The Non/Inhuman Within: Beyond the Biopolitical Intrauterine Imaginary

In the context of the increasingly entangled, devastating markers of this time (climate crises, unfettered capitalism, tribal nationalism, increasing borders, species extinction), this article stakes a claim for the importance of attending to the human intrauterine as a way to connect with non/inhuman alterity. It is argued that the intrauterine phenomenon, as a process experienced by all humans, has a part to play in understanding “humanness,” human connectedness to nonhumanness, which can be used as part of a wider strategy to reimagine collaboratively and with co-response-ability ways to live and survive within multispecies landscapes. Methodologically, Karen Barad’s diffractive approach is used to explore the intrauterine as a time–space of affect and connection between the human and nonhuman. With this approach, the article assembles selected philosophers, alongside a rereading of Mary Kelly’s Antepartum (1973) in the proposal of an intrauterine imaginary unhitched from the biopolitical. In doing so, it seeks to redraw some of the boundaries around the intrauterine imaginary, to propose how paying attention to the non/inhuman of the human intrauterine might generate images and ideas of connections and co-response-ability beyond birth, between humans and more than humans.

When I say “Alice becomes larger,” I mean that she becomes larger than she was. By the same token, however, she becomes smaller than she is now. Certainly, she is not bigger and smaller at the same time. She is larger now; she was smaller before. But it is at the same moment that one becomes larger than one was and smaller than one becomes. This is the simultaneity of a becoming whose characteristic is to elude the present. (Deleuze, 2004, p. 3)