Maria Fannin

Placental surfaces and the geographies of bodily interiors

Within geographical research on ‘the body’, a focus on the surfaces of bodies has been useful for considering how body boundaries, most often implied to begin and end at the skin, (de)limit, (de)regulate, and (de)stabilise what we come to know as ‘a body’. Such work draws attention to how meaning is inscribed ‘upon’ such surfaces and on the fluids that move across, within, and through those surfaces: for example blood, breast milk, and excrement. This paper, however, considers the potential for thinking geographically about interior bodily surfaces by engaging with the placenta. The placenta is a temporary organ that forms in a womans body only during pregnancy and whose purpose is to mediate the flow of substances between a womans body and the foetus. It is often considered to have two surfaces, the maternal and foetal surface, or to be ‘a’ surface in and of itself. Our intention is to think geographically ‘with’ ‘the placenta’ in order to focus on what interior surfaces can ‘do’ rather than ‘what they mean’. In so doing our contribution is twofold. Firstly, we will focus on the ‘resurfacing’ of the placenta when it moves outside of the body to be placed upon other (bodily) surfaces, taken back inside the body of origin, or put to use in research. This is significant for highlighting the specific mobilities and temporalities of interior bodily surfaces. Secondly, we consider the theoretical and ethical significance of the placenta for geography by engaging with Luce Irigarays account of the placental relation between mother and foetus understood as a space of mediation or ‘space between two’. In particular we are interested in considering the geographical potential of the sexed specificities of interior body surfaces, or their ‘morpho-logics’, for understandings of relationality, between self and other, and body and world; in short, we work with the placenta as a ‘relational organ’ in order to uncover new and potentially enlivening ethical spaces of exchange.

The Hoarding Economy of Endometrial Stem Cell Storage

The proliferation of for-profit enterprises offering stem cell storage services for personal use illustrates one of the ways health is increasingly governed through uncertainty and speculative notions of risk. Without any firm guarantee of therapeutic utility, commercial stem cell banks offer to store a range of bodily tissues, signalling the further transformation of the living body into an accumulation strategy within biotechnology capitalism’s ‘tissue economies’. This article makes two related claims: first, it suggests that specifically gendered forms of identification with the leading edge of the bioeconomy are embedded in the speculative practices of commercial stem cell banking and are particularly visible in the recent creation of a banking service for endometrial tissue marketed directly to women. Second, the article offers a novel analytic through which to explore the commercial banking of one’s own bodily tissues (or ‘autologous’ banking) through Marx’s discussion of money hoarding. The aim of the article is to thus further the conceptual claims linking emergent forms of economic and biomedical subjectivity to transformations in biotechnology capital.

Personal stem cell banking and the problem with property

Social scientists increasingly view biotechnological innovation as inseparable from the social and economic transformations of value attributed to human tissue. Informed by research on the exchange relationships embedded in biotechnologys ‘tissue economies,’ this essay discusses the transformation of female reproductive biology into a regenerative resource within one sector of the US biotechnology economy, the commercial stem cell banking industry. The commercial banking of stem cells has emerged as one of the most lucrative services in an emerging market for biotechnology products and services. In the two sectors of ‘consumer biotech’ examined here, umbilical cord-blood and endometrial tissue (menstrual blood) banking, the relationship between account holders and commercial banking services is governed primarily through contractual arrangements. Such contracts form distinctive new spatial understandings of the biological body and make possible specific embodied practices of self-cultivation. They also challenge previous feminist analyses of contract that presume the unity of the subject in relation to her body. The highly speculative banking of bodily tissues, in which the consumer of banking services is also the producer of the banked tissues embodied value, constitutes a new legal geography of the body and, in doing so, affirms the corporeal nature of law.

The burden of choosing wisely: biopolitics at the beginning of life

Recent transformations in French maternal health care demonstrate how the government of the beginning of life encompasses an individual womans desires and aspirations for the uses of her own body. Women are increasingly solicited by the French health care system to express their feelings, their wishes, and their distress to a medical professional for whom the solicitation of such narratives has become a professional specificity. This essay focuses on transformations of governmental power in the realm of reproduction articulated within French maternal health care policy, professional midwifery journals, and womens health activist literature. Crucially, the regulation of reproduction in France no longer takes place primarily through sanction or prohibition, but rather through what sociologist Dominique Memmi claims is the solicitation of narratives about ones own desires and hopes for the fate of ones body, a ‘delegated biopolitics’ of reproductive control. This essay suggests that the contemporary government of reproduction entrusts individuals with little more and no less than the imperative to ‘choose wisely.’

‘Work, life, bodies: New materialisms and feminisms’

This special section of Feminist Theory emerged out of a UK Economic and Social Sciences Research Council-funded seminar series, ‘Feminism and Futurity: New Times, New Spaces’, that was held at the University of Bristol, UK during 2010 and 2011. The impetus for this seminar series was in part to respond to the claims, common in the UK when the series began, that feminism is ‘yesterday’s politics’ (Coote, 2000; Segal, 1999, 2004) and that young women are part of a ‘post-feminist’ generation (McRobbie, 2008). Debates over the status of feminism more generally tended to narrate its malaise through an account of ‘waves’ of feminist politics that culminated in the condition of ‘postfeminism’ (Adkins, 2004; Aronson, 2003; Brooks, 1997). Underwritten by notions of linear progress and generational transmission that have been roundly critiqued in the feminist theoretical literature, invocations of postfeminism suggested that feminism was no longer relevant to the conditions of contemporary life. One consequence of this narrative is that feminism has been described as the politics either of another time or of other places (see Mohanty, 2001; Peters and Wolper, 1994, amongst others). The recent resurgence of activism by young women in the UK and beyond demonstrates the limitations of this narrative, and the dangers of moving too quickly, perhaps, to classify and categorise the lively and creative energies of a

