Maria Martelli

Multispecies tunes to making kin, not reproducing capitalism

            Per farla finita con la famiglia: dall’aborto alle parentele postumane, written by eco/cyborg/feminist researcher Angela Balzano, holds rhythms for the multispecies configurations that can get us out of the mess of an anthropocentric, patriarchal capitalism. How? By mixing theory with speculative fabulation and feminist technoscience – that’s how. It’s clear that theory alone can’t push us beyond precarious situations, technology can’t “fix” the climate crisis, and imagination can only see so far, but putting them all together might hold keys to doors that seem closed from where we are.

            Balzano starts from where she is, doing the feminist work of situating her knowledge – a precarious, yet middle-class researcher, in an urban space, from a westernized country. Written in Italian and published at Meltemi, in the “Radical Cultures” collection coordinated by Ippolita Group, the book is structured into three chapters, with an intro and an outro. From the beginning there is a force to it – the author starts by pointing out how reproduction “isn’t for everyone”, as the reproduction of some (such as heterosexual couples) is preferred to the reproduction of others (such as queer couples, racialized populations), and the reproduction of the human can be detrimental to the reproduction of the nonhuman. Infusing feminism into Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, she begins from the first historical action – the reproduction of life – and adding posthumanism to  Michel Foucault, she continues by looking at how biocapital isn’t solely human but bears “the posthuman face of the females of the species”.

            Other species participate in the work of reproducing the western human, not only by feeding him but by curing him as well. From here, resistance can start, because it is not that human who destroys everything in his wake that we want to reproduce. It’s not the homo economicus of the current, neoliberal capitalism. Balzano proposes something else, both a way of living and resisting: multispecies kin-making and re/productive degrowth! Because “care is for all earthlings or it is not care, it’s the illusion of an ephemeral privilege full of classism and speciesism.”

            Chapter one explores Italy’s history in matters of abortion and feminist legacy, chapter two critically looks at some posthumanist reproductive configurations, and chapter three storms towards the future with three slogans that imagine other families, not the nuclear, heteronormative one that is at the base of the reproduction of capitalism. Questioning how the woman’s body, and specifically, the uterus, came under regulation from nation-states in order to make – not babies, but – population is just the start. Currently, for neofundamentalist movements, a woman’s fertility is the nation’s fertility. Currently, we do not yet have the “pill” for (cis)men, though research has began more than twenty years ago. And currently, access to abortion is restricted on various bases, while access to fertility treatments is encouraged only for heterosexual couples. The future calls for something else – a world in which the desire to enact other sexualities and other (non)reproductive choices are celebrated, not restrained. And the question that unlocks this future, the question that arrives only later in the book, is this: how do we desire differently, in a way that doesn’t hurt the other?

            Balzano explains how the work of re/producing the human has been relegated to what is defined as other. The sapiens defined himself precisely as homo, male, and sapiens, rational, knowledgeable over others. Meanwhile, the female of the sapiens is a sister to the other mammals, the taxonomic class Carl Linnaeus (the „father of modern taxonomy”) named after the mammary glands. Balzano jokes that “biology is an enormous case of mansplaining”, but the joke turns sour as the bodies of women become places of men’s research and scientific discovery. This is why we need feminist technoscience, because neither nature, biology, nor science, are “given” or to be taken for granted.

            We only have to look at Rosita, the cow who was cloned so as to contain protein useful for human babies: she is the one onto which the costs of the reproduction of the human have been externalized, she is where they are the lowest, and least controversial. But the costs don’t rest only on the nonhuman animals, they stand on the shoulders of all those considered less-than the western human. The case of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman, shows just that – her cells were sourced during a biopsy and proved to be especially useful for research. Without her knowledge, parts of her became what is today the first and oldest immortalized human cell line, used in various scientific findings. She wasn’t considered “human enough” to be asked for consent, but her cells have been at the base of many discoveries, curing humans and saving nonhumans from being experimented on. The matter of the reproduction of life has never, in any case, been only human, and we cannot risk it becoming transhumanist, either. Why? Because “transhumanism is, really, only humanism” at maximum speed, growing the human beyond any limit, with no regard for the nonhuman.

            Feminist posthumanism can guide us instead, understanding bodyminds as together; being critical of, but not refusing technoscience; saying no to essentializing discourses over the human. Balzano proposes slogans to help us think – roughly translated as: “crossed legs, open borders”, “posthuman kin for the regeneration of the planet” and re/productive degrowth by “sexual self-determination against biocapital”. She states that the key question to guide the limit to growth shouldn’t really be around what is necessary to us, but rather “what do we produce that harms the other?”. Ultimately, it is about turning the table on re/production: to have productive work sustain reproductive work, not vice versa, as it currently is.  Quoting Picchio (2020), Balzano explains that worldwide, men do more paid work than women, but the total of paid work is less than the total of unpaid work! Equal distribution of labor among genders is not enough, even if it were possible – we need degrowth, not only of production and of productive work but of reproductive work as well. Because if reproductive degrowth doesn’t follow, “we’re fooled”, she says, as unpaid work will rise and will probably fall on the shoulders of those that are already marginalized, it will rest in the hands of the working class, the migrants, the non-whites. She proposes open borders and trans-species kin, stressing that this world is not pro-children, but rather pro-natality. Refusing to bear children, to her, is a refusal in the face of an Europe that would rather let refugees die than open its gates – the same Europe that slowly kills its citizens with heightened levels of pollution. This is not the uncritical antinatalist position leftists are used to facing, but something else entirely: self-determination for collective wellbeing, eco/cyborg/trans/feminism practiced against the human AND for the regeneration of the other.

            Angela Balzano begins this book by saying that “we will recognize ourselves among humans to betray ourselves as posthumans and discover ourselves as compostists”. The warm, rich matter of this compost in which we find theorists such as Haraway, Butler, Marx, Harding, Barad, Foucault, Picchio, Braidotti, Cooper, and mammalians too, cyborgs and clones, is what is dissolved to be re-made anew. “We are the future” beyond the human, for most of us are barely considered so, and all our kin certainly aren’t.