Overview

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.

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9781322537719

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original and thought-provoking...--Luna Dolezal Hospitality and Society (01/01/0001)

Author Information

Irina Aristarkhova is associate professor of women's studies and visual art at Pennsylvania State University, University Park. She edited and contributed to the volume Woman Does Not Exist: Contemporary Studies of Sexual Difference and to the Russian translation of Luce Irigaray's An Ethics of Sexual Difference.

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