Seminar 5 will consider the renewed interest in materiality within feminist scholarship. The session asks how new networks of care and new economic and political relationships are emerging from research on emergent forms of life. What are the implications of concepts of materialism and materiality for rethinking the body, knowledge, politics, and agency? Do the techno-scientific innovations reshaping the natural and life sciences require a transformed feminist conception of ‘life itself’?
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Kate Boyer (University of Southampton)
This talk considers breastfeeding in public in the contemporary UK from the perspective of embodiment, citizenship, and rights to the city. Breastfeeding duration rates in the UK currently fall well below public health targets. They are lower than in other Anglophone countries with comparable rates of maternity leave, and even lower than in US, with much less robust maternity leave provisions. Based on new mixed-methods qualitative research I examine women’s experiences of breastfeeding outside the home in the UK, about which little is known yet which has been shown to influence duration rates in other cultural contexts. Drawing on conceptual work from social/cultural and feminist geography about embodiment, transgression and ‘rights’ to the city, I argue that breastfeeding is constructed as ‘out of place’ (after Cresswell) in public space in the contemporary UK through both subtle (and sometimes overt) social opprobrium as well as built form, in the form of lactation rooms. This seeks to extend understanding of UK women’s experiences of trying to integrate breastfeeding into their day to day lives and preferred ways of engaging with the world in the weeks and months post-birth, while also seeking to advance conceptual work in geography by expanding our understanding of urban subjectivity and the ways this particular groups’ ‘right to be’ in urban space can be practically constrained.
Felicity Callard (King’s College London)
The neuroscientific field of ‘resting state’ research has been described as heralding a paradigm shift in functional neuroimaging. This new field has been central to the development of a cognitive neuroscientific theory of inner mental life, and in this paper, I map and analyse its emergence and potential implications for conceptualizations of brain, self and gendered subjectivity within and beyond the neurosciences. The paper traces how the ‘the resting state’ and ‘default mode’ became visible as objects of scientific enquiry through the yoking together of what were initially separate research endeavours addressing different neurophysiological and neuropsychological questions. In the process, ‘rest’ – as signifying the cessation of movement or labour – has been transformed: the brain, inner mental life – and potentially the self – are conceptualized by researchers in this field as perpetually productive and oriented towards the future. The paper explores how formulations concerning rhythm and temporality within resting state research have complex implications for feminist thought and practice.
Maria Fannin (University of Bristol)
Writing on the placenta in feminist philosophy and theory has considered what Luce Irigaray considers the intersubjective nature of placental relations: the placenta is neither a transparent barrier nor a parasitical apparatus, but a mediator between two. The metaphor of the placenta and the potential of a placental economy to reshape relations between individuals, both ethical and social, reflects Irigaray's interest in transforming the entire symbolic register of difference in a philosophical tradition that tends to situate relations between self and other as relations between opposites or between aggressors or competitors. This oppositional model of intersubjectivity, in Irigaray's reading, limits imaginaries of ethical relation. Echoing Irigaray's rhetorical appeal to placental economies, political philosopher Roberto Esposito suggests that maternal-fetal relations serve as a model for relations of immunity that affirm, rather than negate, the possibility of communal life. This presentation considers conceptual investments in the placenta as a model for new forms of ethical relations alongside the value attributed within existing markets for placental tissue that are similarly premised on its capacity as a mediating site for 'exchange and communication'. It asks: how are these two placental economies related? And how might reflections on placental economies inform thinking on the visibility or invisibility of bodily surfaces and networks of tissue exchange?
