uterine geography?