This experimental arts and humanities project develops methodologies for writing, public engagement, exhibition-making, and co-making artwork to critically care for the racialized “necropolitics of reproduction” (Mullings 2021). Conceived in response to the ongoing Black maternal mortality crisis in the UK, this practice-research is built on the conviction that this injustice and inequality requires care and attention not only through healthcare policy, but on a cultural and discursive level, too — specifically, in the field of contemporary art concerned with birth and motherhood. It performs an interdisciplinary, intersectional, and decolonial analysis of the care and violence which users experience in reproductive healthcare, in order to contribute to a deeper understanding of health inequalities. A continuous search for and testing of methods to critically intervene and mediate the necropolitics of reproduction is guided by María Puig de la Bellacasa’s question of how to care? (2011, 2017). Through two historical artefacts, two crucial phases in the history of reproductive healthcare are investigated: the introduction of modern contraceptives in 1920s Britain, and the emerging obstetric and gynaecological disciplines in 1880s America. These case studies trace the origins of the contemporary Black maternal mortality crisis back to racist and eugenic ideologies, connected to the racialization inherent to colonialism and imperialism (Mbembe 2019). The interactive digital project Touching Matters of Care (“Prorace” cervical cap, 1915–20) (2022) and the site-responsive textile installation Naturkulturpolitik (2022–23), made collaboratively with the artist Lynne Kouassi, re-stage, re-mediate, and re-make the two artefacts as part of a reckoning with the necropolitics of reproduction. Interdisciplinary engagement with these artefacts leads to the identification of the concomitance of care and violence in the necropolitics of reproduction: care and violence often occur simultaneously within the same objects, institutions, processes, and gestures. Concomitant objects, such as the two artefacts in this study, hold competing narratives; they are ambivalent, polarising and deeply divisive. A class of objects which could be drawn from any field, discipline, practice, or consumer experience, they require our critical-caring attention to unpack and mediate their inherent contradictions. Beyond museological preservation or presentation, concomitant objects require critical-creative re-describing, and even re-making, to draw useful insights for our present times. The two concomitant objects of this project exemplify how the necropolitics of reproduction operates. This project problematises white feminist mobilisations of care ethics in the history of reproductive healthcare, to show that care is not always ‘good’ or innocent; care must be critically and historically assessed and “unsettled” (Murphy 2015). It aims to contribute to a braver feminism of reproduction and birth in the arts, by challenging this field to address more intersectionally how class, ability, and particularly race, impact sexual reproduction. Through this project’s critical engagement with the complications of ‘care’, it insists on a situated, responsive, and evolving care for our shared cultures and histories.

Funder: AHRC (LAHP) [2422272]