 | Hospitality of the Matrix: Philosophy, Biomedicine, and Culture The question "Where do we come from?" has fascinated philosophers, scientists, and artists for generations. This book reorients the question of the matrix as a place where everything comes from ( chora , womb, incubator) by recasting it in terms of acts of "matrixial/maternal hospitality" that produce space and matter of / for the other. Systematic acknowledgment of the acts of making space and matter reintroduces the maternal role in generation and contributes to current debates in biomedicine, especially in theoretical biology, embryology, and reproductive immunology of the maternal-fetal interface. Building on and critically evaluating a wide range of historical and contemporary scholarship, Irina Aristarkhova applies her theoretical framework to the science, technology, and art of ectogenesis (artificial wombs and placentas; neonatal incubators; and male pregnancies). Her formulation of matrixial/maternal hospitality provides a framework for rethinking traditional concepts of space and generation and our ability to imagine ethically grounded relations between self and other. Her book relates to contemporary feminist theory and the philosophy of birth and generation and their figurations in biomedical sciences, technologies, and culture. Irina Aristarkhova is associate professor of women's studies and visual art at Pennsylvania State University, University Park. She edited and contributed to the volume Woman Does Not Exist: Contemporary Studies of Sexual Difference and to the Russian translation of Luce Irigaray's An Ethics of Sexual Difference . |
