In her book Hospitality of the Matrix: Philosophy, Biomedicine, and Culture, Irina Aristarkhova discusses how the progress of feminist thought on pregnancy has often been impeded by its struggle against the oppressive hierarchies surrounding it: “Often, in feminist research, pregnancy was represented in the context of an impending struggle between mothers and medical and socio-cultural institutions that treated it as a means to an end: the child.”1 The task of her study is not to keep pregnancy within this “problematic” context for feminist politics, but to find ways of describing it that would make the process of species reproduction emancipatory for those who participate in it—primarily mothers, but also a multitude of other actors.
This task is realized nonlinearly, and it runs through several stages. One needs, first, to see through the philosophical presuppositions of the pregnancy-organizing discourses of embryology and immunology, in order to dismantle the hostility toward mothers embedded in them. Conceptualizing reproductive practices in terms of hospitality rather than competition demands, next, a deep inquiry into how the foundational phenomenological relation of the self toward the other is modeled—for the oppressive realities women face within reproductive institutions build up from an under-conceptualized psychic economy. Art projects such as Virgil Wong and Lee Mingwei’s Male Pregnancy then exemplify reproductive practices modeled on the relation of hospitality. And finally, biotechnological capabilities and their material realities directly inform pregnancy as a discursive practice.
The analysis carried out in the book is remarkable in that it shows how feminist philosophy can work with its objects on several levels, attending both to the material aspect of existence (the Concrete) and to the discursive (the Abstract).2 This seems to be precisely what Karen Barad proposes when she calls the body a “material-discursive” phenomenon.3 There are overlaps here with Judith Butler’s Foucault-inherited theory of gender (gender is not so much what we are as what is said about us), but Aristarkhova’s research is more specialized and shows that one simply cannot advance further on questions such as ectogenesis without considering the practical side of the issue: the cost of the procedure, its availability across different class and cultural strata of society, its actual biotechnological capabilities, and so forth.
This movement toward complicating the world and our speech about it can be contrasted with the poststructuralist tendency within which feminism long situated itself, pointing to the subordinate position of the “feminine” within one or another binary (body–mind, matter–idea, nature–culture). Aristarkhova not only offers a more positive cultural program than the poststructuralist narrative, which merely highlights symbolic subordination; she also demonstrates new ways of handling the conceptual pairs integral to feminist philosophy, surpassing the perpetual drag of disjunctive syllogisms.4
Thus, having anchored the abstract cultural concept of pregnancy to the concrete body of a woman in the book’s first chapters (and thereby denying their rupture), Aristarkhova then detaches pregnancy from the concreteness of the biological forms familiar to us, discussing ectopic pregnancy, technologically enabled ectogenesis, and male pregnancy. The second part of the book proceeds from the conclusion of the first: if body and discourse are interdependent, then the technologization of pregnancy will lead to changes in the realm of discourse—in both how we talk and how we think about generating life.
⁎ ⁎ ⁎
Philosophy postulates p: that mind and body are independent. Feminist philosophy postulates not-p—and that the body can change. Therefore, the mind can change.
⁎ ⁎ ⁎
Making Space
The book’s main concept is hospitality. This notion is relevant not only to reproduction but also to art (the hospitality of institutional spaces) and to migration, which has long since become one of the sore points of the contemporary world. Here Aristarkhova’s thought proceeds on a metaphysical level: the idea of the womb—the matrix—is deeply linked in Western culture with the idea of space, and space, in turn, with that which receives/hosts and carries/bears, with something that is acted upon rather than something that acts. An agent usually intrudes into space and fills it, while space merely endures the other’s presence. All these scenarios imagine space as something always already existing and given. But according to Aristarkhova, space is not given; it is made. I will allow myself to quote her own summary of the metaphysical part of the book, since I cannot describe it better:
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 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.5
The debunking of the myth of pregnancy is thus conceived not as the deflation of its prior “evil” metaphysics (a debunking that would still treat metaphysics as ideology), but as something that demands another type of operational economy: “I must clarify that I am not claiming, either here or elsewhere, that hospitality is ‘naturally’ inherent to the maternal body or the maternal attitude. It is precisely an agential, not a taken-for-granted, characteristic of hospitality as a maternal attitude and of the maternal attitude as hospitality, which will be highlighted and connected with the (dangerous and infrequently articulated) problem of ‘real mothers.’”6
Aristarkhova further describes collective models of hospitality, in which the mother enters into relations of hospitality alongside the machine. The survival of an infant in a neonatal incubator—the technology that has in reality come closest to the idea of an “artificial womb”7—depends directly on the labor of nurses, although that labor often passes unrecognized, as if it did not exist at all. One mother, in other words, is never enough for making life: the infant’s survival is the work of many hands and at least one machine. The complex symbiotic relations Aristarkhova envisions are set against the reality of scientific and feminist studies of ectogenesis technologies, which often turn out to be technophobic. The mother’s body is conceptualized as “natural,” as naturally “containing” the right kind of love for the infant, while the incubator is demonized as unemotional and alien: “the machine is not capable of ‘real’ love or ‘real’ breathing—it merely simulates such actions.”8 Descriptions adequate to the proposed symbiotic model of hospitality thus still await development.
