Common Knowledge and Political Love

Under capitalism, femininity and gender roles became a “labor” function, and women became a “labor class.” On one hand, women’s bodies and labor are revered and exploited as a “natural” resource, a biocommons or commonwealth that is fundamental to maintaining and continuing life: women are equated with “the lands,” “mother-earth,” or “the homelands.” On the other hand, women’s sexual and reproductive labor—motherhood, pregnancy, childbirth—is economically devalued and socially degraded. In the Biotech Century, women’s bodies have become flesh labs and Pharma-commons: They are minedfor eggs, embryonic tissues, and stem cells for use in medical, and therapeutic experiments, and are employed as gestational wombs in assisted reproductive technologies (ART). Under such conditions, resistant feminist discourses of the “body” emerge as an explicitly biopolitical practice.

Primitive Accumulation

Human and animal bodies have been the most valuable commodity in human culture since primitive accumulation began. It follows, then, that bodies are also primary sites of sovereignty, resistance, and contestation. In this chapter, subRosa begins by tracing a brief history of lay or “common” medical, and healing practices that posed an embodied resistance to religious, medical, and capitalist control of gendered bodies, reproduction, and medical practices—and connects them to current social struggles to create accessible and just public health-care systems, biopolitical autonomy, and knowledge in common. Researching and learning from these histories is fundamental to subRosa’s cultural practice.

Resistance

Historically, women’s bodies have been notoriously resistant to machine adaptation or medical regulation. The unpredictable ebb and flow of menstrual cycles, hormones, moods, libido, weight loss or gain, metabolism, ovulation, pregnancy, gestation period, fertility, and natural birth rhythms, have severely tested scientific control and management methods.

Detournement

SmartMom is a detournement (a tactic used by the situationists to change original meanings of texts or images) of the concept of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s (DARPA) Smart T-Shirt technology, and the cyborg engineering of the body for space travel, as described in Manfred Clynes and Nathan Cline’s article “Cyborgs and Space.” SmartMom satirically proposes a civilian adaptation of the technology of the Smart T-Shirt as a new means of surveilling the behavior of pregnant women. Although the shirt was originally engineered for remote battlefield wound sensing and to facilitate telepresent surgery for soldiers or space travelers, it was not hard for subRosa to imagine “repurposing” DARPA’s Smart T-Shirt to control women’s productive and reproductive labor.