Other Mothers:
Toward an Ethic of Postmaternal Practice

In this essay, I join with those who consider conflict within feminism a source of its power to transform everyday experience. The particular conflict I focus on here is about new reproductive practices -- commercial contract pregnancy and the "new" reproductive technologies--and their implications for women in general and for feminism in particular.¹ These practices produce what I call "Other Mothers," positions within the discursive domain of motherhood that serve simultaneously and paradoxically to deconstruct, reconfigure, and reproduce precisely those features of maternal practice that feminism has identified as problematic for women.² By an ironic recasting of these positions, I hope to dislodge the terms into which the conflict over the new reproductive practices has settled. The rhetorical strategy that I use to launch my argument assumes chat moving feminism forward requires an imaginative appropriation of spaces in which it is most unlikely to dwell. As a deliberately perverse strategy, it stands at odds with, but remains fully appreciative of, the character of feminist debate in this domain.³

Motherhood is a well-known mine field for women, and so it is for feminism also -- beset as motherhood is with social, material, and symbolic contradictions. Those contradictions have served to cast motherhood as a source of, alternatively, dangerous subordination and transformative potential. For example, on one hand, Jeffner Allen, who sees all motherhood as dangerous and coercive, calls for its "evacuation" by women, who are otherwise condemned to annihilation (1984). Sara Ruddick (1982) and Carol Gilligan (1982), on the other hand, turn to maternal practices as a source of transformative resistance to the destructive values and habits of patriarchal culture. In discussing Other Mothers, I will attempt to negotiate carefully between these two feminist impulses regarding motherhood. The tension between them, rather than negate the possibility of arriving at an ethics of maternal practice, enables an ethics that recognizes the unstable and shifting ground on which maternal practices take place. Faced with a contradiction, I want to do the impossible: to locate positive transformational activity in its negative space.⁴

it is surely no surprise that the current preoccupation with the "backlash" against feminism should be accompanied by a wariness within feminism about embracing, even celebrating, its internal conflicts. The image of feminism as a seamless ideology has been cultivated for use in particular political contexts -- it was called up, for example, to ensure that Anita Hill was understood as making more than a simple and singular complaint about a guy who was, after all, helping her become one of the boys. It is called up every time the Supreme Court gets its hands on Roe v. Wade. But the pressure -- in the face of the media's use of backlash as an antidote to the inevitability and cynicism of mainstream politics -- to enunciate first principles, to discover some platonic form of feminism, or woman, in which we all participate, should be resisted. Conflict within feminism is a function of the specificity of its concerns, practices, and knowledges. As Teresa de Lauretis reminds us, "Feminism defines itself as a political instance, not merely a sexual politics, but a politics of experience, of everyday life, which later then in turn enters the public sphere of expression and creative practice, displaces aesthetic hierarchies and generic categories, and which thus establishes the semiotic ground for a different production of reference and meaning" (de Lauretis 1986, 10).

This reminder occurs in the process of de Lauretis's effort to refocus feminism in response to what emerged in the 1980s as a generalized feminist panic over subjectivity. The panic -- a collective identity crisis -- was the result of a threat posed by identity politics and by antihumanism to the myth of a unified subject of feminism. As Nancy Miller puts it, "feminist theory had arrived at a crisis in language, a crisis notably inseparable from the pronouns of subjectivity: between the indictment of the feminist universal as a white fiction brought about by women of color and the poststructuralist suspicion of a grounded subject, what are the conditions under which as feminists one (not to say 'i') can say 'we'?" (Miller 1991, 75).

The uneasy relation of gender to "other" differences required a reevaluation, not only of subjectivity itself, but of the role of difference itself in the feminist project. Audre Lorde insisted then on the productivity of difference and on the dangers of its erasure.

Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. For difference must be not merely tolerated, but as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways to actively "be" in the world generate, as well as the courage and the sustenance to act where there are no charters. (Lorde 1983, 99)

But it is important to remember, on the heels of a lot of talk about subjectivity, that feminism is about, has always been about, the material and social body. Rescuing the body from violence and oppression -- both representational and material -- remains a central feminist project. But if the subject of feminism must now be seen as heterogeneous, multiple, self-contradictory, then what of the body of feminism? What son of body can evade both the dangers of male domination and those of a feminism that overdetermines it as a product of that domination? It is with the body in mind that I now enter the debates over Other Motherhood.

II.

