Pub Date : 2022-04-05DOI: 10.28968/cftt.v8i1.37920
S. Vertommen, B. Parry, Michal Nahman
The introduction to the Special Section “Global Fertility Chains and the Colonial Present of Assisted Reproductive Technologies” (re)situates assisted reproductive technologies, infrastructures, and markets within older, yet ongoing, histories of colonialism, racial capitalism, and slavery. Engaging with the “colonial present” of a broad array of reproductive technologies, including surrogacy, adoption, seed saving, “slave breeding,” and in vitro fertilization in different (post)colonial sites of inquiry, including India, Korea, Australia, the United States, and the borderlands between Mexico and Guatemala, the papers in this collection draw on the foundational work of materialist, STS, Black, Indigenous, and decolonial feminists to foreground three main “relational” themes: (1) between past and present colonial materializations and imaginaries of ARTs; (2) between colonialism’s myriad, intraconnected reproductive grammars of slavery, genocide, conservation, exploitation, and extraction; (3) between ART’s life and death functions and their mutually constitutive biopolitical and necropolitical logics.
{"title":"Introduction: Global Fertility Chains and the Colonial Present of Assisted Reproductive Technologies","authors":"S. Vertommen, B. Parry, Michal Nahman","doi":"10.28968/cftt.v8i1.37920","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v8i1.37920","url":null,"abstract":"The introduction to the Special Section “Global Fertility Chains and the Colonial Present of Assisted Reproductive Technologies” (re)situates assisted reproductive technologies, infrastructures, and markets within older, yet ongoing, histories of colonialism, racial capitalism, and slavery. Engaging with the “colonial present” of a broad array of reproductive technologies, including surrogacy, adoption, seed saving, “slave breeding,” and in vitro fertilization in different (post)colonial sites of inquiry, including India, Korea, Australia, the United States, and the borderlands between Mexico and Guatemala, the papers in this collection draw on the foundational work of materialist, STS, Black, Indigenous, and decolonial feminists to foreground three main “relational” themes: (1) between past and present colonial materializations and imaginaries of ARTs; (2) between colonialism’s myriad, intraconnected reproductive grammars of slavery, genocide, conservation, exploitation, and extraction; (3) between ART’s life and death functions and their mutually constitutive biopolitical and necropolitical logics.","PeriodicalId":316008,"journal":{"name":"Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience","volume":"103 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126631831","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-05DOI: 10.28968/cftt.v8i1.37434
Aron Rosenberg
{"title":"Affinity Online: How Connection and Shared Interest Fuel Learning, by Mizuko Ito, Crystle Martin, Rachel Cody Pfister, Matthew H. Rafalow, Katie Salen, and Amanda Wortman (New York University Press, 2019)","authors":"Aron Rosenberg","doi":"10.28968/cftt.v8i1.37434","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v8i1.37434","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":316008,"journal":{"name":"Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience","volume":"46 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114938349","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-05DOI: 10.28968/cftt.v8i1.35232
A. Weinbaum
This article explores the connection between the extraction and dispossession of human reproductive labor power and its products in the contexts of Atlantic slavery and contemporary biocapitalism. It argues that the conceptualization and practice of slave reproduction that sustained slave racial capitalism is forwarded into the biocapitalist present through “the slave episteme.” This becomes evident when reproduction in biocapitalism is viewed through the lens of the long history of slave “breeding” in the Atlantic world. While the “blackness” that enslavers attributed to enslaved mothers and their progeny objectified and dehumanized both and rationalized their treatment as fungible and alienable commodities, in contempory biocapitalism the racial formation that subtends reproductive extraction and dispossession has been complexly recalibrated to do related ideological and material work. The article concludes with a discussion of the sublation of “blackness” in contemporary market exchanges in which reproductive labor and its products are bought and sold.
