Original tittle: Maternidades Subversivas

© 2020, María Llopis

https://www.mariallopis.com/
Translated by Natalia Baizán de Aldecoa
1st digital edition 2020
© De esta edición:
María Llopis
Epub designed by Ismael Llopis
To Tim, who left. To Roc, who came.
Thanks to my brother Ismael Llopis and to my cuñis Carolina Hernández.
 Prologue by
R H C

A and reindiginized mothers is watching

you, Patrix. Retreat with grace, while you still can.
Picture this, a ball machine throwing tennis balls: bam, bam, bam,
bam, bam. Now substitute each tennis ball with little balls of pain:
bam bam bam bam. Now take the machine and imagine it’s a pussy.
It smells bad, its dirty, humid; it gets infected time and time again.
This is perhaps one of the greatest strengths the patriarchal matrix
wields: turing our pussies in machines that birth physical and
psychological pain. This is, after all, the patriarchy’s towering
achievement: having turned the center of the matrix, our bodies, into
a hell that’s humid, sinister, and full of suffering. It is this very same
cancerous, dangerous ‘down there’ region that is the nexus of fear
for so many women, who are scared of it because of what the the
medical establishment tells them to fear.
It hurts us because the patriarchy wants it to be so; because it’s
right and proper. The magnum opus of this factory is this machine
that pops out soldiers, citizens, voters, consumers, spectators. This
machine creates a morality of slaves and masters. Casilda
Rodrigáñez has warned us of this before. And well, it took a
millennia for it to come to be. It took centuries upon centuries for the
patriarchy to settle itself over this planet; this isn’t something, after
all, that happens from one night to the next. No, it requires a great
deal of investment and social engineering over a very long period of
time. I nevertheless hope and demand it takes the few free men and
women left a bit less time to correct this situation.
As I write this prologue I’m eight months pregnant. Pregnant, not
sick. With 35 years under my belt and three grey hairs on my
forehead, I think I can confidently say that I understand how a small
part of this world works. And, equally, that I know some key facts for
how to bring ourselves out of this rut of a civilization we’ve been
stuck in for millenia. I know where I tread. Fuck, I see everything so
clearly, as clearly as Llopis and her interviewees see it. Reason is on
our side. I have no existential emptiness to fill with maternity. This is
why I can be a mother. I’m not going to be a patriarchal mother, that
is I’m not going to be a mother who births and raises her child in
order for it to be a good servant to the the state and capitalism. I
won’t raise it to compete in the classroom. I won’t raise it to work in
an oppressive job, even less so to work as an oppressor. But if it
chooses to go along with the norms of the system, I won’t fight it too
much. I’ll let it go on with its free will. Freedom is the greatest good,
as my friend Don Quixote once said.
We know what has been made of maternity by the centuries that
have passed. They’ve looted and left her empty. As Victoria Sau,
another Great, put it: ‘what we’ve been left with is ‘the black hole of
maternity.’ It’s a silly and unconscious motherhood in the best cases,
and a motherhood of servants and of the system in the worst; a
maternity of watchdogs for an indifferent, patriarchal estate. We
know it too well. The keys to breaking this stagnant civilization have
rained and poured on us from the time we learned how to know. This
information we now have to transform into knowledge, and this
knowledge into wisdom. We know a great deal already, we know
what we must do. We need to learn while acting and act knowingly.
In this book you’ll find a great part of these keys. A great horde of
women will spill out and fill your mind and your pussy. A veritable
storm of well-reasoned and impassioned subversions will begin you
on your path to breaking from the patriarchal conspiracy. I’m sure of
it, because in this book you’ll run into potent ideas and forces,
wherever you turn. You’ll hear from this herd about some incredibly
compelling and radical ideas. It’s urgent for us to immerse ourselves
in radical actions and thoughts because, after all, radical comes from
the Latin word for roots (‘radici’), and we must uproot our origins.
We’ve had enough with wading in kiddie pools and dabbling in
chlorine-filled waters; we must immerse ourselves in the most
abyssal zones in order to find the roots of the metastasizing
patriarchal evolution. We must throw our whole selves into the
deepest parts in order to root out these cancerous origins and clean
out the roots of the tree of life. This is why we need the radical
thoughts and works that run through this text; we need them to flood
our minds. You will find this book soaked with all sorts of actions and
notions and protests. It’s impregnated with subjects as radical as
these: re-indigenization, shared childrearing, the anti-capitalist tit,
care work, ecosexuality, the earth as a lover, how to confront
miscarriages and the dangers of a love that is both romantic and
maternal. You’ll read about obstetric violence and the persecution of
abortions, vivisections performed on black slaves in the
gynecological tradition, gynocologists that have murdered dozens of
pregnant women in order to ‘advance’ prenatal science, and the idea
of prenatal diagnostics as a form of psychological torture performed
on pregnant women. You’ll see matriarchies that persist, orgasmic
breastfeeding, insufferable mothers, disturbed childhoods that only
make themselves known when you become a mother, ecstatic
childbirth, birth as a transpersonal experience, childbirth as the
opening up of a powerful sexual experience, and just good ol’ regular
births too. There’s also intersexual trans, and queer MaPaternities,
traditional and transcendental midwifery, ancestral fertility and
contraceptive dances, self-regulation, frugality, and mutually
supportive social organizations. We will see ideas like curanderas
and witch doctors, transhackfeminists, collaborative self-generated
and horizontal healthcare, healthcare and diagnosing
technologies, the merging of avant-garde medicine and the most
ancient scientific knowledges, gynopunk biolab, sex workers and
porn actresses who don’t attempt to hide their motherhood, and my
own mother’s mothering… You’re going to see my own mother’s
ideas in María’s book too.
And all these parts, all these people that make up this book, are
both creators and parents. Creation and parenting. And once again,
etymology gives us some clues: the English word ‘parenting’ comes
from the latin ‘parire’) (‘give birth to, to create’) while ‘create’ and the
Spanish crianza (parenting’) both come from the latin ‘creare’ It calls
to mind that line by Gonzalo de Berceo: ‘Dios criador, cuál maravilla,’
(‘Both God and parent, what a wonder’) from the times when the
notions of creator and parent were still twinned. A God-parent, and
not just a creator. It’s remarkable. But as time went by, the cultist
notion of ‘create’ was circumscribed to the work of God and that of
the god-inspired artist. Only God and Michelangelo can create. Oh,
creation, only accesibles to demiurges with balls. And the vulgar
version of the latin ‘creare,’ with that high-pitched ‘i,’ went over to the
feminine and the female… and so it came about that us, the other
animals, we were left with the verb ‘criar’.No talk or mention of
creation. Parenting is for women, for little women locked in tiny their
tiny homes. Creation, on the other hands, is for God and those god-
inspired artists in their cozy studios. Well, you got another thing
coming in this book, and from every woman Llopis interviews.
Create, parent and… invent—that’s another one. Here you’ll find that
everything overlaps, and the women interviewed here invent as well
as create and parent… They invent machines for the self-
management of health, to give just one example. Here’s a callout to
DuPont’s engineers: you are not alone. Duponites, proletarians of
the and other wage-slaved R&D researchers: a horde of feminist
and re-indigenized hackers haunts you.
Let’s think for a minute about that often cited formula by one Albert
Einstein: E = mc2. Energy is equal to matter multiplied by the
constant squared. The constant being the speed of light. But if we
focus on the other two variables, Energy and Matter… actually, I can
do better. Let’s expand this metaphor a little. If I am a supreme Patrix
(the patriarchal matrix, that is), what I need to do to with this planet in
order to reach the civilizational impasse (I repeat that term,
civilizational impasse, a lot on purpose) is to control those two
variables; I need to control Energy and Matter. To make a long story
short, we could say that matter is represented by the Earth itself. As
the good powerholic that I, the Patrix, am, I need to have control all
the energy emanating from Gaia: minerals, water, fields, trees,
plants, seeds, non-human animals… You already know how this
story goes, we all know about those babes of empires past and their
predatory, developmentalist streak. You know their whole deal:
raping the Earth, time and again, in whatever newfangled way they
can think of. From the great original perversion of landed private
property to the great perversion of life’s patent and now of the
captive transgenic seeds. Everything that has been condemned by
what remains of ancestral indigenous wisdom. We can’t forget there
was an original, aboriginal people who were wise in their relationship
with the earth. They existed, even in Europe, before the arrival of the
Greek, Roman, and Andalusian Empires, and before the more
developmentalist versions of these empires we see now.
We need to see what they’ve done with the other variable too,
Energy. Leaving aside the energies emanating from the earth, which
we can put into the matter box (the energy emanating from logs,
water, fossils and other minerals from the guts of the Earth), the
Energy that the supreme powerholic needs to control in order to
reach our present mess is that of human labour. You don’t have to be
a full-fledged marxist to understand this. From the great perversion
of slave work, which has always laid the foundations of every
empire, to the great perversion of wage labor (oh, money, money)
deceitfully interiorized... in the depths of her and our psyche lies a
little tyrant shaped like a clock (oh, the blessed clock, unifier of
nations, and truly another machine exerting control over bodies and
souls). And this energy called, who produces it? Who could it be but
the bodies and psyches of those animals called human beings. And
who produces those beings, so efficient and laborious? Women,
feminized and turned to garbage. Therefore, in order to control the
matter of Gaia it is necessary to control the female, precisely
because of the great utility of those uteri that make human beings
which in turn generate the labor-energy. And it’s at that point that
Patriarchy and State-Capitalism sign their marriage (until death do
them apart). Tightly bonded, like the double helix of our s, like
two locks from the same fried and freshly-permed curl.
And, to link metaphor with metaphor, I appeal to the terrestrial
nature of free women and men, against the martian nature of the
powerholics. They can only be martians, seeing how they treat both
Earth and human beings. The great managers of History and of this
stinking present must come from another planet; such behaviour
can’t come from the daughters and sons of Gaia. I insist: it’s a
metaphor, I’m not among those who believe that Rumsfeld, Bill
Gates or Florentino Pérez are martians of the Annunakis V class. If
only it were that simple… And now I really don’t know what to do
about the squared speed of light, I’ll leave that to someone else. I
leave that part to you, reader, who will consume this book with the
most voracious of speeds. Because these words, reaped by María,
will hook you; because truth and rebellion are addictive.
Having said all this, it is crucial to understand what they’ve done to
motherhood as an institution, what they’ve done to biology, how
they’ve fucked our physiology, one mass at a time, with their
inquisitions, fears and bio-capitalist iatrogenesis. What have they
done to our pussies, so full of pain today, but so full of pleasure
yesterday and tomorrow? The question of motherhood, of pussies
and uteri is not a footnote to History and Biology… It is there that we
mold freed or enslaved future beings. And here lies the reason why
uterus control is the central source of domination of this piece of shit,
all this shit, I’ve been calling the Patrix. It’s but a curl made of three
locks which are too much of a muchness: Patriarchy, Capitalism and
State, with all racism, sexism, and specisms.
This is but a really snappy summary, but it’s here to remind you
and me. We need to remember the History of this species and its
modes of production; That is, the history of the control of our uteri.
It’s something fascinating and definitely worth teaching in the jails we
call schools as an alternative to the drivel of petty wars fought by
obese and stupefied kings. It would also be a real kindness to have a
little history of motherhood and gynecology in those childbirth
preparation classes which nationalized institutions offer up as charity
every once in a while. More than one person would be shaken by
that greatly needed interior and exterior revolution. That—and not
Yodocefol, or epidurals—that’s what’s urgent today. Oxytocin nor
epidural, that’s what’s urgent today.

