Gestational Communism (and Real-Life Parenting)
Mary Harrison - Feminism Against Progress, Diary of a Parent of Four, and (very exciting!) Gardening Update
Reading - Mary Harrington, Feminism Against Progress
After writing my post last week, I decided it was ridiculous to try to read nine books at once (I actually remembered a tenth subsequently), so I’ve decided to focus on just two or three (or perhaps four at the most). One of the books I have to finish in the next couple of weeks (because I’m interviewing her) is Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress. I’m very much enjoying this book. Harrington is sympathetic to the concerns of progressive feminists but nevertheless incisively critical of many of their ideas and this, not least, because her own experience of liquid post-patriarchal feminism and, subsequently, motherhood have changed her perspective. It’s helpful to hear. As a father, all I can do is observe the whole process. I cannot feel it, cannot experience it or incarnate myself into it. I can understand what it must be like and I can feel something of the same by analogy. But I know that my experience as a father is different to my wife’s as a mother.
The biological symbiosis that exists between a mother and child is mind-blowing. “Foetal microchimerism” refers to the phenomenon of a baby’s DNA remaining in a woman’s body after birth and helping to repair it. Traces of baby DNA can be found in women’s scar tissue and, in one case, was demonstrated to have helped rebuild the lobe of a woman’s liver.1 As a father I will never be able to understand such a thing. I know that my children are my children, but they are my wife’s in a very different way. This book has helped me to see that.
This book has also introduced me to the world of Marxist post-modern feminism, which is by turns concerning and very amusing. At one point, Harrington talks (gently, but critically) about a Marxist feminist called Sophie Lewis who considers the biological apparatus of reproduction to be “bourgeois” and argues for the liquefaction of all loyalties grounded in blood kinship which she characterises as perpetuating unjust capitalist structures of oppression.2
This can be achieved by replacing the natural understanding of motherhood with,
…a provisional, de-gendered, denatured, often marginalised or otherwise ambiguous surrogate role of ‘gestator’. The endgame is ‘gestational communism’: a world where babies are not the particular obligation of family units, but ‘universally thought of as anybody and everybody’s responsibility’.
Mary Harrington, Feminism Against Progress, p.118
Wow, who wouldn’t want to go through nine month of hellish discomfort and become a mother (or a ‘surrogate gestator’) on those terms? And who wouldn’t want to hand their children over to the state to be owned by it and to become “everybody’s responsibility”? What delusional ravings people are willing to entertain in the pursuit of their goal of freedom from all constraints, even those which are imposed which such stringency by nature herself. And what wilful blindness they employ in imagining that somehow the state (of all things!) might be able to sort out all of this…especially given its far-from-ideal record of being entrusted with much less precious (albeit still significant) resources. Just amazing.
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