Undercommoning Anthrogenesis

Abstract

Abstract Sophie Lewis coined anthrogenesis as “the production of human beings” and, using this unfamiliar term, calls for the radical reimagining of gestational politics, as an alternative to liberal feminism's focus on choice. Revivisng Shulamith Firestone, for feminists like Lewis and Helen Hester this reimagination takes shape within a techno-utopic communist framework. While enticing, such a framework relies on a modernist understanding of institutions that has been critiqued by decolonial and abolitionist theory and risks undervaluing the fugitive underground work of radical care and mutual aid that already exists today. In this article, two strategies at play in the contemporary Marxist reimagination of anthrogenesis are differentiated: (1) a communist approach focusing primarily on fundamentally restructuring the commons of reproductive care on a grand societal scale and (2) an “undercommons” approach that aims to fugitively abolish public institutions through small-scale mutual aid and radical care practices that are already constituting otherworlds of reproductive justice through transnational coalitions. Highlighting abortion and birth networks in the Netherlands (the Abortion Network Amsterdam and the Geboortebeweging, a loose collaborative network of midwives) who transnationally and fugitively care for anthrogenesis, the second strategy is proposed as the more promising one for the anthrogenesis of human beings otherwise. The author develops another possible outcome of Firestone's revolutionary thought: not a gestational communism but an anarcho-abolitionist fugitive undercommoning of anthrogenesis, through the work Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Marquis Bey, and Chiara Bottici.