R H C
21st of March, 2015.
At Boiro, council of Ibias, remnant of indigenous Europe, guarded by
the forest of Munierllos. Asturias.
www.rosariohernandezcatalan.com
 Introduction
‘S , I didn’t have an orgasm while giving birth (or at least I didn’t have
one like the ones I had had up to that point). I realized that the dilation had ended
because suddenly I felt that I was shitting myself, and like a big ball of fire was bursting
through my ass and vagina. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, pain; it was something savage,
furious, just as if the whole eruptive power of the cosmos was exploding in my pussy. I
remember how, like a possessed person, I would scream with every contraction, on my
knees and grabbing the bed’s headboard. I couldn’t see anyone. I wasn’t hearing anyone.
Me, my body and my daughter—we were somewhere else. I could only feel fire.
Suddenly, Clara came out and that fire which was bursting inside me suddenly came to a
stop. Before they could cut the cord, my daughter climbed all alone up my tits, latched
onto my nipple, and didn’t let go. During the following hours, I felt like a goddess: strong,
triumphant, ready to receive the world’s applause (and rightly so). I felt strong enough to
go through the birth all over again, ready to run a marathon if asked. Instead of that, I
gobbled down two ham sandwiches. While I was devouring them, my partner said what
was to become the leitmotiv of the birth: you couldn’t tell who was screaming, a woman, a
cow or a dinosaur. Anyway. I have never felt any dick burst me open like that, or made me
feel that fire and euphoria. That was a (blessed) madness.’

