Thinking geographically with wombs

‘Uterine geography’ (regardless of whether one sides with cyborgs or goddesses) is central to understandings of the social and the spatial. We all have mothers from whose wombs we came. Reproduction is not just a mainstay of life, it is life. Despite this, based on experience of reactions to my own work on maternal bodies and spaces (e.g. Metro, 1993), it is likely that some will read this article by Sophie Lewis (2018) as being peripheral to geographers’ concerns – not ‘real’ geography. I disagree. I think that theorizing with the uterus is an intriguing idea that ought to be of interest to a wide cross section of geographers. It has the potential to prompt the rethinking of a range of concepts such as the making of people and places, self and Other, boundaries, labour, social reproduction and care – things that often sit at the heart of spatial relations. Lewis, in this article, asks: what geographies of gestation might become imaginable if a ‘wider range of ongoing social labours were felt to be “uterine”, and the uterine [was] made seriously comparable to other labours?’ Or, to put this another way, how can we think geographically with wombs, especially in relation to labour? This is not an easy question to answer.

Reading this article, I reflected on how it has now been more than 15 years since I wrote: ‘the bodies articulated in geographers’ texts have tended to be theoretical, discursive, fleshless bodies’ (Longhurst, 2001: 1). It struck me that in some regards little has changed. Words such as ‘body’, ‘embodiment’ and ‘corporeal’ still tend to be used in preference to describing the messy traces and processes (internal and external) of bodies, for example, saliva, sperm, sweat (but see Waitt, 2013 and Waitt and Stanes, 2015 as exceptions).

This is not, however, the case with Lewis who does not shy away from using words such as uterus, womb, fetus cervix, parturition, gestation, blood stained, menstruation, hormonal flows and ‘milk bonds’ despite the fact that these words and phrases might prompt in some a sense of ‘squeamishness’ (McNee, 1984). Importantly, and again to rehearse an argument that I have made in the past (Longhurst, 2001), there is a gendered dimension to this. The messy materiality of bodies tend to be associated with women’s bodies (and the bodies of those deemed as Other, e.g. ‘trans’, those who have a disability, are large or ‘fat’). Although every body is flesh and blood, men, especially ‘respectable’, middle- and upper class, White men, tend to be discursively constructed as solid, rational and in control of their bodily boundaries while women are not. As McDowell (1993: 306) noted more than 20 years ago:

Women’s experiences of, for example, menstruation, childbirth and lactation, all represent challenges to bodily boundaries. The feminine construction of self is an existence centred within a complex relational nexus, compared to the masculine construction of self as separate, distinct and unconnected.

Although these arguments have now been in circulation for a long time, most geographers are still unaccustomed to reading disciplinary texts about menstruation, childbirth and lactation, and words such as cervix, vaginal and gestating (all of which are used in Lewis’s article) are therefore likely to prompt a reaction. More specifically, addressing a ‘geography of the uterus is likely to mess up a masculinist knowledge based on claims to truth, objectivity and rationality’ (Longhurst, 2001, 129). Lewis’s article, then, has the potential to prompt in geographers and others a response, whether it be negative or positive, thereby sparking debate and furthering ideas about care and social reproduction.

Continuing on the theme of language, it is not just words that describe body ‘bits’ or processes that might strike readers as noticeable in this article but also that it contains a dizzying array of terms. Personally, I enjoyed the poetry of some of the turns of phrase, but there are sections where I was uncertain as to what exactly was being argued. A few examples of terms and phrases that might be unfamiliar to readers are microchimeric character, matrixial sym-poeisis, sympoetics, copoeisis, copoetics gestating-ness, symbiogenesis, matrixial geography, ‘dark, wet arena of care’, transcorporeal traces, gynocentric feminisms, ecoprimitivist affiliates, ‘amniotic womb-habitat’ and anti-reprotech purism. I am conversant with most of the literature that Lewis draws upon but still found this a challenging read, partly because of the language used and partly because she covers a wide array of topics including goddesses and cyborgs, capitalism, care economies, ‘GynePunks’, ‘mutant queers’ and many others. The article presents material from memoirs, magazine articles, poems and academic literature and brings together different theoretical frameworks including from biologist Suzanne Sadedin and feminist, science and technology scholar Donna Haraway.

Given that the article is a challenging read, it is useful when Lewis filters the ideas through specific examples although this does not occur until the penultimate section. Here Lewis argues that once geographers have embraced the uterine, then it is possible to ‘proliferate queer and counter-intuitive examples of reproductive assistance’. One example of reproductive assistance that she refers to is the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) House that was set up in the late 1960s and early 1970s in New York’s East Village by two individuals, Rivera and Johnson. Lewis describes Rivera and Johnson as ‘uterine agents’ whose aim was to support those who others tend to shun in a queerphobic society. The second example provided is GynePunk, a bio-hacking cooperative in Catalonia, Spain. Lewis describes this group as ‘uterine scholar-activists’. All reproduction, she argues, is assisted and families such as those at STAR House and GynePunk ought to be included in topics of reproduction.

