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 paper 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 phenomena, 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 re-imagine 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 paper assembles selected philosophers, alongside a re-reading of Mary Kelly’s Antepartum (1973) in the proposal of an intrauterine imaginary unhitched from the biopolitical. In doing so, it seeks to re-draw 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.