I believe in bodies. I don’t give a single solitary fuck about culture,

intellectuals, science or knowledge. I believe in nature, in our
wildness, and in the strength of our instincts. My body seeks
pleasure. Sometimes it finds pleasure in pain, because pain is an
intense and powerful emotion, that has the power to heal. My body is
wise; my brain is just another organ that tries to explain the world to
me through theories and labels and other constructions.
I feel that motherhood is one of many sexual stages our bodies go
through. I’ve felt this in my own body, even before being a biological
mother. I don’t think it’s mere chance that babies gestate inside the
uterus. The same uterus that moves when we get excited and have
an orgasm. Ecstatic births are a fact of life.
Pregnancy is a period where the vulva grows, and you can come in
three seconds with just a quick brush. We are savage, sexual and
brutal beings from our birth, and that animality is sacred. Our savage
sexuality is sacred. And motherhood is a way of living out our
savage sexuality in order to join the sacred and the divine. Tantric
buddhism explains it very well. Fuck it, all this rationality has turned
us into a bunch of idiots. I’m fed up with this fear we have of
understanding our own spirituality. So long as we are disconnected
from that sacred, sexual and maternal energy, we will continue to be
fucked up.
Because we are really fucked up, in this society from which I write.
We have created so many rules and norms regarding how we should
feel about our unfeeling and bodies—that is, our bodies that don’t
feel or enjoy motherhood, life, or anything at all. I hope to convey to
the reader the fact that we doesn’t stop being fantastic—or feminist
—if we don’t come like wild animals through every stage of our
motherhood. It’s like female ejaculation: it’s great that some women
can enjoy it, but I am not one bit less of a feminist if I can’t ejaculate.
I would suggest reading Diana J. Torres in Coño potens for more on
the subject. We need to spread the word, make ourselves heard,
protest and visibilize other realities that defy the system. That’s the
best way of taking revenge.
And for the extinctionists: don’t have kids if you don’t want to —in
fact, there are too many of us already on this planet— but don’t tell
me that motherhood has nothing to do with you. Motherhood extends
way beyond biological motherhood. There are loads of people living
out motherhood in a plurality of ways, beyond the limitations
imposed by social constructions of gender, beyond the limits of
heteronormative societies, beyond the limits of coitus-centric
sexualities. It’s far beyond what patriarchal capitalism continues to
define as work and care work, the later of which ensures the survival
of our society.
This is why I have interviewed each person that makes up this
book; because each one provides us with a different view of savage,
pleasurable and non-conforming motherhood. Some are biological
fathers and mothers, others are foster or adoptive parents. Some are
involved in projects of shared parenting and others are too, though
not of their own will. Each one subverts the notion of motherhood
imposed by the patriarchy. Each one is savage in their own way, and
I love all those savage people, for existing, for following their
instincts without fear, and for teaching me so many things.
I
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Sarri Wilde:
Ecstatic birth