New reproductive technologies are the vehicle that will turn men's illusions of reproductive control into a reality. By manipulating eggs and embryos, scientists will determine the sort of children who are born -- will make themselves the fathers of humankind. By removing eggs and embryos from some women and implanting them in others, medical practitioners will gain unprecedented control over motherhood itself. Motherhood as a unified biological process will be effectively deconstructed: in place of "mother" there will be ovarian mothers who supply eggs, uterine mothers who give birth to children, and, presumably, social mothers who raise them. Through the eventual development of artificial wombs, the capacity may arise to make biological motherhood redundant... The object and effect is to deconstruct motherhood and to destroy the claim to reproduction that is the foundation of women's identity. (Stanworth 1990, 289)

First, reproductive technologies are both highly invasive and remarkably unsuccessful. The Sunday Times Magazine (15 March 1992) recounted the extraordinary measures to which women are subjected, over and over again, once they have been enlisted in IVF, GIFT, etc. programs. In contrast to the men, who are simply required to deposit sperm in a clean jar a few times, women in these programs take powerful hormonal drugs, often by injection, to induce superovulation. Eggs are "retrieved" transvaginally and then replaced, once fertilized, into their uteruses or fallopian tubes. A woman must spread her legs repeatedly before the ultrasound machine (invented for use in submarine warfare), have blood taken from her arm over and over again, spread her legs once more for the re-insertion procedure. In exchange for the physical trauma induced by these procedures, and the psychological trauma of waiting, a woman is most likely to find herself, at the end of all of this, with a negative pregnancy test. In some cases, the situation is complicated by the fact that the woman cannot herself produce any eggs and so must use "donor" eggs, namely, those of some other woman who agrees to go through the egg extraction process in place of her. The exploitation of one woman in the service of the exploitation of another simply underscores the extent to which male dominated medicine will go in the name of the pronatalist regime in which it is a central player.

While the women interviewed in the Times article see themselves as driven by the simple desire to have a successful pregnancy, a desire that has no possibility of fulfillment in the absence of these technologies, the Corea/Raymond position is that the desire itself must be seen as a product of coercive social values and practices. If motherhood were a choice and not a compulsion, and if science and medicine were not so reflective of prevailing social relations, then these technologies would never gain a foothold in the matrix of women's procreative desires.

This feminist opposition to the new reproductive practices grounds itself on a terrain of coercion, compulsion, and overdetermined desire, though in the case of contract pregnancy, the specter of abusive technology must be bracketed, for it can be accomplished with nothing more technologically sophisticated than a syringe. In addition, contract pregnancy enlarges the cast of characters participating in the drama, for within its bounds, doctors are joined by lawyers to ensure that the father's seed finds fertile ground According to Andrea Dworkin, contract pregnancy is exactly modeled on prostitution -- the would-be patriarch chooses from the lawyer pimp's stable of reproductive whores that one who can best fulfill his manly needs. The image of the stable suggests as well the factory farm that Dworkin introduces as an alternative model: woman-as-cow, destined to live her life as nothing more than an incubator for patriarchy's perverse desires. Contract pregnancy pits the infertile woman and her failure against the fertile woman whose only claim to identity lies in having His fruit in her womb. Once again, one woman is exploited in the service of the exploitation of the other; for once His child is born, His masculinity affirmed, He will pass the child over to His wife, thereby ensuring her maternal enslavement. Dworkin's opposition to surrogacy, like her opposition to pornography, is based on her view that male domination produces women as its victims and so overdetermines their subjectivity.

As ideology, motherhood is itself embedded within the ideology of the family, which is, in turn, embedded in the ideology of capitalism. Given the faltering nature of each of these ideologies, feminist attempts to extract motherhood from its present ideological context are bound to find themselves intertwined with conservative rescue efforts. Opposition to the new reproductive practices has come from those quarters as well. Concerns about the commodification of children and body parts are based on a nostalgic dream that places the family outside the public sphere of capitalist production -- a haven in the heartless world. And in spite of their potential to increase the ranks of Catholics, the Pope sees surrogacy and reproductive technologies as assaults on nature and God's will. Technological intervention is an act of hubris, a transgression against God's way of doing things. According to the Pope, surrogate motherhood, even more violative, "represents an objective failure to meet the obligations of maternal love, of conjugal fidelity and of responsible motherhood; it offends the dignity and the right of the child to be conceived, carried in the womb, brought into the world and brought up by his own parents; it sets up, to the detriment of families, a division between the physical, psychological, and moral elements which constitute those families" (New York Times, 11 March 1987).

