earth/endometrium
This is where we/I began.
This assemblage is a maifestary call to birth neuroqueer † , speculative extensions of (maternal) labour and (M)othering in future worlds (cyborg (M)others) † . This is a playful call for the cripping † , hacking, glitching † , neuroqueer’ing, co-opting and reimagining of hardware and software (and in turn, the worlds they build).
This is a call for maternal recoding (social and technological) and returning † …
Dreaming’s of and for technological emancipation (its potentials and problems) and the speculative reconfiguring of mothers, mothering and care within queer, feminist and posthuman studies are not new † nor are they claimed by this text. There are many writers, artists, activists, scientists, researchers and academics working through and within alternative modes and care and reproduction in the frameworks of transhumanism/commercialism, posthumanism, queer theory and feminist studies, each traveling from different ideological points of departure. As yet, there are none that have defined this critical inquiry as Post(M)other. The approach of this textural assemblage is to transversally bring together some of these inquiries and creative investigations, generatively planting seeds in their common ground – sprouting a call for a million micro actions of care and reimagining across a pink coded landscape † (a dreaming).
This text itself is a dreaming, it is both hardware and software, it is analogue and digital, and, it is text and textiles. It can be read linearly, through a sequence of chapters; earth/endometrium † , seed/ovum † , germination/gestation † , emergence/birth † , extend/live † and post index † . Each chapter contains a multitude of hyperlinks, diverging and returning, encouraging a folding in and folding out, non-linear reading of the work.
The hyperlinked elements extend the text out and through the digital, moving to analogue and back again: a coded weaving, a bearded iris † …
Each rhizomic increase, extends a stalk † to a (M)other reflection, a reference, a recipe, a historical note, a pop-cultural reference, a poetic entry, or an unfolding artwork: it is intertextual.
Each artwork is itself text and textiles, a coded imagining folded from the analogue into the digital; often a literal textile-tech creature or biomorphic form suspended in code, live and experiential, and, eventually taking you back to the original text, a mirror speaking to itself.
This is my Post(M)other.
You are invited to move through the work, producing your own assembled experience and pathway through the text, each encounter becoming a new birth, and self-directed path (life).
With the intention to move beyond imaginings and to create material change †, the manifesto contains a series of actions (extend/live), guided by Post(M)other declarations outlined in the germination/gestation chapter. Each action is a set of wings, open, allowing for individuated interpretation and methods, inviting you to intervene, to recode, world build, and, to co-opt or hack this very text, to create, play and imagine.
(genderless-daughterboards (cyborgs)).
As the unclaimed, however, this text is illegitimate. Illegitimate and playfully rebellious, holding the failings, limitations and erasures † of our feminist (M)otherboards. We take from their words only that which serves us † , that which continues to love, that which continues to imagine all that could be (in the spaces in-between).
The manifesto has long been a tool for the queer and the feminist, agitating for progressive social change and advocating for utopic counterpublics for the unseen and the illegitimate. Having many manifestary ancestors, mothers and siblings, this text emerged as manifesto (M)other.
The bracketed, delineation of the central concept of this text – (M)other – is a love letter to Others who Mother, a love letter to the (M)otherboards, philosophical (M)others who hold us, safe and nurtured as alien.
until we are fed.
Post(M)other is for the neuroqueer and Queer mothers, the crip mothers and the divergent mothers. It is for the fathers who mother, the mothers without children, the mothers that birth art and community, the mothers that care for our earth and non-human kin. It is for the mothers that still need mothering, those that do not want to be mothers and for those who do.
This text is an unfolding imagining, a neuroqueer, speculative extension of (maternal) labour and (M)othering in future worlds.
The central thesis of this text is that we shape and are shaped by our technologically mediated context and so, we, as (M)others must crip, hack, co-opt, rewild, rebuild, remember and re-code † MOTHER. (We cannot allow our worlds and our stories to be built by those that continue to uphold our collective oppression(s) (father).
While we may yearn for it, we cannot (all) run ‘back’ to the forests †.
We are technology and technology is us and of this earth † – the technological turn is a turn towards ourselves, we must birth utopic dreamings for the worlds technologies (we) construct.
‘It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories’ †
(Haraway, 2016, 12).
This manifesto is a call for the textural and technological neuroqueering of dominant (M)other narratives, claiming space for the alternative social realities technology can create, and worlds they can build. If the only imaginings that surround future technologies are founded in dominant/normative bodymind experiences, then those the world mark as alien other, will remain excluded (unmothered) in the future worlds technologies will construct.
This text is (my) part of contributing to the potentiality of future worlds that are soft and nurturing, reimagining modes of reproduction and care; meaningfully holding our othered, alien bodies and our more-than-human kin.
For the (M)others.