S W :
Ecstatic birth Maternity as a sphere of sexuality

E as orgasmic birth, but here I will use

the term “ecstatic” instead. The point is not whether you reach
orgasm or not—just like in any other sexual relationship—but
whether the experience is satisfactory as a whole. There is a great
deal of prejudice towards this kind of childbirth, to such an extent
that many women who have experienced it still keep it a secret. It is
more frequent than it seems, and it has always existed. Ecstatic birth
should be another stage of motherhood, a sexual stage, alongside
the sexual pleasures of pregnancy and breastfeeding. I like to think
that there was a time when we always used to give birth with
pleasure, before the biblical—and patriarcal—curse fell upon us. If
you want to read more about the subject you should consult the book
Parirás con placer, by Casilda Rodrigáñez, or the documentary
Orgasmic Birth, by Debra Pascali-Bonaro.
Sarri Wilde is a woman whose experience of motherhood has
opened up the doors to her liberated and unbridled relationship with
sexuality. She is a gentle and tender woman, whose intense
conversation and immediate closeness is striking. She is one of
those few and happy women who gave birth, not in pain, but with
infinite pleasure. It all caught her by surprise, and changed her life
along the way.
She lives in Valencia, and devotes herself to developing, exploring
(and exploding!) spaces with cultural and artistic activities. She has a
son and a daughter. We met through a shared friend who gave me
her my contact details as soon as she heard that orgasmic birth was
one of the themes I wanted to tackle in this book. It was the first
interview that I did, and it’s with her that I want to begin this journey.
This conversation took place in a horchatería, in Ruzafa, Valencia,
on a proverbially hot summer’s day in 2013. We began to talk about
parenting and feminism.
Sarri: I have many conversations about feminism with Marceline, it
comes very naturally between us because of how she is. With my
son, however, I keep on putting it off, because he doesn’t ask. That
got me thinking. I have two brothers and I remember very clearly
how my mother would always talk to me more than she would talk
to them. So you end up thinking to yourself : ‘At the end of the day,
I’m doing just the same thing.’ Although my mother’s conversation
was not the most fortunate one. She would talk about prudence,
about being alert, about how all men want is sex; she was always
afraid of things. Our conversations are different, but the forms they
 adopt are alike. My mother should have actually talked to my
brothers, she should have warned them: ‘Take care how you treat
women, they deserve respect.’
Now I’ve changed my tune and I’ve begun to talk to Jack, though
he doesn’t ask for it.
María: Tell me about your personal experiences with motherhood.
Sarri: When I got pregnant, I was conscious of the importance of
extended breastfeeding. I read that in order to lactate successfully,
one’s experiences with childbirth had to be good. So I began to
make preparations to ensure the birth was as respectful as
possible. It was all for the sake of lactation, and not for the
experience of the birth itself.
I went to talk to a friend who had given birth at home. I really felt
like doing that, but at the same time I was afraid. I then got in
contact with a gynecologist who had assisted home births, and that
gave me a great deal of confidence. We agreed to do it in a
hospital, and everything was agreed upon with a lot of respect. We
did the whole preparations at home. I would call him every now and
then to ask whether I had to go to the hospital already, and he
would tell me not to rush it yet. That was all very good.
When we got to the hospital I had bad luck: a midwife entered
while I was asleep and broke my water. She even sent my partner
Groco away on meaningless tasks while she did it, though he was
Marceline’s father, saying: ‘Can you go fetch this and that?’ When
he came back, he was really mad at her. Plus we didn’t want to
have any drip. I was exhausted, and when I woke up I found myself
already on a drip, with my water broken, and a raging Groco. We
later found out that she had wanted to go home early, and so was
eager to wrap the whole thing up as soon as possible. The
gynecologist I had been preparing with was also furious when he
came over. Apart from this midwife, we were lucky and everything
went along fine. I gave birth, inside a hospital, and very naturally.
María: I’m very glad for you. Was it pleasurable?
Sarri: That’s what I didn’t see coming, because I knew nothing about
this. They left me quite a long time alone with my partner, and I
suddenly felt like dancing. I didn’t know why, I only wanted to hug
him and dance with him. I wouldn’t say it was sexual urge, but it
was still very intense. I kept on telling him to kiss me and hug me.
At that point I hadn’t read anything on the subject of sexuality and
childbirth, that came much later. Up until that moment, my sexuality
had been pretty average, I would even say I wasn’t very interested
in it. My sexuality was awakened on that day, while I was giving
birth. Groco always says that: ‘I’ve never seen you as affectionate
as you were that one time.’ I had always been quite a remote
person.
But I couldn’t have enough of that hugging and touching. I led him
to the toilet and said: ‘If I could I would make love to you, here and
now.’ We were laughing the whole time, it was a lot of fun. I was
doing this weird dance where I would bend down and rise, kind of
in an “s” formation. I’ve researched afterwards about this dance
women break into instinctively during childbirth. It came very
instinctively because they let me be alone with my partner, without
anyone bothering us. I would bend down and rise twisting like an
“s.”
From that moment on, my sexuality was completely changed. It
was awakened! After that moment we had sex constantly, and
that’s how I got pregnant again. It’s probably the best sex I’ve had,
the one that took place between the birth of our two kids.
The second time I got pregnant there was no doubt in my mind: I
was going to give birth at home. I began to investigate about the
dance I had done during my first birth. I began to research about
dances and pregnancy, which led me to Casilda Rodrigáñez. With
her I read about pleasurable and joyful births; about births without
pain, like mine. I talked to my mother about it and she told me she
hadn’t experienced any pain either.
I wouldn’t define what I felt as pain. I would call it tiredness, like
when you get tired after walking. Maybe some women see it as
pain… Maybe I found pleasure in pain, I don’t know. Because I’ve
thought about it afterwards and yeah, maybe it was pain, but not a
bad pain; it was an organic pain. That’s the word: organic pain.
At that moment I couldn’t put into words what I had felt. I’ve learnt
about it later, after reading. Back then I would say to myself: “How
can I explain this?” I had to remain silent, I couldn’t tell anyone.
 Researching about all this helped me give words to what I had felt.
The words are evidently Casilda’s, and those of many writers who
have dealt with this topic, but they are nevertheless words which
embody what I felt.
When I got pregnant with Jack, I was still breastfeeding
Marceline. I’ve never felt so much pleasure breastfeeding as I did
when I was pregnant. I had a strong sexual appetite during
Marceline’s pregnancy. It isn’t very common, it seems that
pregnancy stops most women’s sexual appetite.
María: Some do have an enhanced sexual appetite; other don’t.
Those that do see it increase, feel it very strongly; those that don’t,
barely notice it. It’s like there’s no middle term.
Sarri: I would lay down in bed and just by placing the pillow between
my legs, I’d say: “Fuck, come on!”. It’s the greatest stroke of luck
I’ve ever had. Thirty something years with an OK sexuality, and it
turns out there are many more things left to come.
María: How was Jack’s birth?
Sarri: I knew Jack’s birth had to be at home. Amparo de Vargas, from
the naturist center, helped me out, and it was splendid. If with
Marceline I hadn’t felt any pain, this was something amazing.
María: Put it in words; I can see your face, but those who will read
this interview can’t see you now. What was that something?
Sarri: The most beautiful thing.
When I look back on it I sometimes think it is a pity my births were
so short. They were so quick. I kept on telling myself: “No, no, not
yet.” The pregnancy, and all the rest was over too soon… I’m really
made to be pregnant.
María: Have another child!
Sarri: No, no. Parenting is very tough, and life has led me in another
direction. Giving birth opened up my life to a beautiful world. Now I
understand those women who used to always be pregnant. I get it.
They must have had a great time!
María: Would you consider giving birth to be a sexual experience?
Because I consider pregnancy, childbirth and lactation to be a
 series of stages in the sexual lives of women.
Sarri: Until Marceline’s birth, I had only had sex with one person. I
had had two lovers before, but they had only been one-night
stands.
I discovered my sexuality when I got pregnant. Menstruation
didn’t make a woman out of me; it was my pregnancy which made
me a woman. I really discovered my sexuality then. I had, of
course, touched myself before, but not like I did after giving birth.
That’s really when I learned what my sexuality was capable of.
In fact, after Jack’s birth, my partner and I separated because I
felt I needed more sexual experiences.
I’ve been living without a partner for many years now, having
beast-like sexual relationships. Back then I would go out any day
and bring one, two, or three people back home with me. I said to
myself: ‘I can’t die like this, without experiencing more, after what
I’ve just discovered.’ And I risked a lot, because my partner and I
separated while I was still in love with him. But that’s just the way
things go.
María: Did he refuse to have an open relationship?
Sarri: I didn’t suggest it. I’m very independent, so I didn’t make the
decision with him. I informed him of my decision; the possibility of
an open relationship didn’t even came up.
María: You know what I’d like to talk about, and what I think we’re
leaving out? The stages of the childbirth. You know, like dilation,
then the push, the delivery. Which parts did you feel to be more
orgasmatic or ecstatic? I had a very good birth experience but
there was a moment, when I was completely dilated, that I
connected with a very deep pain. And that’s where the pleasurable
part ended, all of a sudden.
Sarri: Marceline’s was a whole discovery for me, I was surprised at
every turn. With Jack I already knew what was going to happen.
María: I have spoken with other women who have experienced
orgasmic or ecstatic births and they note that it is in the delivery
stage when they feel that their pleasure comes with a powerful
orgasm.
Sarri: In my opinion, an orgasmic childbirth isn’t separate from a
woman’s sexual development. I discovered my sexuality through
my pregnancies, and I haven’t lost it since. My childbirth belongs to
that sexual evolution.
With the birth of my second child, I had a clearer idea of the