Inhospitality and Its Politics
When it comes to technophobia in the context of ectogenesis, one point seems important to me: the exclusive right of mothers to participate in the process of raising and caring that follows from it stems from the adoption of a certain paradigm of economic relations. As Marx and Engels already argued—in The Communist Manifesto and, at length, in Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State—private property and the bourgeois family emerge in Western history together; the two co-constitute each other. The cultural framing of pregnancy as a private concern of the mother emerges within the historical formation of modern capitalism. The problematic part here, it seems to me, is not the notions of private care and individual responsibility in themselves, but the situation in which they result from extrapolating the notion of private property onto the agency of hospitality.
In feminist activism, which may combine in its programmatic statements the premises of various ideologies, one often has to explicate those hidden premises oneself. Thus the meaning of “my” in the liberal feminist slogan “my body, my choice,” read literally and taken to its extreme, comes close to the idea of full ownership over one’s body. This idea is unattainable and absurd, but it also sits oddly with those who prefer communal models of living and a collective mode of childcare over the traditional model of the bourgeois family. Following the logic of Aristarkhova—whose book indeed opens up a space of possibility for thinking non-capitalist modes of social reproduction—we can make the aforementioned slogan more precise: “My body is my choice, but not my private property” (Моё тело — моё дело, но не частная собственность). Let me turn to an example.
Hospitable Mars
Red Mars, the first novel in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, is a story of the colonization of Mars spanning several human generations—and a thought experiment on the political, economic, and cultural models of organizing Martian society.
In the near future, a hundred colonists—an international group of scientists and engineers, the best skilled and best trained—are sent to Mars. They cope with the harsh conditions of the red planet, with its stubborn and powerful landscape; they invent a way to extract water, grow plants in hydroponic greenhouses, and, in parallel, work on a means of achieving longevity in a biolaboratory. These tasks demand of the colonists superhuman dedication and extraordinary ideas.
The new social form brings about new social conflicts. Throughout the construction of the colony, the characters of Red Mars form alliances and split into factions. The life of the colony is actively organized by two forces: on one side, John Boone, who shares the views of classical American liberalism; on the other, Arkady Bogdanov, heir to the views of the revolutionary tektologist Alexander Bogdanov. In the novel we witness a remarkable history of solidarity and cooperation between these two characters. True to the political worldviews they represent, both leaders agree on the need to stop the encroachment of capitalism by the transnational corporations that keep preying upon the Earth. Open to political ideologies he himself does not profess, John Boone becomes involved with underground revolutionary Bogdanovist cells. When it comes to human reproduction, however, Boone diverges from Bogdanov’s collectivist doctrine, asserting his inherent right to a child solely because the child carries his genetic material.
“You grew them, right? Fertilized a bunch of your eggs, and grew them in vitro?”
After a pause she nodded.
John leaned toward her, getting angry. “I presume there’s kids from every man in the first hundred?”
Hiroko tilted her head at him, and shrugged very slightly. “We took from the samples everyone gave.”
“The mothers are all the women in the group, the fathers all the men.”
“What gave you the right to do all these things without our permission?” John asked. “To make our children without asking us—to run away and hide in the first place—why? Why?”
