In this thesis I explore Donna Haraway’s planetary ethic of making kin, not babies (2016) and how it could be put into practice by way of my own struggles with myoma (common muscle knots in the uterine tissue) and the question of having children or not. The personal reflections herein are based on my own thoughts and concerns, drawn from diary entries and personal conversations, on the issue of birthing and raising children on “a damaged earth” (Haraway, 2016, p. 2). In doing this exposé of feminist reproductive politics and theory in a climate changed and environmentally altered world –Haraway’s ethos in particular– and juxtaposing this with my own localized and particular situation, the starting point for this thesis is that the personal is political, but also vice versa. Simply put, I seek a better understanding of what Haraway’s vision might look like if juxtaposed to a female central European, feminist 28-year old’s life (my own) in order to put theory to the test of lived experience. In my thesis I draw methodologically on both historiographical accounts of feminist science and technology studies and this field’s long-standing research traditions on reproductive politics, and on autoethnographic accounts of living with myoma and a desire for children thereby “connecting the personal to the cultural” (Ellis and Bochner, 2000, p. 739). Consider this thesis an invitation to watch me play string figures with myoddkin, to see us compose, re-compose, and decompose relational patterns among us.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:liu-177197 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Richter, Anika |
| Publisher | Linköpings universitet, Tema Genus |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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