whole process. I was already due, lying in bed and breastfeeding
Marceline when I began to have an orgasm. I got very wet and I
stood up because I felt very weird. That’s when I realised that my
water had broken.
I went down the steps (we lived in a two-story house then)
dripping everywhere, and I told Groco: ‘The birth just started to
happen.’ I had already come and everything. And the thing didn’t
stop there.
It’s like when you have sex; if you can keep on going, you can
come several times. With me, my partner has to tell me when to
stop, otherwise I can keep on having one orgasm after another.
Let’s go back to the subject at hand. I then went and sat down on
the couch. I had been touching myself the whole time, and at some
point I asked Grocco to go out of the room because I didn’t want to
be watched while I masturbated. Just like in Marceline’s birth when
I wanted to dance with him, in this case I needed to kick him out of
the room. I wanted to be left alone.
I twisted like a wild animal, across the floor, the couch, around
everything. I needed to rub myself against everything.
I got down on all fours and the baby began to come out. In that
moment Amparo, the midwife, came through the door. Groco left
the front door open so she wouldn’t need to knock and interrupt the
birthing experience. She says that when she opened the door, and
saw Jack’s head coming out, she screamed: ‘With the abdomen,
with the abdomen!’ I recall that too. I rose to my feet and he came
out. I was truly ecstatic.
María: One can’t say that the orgasm takes place during one or
another phase of giving birth. In a way the question is ridiculous in
and of itself.
Sarri: What differentiates my sexuality before childbirth and after is
that now I can control my orgasms, and hence my sexuality.
 I kicked Groco out of the room because I was pleasuring myself
and I didn’t need anyone else there. And it doesn’t matter with
whom I have relationships now, my sexuality remains egotistic.
Amparo and Groco came into the room when the baby was
already coming out. I still remember that they carried me to the
shower, I was so ecstatic that I couldn’t remember I had just had a
baby. Amparo had to breastfeed for me. Me, breastfeed? No way,
all I wanted was to keep on coming.
The placenta was out by now and I was super tired.
It wasn’t like in Marceline’s birth where I took care of everything
regarding the baby. Jack was dressed and fixed up by Groco. He
didn’t bathe him because Amparo didn’t think he should.
He did everything. He even pulled my breast out so that Jack
could breastfeed. I can’t say if he latched on or not, I don’t
remember. It seemed like he didn’t grab on immediately, but we
didn’t worry because we already had experience and we knew he
would grab on later, and that would just be it.
Anyway, I already had milk because I was still feeding Marceline.
I remember one morning when Marceline woke up and said:
“Mommy, titty.” She grabbed a breast, Jack was hanging from the
other, and she asked: “Have you bought me a doll?” I told her it
was her brother and the kid flipped out. Jack was already latched
by then. I recall very distinctly that he had latched that morning.
María: And how was Marceline’s latch?
Sarri: Beautiful. The gynecologist who treated me knew of the import
that I conferred to lactation, so that when Marceline was born he
put her immediately on my belly. Marceline crawled with the cord
still on and she grabbed me on her own. The gynecologist was
telling me: “Don’t touch her. Keep close, but don’t guide her.” She
latched on her own, without any pains, without any problems of
position. Like I say, she latched like a pro. And she didn’t let go.
She spent a little more than three years nursing. Jack wasn’t as
much of a beast as she was.
María: I’m beginning to work as a doula, and the woman that
accompanies always asks me: “What should I do when it begins to
hurt?” And I tell her: What if it doesn’t begin to hurt?” Her mother
 and grandmother had very good childbirths and their periods were
always painless. So maybe it doesn’t hurt when she gives birth.
Sarri: My periods also aren’t painful. It never occurred to me to talk
about childbirth with my mother. It was later that I told her: “Mom, it
wasn’t painful for me.” And she replied: “No, it isn’t painful. I had
three children and it never hurt.”
She got very angry with the third birth because they gave her a
painkiller without consulting her.
María: She had them in a hospital?
Sarri: Yeah, in a hospital.
María: Have you ever talked about your sexuality with her?
Sarri: No, not with my mother. I haven’t talked about this with many
people. For me it was a brutal discovery. With Marceline it was
madness. I even went to a therapist. Because I didn’t know what
was wrong with me. I had such a need to expand my sexuality!
María: Did Casilda’s texts help?
Sarri: I’ve read all her books and texts. It was after I did so that I said
to myself: “I’m not crazy!” Like I was saying, she gave me the
words. She gave meaning to a feeling. That led me to rationalize
everything.
María: And to let yourself go during Jack’s birth.
Sarri: Yes. By the time I reached Jack’s birth, I had strong self-
esteem. I knew everything that was happening, and I had a name
for everything that was going on.
When I told my midwife about Marceline’s birth, she told me that
this second one was going to be very fast. And I thought: “Fuck, I’m
not even going to notice!”
With Marceline the period of contractions was very long. With
Jack I had contractions at the hour he was later born for a month.
Every day at 10pm. I would attribute this to the fact that I would
usually put Marceline to bed around that time, and so I would have
just finished nursing her.
Amparo told me that I began the process of labor with those
contractions. That my body was dilating already and getting ready
to give birth.
María: Your midwife is very wise. I’d like you to tell me about the
changes that took place in your sexuality. I wanted to ask you if in
those new sexual relations that you established with the world, and
with your own body, there were people from both genders and
different sexes.
Sarri: My whole sexuality has changed, because, without noticing, a
weighty Christian burden I had been carrying suddenly dropped off.
When I separated from Groco, I knew very clearly that I only
wanted to have sexual experiences. I’ve opened myself up to
everything; everything. Though I haven’t tried with animals
(laughs). I’ve been with two boys at the same times, two boys and
one girl, etc. Now I’m with one person since a few months ago. I’m
surprised of myself, as this wasn’t the intention. I’m surprised
because he was afraid of me, because he only knew me as a
person with a very open sexuality.
I’ve learnt to be faithful to myself, not faithful to people. I’m faithful
to what I’m feeling. What I’m not going to do is to betray myself.
I don’t intend to be faithful to him, nor to respect him. The day I
don’t feel like staying with him, I’ll leave for my sake.
Sex doesn’t begin the moment you get naked, sometimes it
begins with the flirting. My sexuality changed from the moment I
became the one who chooses people. I am the one who flirts, it’s
from that perspective that my sexuality changed.
I’m going to give you an example. I had a lover who was taoist
and practiced tantric sex. When I met him he interested me a lot
because I wanted to practice all that stuff. Not because I liked him
or disliked him. In the end it wasn’t what I was expecting. Maybe
my expectations were too high. However, since then I’ve read
about tantra and I’ve put it into practice. And that did go the right
way.
I’m very happy with my sexuality. I see it as the fruit of my
personal trajectory: getting rid of my guilt, carrying out my desires,
feeling that I control each and every situation. Everything that
happens does so because I choose it.
I’m very curious and I like to read a bit of everything. But I didn’t
read about this; this came to me from somewhere else. It’s been
one of the few things that’s purely been experience and vitality. I
 read about it afterwards and then had names for every experience.
It really is a matter of life experience, and about people being
willing to accept that experience and the fact that that not all of us
have to experience an orgasmic birth! Imagine what pressure that
must be!
My friends and I meet every Wednesday, and we talk about sex
and other things. They say it’s easy for me because I’m multi-
orgasmic. I tell them that not always, only when I can and want.
And sometimes, even when I can’t come, it’s turned out to be some
of the best sexual experiences I’ve ever had. I don’t set an aim, I
just go with an open desire to have a good time. Even without
penetration. I’ve had marvellous orgasms without penetration and
almost without being touched.
The worst is to set a standard of the “this has to be this way” type.
That attitude is very masculine, unfortunately.
María: With childbirth we ought to be able to say something like that
too: ‘I came here to have a good time, to have fun, to live through
the experience.’
Sarri: In life we ought to seek pleasure in everything. We tend to
forget this. Maybe the birth hurts and, maybe you happen to enjoy
that pain. Let me enjoy it. Why does it have to be a bad pain? I’m
going to have a good time, even if I cry, scream, and claw. Did I
have a good time? Well, then, let me be in peace with my pleasure.
You don’t need to reach orgasm in order to have a good birthing
experience, you can feel a lot of pain and it can still be good, it can
be pleasurable. At the end of the day, my philosophy amounts to
this: seek pleasure in life. A child follows that philosophy. They do
something, it hurts, and they don’t do it again. They always seek
pleasure. As we grow older, our imposed education makes us
forget the basic facts.
We’re going to have to struggle and strive, yes, but the question
is: does the effort bring you pleasure?
That’s why, in an active birth, the woman moves so much. She
searches for something: not here; there, that’s better. It’s the same
with sex. Now, let’s change; and why did you change if we were
fine just like we were fucking up to now? Because I want more. It’s
pretty similar with childbirth. You switch between positions, you go
searching, you find it, it goes well and then, suddenly, it gets stuck;
your contraction gets stuck. Just like when you are having sex: it’s
going well and, suddenly, you don’t find it; well, then, switch
positions.
That’s why dancing is comparable to sex, and I think that’s why I
danced the first time.
‘I’m aware that my photographs are just another experience. They
are not testimony to an absolute reality. I understand there are
difficult births and some births that need assistance. What interests
me is to consider whether these difficulties have become the
exception or the rule. I’m also interested in questioning the role that
a restrictive and manipulated imaginary exerts over generations of
women who grow alienated from their bodies, alienated from the
maternal experiences of other women and totally molded by stories
that spread fear and contribute to women’s subordination to
institutions and systems of control that weaken or obliterate the
power of experience.’
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A Á -
E