Hiroko returned his gaze calmly. “We have a vision of what life on Mars can be. We could see it wasn’t going to go that way. We have been proved right by what has happened since. So we thought we would establish our own life—”
“But don’t you see how selfish that is? We all had a vision, we all wanted it to be different, and we’ve been working as hard as we can for it, and all that time you’ve been gone, off creating a little pocket world for your little group! I mean we could have used your help! I wanted to talk to you so often! Here we have a kid between us, a mix of you and me, and you haven’t talked to me in twenty years!”
“We didn’t mean to be selfish,” Hiroko said slowly. “We wanted to try it, to show by experiment how we can live here. Someone has to show what you mean when you talk about a different life, John Boone. Someone has to live the life.”9
The novel’s heroine Hiroko Ai was initially engaged in growing plants in extraterrestrial conditions during the early settlement of Mars, later moving on to the biotechnological projects key to the plot. At a turning point, while the expedition’s members were drowning in lengthy political disputes, she organized an independent group to design and implement reproductive strategies for the new planet—what she called by the Latin term viriditas. Ai’s group developed the technology of extracorporeal pregnancy—ectogenesis—which utilized the reproductive cells of the crew, collected back during the preparatory stage of the mission.
Each ectogene had not two but several pairs of genetic parents, which corresponded to Ai’s spiritual view of human nature. After birth, the children grew up in a massive family consisting of her entire research group and could turn to any member as a parent—care was distributed horizontally, peer-to-peer. The group lacked the social hierarchies found on Earth. The collective process of upbringing practiced by Hiroko’s group presented an ecologically resilient and sustainable alternative to the Earth-bound model of the nuclear family.
Not everyone, however, embraced Ai’s realized ecological utopia with open arms. For some characters this was a step too far. The following dialogue between John and Hiroko takes place:
“Have you had the gerontological treatments in your colony?”
“Yes.”
“And you got the process from Sax?”
“Yes.”
“Do these kids of yours know their parentage?”
“Yes.”
John shook his head, exasperated and more. “I just can’t believe you would do these things!”
“We do not ask for your belief.”
“Obviously not. But aren’t you the least bit concerned about stealing our genes and making kids by us without our knowledge or consent? About bringing them up without giving us any part in their upbringing, any part in their childhood?”
She shrugged. “You can have your own kids if you want. As for these, well. Were any of you interested in having children twenty years ago? No. The subject never came up.”
“We were too old!”
“We were not too old. We chose not to think of it. Most ignorance is by choice, you know, and so ignorance is very telling about what really matters to people. You did not want children, and so you did not know about late birth. But we did, and so we learned the techniques. And when you meet the results, I think you will see it was a good idea. I think you will thank us. What have you lost, after all?”10
John’s descent into denial and his indignant reaction to the new reproductive technologies are telling: what provokes his repulsion is precisely the “theft” of genes incorporated in individual bodies, rather than the fact of the alteration or mutation of the normative body. As we see from the fragment quoted above, John has undergone gerontological therapy—a modification of DNA that increases life expectancy—and considers it a matter of course for everyone in the first hundred. Apparently, for him, the result of such a procedure does not violate the normative boundaries of the human. Yet John experiences a profound culture shock precisely when confronted with the undermining of the nuclear family and the reproductive technologies inherent to it—when the most personal, even intimate contribution of the individual to reproduction turns out to be collectivized.
It is curious how one technological change in the realm of the body is recognized as an illegal intervention while another passes as a reasonable improvement. Such differential sensitivity to changes in bodily configuration reveals itself as purely ideological. And the adopted ideology is such that what is possible at the level of individual reproduction turns out to be unthinkable at the macro level of the reproduction of the species—as if, once the same question is enlarged to the scale of the species, its (in)human face finally comes into view.
Kim Stanley Robinson portrays his character John Boone as a figure of high liberalism (by “high” I do not mean neoliberalism, but a liberalism that stands as one with humanism, progress, faith in social justice, egalitarianism, and openness to public debate—all such truly good things).11 But we see the limits of liberalism when it comes to the material structure that enables this system’s functioning in the first place.
