Visceral Acts: Gestationality as Feminist Figuration

Reproductive labor has recently become the site of renewed theoretical interest. Despite this resurgence, visceral acts of procreative “life-making” continue to be undertheorized, particularly in social reproduction feminism. I argue that the vocabulary of “reproduction” is insufficient to capture the paradoxes, fugitivity, and gender-rupturing potentialities of procreative labor. In an effort to theorize the paradoxical contours of these labors, I develop “gestationality” as a feminist figuration. Gestationality is shown to be a productively unruly figuration, with the potential to carry and recognize the multiple ambiguities of procreative labors. Furthermore, I argue that gestationality offers a way of conceptualizing procreative labor that is not predictably tied to “women,” cisgendered embodiment, white repronormativity, the gender binary, or individual wombs. In the essay, I focus on five unruly residues of gestationality: namely, psychofleshy paradoxes, sticky afterlives, fugitivity, un/gendering, and posthuman expansions. I argue that gestationality offers the possibility of reimagining the politics of visceral life making as part of a broader project of anticapitalist, intersectional, environmental, feminist, and trans-inclusive gestational justice.