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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.” 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.

































































































