Feminist Epigenet(h)ics: Maternal Waters, Gestational Forms and Mitochondrial Eves in Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Evolution

Abstract

This article takes Catherine Malabou’s provocative insistence on an alliance between plasticity and feminism to initiate an exploration of gestation and its representation in the context of the postgenomic age. I argue that Malabou’s attention to epigenetic schemas of life and becoming can inform and, in turn, be enriched by feminist film-philosophy which locates the maternal as an alternative schema of embodied subjectivity – simultaneously displacing essentialising over-reliance on gender/sex binaries without entirely metaphorising or abstracting the material processes which subtend bodies and their openness to difference. Drawing on recent feminist scholarship, including Ann Carruthers’s Fertile Visions and Sophie Lewis’s Full Surrogacy Now, I turn to Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Evolution (2015) in order to approach gestational bodies as a central site for both the violent subjugation of embodied life and a feminist ethics and aesthetics of affective relationality. Part science-fiction, fairy-tale and body horror, Hadžihalilović’s film responds to contemporary bio-genetic innovations: Malabou’s elaboration of the “phylogenetic remains” and “cellular potentials” that epigenetic plasticity reactivates guides my reading of its seething maternal waters, multiply directed gestational bodies and various forms of plastic co-becoming. As well as being exemplary of new epigenetic imaginaries, Hadžihalilović’s complex foetal/fertile visions illuminate how feminist-philosophical-artistic practices may elaborate an epigenet(h)ics of life – informed by past forms, present configurations, and open to future bio-possibilities.