These examples help cast light on the argument being made for a ‘cyborg uterine geography’ but by the end of the article I was still not entirely sure how focusing on the uterus might help to ensure that more non-normative accounts of care and social reproduction emerge. As I said at the beginning of this commentary, the article poses an interesting and ambitious research question about what might be possible by thinking with and politicizing uterine relations but how far she gets in answering this question is probably up for debate. Lewis suggests that by focusing on the uterus, it becomes difficult to ‘silo off’ multigendered mothers, DIY hysterectomies, three-parent babies, indigenous midwives and others instead bringing them together under one theoretical frame so as to understand more about care and social reproduction. She suggests, pointing to Colls and Fannin’s (2013) research on ‘Placental surfaces and the geographies of bodily interiors’, that focusing on the uterus is potentially more useful than focusing on the placenta as a model for thinking differently about boundedness, identity, territories, care and a range of other topics because it does not ‘lend itself so easily to non-gynocentric political appropriation’ (p. 313). Lewis argues that Colls and Fannin do not explicitly acknowledge that gestation does not always result in motherhood and therefore they suggest tacitly that it does or should. Again, I think there is probably potential to clarify and extend the argument here.

I appreciated Lewis also turning her attention to two of my own research monographs Bodies (2001) and Maternities (2008). She explains that although I use words such as ‘vomit, sweat, milk, blood and amniotic fluid’ to make a point about bodily boundaries in relation to pregnant women, I do explicitly address gestation, and therefore the works do not offer ‘a “ground zero” account of gestational relationality on the inside’ (p. 308, italics in original). Lewis continues that neither of the two aforementioned monographs contain the ‘active words’ gestate, gestates, gestating or gestated. This is perhaps a fair point but it does raise the question: what exactly is an ‘active word’? Maybe what is being referred to here is an active verb, that is, when the verb is clearly the subject. Again, I was not entirely sure. What I do know though is that many of the pregnant women I have interviewed over a period of decades talk about being pregnant or having a baby but not about gestating. They reflect on being sick, vomiting, their waters breaking and their bellies or stomachs growing but few, if any, have talked with me at length about their uteruses or about gestating. Does this matter for a cyborg uterine geography? It is likely that the doctors and midwives who work with pregnant, aborting, miscarrying and birthing women use these terms but in my experience, the women themselves tend not to. Are the terms gestation or gestate more active than others? How exactly do they ‘animate gestating-centred corporeography’? Does including the terms placenta and uterus in Katharine McKinnon’s (2014) line-up of coalitions of actants who are human, non-human and sub-human actually create a sense of ‘intrauterine liveliness’ as Lewis suggests? Again, I am not sure and think there is potential to tease this idea out further.

Another dimension of the argument that I think is worthy of further reflection in subsequent work is how place, space and geography matter to the uterus. Although the title is ‘Cyborg uterine geography’, there is potential to think more about how geography matters to wombs or ‘the uterine’. The article contains a number of references to universality including the earth, humans, ‘the world’, ‘world shaping power’ and ‘all human identity’. There are fewer references to the specificity of the way wombs are lived in particular contexts. In concluding, Lewis notes: ‘Reproduction is geographical in that its material flows and conditions of possibility stretch to the ends of the inhabited earth’. Again in this statement there is a sense of the universal invoked – ‘the inhabited earth’ – but not the particularities of different wombs in different contexts. Despite this, it seems that Lewis is keen to understand uteruses, in relation to care and social reproduction, in all their spatial and social ‘difference’. As she argues, all reproduction in some sense is ‘assisted’, queer, multi-gendered and non-normative. Teasing out the universal and particularities of these cyborg uterine geographies (plural rather than singular) might be a useful future project.

The article also got me thinking about texts of one sort or another that critique, often humorously, the discourse of the ‘good’ mother (goddess). The TV sitcom Absolutely Fabulous (Ab Fab) featuring Jennifer Saunders in the role of Edina, a single, jet-setting, alcohol-swilling, drug-imbibing mother to daughter Saffron springs to mind as an early example of the genre. There are a range of other examples though including other TV comedy series, films, popularist books, websites and blogs (e.g. Long, 2005). Given that a big part of Lewis’s project is about deromanticizing reproduction and that she notes care and social reproduction are tantamount to mothering, ‘bad’ mothers may have something to offer.

To return to where I began, uterine geography (especially one that sides with cyborgs) is arguably central to understandings of the social and the spatial generally but even more so to understandings of care and social reproduction. Lewis has provided readers with a work that it likely to prompt a great deal of thought and reflection. I have appreciated the opportunity to engage with it and look forward to reading some of the ideas contained within this important piece being teased out more fully in research to come.