How, though, would Alexander Bogdanov himself react to such an ectogenetic experiment?
In a commentary on the first version of this text, Alla Mitrofanova suggested that Robinson’s Red Mars indirectly polemicizes with the projects of two prominent socialist revolutionaries. First, the novel partially overlaps with the revolutionary sociology of Alexander Bogdanov—author of Red Star, a science-fiction novel about a Martian socialism of the future—and includes direct allusions to his life and work. “Bogdanov,” writes Mitrofanova, “developed a scientific project centered on systems theory (Tektology) and modeled a post-revolutionary society structured as a network of local institutions whose collective activities generate the impulse that drives the entire system. This new social model was realized in the mass movement Proletkult, whose working units became houses of culture, amateur theaters, clubs, libraries, and the grassroots press.”12 But, as Mitrofanova keenly notes, Bogdanov’s sociology was also known to another pivotal figure of the socialist transformations—Alexandra Kollontai—and served as the blueprint for her Zhenotdels (Women’s Departments), functioning between 1919 and 1930. “These institutions implemented a policy of gender equality in families and labor collectives, engaged in labor and maternity protection, and established networks of kindergartens and schools.”13 There is no doubt that Robinson refers to Bogdanov’s project and tests its resilience in the novel; but perhaps he also, collaterally, polemicizes with Alexandra Kollontai. In any case, while still preserving the biological link between mother and child, Kollontai’s project already redistributes childcare along a comrade-to-comrade chain and deprivatizes the mother’s individual responsibility for caring and for generating the conditions of upbringing. As for Bogdanov’s own likely verdict: it is hard not to suspect that the tektologist would have recognized in Hiroko’s commune less a theft of genes than his own blueprint realized—a self-organizing collective in which reproduction, too, is at last deprivatized.
Reproduction at Point Zero
Of course, it was feminist thought, and not necessarily leftist thought as such, that had previously drawn attention to these questions. As Silvia Federici, one of the beacons of 1970s socialist feminism, wrote in her preface to Revolution at Point Zero: “Through my involvement in the women’s movement I realized that the reproduction of human beings is the foundation of every economic and political system, and that the immense amount of paid and unpaid domestic work done by women in the home is what keeps the world moving.”14 Federici helped develop feminist social reproduction theory (SRT), which points out the blind spots of traditional Marxism. While classical Marxist theory is centered on the commodity and production, feminist Marxism views reproduction as the condition of labor, allowing us to bring to the forefront the materiality of the human—suffering, limited in its material capacities, and serving as a resource—rather than the abstract matter of capital. If under the capitalist mode of production the worker produces the product, then who produces the worker?—such was the central question of Marxist feminism.
However, while SRT understands reproduction primarily through the lens of socio-economic relations—focusing on domestic labor traditionally performed by women, care work, and other unpaid practices that ultimately sustain the accumulation of capital—Hiroko Ai and Aristarkhova turn us toward the material reality of the human species as a technological reality, thereby allowing us to pose the question of the human in the most foundational sense. I contend that the turn to such materiality is just as important as the turn to the brain and functionalism was in the philosophy of mind—especially when it comes to dismantling the folk theories that feed inequality. The more detailed our knowledge of pregnancy as a material technology, the sooner we can rid ourselves of the corrosive myths surrounding it.
Aristarkhova’s great contribution to reproductive theory lies in her framing of pregnancy as a social practice in which women, men, and machines—nannies, uncles, sisters, friends, incubators—all actually or potentially participate. Perhaps, by extending our analysis along the lines Aristarkhova suggests, we can approach the very ideal for which Ursula K. Le Guin felt compelled to imagine the ambisexual inhabitants of the planet Gethen: “Burden and privilege are shared out pretty equally; everybody has the same risk to run or choice to make.”15 But no matter what the future brings, I think the development of egalitarian ideologies lies in turning to the question of species reproduction—above all, to its feminist renderings.
Notes
⁎ This essay was originally published in Russian as «Ничего земного? Практики эктогенеза на Марсе» in Киберфеминизм+: эпистемологическая недостаточность, эмансипация органов, ангелы-операторы, ed. Alla Mitrofanova (inexistent press, 2026) [Cyberfeminism+: Epistemological Insufficiency, the Emancipation of Organs, Operator Angels].