The vocal feminist opposition to contract pregnancy, often less hyperbolic than that of Dworkin, coalesced around the Baby M case. As the case unfolded, and in its aftermath, an avalanche of work emerged that defended Mary Beth Whitehead's desire to keep the child that she had borne. Much of that work reinscribed, within a feminist context, the conservative charge of "unnaturalness" against contract pregnancy. Pregnancy, embodied as it is, establishes a relationship between a woman and a baby, and it is in virtue of that bond chat the baby is first and foremost hers and not His. Although feminist opposition to contract pregnancy helped fuel the televisual dramatization of the Baby M case, there were, of course, feminists, myself among them, who were not sure what to think. Janice Doane and Devon Hodges locate the conflicted response in the failure of binarism any longer to account for the realities of what we saw before us:

Feminists have sensed for some time the difficulty of placing themselves on one side of the debate between nature and nurture, or between individual rights and the social order, or even between men and women. The tangle of the Baby M Case dramatizes the breakdown of oppositions that have long worked against women not simply by restricting women's lives but by masking economic and social conditions that make us long for the nostalgic ideal of the family. (Doane and Hodges 1989, 76-77)

But if there is considerable agreement among feminists about the general context of contract pregnancy, as is the case with pornography, there has remained considerable dis-ease among some feminists about whether Mary Beth's (or Linda's) fate was its only possible outcome. To grant that heterosexist, patriarchal, phallocentric culture operates to the detriment of women may nevertheless leave open the question whether it overdetermines any movement within its field, whether its account of women's subjectivity and of sexual difference, when reconstructed from within a feminist theory of victimization, leaves women with only one recourse: to use against it its own mechanisms of prohibition. Insisting that the new reproductive practices (and pornography) be outlawed forecloses the possibility that those very practices might themselves become sites of resistance as they are reclaimed and reinscribed within a transgressive feminist economy.

III.

In what for me proved to be the inspirational sequence, two women sitting on a piano bench, tell the story of their pregnancy with the sort of disingenuous duplicity that might accompany a story about being the only girl on the soccer team who nevertheless scores the winning goal. The film's tone of happy domesticity is at odds with the subversive details of this couple's reproductive journey: one of them drives to the friendly sperm donor's house and returns with a (clean) marinated artichoke jar of semen which she has kept warm between her thighs on the drive home. Even the syringe that they use for the insemination is wrested from the medical economy and reinscribed within the domestic by their invocation of the now classic trope of the turkey baster.⁷

This filmic narrative succeeded in restoring my faith in practices that evade the strictures of reproduction as usual. Unless we simply write off motherhood entirely as antithetical to the feminist project, we have to worry about the hubris of an analysis that reduces women's "desire" to mother to nothing more than the (unconscious) desire to enlist in the patriarchal infantry. In the media coverage of the Baby M case, it emerged that William Stem was referred to as Mr. Sperm, a name that lays bare the ground on which paternity constructs its gigantic self -- little sperm, Big Father. But in the context of Choosing Children the synecdoche suggests its own displacement, for there is nothing more to fatherhood than what's in the jar.⁸

IV.

It is only if we see the heterosexist sexual economy as fixed and totalizing, as determining once and for all the symbolic domain within which we imagine the deployment of alternatives to "natural" motherhood, that reproductive technology and contract pregnancy emerge as antithetical to the feminist project of reconstructing sexual difference for women. This way of thinking is a product of what Monique Wittig refers to as the "straight mind," so that even in that (feminist) case where gender is seen as socially and not naturally produced, where culture pervades and so displaces nature, "there remains within that culture a core of nature that defies examination, a relationship excluded from the social in the analysis--a relationship whose characteristic is its ineluctability in culture, as well as nature, (and that is) the obligatory social relation between 'man' and 'woman' " (Wittig 1980, 107).

There are several dimensions in which the new reproductive practices serve to disrupt the natural heterosexual logic of reproductive sexuality. On the one hand, both practices push men to the sexual periphery. Heterosexual sex is rendered extraneous to the process. In an ironic reversal of the familiar reduction of woman to uterus, the man becomes his penis, reduced to a position of pure instrumentality. As Alan, an IVF participant, put it in his interview with the Times reporter, "I suppose on some level it might have been comforting to watch the embryo transfer. But be realistic ... Even if I was there, I was going to be excluded. My involvement consisted of weekly deposits into a plastic cup" (New York Times, 15 March 1992). On the other hand, the visualization of the eggs on the ultrasonic video screen and the circulation of the eggs from the woman to the laboratory and back relocate pregnancy from its mystified and privatized place inside a woman's body and so serve to interrupt the Beauvoirian drama in which the embryo is both part of the woman and parasitic upon her (Beauvoir 1974, 553). Sitting in a petri dish, the embryo does not depend on the woman for survival: she could give it to someone else, maybe even to another woman, maybe even to a lesbian.