Creation and parenting in artistic practice

Motherhood’s self-portraits
A Á -E

T that repeatedly presents itself to

me as a source of inspiration and a force of unstoppable creation. It
is as if raising children, despite the lack of sleep and insurmountable
demands it brings, fills one up with creative energy. Your kid
becomes your muse. Motherhood means, after all, a direct
connection with the cycles of life and death. Or so I have lived it in
my experience, and have come to see it as such in this book.
Creation and death. Life and creation. And it makes sense—oh,
does it make sense: we must create new ideas surrounding
motherhood! We need artists that courageously portray their
experiences and those of other women in order to see ourselves in
them, build ourselves and rebuild ourselves, again and again and
again.
Ana Álvarez-Errecalde is the artist behind a series of portraits and
self-portraits focused on maternal experience which have
revolutionized the art world and the forms in which maternity is
represented. In fact, if you type the word ‘birth’ into Google, the
images that appear are the typical Christmas postcards… and The
birth of my daughter (El nacimiento de mi hija) (2005) by Álvarez-
Errecalde. This double self-portrait displays a woman that recently
gave birth, grinning and ecstatic, with her baby in her arms and the
two of them still connected by the umbilical cord. There they are, full
of blood and oxycontin, full of love and bliss, showing the world that
a woman can birth and feel spectacularly happy, while her kid
peacefully dozes off in her lap, alien to the cameras.
Ana Álvarez-Errecalde was born in Bahía Blanca (Argentina) and
currently resides in Barcelona where she continues with the twinned
labor of artistic creation and parenting. She is mom to two boys and
a girl, all born at home. I have never had the chance to meet with her
in person, but I feel very close to her. I think it’s because of her
sincerity and honesty when speaking about her work and her
experience of motherhood. I sent her these questions via email from
Vancouver and she replied from Barcelona as if she were right here,
by my side.
María: I once heard you say: ‘I became an artist when I became a
mother.’ In my experience they made me believe that to be a
mother would stand in the way of my professional career. But I’ve
found that paths change rather than close up completely. Maternity
 gives wings to creativity in unexpected ways, while simultaneously
confronts a labor system that turns its back on parenting and care
work. What has been your experience?
Ana: Before becoming a mother I also took part in creative work, but
it was really maternity and the added difficulties that arose with my
first son that pushed me to develop myself as an artist.
Motherhoods that challenge the system—self-aware, ecological
and independent motherhoods—confront not only the labor system
but indeed everything that the system involves (healthcare,
nutrition, education, productivity, and consumerism in all its forms).
Evidently, from the moment I oppose giving birth in a hospital,
refuse to be systematically vaccinated without my consent, reject
any form of early childhood education, and in general stand against
any predetermined pattern that doesn’t coincide with the
necessities or beliefs of my family, the fragile net that the system
offers to mothers doesn’t extend to cover the things I’d like to give
to my children.
Nevertheless, as an immigrant, an artist, and a mother with a
large family that includes an adolescent son whose needs have
made him entirely dependent since he entered this world, I have
never felt a need for the labor market’s protection or recognition.
One way or another, my life has made it easy for me because I
already had other priorities to consider. When one decides to take
charge of caring for a loved one, you accept that there are certain
changes in your life you don’t get to choose. These past few years
for example I have never generated a salary but rather a means of
survival. That is, my partner and I have opted for reducing costs
and returning to self-sufficiency and collaborative networks instead
of a salaried incomes. As the years pass, we begin to see that the
projects we have settled on have brought us very far in maintaining
the lifestyle we have fought for. Maybe throughout all these years
our careers could have been more prolific, and our family could
have enjoyed a higher level of wealth and economic benefit, but
that would have meant giving up other things. You say that our
professional careers alter with motherhood and I agree with that,
because each person is transformed with every new challenge they
take on.
 To ask a constraining social system to make space for the
diversity of our experiences is very good and necessary.
Nevertheless, we cannot stop living and prioritizing what we feel to
be true in order to wait for the ideal, perfectly enriching, social
space—what one loses in the wait is irretrievable! I believe there is
a great need for stories of lives that transgress the established
order. We need lots of these stories so that society can then
validate those experiences and offer a network in which these new
necessities and stories are contained. I see all the new
conceptions of families now as pioneers in challenging a
hegemonic model that only protects the needs of those familie that
loyally fit within its constraints.
María: You have a series of photographs, portraits and self-portraits
that are wonderfully lucid reflections on maternity. They are
photographs that change the world; that change our perception of
childbirth, of raising children, of life and of death. I would like you to
talk about them a little bit. How was the process of making of them,
what was the response in the media and society, how did they
changed you and those around you.
Ana: The birth of my daughter came, not from a desire to produce
another work of art, but from the need to capture an image that
repeatedly came to my mind. I was planning my second home
birth, and the image of myself united with my baby by the umbilical
cord appeared to me like a spell, night after night. I then just
decided to put up a white backdrop in order to try and capture this
image just as it had presented itself in my head. At that time I had
no intention of displaying these photos publicly. Near the very end
of my pregnancy, a friend got me some white light bulbs that are
used by professional photography as an alternative to the
traditional bright flashing lights. As soon as I was in labor, my
somewhat reluctant friend began to hang up the white backdrop in
a corner of the house. It seemed impossible to create a self-portrait
while giving birth, but the truth of the matter is that my daughter’s
birth really presented the perfect opportunity. It was a free birth;
lucid, pleasurable, loving, respectful, and joyful. I had a spike of
energy and clarity. I was in control to such an extent that I was able
to decide to take these photos. In the first photograph I still have
the placenta in me and, in the second, the placenta is still
connected to my baby but already outside my body. At that time I
had an analogue camera, and as I was developing the film and
seeing the photographs I understood that I had to share them
because they counteracted a great part of the stories surrounding
childbirth that millions of women are raised with. These photos are
a testament to the fact that a birth can follow a different path, be
lived out in a different way. Here there is no fear, no patient, no
birth coaches, no directives. There is no idealization of childbirth,
nor is there those clichés Hollywood has made us accustomed to
(infantilized women with no control and in need of advice and
guidance, the aseptic green gloves, and the nervous desire to
convert a physiological act into a pathological one).
There’s a happy mother and baby, and there’s a cloth that doesn’t
cover anything, a ‘veil’ that seems to leave uncovered those things
that bother our cultural norms.
I liked being able to offer this diptych as a counterpoint to the
vastly limited ideas of childbirth within our cultural imagination. I like
that, whether one likes it or not, it forms part of the google search
for nativity and birth, giving a true testimony in the midst of all the
cheesy and virginal religious icons.
It makes me happy to think that the representations of
motherhoods in both art and the media must make space for my
experience, because my contribution validates the experiences of
so many women that came before me, those who opt for this type
of birth, and those whose histories are silenced or minimized.
Unassisted childbirth is only a subject of media attention when it
happens by accident.
I’m aware that my photographies are just another experience.
They are no testament to an absolute reality. I understand there are
difficult births and some births that need assistance. What interests
me is to question whether these difficulties have become the
exception or the rule. I’m also interested in questioning the role that
