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The question "Where do we come from?" has fascinated philosophers, scientists, and artists for generations. This book reorients the question of the matrix as a place where everything comes from (chora, womb, incubator) by recasting it in terms of acts of "matrixial/maternal hospitality" that produce space and matter of / for the other. Systematic acknowledgment of the acts of making space and matter reintroduces the maternal role in generation and contributes to current debates in biomedicine, especially in theoretical biology, embryology, and reproductive immunology of the maternal-fetal interface. Building on and critically evaluating a wide range of historical and contemporary scholarship, Irina Aristarkhova applies her theoretical framework to the science, technology, and art of ectogenesis (artificial wombs and placentas; neonatal incubators; and male pregnancies). Her formulation of matrixial/maternal hospitality provides a framework for rethinking traditional concepts of space and generation and our ability to imagine ethically grounded relations between self and other. Her book relates to contemporary feminist theory and the philosophy of birth and generation and their figurations in biomedical sciences, technologies, and culture.
The question "Where do we come from?" has fascinated philosophers, scientists, and artists for generations. This book reorients the question of the matrix as a place where everything comes from (chora, womb, incubator) by recasting it in terms of acts of "matrixial/maternal hospitality" producing space and matter of and for the other. Irina Aristarkhova theorizes such hospitality with the potential to go beyond tolerance in understanding self/other relations. Building on and critically evaluating a wide range of historical and contemporary scholarship, she applies this theoretical framework to the science, technology, and art of ectogenesis (artificial womb, neonatal incubators, and other types of generation outside of the maternal body) and proves the question "Can the machine nurse?" is critical when approaching and understanding the functional capacities and failures of incubating technologies, such as artificial placenta. Aristarkhova concludes with the science and art of male pregnancy, positioning the condition as a question of the hospitable man and newly defined fatherhood and its challenge to the conception of masculinity as unable to welcome the other.
Faith Wilding, artist, Guggenheim Fellow, cofounder of subRosa, a cyberfeminist art collective, and professor emerita, School of the Art Institute of Chicago:Aristarkhova makes an original and fascinating contribution by spelling out the matrixial/maternal relation as a matter of hosting the other. She opens an alternative vision of self-other relations that redefines philosophical, technological, biomedical, and cultural/aesthetic vocabularies by challenging them to welcome the mother. Artists, thinkers, and scientists interested in the studies of generation, its matter and form, human-machine relation, and biomedical technologies will find this book indispensible and full of new ideas.
Susan Squier, author of Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine:Every feminist scholar interested in the spaces, practices, limits, and social meanings of motherhood will want to read this book. Irina Aristarkhova's erudite, intrepid exploration of the meaning of the matrix in philosophy, embryology, biomedicine, nursing, and performance art is a tour de force of feminist scholarship. Bringing together matter, mind, and new media, her book demonstrates how a full understanding of the matrix dramatically expands the meaning of hospitality itself.
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