Finally, the interruption of the "natural" processes of embryonic development -- the production of different maternal positions within the discourse of motherhood -- suggestsprecisely the deconstruction of motherhood, which otherwise is fixed in relation to its origination in the heterosexual contract. It is no longer His homuncular doppelgaenger, deposited in her womb, and so it is not then singularly hers but is rather multiply theirs--where they are the Other Mothers of a female symbolic order. By belonging to Other Mothers, mothers who need have no relation to Him within the terms of the heterosexual contract, the resulting child fractures its binary logic. A maternal subject of feminism emerges here: a heteronomous subject who is strategically positioned against the unifying discourses of "natural" motherhood, and whose multiple embodiment(s) (and the embodiments of their offspring) call up Donna Haraway's perverse cyborgian possibilities. A hybrid of machine and organism, a cyborg "is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence.... Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for the appropriation of the other.... The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential" (Haraway 1991, 151).

In suggesting a rereading of reproductive technology within a register that resists the terms of the male symbolic order, I am assuming the possibility of locating utopian moments within a set of practices that are surely designed to maintain that order's hold over the production of meaning in the field of sexual difference. By arguing in this way, that is, by resisting the impulse toward a dialectical resolution of the contradictions both within the ideologies of motherhood and within feminist discourse about them, I do not mean to dismiss the real difficulty of constructing a maternal ethic within the reality of "biopower." Rosi Braidotti reflects on the more general problem of reclaiming feminism from what she calls "organs without bodies" that create false symmetries between men and women -- just exchange body parts until men can do everything that women can do, thereby eliminating sexual difference, and so women, altogether.⁹ For Braidotti, the elimination of sexual difference before women have affirmed the positivity of difference is to write them out of the picture by appropriation, elimination, or homologization. She raises a number of important questions that lie behind my own attempt to move toward a strategic maternal ethic: The fundamental lack of symmetry between the sexes needs therefore to be reasserted as the basis for a postmodern ethics that would take into account "organs without bodies" as the basic element in our own historicity, while rejecting its perverse edge. The question for feminist practice then becomes: What values do we posit, starting from this position? What is the ethics of sexual difference (Irigaray, Speculum)? How can one judge as "perverse" the interchangeability of organs, without referring to a naturalistic paradigm...? Furthermore, insofar as fragmentation and disqualification from the position of the subject are part of the historical heritage of women, how far and how fast can feminist theory propose a new form of bodily materiality, a sexual-specific reading of the totality of the bodily self? I fear, in fact, that the dislocation of sexual differences, the new hiatus between reproduction and sexuality, and the biotechnical appropriation of reproduction and sexuality occur precisely at the time in history when women have explicitly demanded the political control over their body and their sexuality. (Braidotti 1989, 158)

Without answering each of these questions, I am suggesting a strategy that locates their answer on precisely the terrain that Braidotti finds most dangerous, namely, within the sphere of the very practices that threaten women's identity either by reinscribing motherhood within a commodified naturalism or by extinguishing it in the interchange of "organs without bodies." Braidotti's remark about the co-temporaneity of women's demand for reproductive control and the ascendance of reproductive technology suggests to me that we reconsider feminist anxiety about reproductive technology and contract pregnancy in light of the long-standing feminist commitment to contraception and abortion in the name of control over reproduction. The studies conducted by Kristin Luker (1984) and Faye Ginsburg (1989) confirm that, for pro-life women, abortion itself represents a threat to their very identity as women. The tendency to dismiss their anxieties about motherhood as being nothing more, or less, than a product of male-generated pronatalism, sits in uneasy alliance with the feminist defense of Mary Beth Whitehead's change of heart. Once again, we find ourselves within a contradiction whose invitation to resolution must be resisted.¹⁰ If contraception and abortion are seen as necessary to bodily control precisely because they disrupt a patriarchally and papally determined "nature and God's will," and if they are not seen by feminists as foreclosing the possibility of reinscribing maternal practices within a feminist economy, then why the tendency to view reproductive technologies and contract pregnancy as doing so?¹¹ Coming at this question from a different direction, Michele Stanworth suggests that we consider feminist anxiety about the dangers posed to motherhood by reproductive technology and surrogacy by reference to, as Linda Gordon puts it, "a loss of mothering, in the symbolic sense" (Gordon 1982, 51). The discourses of law, medicine, and commodification within which these practices inhere threaten to negate those aspects of motherhood that have (albeit sometimes far too romantically) marked it, for feminists, as a distinct and protected domain of positive connection. But this move simply serves to fix motherhood within precisely that domain of sexual difference -- the difference of Man from Woman, the Oedipal difference -- that, I suggested in my discussion of de Lauretis, feminism must resist, despite the fact that it is always there, ready to wear. The symbolic loss identified by Gordon must be recast, then, within a different domain of difference. On pain of condemning ourselves to naturalized reproduction that holds us to the heterosexist contract wherein Man and Woman couple to produce His child, we are compelled to find within alternative reproductive practices those moments that might produce Other Mothers -- other forms of female subjectivity within another, emergent symbolic order.