{"title":"Slave Episteme in Biocapitalism","authors":"A. Weinbaum","doi":"10.28968/cftt.v8i1.35232","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v8i1.35232","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the connection between the extraction and dispossession of human reproductive labor power and its products in the contexts of Atlantic slavery and contemporary biocapitalism. It argues that the conceptualization and practice of slave reproduction that sustained slave racial capitalism is forwarded into the biocapitalist present through “the slave episteme.” This becomes evident when reproduction in biocapitalism is viewed through the lens of the long history of slave “breeding” in the Atlantic world. While the “blackness” that enslavers attributed to enslaved mothers and their progeny objectified and dehumanized both and rationalized their treatment as fungible and alienable commodities, in contempory biocapitalism the racial formation that subtends reproductive extraction and dispossession has been complexly recalibrated to do related ideological and material work. The article concludes with a discussion of the sublation of “blackness” in contemporary market exchanges in which reproductive labor and its products are bought and sold.","PeriodicalId":316008,"journal":{"name":"Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115100148","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-05DOI: 10.28968/cftt.v8i1.35072
Sonja van Wichelen
Law and regulation are often seen as the panacea for the ills of science and markets: regulation minimizes risks by setting out clear rules, calls out abuses when those rules are not obeyed, and disciplines actors, institutions, and states to behave according to collectively agreed upon principles. In this article I challenge this liberal narrative of regulation by looking at how cross-border surrogacy arrangements are currently debated in private international law. I first demonstrate that technosciences are intimately linked to regulatory and legal frameworks. Here, recombinant knowledge has led to new formations of legal parenthood while obscuring other forms of kinship in quite paradoxical ways. Second, the liberal story of law and regulation erodes the history and political economy in which law has come to represent itself as universal and moveable. I examine how a gendered, racialized, and (post)colonial context of global fertility chains is lost in the legal instruments designed to protect the people involved in international surrogacy arrangements, preferring instead neoliberal forms of kinship. Finally, the liberal story of law also embraces the story of individualism. I show the conflicts that arise when such individualist forms of law are transplanted to non-individualist contexts, both in non-Western and Western contexts. I argue that by subjecting non-liberal others (across the Global North-South divide) to bioethical frameworks that intervene in kinship ontologies, private international law runs the risk of prolonging the logic of colonial and imperial thinking.
{"title":"Law as Anti-Kinship: The Colonial Present in Global Surrogacy","authors":"Sonja van Wichelen","doi":"10.28968/cftt.v8i1.35072","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v8i1.35072","url":null,"abstract":"Law and regulation are often seen as the panacea for the ills of science and markets: regulation minimizes risks by setting out clear rules, calls out abuses when those rules are not obeyed, and disciplines actors, institutions, and states to behave according to collectively agreed upon principles. In this article I challenge this liberal narrative of regulation by looking at how cross-border surrogacy arrangements are currently debated in private international law. I first demonstrate that technosciences are intimately linked to regulatory and legal frameworks. Here, recombinant knowledge has led to new formations of legal parenthood while obscuring other forms of kinship in quite paradoxical ways. Second, the liberal story of law and regulation erodes the history and political economy in which law has come to represent itself as universal and moveable. I examine how a gendered, racialized, and (post)colonial context of global fertility chains is lost in the legal instruments designed to protect the people involved in international surrogacy arrangements, preferring instead neoliberal forms of kinship. Finally, the liberal story of law also embraces the story of individualism. I show the conflicts that arise when such individualist forms of law are transplanted to non-individualist contexts, both in non-Western and Western contexts. I argue that by subjecting non-liberal others (across the Global North-South divide) to bioethical frameworks that intervene in kinship ontologies, private international law runs the risk of prolonging the logic of colonial and imperial thinking.","PeriodicalId":316008,"journal":{"name":"Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114054441","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-05DOI: 10.28968/cftt.v8i1.37278
Z. Ihar
{"title":"What Comes after Entanglement?: Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion, by Eva Haifa Giraud (Duke University Press, 2019)","authors":"Z. Ihar","doi":"10.28968/cftt.v8i1.37278","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v8i1.37278","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":316008,"journal":{"name":"Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123929932","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-05DOI: 10.28968/cftt.v8i1.35133
X. Chacko
Transported through colonial technologies such as Wardian cases and imperial ships, or simply popped in envelopes and sent via the postal service, the reproductive bodies of plants have been extracted, commodified, reproduced, and proliferated to satisfy human needs and desires. The ongoing and historical movement of plants and their reproductive capacity—known now through the disembodied clinical term germplasm—for economic, social, political, and agricultural purposes provides a lens through which global fertility chains can be studied. I study one such fertility chain: the movement of seeds of plants into frozen vaults known as “seed banks.” While colonial plant movements are associated with exploitative control, newer plant extractions for seed banking are shielded from rebuke because they embody the unquestionably positive valence of “biodiversity conservation.” The view from Australia captures the awkwardness of seed banking as a reproductive technology because the ongoing tensions between Indigenous struggles and settler-colonial nation building, and the urgency around climate change, are far from resolved. The politics of the Anthropocene are particularly poignant in Australia because anthropogenic destruction looks very different when viewed from the perspective of either Indigenous people or settlers.
