The Pregnant Posthuman: Hacking the modern human through fertility, natality, and giving birth.

To end the MFAAR guest speaker series this spring it is my pleasure to invite you to a lecture (and Q&A) by independent midwife and philosophy scholar Rodante Van der Waal.

Please join us on zoom;

Friday, February 11, 2022.

11am–12.30pm

zoom . https://lu-se.zoom.us/j/61295448494

Malmö Art Academy

The Pregnant Posthuman: Hacking the modern human through fertility, natality, and giving birth.

As the philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva (2007) theorizes, modern white humanity is established through its colonization of the world. With the start of Europe's large-scale colonial enterprises, people slowly became differentiated between European “universal” humans, recognizable by their whiteness, and “Europe’s others”, subaltern humans recognizable by their being of color. Insightful of the objective laws of nature and humanity, but himself occupying a transcendental position to those, the European human was constructed as the only one capable of self-determination (Silva 2007). “Europe’s others” in turn became characterized as being fully outer determined, i.e. not in possession of interiority, without self-consciousness and only knowable by the universal subject instead of by themselves (Silva 2007). Modern racialized people became hence incapable of truly “living” with their surroundings or living as themselves.

The question is, in Silva’s words, how we can “hack” this modern racialized human in favor of difference without separateness. In this lecture, it is argued that one possible way to do that is through a re-imagination of fertility, pregnancy, childbirth and natality.

This lecture will explore how our fecundity can be effectuated to transgress, and thus hack, our modern understanding of what it means to be human in order to arrive at a pregnant post humanness that can live in difference without separation.

Rodante van der Waal (she/her) has a BA in midwifery and a BA and rMA (cum laude) in philosophy. She works as an independent midwife in Amsterdam and is a PhD-student at the University of Humanistic Studies, Utrecht. In her PhD-study, she investigates obstetric violence from the perspectives of feminism, postcolonial theory, and care-ethics. She is the producer of the ongoing podcast series Contractions on the politics of midwifery and is part of the Critical Midwifery Studies collective.

criticalmidwiferystudies.wordpress.com/

rodantevanderwaal.com/

I much look forward to a lively event.

Ellinor Lager

www.ellinorlager.com