V.

One data point occurs within the context of a story about Peter and Carol, a married couple who entered a surrogate contract with Dee. The story, told in Diana Frank and Marta Vogel's book The Baby Makers (1988), contains the usual unsettling details about people looking through a book at the Hagar Agency in order to select the "perfect" surrogate. Carol and Peter pick Dee for the usual inscrutable reasons. There is a lot of contract signing, of psychological and medical testing. During the course of the subsequent nine months, Dee and Carol maintain a close correspondence by phone and letter. Carol says of Dee, "We felt pretty connected. Dee is a very warm, open person, and we immediately became good friends." Peter remains extraneous to their relationship. Carol says, "Peter would tack on a little note at the end of the letter. He sort of wanted to be a part of it, wanted to be involved, but the teal emotional involvement was between Dee and me" (Frank and Vogel 1988, 141) Frank and Vogel provide the following glimpse of the nature of Dee and Carol's relationship:

The pregnancy progressed normally and with the usual discomfort for Dee. "There were probably some days when I was throwing up and thought, 'Why couldn't it be her instead of me [doing this] but knowing that she had done everything possible to do this for herself, I never felt any resentment."

"I probably had a lot of needless concerns about the pregnancy," admits Carol. "Like once Dee wrote that she had a bad cold, and I immediately worried about that, and she had a cat so I worried about toxoplasmosis. Once I wrote to ask about her diet."

Dee wrote to Carol faithfully and sent pictures of her stomach in profile. "I always wanted Carol to feel as involved as possible. I even told her to close her eyes and imagine real hard what I was feeling and she would feel it, too. In one of my letters, I told her to put a volleyball under her shirt and try to shave her legs, because that's what I felt like when I was in the shower." (Frank and Vogel 1988, 142)

The other atom of data occurs in the context of Judith N. Lasker and Susan Borg's In Search of Parenthood (1989), a book that presents the new reproductive practices as natural answers to the natural desire of middle-class people to reproduce themselves. The story is about Lisa, Alex, and Sarah, the woman Lisa and Alex hired as their surrogate mother-to-be. In this case, their relationship began with an unsuccessful attempt at insemination, recounted by Sarah: "It was all very odd. Lisa came with him and she and I are sitting there chatting in the waiting room while Alex goes in the bathroom. He comes out with the stuff and then I go in the other room to have it inseminated. Then we all leave on the elevator together just like this is an everyday occurrence" (Lasker and Borg 1989, 81). When they were ready to start again, Lisa decided that she wanted "her" baby conceived in a more "personal" environment, and that, after all, the necessary technology amounted to nothing more than a "store-bought syringe." As she put it: "We invited her to our house for a few days and I helped her do it several times. She and I would just lay on my bed and put up our feet together and just talk for an hour. It's so special that our baby was actually conceived in our bed" (Lasker and Borg 1989, 83).

Lasker and Borg interviewed Lisa halfway through "the" pregnancy: "I'm really very glad though that the baby's in her uterus and not mine. It would be dead if it were in my body, and so there's really a feeling of relief and trusting her body over mine" (Lasker and Borg 1989, 83).

Where was Alex in all of this? According to Lasker and Borg, "Alex dealt with his anxiety by trying to be more detached. It didn't help that he was uncomfortable with the whole idea." Alex put it this way:

I still would rather it be Lisa carrying my baby, and sometimes I get angry at Sarah for not being Lisa.... In some ways it would have been easier if we didn't meet her.... It's more difficult than just renting a womb, so to speak. And she needs a lot of attention ...-- if Lisa doesn't call one week, Sarah starts to wonder what's going on. (Lasker and Borg 1989, 84)

Whenever I had any maternal feelings toward the baby, like when it first started to move, I would call up Lisa and talk it through with her. That way I just transferred those feelings to Lisa. I never felt this was my baby.... When I started pushing, Lisa was pushing with me. There were tears in her eyes when she saw the baby's head... The nurse told me that she had been on the labor floor twenty five years and never in those twenty-five years had she ever witnessed such love in the delivery of a baby... The hardest part was saying good bye to them.... I had a much harder time saying goodbye to Lisa than to the baby because I had such an intensely close relationship with her. (Lasker and Borg 1989, 85)

By reading these stories against the grain, by refusing to take their meaning as fixed by the reproductive economy that claims to own them, I hope to suggest ways in which feminist discussions of the new reproductive practices might turn to the totality of everyday life and so to the specificity of the processes by means of which subjectivity is constructed. Indeed, my reading of these stories calls up a radically different -- even counter-intuitive -- interpretive context, namely, the feminist practices of the Milan Bookstore Collective, as presented in their book Sexual Difference (1990). My invocation of the collective's self-consciously constructed feminist process is merely a ploy to suggest the proto-feminism that I wish to locate in the emblematic stories of Carol and Dee, and Sarah and Lisa.