a restrictive and manipulated imaginary exerts over generations of
women, who grow alienated from their bodies, alienated from the
maternal experiences of other women and totally molded by stories
 that spread fear and contribute to women’s subordination to
institutions and systems of control that weaken or obliterate the
power of experience.
This diptych has been widely circulated and it has received
multiple critiques, both positive and negative. Many people feel
moved by the images, and many too are offended, because the
photos confront with a smile all their prejudices relating to blood,
female nudity in a non-seductive context, life cycles, and their own
personal roles in maintaining social restrictions. There have also
been situations where, after having lived through misled, painful
and stolen births, mothers (and sometimes fathers as well) have
made a great effort to forget those experiences of impotency,
humiliation, and loneliness. These photographs help to reopen
those wounds in order to heal them, but one must also have a
great deal of courage in order to then be able to look back and
learn from the path and unique experiences lived through.
María: Tell me about the piece Cesarean, beyond the wound
(Cesarea, más allá de la herida). This series, in collaboration with
an association called labor is ours (el parto es nuestro), seems to
me to be a fundamentally reflective work on c-sections. Just as
there is a need to condemn the abuse of unnecessary cesarean
sections, so too we must take the steps to make peace. Make
peace with our bodies, our scars, with our experiences of birth
when they haven’t gone according to plan. You were born via c-
section. Is your mother a part of this series?
Ana: My mother had a great deal to do with my involvement in this
project. At the beginning I thought that, having given birth to all my
babies at home, I had no right to speak about an experience of
motherhood I had never had. Nevertheless, I am the youngest of
seven siblings and I’m the only one that was born via c-section. I
called my mom in Argentina and we spoke a lot about each one of
the births she went through, focusing specifically on mine. Only
after that was I finally able to approach this project with gratitude
and without prejudice. Even though I have photographed my
mother’s scar, her picture didn’t become a part of the book. I hope
to exhibit the whole of the project and I hope that this photo
 (alongside others I developed when the book was already in the
production process) can be included. Cesarean, beyond the wound
has been a magnificent project. Photographing thirty-odd women
who had had one or more c-sections helped me understand the
great variety that exists within the spectrum of what is called
medical interventions. This is what I hoped to capture in the project.
It’s important for us to see beyond our wounds, to find what we can
learn from our lived experience. With this project I met wonderful
mothers that had succeeded in re-making their experiences into
success stories by becoming sources of support and information
for other women.
María: The four seasons (Las cuatro estaciones) series which
includes Annunciation (Anunciación), Shadow (Sombra), Assent
(Asentir), and Symbiosis (Simbiósis) was something I found truly
beautiful. Abortion, breastfeeding, parenting… motherhood. Its
dark side and its luminous side. Everything is included within it.
Everything.
Ana: The four seasons capture some of my reflections on maternity,
born out of of my experiences of it. Annunciation attempts to
portray the ‘yes’ that unconditional love involves. A ‘yes’ that takes
on the vulnerability of our children and of ourselves as well. A form
of love which inspires and elevates and while at the same time is
accompanied by inevitable pain. According to my interpretation of
Michelangelo’s La Pieta, this love does not begin with passion but
with wholehearted dedication. With the mystery that is saying ‘yes’
to an uncertainty that will envelop our lives from the moment we
commit ourselves to the destiny or the vicissitudes of another’s life.
Shadow is the mother wolf capable of both ferociously defending
her offspring and of being the big bad wolf from the storybooks. It is
fear, repression, restrictions laid out ‘for your own good,’ and the
transformation from the girls we once were in those motherly
commandments we both rejected and inevitably inherited. It is the
unconscious that manifests itself, despite our best efforts but
ultimately in our favor, in order to present to us the possibility of
change. Consent is about trust and relinquishing control. I had a
late-term miscarriage in a very difficult year, marked by other
 irreparable losses. Consent is about making peace with what we
get. It an attempt at exercising detachment from expectations, and
our desires and demands. Symbiosis focuses on relationships that
nourish each other. A mother who willingly offers her body and her
presence to her kids is in herself a revolution, because she stops
being a cog in a system that creates and nourishes masses of
unfulfilled desires in future men and women. Symbiosis distances
itself from the idea of the ‘supermother’ in the same way that my
idea of womanhood distances itself from the idea of a
‘superwoman.’ Symbiosis doesn’t focus on a ‘superpower’ that
makes us moms superior to our children. It isn’t the concept of
mothers as superheroes, but of them as individual beings, who
reinvent and strengthen themselves through the relationships they
form with their children and themselves. In that symbiotic
relationship, built on mutual respect, attentiveness to one’s and
others need’s, and shared learning, resides power.
María: Motherhood as the beginning, as a door that opens, as the
possibility of beginning from scratch in an entirely new totality
rooted in the manifold possibilities that raising children brings…
starting at the point where nothing works as before, and thankfully
so. Because maternity can be a deeply transformative experience,
a transcendental and mystical experience, where sexual ecstasy is
only just a footnote. Creation and parenting (creación / crianza).
They are related words. And they’re analogous concepts. How do
you see it?
Ana: Sexual ecstasy tends to come as a surprise to all and is
facilitated by the degree of oxytocin that runs in our blood. If the
birth is free, desired, and the woman touched only when she asks
to be touched (there is no external intervention, monitors,
flashlights, mirrors, checkups, distracting conversations, etc…)
sexual ecstasy can be reached. This can come to take place
because of the reflexive, involuntary ejection of the baby which
coincides with the physical and emotional exhaustion of birth and
the natural oxytocin high. Even the ‘ring of fire,’ a burning sensation
that occurs when the baby crowns, can reach the heights of
pleasure if one gives in to its intensity without fear. But the mystical
and transcendental change that maternity bring is not limited to the
act of giving birth. That’s why I believe that, even though it’s an
important thing to share in an informative sense, we shouldn’t
glorify childbirth as an end in itself. Each child transforms us in a
distinct way and it is not necessary to give birth to a child in order
to have a transcendental or mystical maternal experience.
I feel that creation and child raising are not analogous concepts. I
have learned to merge these two opposites in order to come to
terms with the bumps and ruts coexistence and constant interaction
create in my life.
In order to capture a concept or image, one has to scrap many
others; it isn’t rare for our initial idea to change, to leave out now
contradictory aspects, and in the process challenge our certainties.
The same situation takes place, I find, in raising children. I think
this is the transcendental aspect common to creation and raising
children: both situations force me to go beyond my limits. Many
conflicts that arise from coexistence are resolved when we are able
to practice this same creativity in our relationships. Going beyond
the limits of what we believe we can love, practicing patience we
did not think ourselves capable of, achieving satisfaction in the
smallest things and laying bare our egoism… these are all
experiences that help us rethink ourselves, reinvent ourselves, and
grow. Motherhood is a balancing act between determining what is
right, when to act, when to express an opinion and when to not
intervene and letting be. It is seeing myself repeating things I would
have sworn I would never say. It is finding the middle point between
measuring myself to be greater than I am or finding myself to be
too stingy in my self-evaluation. It is balancing between
simultaneously being a mother and a daughter, confronting each
maternity in light of all the experiences that have made me who I
am. It is taking my fears and giving them a fair weight, and not
demanding too much creative and moral energy from my children…
In this sense I think creation and raising children are exactly the
same thing.
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A M
Motherhood in a

