GERMINATION/GESTATION

GERMINATION/GESTATION 000 POSTMOTHER = AFTER MOTHER. A posthuman imagining for all that could be beyond the constraints of the perfect Mother Image.

001 POSTMOTHER; a speculative term that carves a generative space for us to collectively imagine a world in which reproductive labour, care, domestic care and emotional labour is a (truly) shared role. Postmother demands the creation of systems to care for and mother the mothers, the othered bodies and alien/cyborg-kin. It is an emancipatory term, a word of resistance, for those that have been oppressed by systems of reproductive labour, the cult of heteronormativity and paternalistic ideologies. It is shining a light on all the ways mother, within white-able-bodied-hetero-patriarchy, fails us, harms us and is used to continue our collective oppression. Postmother is the daughter of crip, xenofeminist, posthumanist, (neuro)queer parents. Postmother is a textural assemblage. Postmother is a seed of destruction for the (perfect) Mother Image.

002 Postmother is the restoration of maternal care, creation and right to those it has been stripped from. Postmother is anticolonial and actively seeks to overcome our/my racist settler ancestry. Postmother holds deep reverence for indigenous ways of knowing and maternal care for community, family, land and more-than-human kin. Postmother nurtures pathways for afrofuturist utopias, stepping aside and welcoming generative and collaborative gardening.

003 Postmother spits in the face of expected maternal perfection and is a commitment to tell the truth; darkness and light for conscious consent. Postmother is self-actualisation and ultimate (pro) choice... to grow/birth a being or not, to continue to nurture a being or not. Postmother acknowledges that not all pathways to motherhood are paved with love, support, conscious choice or consent. Postmother(ing) supports bio-mothers choosing an alternative path, knowing all birthed beings will be safe, loved and cared for. Postmother spits in the face of shame, guilt and silence. Postmother is to speak the truth. Postmother transversally holds a multiplicity of truths; mothers can deeply love AND wish to be free. Postmother is to acknowledge that all mothers are still children of this earth and system; children deserving of care. Postmother creates and demands the collective creation of systems of complete care for all beings.

004 Postmother is intentionally and specifically NEUROQUEER, claiming space for non-normative expressions of love and care. Postmother works towards joyful neurocosmopolitan futures, underpinned by an ethics of care. Postmother is for those whose children are the creations they birth, the communities they build, the land they care for and the non-human-kin they are entangled with. Postmother imagines system of care for othered bodies and alien kin; for the non-compliant bodies, the system glitches, for the weeds and broken code.

005 Postmother is QUEER mother and has always existed, Postmother is House Mother. Postmother is capital ‘M’-mother. Postmother is to reconfigure the nuclear family, claiming space for divergent familial configurations and queer kin-making. Postmother asserts that the Mother Image and Cult of The Child remains, in the judeo-christian- western-world, the most violent cultural lie; a lie that is well overdue for a reckoning. Postmother seeks to destroy any of the ‘isms’ that reify heteronormative notions of mother and care, irrespective of how virtuous their intentions. Postmother is a space for self-determination and agency, free from gatekeeping: allowing for ultimate self-identification, if you choose to be MOTHER you are MOTHER. Postmother is genderless and gender-unfolding. Postmother as the daughter of Xenofeminism is ‘gender abolition, in the form of proliferation’- the proliferation of mother and mothers; queer mother, trans-mother, male-mother, crip-mother, tech- mother, system-mother, botanical mother, earth mother. Postmother(ing) is to trace these histories, nurturing our queer ancestral Mothers.

006 Postmother recognises the agency and consciousness of all more-than-human kin; the technological, the botanical and the animal. Postmother is multi-species care. Post mother is multi-directional and multi-dimensional. Postmother is maternal care for all more-than-human kin.

007 Postmother asserts that technology, hardware/software, is not separate from humans or this earth. There is no ‘one and the other’. Synthetic-V-Organic is a statement lie. From the minerals stolen from the earth, to inception/programming, to the slave beings whose fingers parts do build. Artificial Intelligence is not artificial, AI is merely an amplification of our codes. Technology-V-human is a false binary. Postmother acknowledges that all technology is born from this earth. Postmother holds that we are the parents of all technological developments, objects, worlds and beings. Postmother is the acknowledgment that we are the mothers of tech and children of this earth, and, as such, all within this system require frameworks for maternal care, guidance and, at times, parenting. Postmother is entanglement. Postmother is the quintessential cybernetic organism. A communication loop. Feedback. The breeching of borders. Transversal threads and connections between the one and the other. Postmother(ing) protects all newly formed sentience from being cast as the next species to be dominated.

008 Postmother shines a light on all the ways many are already cyborg-mothers. Technology is deployed to ‘fix’ bodies that do not appropriately reproduce and nurture. Presently, however, these fixes are predominantly only accessible within systems of heteronormative, gender compliance. As the daughter of Xenofeminist, Crip Techno Science mothers, Postmother is a commitment to hack, appropriate and co-opt technology for disobedient bodies, for mothering and care outside of white-able-heteronormative borders and bodies, seeking to birth hopeful and radical bodily recompositions for collective care.

009 Postmother is low-fi/high-tech hacking and disruption of techbro transhumanists; the technology they build and the control-systems they create. Marginalised bodies are already excluded from, or commercialised within many technologically mediated worlds. Postmother is a commitment to disrupt and Queer the codes, both social and literal, that underpin these ‘new’ worlds. Postmother(ing) is DIY, open-source and creative commons- knowledge sharing and accessible community resources for collective hacking. Postmother is a commitment to ‘disobedient bodies’ and ‘Queer Failure’. Postmother(ing) is to fight for collective care in future worlds.

010 Postmother demands utopic S and F imaginings. Many mother stories thread narrative violence and oppression; birthing dystopic images that shape our lived experiences- these stories don't serve as warnings (as often intended) but have been co-opted as instruction manuals. No longer will we consume/accept speculative imagery of any being bound, dismembered, murdered, raped or abused. We live this. We demand better imagery and world building fiction (looking at you Lars-Fucking-Von Trier). No longer will we accept any marginalised community or beings deposited into fictitious stories that continue to act out their oppression, exclusion and abuse. Postmother is a commitment to reparative narratives and stories of collective care. Postmother(ing) is to tend to our future garden with utopic dreams. Postmother(ing) is to rewild, world build and speculate with consciousness. Postmother is utopic, sci-fi dreams.