For the collective, feminist practice is located in a relationship between women that they call "entrustment," a relationship that is based on the affirmation of disparities -- in class or social position, level of education, age, etc. -- between them. The collective hopes to forge a reconfiguration of sexual difference, and so a restructuring of social relations, within what they referred to as a "female symbolic," not in spite of the disparities between women but because of them. The familiar feminist ideal of equality among women is rooted in the masculine ideal of ungendered justice, which absorbs female difference into "a system of neutral measures" (Milan Bookstore Collective 1990, 133). The emergence of the female subject -- a subject who could be a source of its own action -- depends on its having been first authorized outside and against the confines of masculine authority invested in God, the Father, the State. The relationship of entrustment enables the alliance "between the woman who wants and the woman who knows" (148) and is authorized by the formation of a symbolic bond evoked by the power of the maternal figure -- a woman who is greater, in some respect, than oneself. Within a relation of disparity -- where one woman wants what another has -- entrustment requires mutual valorization: "Authority is received originally from another human being who is in a position to give it, who has the authority to give it. But she cannot have it if the person who needs to receive it does not acknowledge it in her" (126). Transferred to the relationships between Carol and Dee, and Sarah and Lisa, this notion of entrustment provides a way out of the traps into which feminist analysis has placed them. It honors the desires--for pregnancy, for children, for money, for giving gifts to other women--that these women variously appear to have. And it effects a displacement of the exploitative relationships of gender, class, and social position that otherwise determine our understanding of contract pregnancy.¹³

I have, it must be said, serious reservations about invoking the self-consciously produced critical practices of the Milan Collective within a context that differs quite radically from those within which they are intended to function. In addition, I have reservations about the collective's apparent assumptions about the fixity of patriarchal law and the invariability of the social conditions produced by it. Yet, in enunciating the transgressive possibilities of an alliance among women that marshals their disparities in the service of initiating another symbolic order (and so perhaps another set of maternal practices), the collective provides a discursive medium within which we might begin to understand the pervasive cultural anxiety and ambivalence about alternative reproductive practices. Read with the grain, those practices are accorded the potential either to enslave women yet again or to render them entirely insignificant. Read against the grain, they suggest instead the limits of men's sexual significance, and so the possibility of a maternal symbolic order in which the mother and the maternal body are multiple and heterogeneous, no longer fully vested by Man in collusion with Nature.

I urge that we accept both readings, that we allow their contradictions to exist in productive tension. Seen as tiny acts of transgressive alliance through entrustment (however unconscious), the relationships between Dee and Carol, and between Lisa and Sarah, provide a glimpse of the ways in which feminism (however partially) can reinscribe itself within the social order and, in doing so, displace male authority to set the terms of sexual difference. The proliferation of maternal positions within the discursive field of motherhood need not be seen, by feminists, as signaling inevitable and pervasive danger. Rather, as I have argued, this proliferation deranges the founding binarisms of man and woman, mind and body, nature and culture, that set the terms of reproduction under the heterosexual contract. This is precisely the moment to call up de Lauretis's reminder that feminism, as a politics of everyday life, provides "the semiotic ground for a different production of reference and meaning" (de Lauretis 1986, 10). Other Mothers possess, indeed, just that "multiple, shifting, often self-contradictory identity ... made up of heterogeneous and heteronomous representations of gender, race and class," are just those subjects "not divided in, but rather at odds with language" (de Lauretis 1986, 9) whom we must see as the emerging subjects of feminism.

