Maria Fannin

This chapter considers the centrality of feminist approaches to reproduction and reproductivity (and its refusal) in geography. Much of the early work on reproduction in feminist cultural and social geography was driven by an effort to show how reproductive spaces – be they hospitals, clinics, homes, bodies, borders, or cultural imaginaries – were governed by struggles over power and knowledge. Increasingly, these critical efforts are accompanied by work that explores affirmative contributions to thinking the futures of reproduction otherwise, imagining new speculative futures for reproduction, and pluriversal approaches to caring for life that wrest it from its eugenic past. The chapter closes with a consideration of the new methods – collage, zines, drawing, and body mapping – feminist geographers increasingly draw on to explore what it means to be reproductive.

A new concept of childbirth ‘experience’ emerged in late twentieth-century Britain, crafted by an erratic yet powerful mesh of interest groups. Experience is a powerful and malleable concept, that has been mobilised in different ways over time. In this case study, discussions of ‘experiencing’ childbirth were first the grounding for a culture of complaint, and birthing people were typically spoken for. In later years, to ‘experience’ childbirth was increasingly named, as a term and a concept. Indeed, the idea of a ‘birth experience’ became aspirational, and linked to distinctive and new cultures of celebration. This article’s analysis of the history of ‘birth experience’ traces this shift through archival methods, while also insisting that ‘experience’ does not simply exist for historians or geographers to ‘uncover’. Rather, experience must be closely attended to. In this case, these contested concepts of experience had significant implications for women’s lives and the ways in which they have made sense of childbirth in subsequent decades.

Birthing pools are a common feature of maternity units across Europe and North America, and in home birth practice. Despite their prevalence and popularity, these blue or white, often bulky plastic objects have received minimal empirical or theoretical analysis. This article attends to the emergence, design and meaning of such birthing pools, with a focus on the UK in the 1980s and 1990s. Across spheres of media, political and everyday debate, the pools characterise the paradoxes of ‘modern maternity’: they are ‘fluidly’ timeless and new, natural and medical, homely and unusual, safe and risky. Beyond exploring the contradictions of ‘modern maternity’, we also make two key interventions. First, we contend that modern maternity has substantially expanded in recent decades to hold and include additional ideas about comfort and experience. Second, we flag the culturally specific notions of ‘modernity’ at play in modern births: the popularity of the birthing pool was typically among white, middle-class women. We argue that birthing pools have had an impact at a critical moment in birthing people’s care, and we map out the uneven and unjust terrains through which they have assumed cultural and medical prominence.

If resistance is perhaps the most familiar understanding of what feminist political engagement has made possible, one might expect to find contemporary feminist scholarship characterised by accounts of resistance: of subjects working against the state and capital, against dominant constructions of masculinity and femininity, and other elaborations of the resistant politics characteristic of the women’s movement. But in large part, very few scholars now position themselves as working on explicitly feminist or indeed gendered projects of resistance. This is a product of both the troubling of the traditional notion of resistance as an exterior force - in Matt Sparke’s (2008: 423) language ‘the basic idea of resistance [as] people “pushing back”’ - and the increased recognition of forms of resistant politics as something immanent to everyday relationships. Resistance is no longer framed as an oppositional dialectic but as something achieved through more mundane forms of practice. Recognising this, in the chapter we trace how feminist activism is internal not external to the forces of power that shape the domains of life and work. At one level, we outline how work on ‘border spaces’ is generating new understandings of how the state and capital are more multifaceted and porous than traditional accounts suggest. It is clear from these accounts that we are no longer imagining or dealing with monolithic structures (such as patriarchy or capitalism) in our enquiries but being required to think hard about complex subjects who operate across multiple politicised domains. At another level, we explore studies of women ‘getting on’ and ‘getting by’ in order to reveal how resistance can be achieved, not by outright rejection or through large-scale transformation, but through everyday acts that allow one to reach individual goals and targets. New formations emerge out of creative ways of being in the world, pushing us to consider the very terms by which subjects are constrained by contemporary political and economic configurations. By detailing how new forms of ‘resistance’ can be still be traced in feminist accounts, our aim is not only to reveal less visible forms of oppositional consciousness, but to expose how these forms of resistance provide for a new way of thinking about political subjectivity given they rely on an understanding of politics that is necessarily complex and messy.

In December 2020, the International Review of Law and Economics (IRLE) published an article by Harvard law professor J. Mark Ramseyer, ‘Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War’, that is premised on the unsupported and scholarly-consensus-defying claim that thousands of young women and girls mostly from Korea, who ended up in Japanese military ‘comfort women’ stations during the Pacific War, were paid sex workers. Scholars were quick to criticize Ramseyer’s research and the journal’s decision to publish, but we argue that the full significance of the Ramseyer affair can only be seen by situating his article within an historically nuanced understanding about gender-based violence in general and the sexualization and fetisishization of Asian women in particular. We do so by using feminist inquiry to better understand the embodied and intimate experiences of Japan’s ‘comfort women’ scheme and the implications of Ramseyer’s denial of their lived experiences. Our approach attends to the visceral, intimate and affective matters that are clearly overlooked in Ramseyer’s piece.

This commentary responds to Bagelman and Gitome’s article, ‘Birthing Across Borders: “Contracting” Reproductive Geographies’, in the context of the growing attention paid to an increasingly diverse set of work on ‘reproductive geographies’. Their call for more South-South stories of birth, and of birth in liminal places, resonates with the growing body of literature exploring dimensions of abortion, fertility, reproductive technology, childbirth, and miscarriage by geographers. Their development of the concept of ‘contraction’ from the collection of accounts of birth in the Dadaab camp illustrates the generative potential of theorising with and from the bodily sensations of labour. The commentary concludes with a discussion of the concept of ‘dilation’ by political theorist Jane Bennett, who in seeking a new conceptual language for affective encounter also draws on the affirmative potential of poetic expression.

This paper reflects on collaboration between an artist, a scientist, and two social scientists involved in research on cultured red blood cells. Cell culture is part of a suite of methods used by bioscientists to study cellular processes outside of the living organism. The production of laboratory-grown blood is at the cutting-edge of cell culture and regenerative medicine, with hopes for significant therapeutic benefit in the future, particularly for patients with rare blood types or with conditions that require frequent blood transfusions. We reflect on our collaboration and on artistic experimentation with spatial dimensions of cells and scaffolds used in red blood cell culture, highlighting our efforts to generate knowledge that cuts across our respective disciplinary locations. We situate our work together in the context of the increasing molecularization of the body in science and medicine, and on the efforts to ‘open up’ scientific practice to multiple publics.