•  42
    What a Child Can Teach Us
    In Luce Irigaray, Mahon O'Brien & Christos Hadjioannou (eds.), Towards a New Human Being, Springer Verlag. pp. 17-34. 2019.
    Luce Irigaray’s work explores the debt owed to the maternal body and the obscured or derelict figure of the maternal in the Western philosophical tradition. Her writing is deeply concerned with the status of the maternal and with the effort to revalue the maternal at a symbolic level in Western metaphysics and culture. One of the major contributions of her philosophy is its emphasis on the central, yet denigrated, unthought or disregarded bodily dimensions of maternity. Throughout her philosophi…Read more
  •  32
    The reception of Elaine Scarry’s landmark text, The Body in Pain, focuses in part on exploring how pain might be understood as beneficial or therapeutic. Childbirth is often cited as the paradigmatic instance of this kind of beneficial pain. This essay examines conceptualizations of labour pain in biomedical, natural childbirth and reproductive justice movements that explore the limits of Scarry’s description of pain as ‘unshareable’. Political struggles over pain in childbirth centre on the leg…Read more
  •  25
    BrisSynBio Art-Science Dossier
    with Katy Connor, David Roden, and Darian Meacham
    NanoEthics 14 (1): 27-41. 2020.
    Finding avenues for collaboration and engagement between the arts and the sciences (natural and social) was a central theme of investigation for the Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) and Public Engagement programme at BrisSynBio, a BBSRC/EPSRC Synthetic Biology Research Centre that is now part of the Bristol BioDesign Institute at University of Bristol (UK). The reflections and experiments that appear in this dossier are a sample of these investigations and are contributed by Maria Fanni…Read more
  •  19
    Work, life, bodies: New materialisms and feminisms
    with Wenfei Winnie Wang, Wendy Larner, and Julie MacLeavy
    Feminist Theory 15 (3): 261-268. 2014.
  •  14
    The Hoarding Economy of Endometrial Stem Cell Storage
    Body and Society 19 (4): 32-60. 2013.
    The proliferation of for-profit enterprises offering stem cell storage services for personal use illustrates one of the ways health is increasingly governed through uncertainty and speculative notions of risk. Without any firm guarantee of therapeutic utility, commercial stem cell banks offer to store a range of bodily tissues, signalling the further transformation of the living body into an accumulation strategy within biotechnology capitalism’s ‘tissue economies’. This article makes two relate…Read more
  •  12
    Placental relations
    Feminist Theory 15 (3): 289-306. 2014.
    The placenta’s role as a mediating passage between bodies has been a conceptual resource for feminist theorists and philosophers interested in developing more nuanced explanations of the maternal–fetal relation, a relation that has tended to be identified with maternal and fetal bodies rather than with the placenta between them. I draw on efforts by philosopher Luce Irigaray and her readers to theorise placental relations as a model for the negotiation of differences. In her more recent work, Ir…Read more