[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.