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Hospitality of the Matrix
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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 (ch...
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31 July 2012

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" producing space and matter of and for the other. Irina Aristarkhova theorizes such hospitality with the potential to go beyond tolerance in understanding self/other relations. Building on and critically evaluating a wide range of historical and contemporary scholarship, she applies this theoretical framework to the science, technology, and art of ectogenesis (artificial womb, neonatal incubators, and other types of generation outside of the maternal body) and proves the question "Can the machine nurse?" is critical when approaching and understanding the functional capacities and failures of incubating technologies, such as artificial placenta. Aristarkhova concludes with the science and art of male pregnancy, positioning the condition as a question of the hospitable man and newly defined fatherhood and its challenge to the conception of masculinity as unable to welcome the other.
Price: $34.00
Pages: 248
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Publication Date:
31 July 2012
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780231159296
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
PHILOSOPHY / Movements / Deconstruction, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Women's Studies, MEDICAL / Biotechnology
Every feminist scholar interested in the spaces, practices, limits, and social meanings of motherhood will want to read this book. Irina Aristarkhova's erudite, intrepid exploration of the meaning of the matrix in philosophy, embryology, biomedicine, nursing, and performance art is a tour de force of feminist scholarship. Bringing together matter, mind, and new media, her book demonstrates how a full understanding of the matrix dramatically expands the meaning of hospitality itself.
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.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Journeys of the Matrix: In and Out of the Maternal Body
2. Materializing Hospitality
3. The Matter of the Matrix in Biomedicine
4. Mother-Machine and the Hospitality of Nursing
5. Male Pregnancy
Conclusion: Hosting the Mother
Notes
References
Index