TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

This paper discusses extra-utero reproduction in the context of automation and feminised protein. Almost all non-human mammals eat their placenta after giving birth, a practice known as placentophagy. Yoshizawa and Hird (2020) critiquing human exceptionalism by demonstrating how women request to keep their placenta and consume it through encapsulation is being ridiculed, disgust and worried by placenta scientists. Placentas, like eggs yolk, can be considered as feminised protein.

In the late 1980s, Carol J. Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat, coined the term “feminised protein”, pointing to domesticated female animals whose reproduction is controlled and managed to optimize the production of offspring and lactation for human consumption. Feminised protein, Adams writes, is taken from living female animals, whose reproductive capacity is manipulated for human needs. A consequence of the exploitation of female animals' reproductive cycles to produce food on a mass scale is that the majority of livestock grown on the farm are female. Agriculture, a predominantly male profession, tasks men with the ultimate care of non-human mothers.

The example of the non-human animal tells us that the industrialisation, mechanisation and automation of the reproductive system of the female animal did not, in fact, reduce the number of female bodies required in the process. On the contrary, making it “easier” to produce offspring, eggs, and milk requires more female bodies and their labour to meet the demand for their feminised proteins.

In our artistic project, we are exploring the artificial womb and its mechanical placenta. The legal, social, and ethical issues concerned with ex-utero technologies (AKA artificial womb) have been written upon quite extensively. For example, Elizabeth Chloe Romanis’s writings about the bioethical implications of Artificial Womb research; the likelihood of public and private eugenics were written about by Vera Lúcia Raposo, and much more. However, this paper purposefully takes a position which is beyond the anthropocentric case, with the hope to tease fresh discourses, counter to the human- centered techno-optimistic ones.

Taking an ecofeminist perspective, we argue that with acceleration of automation, we are creating a world of disembodied parts/organs producing monoculture yields; segregating parts rather than valuing a complex whole so they will fit into the continuous assembly line. Ex-utero technologies are only a part – a cog - of this ambition of automation utopia.