- Irina Aristarkhova, Hospitality of the Matrix: Philosophy, Biomedicine, and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 63. ↩
- It is appropriate to recall here a recurring theme in the work of the xenofeminist Patricia Reed—the search for a language that would combine the concrete and the abstract, the universal and the particular, the local and the global: “Local or uniquely particular perspectives on their own, are not sufficient to the interwoven planetary demands we confront today, but this acknowledgement resists being parsed as an either/or dichotomy – of pitting one perspective over the other. Framing scalar cognitive ambitions as a dichotomy is antithetical to those very pursuits, and risks repeating the inscription of a particular perspective at a massively inflated, and therefore colonising scale. ‘Totality’ does not mean localization can be ignored – on the contrary, it is constitutive of ‘totality’; thinking totality requires departure and ramification from a local perspective, so the profound demand of ‘totality’ lies not in formulating (yet again) an impossibly omniscient model, but in understanding the bidirectional movement between the local and the global, the particular and the universal, and grasping how those transitions operate.” Patricia Reed, “Uncertainty, Hypothesis, Interface,” AH Journal, no. 00, “Scientific Romance,” ed. Beatriz Ortega Botas (2017). ↩
- See Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), for an account offering a slightly poetic yet importantly politically charged analysis of conceptualizing matter. ↩
- Strictly speaking, feminist critique has historically targeted the forced resolution of disjunctions through syllogisms often deployed by traditional philosophers. What came under scrutiny was the systemic attribution of femininity to matter based on its supposed alienation from ideas, or the reduction of femininity to mere corporeality by depriving it of the status of rationality (a move operating on the logic of material implication). At times the foundational premise itself—wherein we proceed from two binary, interrelated variables—was criticized. Yet it is evident that the mind–body coupling that continues to torment philosophers ought to be understood as an inclusive rather than an exclusive disjunction. From the premises Body ∨ Mind and ¬Mind one may validly conclude Body; yet, although that argument is valid, one should not forget that the first premise can also mean Body ∧ Mind. ↩
- Aristarkhova, Hospitality of the Matrix, 3–4. ↩
- Ibid., 29. ↩
- Леся Прокопенко, «О заботе», in Киберфеминизм+, ed. Alla Mitrofanova (inexistent press, 2026), 131. [Lesya Prokopenko, “On Care,” in Cyberfeminism+.] ↩
- Aristarkhova, Hospitality of the Matrix, 105. Specialized discourses that play a central role in reproductive reality, such as embryology—as well as ordinary language and the cultural institution of the family that structures it—operate, among other things, by separating mothers and nannies, or mothers and caring machines, speaking about them in terms of hierarchy and competition (see 104–124). ↩
- Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars (New York: Bantam Spectra, 1993). ↩
- Ibid. ↩
- When reading the book, I genuinely liked the character of John Boone: a laid-back, open-minded figure who does not weave political intrigues, yet consistently achieves his goals and wields immense power on Mars; a good interlocutor. With him everything feels completely natural—think of the scenes of his omegendorph-fueled dance with the dervishes, or his zero-gravity sex with Maya. As the first human to set foot on Mars, his influence on the planet is sustained not only by his rhetorical gift for delivering lightweight, optimistic speeches but also by this very fact. He acts as though he had a natural right to decide the fate of the planet and its community. The novel, though—just like feminist philosophy—shows that we should never trust things that seem altogether natural. ↩
- Лика Карева, «Ничего земного? Практики эктогенеза на Марсе», in Киберфеминизм+, 50—the Russian original of the present essay, from which Mitrofanova’s commentary is quoted. See also Алла Митрофанова, «Предисловие редактора» and «О киберфеминистской политической практике и о проекте Sci-Hub», in Киберфеминизм+, 5–19, 30–42. [Alla Mitrofanova, “Editor’s Introduction” and “On Cyberfeminist Political Practice and the Sci-Hub Project,” in Cyberfeminism+.] ↩
- Ibid. ↩
- Silvia Federici, preface to Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012), 2. ↩
- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (New York: Ace Books, 1969), ch. 7 (“The Question of Sex”). ↩