[this is just a fragment]
[full text can be reached here: https://text-collection.hangar.org/en/a-breeding-ground-for-uncertainties/]
We are familiar with techniques like grafting, cutting, layering and sprouting. These are naturocultural linking
methods that are always in tension, often pushing the boundaries of
what can be named. These are ways of propagating life, fostering shared
mutation, cultivating unexpected varieties of interdependent modes of
existence, and nurturing non-categorised, non-rigid and dynamic
connections. These techniques are familiar to us, to Ona and myself.
They introduce us to unexpected forms of bonding by other means.
Unexpected forms of kinship, of nurturing, of non-binary parenting when
desires align. Propagation of shared, eventually enby (NB)8 life. Co-parenting through the uncertainties of humanness. And that also means embracing and becoming entirely-spontaneous weeds, like the cugula9 that grows in the ditches of patriarchal and productivity-focused enclosures.
Ona’s
work calls for the “end of individualized genetic property”. I join
this riot against reproductive Modernity, unifier in relational
universals; and we loop back to Sophie Lewis: “At what point does queer
pose no challenge to property? To what end are we queering motherhood?”10
A Breeding Ground for Uncertainties
serves as the most compelling figuration I can think of for navigating
patriarchal-colonial contemporaneity. It captures the emphasis of this
norm in tension with the thick web of inter-dependencies that surround
it, teeming with contradictions and deeply entrenched injustices.
“World-making” differs fundamentally from creating processes for a regenerative justice. One approach assumes a capacity to start anew, often based on a misguided notion of tabula rasa,
continuing to tap into the blueprint of the modern project to some
extent. Against the backdrop of the flatness of genetics, for example,
the praxis of art–research for a regenerative justice in
which Ona Bros participates is committed to restoring and partially
repairing while working with what is already there. This approach
fosters the generation of relational and supportive tissues, which work
as emergent, epigenetic and to a large degree unanticipated alliances.
In
opposition to the essentialism and biological determinism of racial,
anthropocentric, and ableist capitalism, enby propagation seeks to
flourish transcending the liberal humanist concept of the filial11, which positions individual subjecthood as the core of identity and desire.
Ona
thus experiences and expresses the collapse of this essentialist regime
both against and from within: “with your foot you collapsed the pillars
on which the modern world was founded: the autonomous being, the
hierarchy of presences, the excuses for plunder”.12
Enby
parenting is familiar to us, the regeneration of simple yet
non-repetitive nor nostalgic worlds. We are familiar with boycotting the
assumption of forms of reproduction grounded in the industrial fiction
of verisimilitude and the erasures of dependencies it implies. We are
familiar with assisted reproduction in non-technosolutionist terms:
reproductive processes are always assisted, because which reproduction
is not assisted?13.
As Sarah Franklin notes “..reproductive technologies that assisted
conception technologies (…), are reproducing much more than children per se.”14
And we echo Sara Lafuente’s question “What does assisted reproduction
reproduce?” What culture does it participate in and create?15
We
are familiar with a collective political subjectivity if it is
more-than-human, more-than-nuclear, but also more-than-familial and
certainly more-than-pessimistic, as M Murphy’s notion implies16.
Despite multilateral and multimodal collapse, we can continue to invent
frameworks for regeneration and enby reproduction that are resistant to
rampant TERF anti-utopianism.
New narratives are urgently needed; we owe it to the children of ice and to the adults who grow up with them.
This will require us to call on the communities. So let us call on the non-genetic uterine lineages, extra-uterine milk lineages, chimerical neighbourhood kinship, home-born monsters, Equidnas of the socio-technical complex of the now.