{"title":"Stringing, Reconnecting, and Breaking the Colonial “Daisy Chain”: From Botanic Garden to Seed Bank","authors":"X. Chacko","doi":"10.28968/cftt.v8i1.35133","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v8i1.35133","url":null,"abstract":"Transported through colonial technologies such as Wardian cases and imperial ships, or simply popped in envelopes and sent via the postal service, the reproductive bodies of plants have been extracted, commodified, reproduced, and proliferated to satisfy human needs and desires. The ongoing and historical movement of plants and their reproductive capacity—known now through the disembodied clinical term germplasm—for economic, social, political, and agricultural purposes provides a lens through which global fertility chains can be studied. I study one such fertility chain: the movement of seeds of plants into frozen vaults known as “seed banks.” While colonial plant movements are associated with exploitative control, newer plant extractions for seed banking are shielded from rebuke because they embody the unquestionably positive valence of “biodiversity conservation.” The view from Australia captures the awkwardness of seed banking as a reproductive technology because the ongoing tensions between Indigenous struggles and settler-colonial nation building, and the urgency around climate change, are far from resolved. The politics of the Anthropocene are particularly poignant in Australia because anthropogenic destruction looks very different when viewed from the perspective of either Indigenous people or settlers.","PeriodicalId":316008,"journal":{"name":"Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience","volume":"45 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124170617","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-05DOI: 10.28968/cftt.v8i1.37713
Nassim Parvin, Rebecca Rouse, D. Álvarez, Sanaz Haghani, S. Clark, N. Gaskins, Anne M. Sullivan, Erin Mergil, J. Pelizari, Aditya Anupam, Pooja Casula, Shubhangi Gupta
How do materials and making come to matter in the messy practices of feminist teaching? This Lab Meeting shares examples of interdisciplinary work in feminist making and teaching across a range of contexts (AI portraiture, printmaking, quilting, musical performance, game design, theater, storytelling, and more) to extend the discussion of materials in feminist thought, a topic of long-standing importance in the field. As a group of theorist-practitioners, the contributors to the Lab Meeting share an interest in bridging the conceptual and material via a scrappy mode of making and inquiry that does not seek to remediate chaos but rather engage it, in all its complexities. Each contributor captures multiple interpretations of mess, making, storytelling, and education from a feminist perspective. Together, they offer insights into the liberatory promise of material engagements.
{"title":"Mess and Making Matters in Feminist Teaching","authors":"Nassim Parvin, Rebecca Rouse, D. Álvarez, Sanaz Haghani, S. Clark, N. Gaskins, Anne M. Sullivan, Erin Mergil, J. Pelizari, Aditya Anupam, Pooja Casula, Shubhangi Gupta","doi":"10.28968/cftt.v8i1.37713","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v8i1.37713","url":null,"abstract":"How do materials and making come to matter in the messy practices of feminist teaching? This Lab Meeting shares examples of interdisciplinary work in feminist making and teaching across a range of contexts (AI portraiture, printmaking, quilting, musical performance, game design, theater, storytelling, and more) to extend the discussion of materials in feminist thought, a topic of long-standing importance in the field. As a group of theorist-practitioners, the contributors to the Lab Meeting share an interest in bridging the conceptual and material via a scrappy mode of making and inquiry that does not seek to remediate chaos but rather engage it, in all its complexities. Each contributor captures multiple interpretations of mess, making, storytelling, and education from a feminist perspective. Together, they offer insights into the liberatory promise of material engagements.","PeriodicalId":316008,"journal":{"name":"Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123870595","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-05DOI: 10.28968/cftt.v8i1.36220
Daisy Deomampo
{"title":"The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery: Biocapitalism and Black Feminism’s Philosophy of History, by Alys Eve Weinbaum (Duke University Press, 2019)","authors":"Daisy Deomampo","doi":"10.28968/cftt.v8i1.36220","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v8i1.36220","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":316008,"journal":{"name":"Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience","volume":"434 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116734407","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-05DOI: 10.28968/cftt.v8i1.36952
C. Prescod-Weinstein
{"title":"Dear Science and Other Stories, by Katherine McKittrick (Duke University Press, 2021)","authors":"C. Prescod-Weinstein","doi":"10.28968/cftt.v8i1.36952","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v8i1.36952","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":316008,"journal":{"name":"Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114110392","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}