Notes

1. The terms "contract birthgiver" or "contract pregnancy" are seen as preferable to "surrogate motherhood" because the latter carries with it precisely the implication that birthgiving and motherhood are inextricably intertwined. It also obscures the legal and market aspects of the practice. The politics of this terminology are intelligently discussed by Laura Purdy (1994). On the other hand, since much of the material that I discuss makes use of the surrogacy vocabulary, I sometimes revert to it myself. And while it is clear, for example, that contract pregnancy and In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) are practices that have different histories, consequences, and possibilities, I sometimes lump contract pregnancy and the "new" technologies together by means of the term "new reproductive practices."
2. Rosalie Riegle Troester (1986) uses the term "othermothers" to denote adult women who help mediate the intensity of the relationship between black "bloodmothers" and their daughters by exemplifying alternative values and possibilities, and by providing girls with emotional support and release. Troester offers a reading of Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones that revolves around this concept of "othermothers." Patricia Hill Collins finds theoretical uses for he concept in her analysis of child-caring practices and norms within African American communities. On the one hand, she traces the custom of community-based child care to its West African origins. On the other, she sees it as a reflection of "functional adaptations to race and gender oppression" (Collins 1991, 119). I began to use the term without knowledge of Troester's coinage or Collins's use of it. I now see it as encompassing maternal practices that serve, at the theoretical level, to dislodge and to complicate the assumption that blood and birth fix the position of the mother in elation both to children and to fathers. Clearly, much should be done to differentiate the Other Motherly practices that I am concerned to identify and those of Troester's and Collins's othermothers. Othermothers and Other Mothers gain whatever subversive, revolutionary potential they have in relation to an ideologically saturated conception of motherhood, but they do so differently. Different others may generate different other mothers.
3. That is, this essay is not intended to engage in the usual way either feminist debates about the new reproductive practices or the deliberations of individuals who are considering whether or not to use them. While it makes no claim to answer familiar questions about contract pregnancy and reproductive technology, it does hope to effect a reconsideration of the interpretive register within which those questions have been asked and answered. My work is motivated by the undoubtedly perverse desire, as Donna Haraway puts it, "to work from the most dangerous place, not to locate oneself outside but inside the belly of the monster" (Penley and Ross 1991, 6).
4. Valerie Hartouni (1991) provides a compelling case for this strategy:

It is difficult to see in the regressive and reactionary character of this decade's discourse on reproduction anything remotely resembling alternative, liberatory possibilities. Throughout much of the decade, those of liberal, left, and feminist political commitments have together scrambled merely to defend "women's rights" against a continuous onslaught of legislative, judicial, and medical incursions and have been forced moreover toward a range of narrowly construed and often confused political responses and settlements. Within the terms, boundaries, categories, and codings of this decade's discourse on reproduction, political possibility has indeed seemed drastically circumscribed. But read differently, read symptomatically, the sheer and concentrated attention directed throughout the decade toward disciplining and managing women's bodies and lives -- the fierce and frantic iteration of conventional meanings and identities in the context of technologies and techniques that render them virtually unintelligible -- signals, among other things, the profound instability and vulnerability of privileged narratives about who and what "we" are. What looks like the narrowing of possibilities from one angle betokens their presence and proliferation from another. (Hartouni 1991, 51)

Jana Sawicki's critique (1991) of feminist opposition to the new reproductive practices operates, I think, within the scope of Hartouni's reminder that what sometimes looks like a duck can at other times appear as a rabbit.
5. The opposition that I am concerned to characterize is epitomized variously by the work of Janice Raymond (1993), Gena Corea (1986), and Phyllis Chesler (1988). Though the emphases of their respective positions differ somewhat, they share the conviction that capitalist patriarchal control of law, medicine, and technology overwhelm any benefit that the new reproductive practices might have for individual women. Barbara Katz Rothman (1989) adds to this a concern that the fragmentation of motherhood effected by these practices subverts important maternal values that are crucial to women's identity and to social well-being. In focusing on this oppositional trajectory, I do not intend to ignore or undervalue criticisms that highlight other worrisome aspects of the new reproductive practices, e.g., that they ate designed principally to benefit higher class white women, that they direct attention to the infertility of such women to the exclusion of women of color whose rates of infertility are in fact far higher, that they raise for African American women the symbolic and material specter of motherhood under slavery. A broad range of perspectives on the new reproductive practices can be found in Holmes (1994).
6. In taking this approach, I intend to invoke a tradition in feminist writing that ranges science-fictionally from Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1979), through Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), to Octavia Butler's Dawn (19870), and theoretically from Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex (1970) to Donna Haraway's cyborgs and the possibilities that they occasion in the work of, e.g., Kathleen Biddick. Biddick adopts a strategy not unlike my own (though with different material) in imagining answers to these questions, "Can distributed maternity appear only as the effect of oppressive institutions and technologies? Can we imagine distributed procreation as transformative and productive of differences? Can a history of the future be written on the fetal cyborg, a history to displace oppression (Biddick 1993, 171-2)
7. I recommend a concurrent viewing of Choosing Children and Three Men and a Baby. Tania Modleski's renaming of the latter "Three Men and Baby M" ( 1991) suggests an analogous renaming of the former "Two Women and Some Warm Semen."
8. By invoking lesbian reproductive practices as a counter to the specter of technological tyranny, I do not mean to ignore the fact that, as presently constituted, IVF, GIFT, etc. programs are readily available only to heterosexual couples, married ones at that. But even the primitive technology of the "turkey baster" used in this case suggests the possibility of the productive disorganization of heterosexual reproductive practices, as I will shortly argue in more detail.
9. Though she does not cite Deleuze and Guattari, I assume that Braidotti intends her "organs without bodies" as a threatening reversal of their "bodies without organs" and as such locates the argument on the terrain of the anti-anti-Oedipus. How is that not Oedipus all over again?
10. Facing up to a related tension, Carole Stabile insists that we need more cogent and empirical accounts of the ways in which women -- from different class and race backgrounds -- think and live their relationship to their varied and various reproductive lives. Instead of disavowing representation, we need to construct representations and representational practices that self-consciously avoid positing pregnancy as a condition necessarily terminating in birth (where the fetus must always become the child). We need to discuss pregnancy as work that women may, or may not, choose to undertake.... Although feminists must insist that pregnancy is not synonymous with mothering, they must also insist that both are 'biosocial' experiences -- that pregnancy, like mothering, is something that occurs within a specific social, economic, cultural, and historical environment and that the experience of pregnancy, as such, is structured by social relations. Contextualization of pregnancy that functioned in this way would further allow feminists to argue coherently for prenatal care and day care -- for support for women who "choose" to mother -- at the same time that they argued for abortion rights. (Stabile 1994, 93-94)