The ‘Midwifery Question’ in Québec: New Problematics of Birth, Body, Self

Scholarship on midwifery in the North American context has tended to evaluate the recent legalization of the professional practice of midwifery across the United States and Canada as evidence of the success of womens claims to broader reproductive rights concerning pregnancy and birth. This article, however, approaches the efforts to legalize midwifery in North America through the question of claims to reproductive autonomy, arguing that midwiferys legalization is one effect of the entrance into modern scientific practice and state health policy of a new political subject: one whose emotional satisfaction is the target of reproductive health-care policy. As such, the ‘new’ midwifery in Québec encourages pregnant and birthing women to invest intimately in the project of staking claims for reproductive self-determination. Counter to claims that the ideal citizen of contemporary liberal regimes is ‘unattached and unbiased’, midwifery compels women to invest ‘deep down’ in claims to reproductive self-determination. An examination of policy and activist discourses circulating during the time leading up to the period of experimentation (1993–1998) and eventually to the legalization (1999) of midwifery in Québec provides a useful lens onto broader transformations in the liberal governance of pregnancy and birth.

Origin stories from a regional placenta tissue collection

Twenty-three years ago when women and their children were recruited to a longitudinal genetic epidemiological study during pregnancy, placentas were collected at birth. This paper explores the history of a regional placenta biobank and contemporary understandings of its value for the constitution of a research population. We draw on interviews with some of the mothers and those responsible for the establishment and curation of the placenta collection in order to explore the significance and meaning of the collection for them. Given its capacity to stand in for the study cohort of mothers and children, we argue that the material significance of the placenta biobank as a research tool seems far less important than the work it does in constituting a population. The stories about this collection may be understood within the wider context of developments in biobanking and the bioeconomy.

The spirit of Guattari

Joe Gerlach and Thomas Jellis’ essay calls on geographers to extend their engagement with the rich spatial vocabularies of Gilles Deleuze’s collaborator and co-author, Felix Guattari. This commentary considers the tenor of Gerlach and Jellis’ call to think alongside Guattari and invites them to situate their response to the heterogenous, transnational communities that make up their disciplinary audience. It also optimistically calls for recognizing where the spirit of Guattari’s might already be at work in ‘human geography’ today.

Professional citizenship and medical nationalism in France

In principle, the European Union provides for the free movements of workers between its member states. No worker should be discriminated against based solely on nationality, and this applies to most jobs in the public sector. In practice, however, the elimination of nationality criteria for public sector work applies only to workers from EU member states. In the French public health care system, discrimination based on nationality, either of the worker or the workers diploma, remains salient for ‘third-country’ medical professionals whose qualifications must undergo a lengthy recognition process. In the context of expanding EU integration and anxieties over postcolonial medical migration into Europe, the historical and geographical context for nationality criteria warrants greater attention. This paper suggests that the persistence of nationality restrictions, and their effects on medical professionals seeking recognition for their qualifications in France, lies in the occluded colonial context for their development. This perspective on medical migration requires moving outside the European frame in which nationality restrictions, instantiated in French law during the Third Republic (1870 – 1914) and strengthened further under the Vichy Regime (1940 – 44), have been addressed by historians and policy makers. A more explicitly postcolonial perspective on medical migrations implications for citizenship productively demonstrates how colonial distinctions between French citizens and colonial subjects helped shape the regulatory frameworks that continue to regulate the medical professions in contemporary France.

Refiguring the Postmaternal

In Confronting Postmaternal Thinking: Feminism, Memory, Care (2011) Julie Stephens identifies a significant cultural anxiety about care-giving, nurturing and human dependency she calls ‘postmaternal’ thinking, based on analysis of offline and online cultural texts and oral histories about maternal experiences. Stephens argues that maternal forms of care have been rejected in the public sphere and marginalised to the private domain through an elaborate process of cultural forgetting, in turn contributing to the current dominance of what Stephens terms a degendered form of feminism. Stephens argues that an alternative politic where human dependency and vulnerability – rather than market performance – are imagined as the primary connection between people has been forgotten. This is manifest in the realm of social policy through the reduction and in some cases elimination of social supports for women as mothers. In the cultural sphere, Stephens cites the anxieties over motherhood and mothering articulated in the genres of popular and advice literature aimed at professional women, and in the conflicted memoirs of young women recounting their experiences as children of feminist mothers. The postmaternal thus describes for Stephens the contemporary condition of forgetting, obscuring, or rendering culturally illegible the maternal in both social policy and histories of feminism, whereby women’s claims as mothers are no longer seen as political. Stephens situates her diagnosis of the postmaternalism of contemporary social policies in Europe, Australia and North America as one of the defining characteristics of neoliberal policy-making. In this sense, Stephens’ book makes an important contribution to theorising neoliberalism as a cultural and political formation. The forgetting of the vulnerability, intimacy, emotion and affective labour entailed by mothering is an important yet undertheorised dimension of how neoliberal policies transform social responsibilities for dependent others into ‘burdens’ to be borne by individuals. Stephens’ critique of this forgetting of maternal thinking, and her return to theorists of care such as Sara Ruddick for inspiration, extends to the telling and retelling of histories of feminist politics in relation to experiences of mothering. The aim of this special issue, Refiguring the Postmaternal, is to explore the concept of the ‘postmaternal’ as a critique of and response to changing cultural, political and economic conditions for mothering and motherhood (Kawash 2011; Giles 2014; Wilson and Yochim 2015). Our initial interest in bringing together critical reflections on Stephens’ book emerged from our inquiry into alternative models of feminine and feminist relationalities and the ways that metaphors of maternity and sorority have tended to dominate feminist