A feminist view of reproduction requires that heterosexual sex not be seen as pregnancy production, and that pregnancy not be seen as fetal production which results, inevitably, in motherhood. The reconceptualization of these "biosocial" experiences lies at the center of women's demand for control over abortion and contraception. I am suggesting that we explore the possibility of a reconceptualization that might lie at the center of women's demand for control over the new reproductive practices.

11. Put differently, we might ask why it is that feminists have been uniform in their demand for women's control over abortion and contraception, but have tended more toward a condemnation of the new reproductive practices. (There have, of course been significant exceptions, e.g., Michaels (1992), Purdy (1994), Sawicki (1991), and Stanworth (1990). See also Maureen Turim's critique (1991) of Martha Rosler's video (1988) about the Baby M case.) Reproductive practices that prevent or terminate pregnancy have been, for perfectly understandable reasons, more congenial to the feminist insistence on reproductive self-determination than are those that promote pregnancy. If women have been able imaginatively to project themselves into a world in which they exercise control over abortion and contraception, and to struggle for its actualization, then why not spend some time in the dream world orthogonal to that represented in, e.g., Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1986).
12. For an interesting discussion of the ways in which different reproductive practices (e.g., IVF, GIFT; AID, contract pregnancy) differentially threaten and/or undermine dominant family ideology, see Erica Haimes:

cases of surrogacy can be seen as placing the highest possible value on the desire to have a family.... However, the practice of surrogacy can amount to a questioning of the role of motherhood, depending ultimately on the surrendering of a child by a woman who has given birth to it. Not only does this bring into question views which place a high regard on the value of pre-natal bonding between a woman and the child she is carrying, it also places obstacles in the path of attempts, such as those made by the Warnock Committee, to define who constitutes the real mother in other uses of the new reproductive technologies. For example, in the case of egg and embryo donation, the woman giving birth is to be regarded in law as the mother of the child (Warnock 1985, 85). If the birth experience is given primacy in defining motherhood, then surrogacy undermines motherhood. Since motherhood is at the centre of "familyness," to subvert motherhood is to subvert the family. (Haimes 1990, 166)

13. The class disparity between Mary Beth Whitehead and Elizabeth Stern gave the moral edge to Whitehead and so marked the operation of two sets of class prerogatives in feminist thinking about the Baby M case in particular and contract pregnancy in general. With its implication that class prerogatives themselves operate heteronomously in this context, my argument is designed to suggest the possibility of identification with both women. While it is true that contracting couples tend to be of a higher class relative to the women they employ, feminist concerns about class inequities can carry with them some pernicious assumptions about the ability of lower-class women to make educated, clear decisions about what they want to do in this context. Just as does everything else, contract pregnancy (and the new reproductive technologies) presently exist within the exploitative relations of gender, race, and class. The question is whether these practices can suggest productive alternatives to those relations. My purpose has been to show that they can. If my argument has occupied itself principally with the symbolic operation of contract pregnancy, it in no way presupposes that the material is irrelevant or incidental. Indeed, I would argue, with Raymond Williams (1980) and more recently Stuart Hall (1991), that in our attempt to understand the cultural production of subjectivity, the material and the symbolic have always to be related rather than contrasted. Ultimately, a fully realized version of my argument would require reckoning with Drucilla Cornell's "social unconscious." For an illuminating discussion of Cornell that bears on the difficulty of finding/avoiding the Archimedean point in discussions of motherhood, see Babbitt (1994). Obviously, we are on the cusp of yet another argument.

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