A M
Motherhood in a capitalist society

I a tribe to raise a child, and, as Carolina

del Olmo adds: where the fuck is my tribe? (Dónde está mi tribu.
Maternidad y crianza en una sociedad individualista, Traficantes de
Sueños, 2013). Our capitalist and patriarchal society is already
deranged, but it’s when you have to raise children that you’re really
in for the treatment. “You don’t work at all?” they ask you, and all
the while you have been raising children 24 hours a day, seven days
a week, sleepless nights included. When facing a question such as
these, I, for one, go mad. The indignation that such questions create
in me is fathomless. A guy may work 8 miserable hours a day, and
he is supposed to be generating a great benefit for society. He’s
given rights to a dole and sick leave. On a personal level, this
interest goes way back. I’ve spent years taking care of my elders, I’m
held responsible for a relative’s tax bills as her legal tutor, and
everyone assumes—always—that all this work is free. It is this work
that all of us caretakers (who are, largely and overwhelmingly,
women) do that lays the foundation of the capitalist system, as Silvia
Federici has pointed out (Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body
and Primitive Accumulation).
Alicia Murillo studies motherhood within our capitalist society, and
proposes active solutions so that care work is considered at an
economic level. She makes us question the scope of our concept of
care, and the notion of motherhood itself. She fights against feminine
work being unremunerated. She’s a woman who goes beyond
theory, always, and practices what she believes while sharing it with
her companions. I admire her enormously for that.
Alicia is a singer and a feminist activist. She lives, creates and
raises her children in Seville. She has also lived in Pesaro, Seattle
and Marrakech. Alicia is a biological mother to two children, and also
a foster mother. She’s the creator of El cazador cazado—a video-
project in which she films men verbally assaulting women in the
street—and El conejo Alicia—a monthly vlog on feminism and
current affairs, published in the magazine Pikara. She has also put
out the album Cuidado con la perra, and often goes on tours and
gives workshops. She has recently given a a conference on
economy and motherhood entitled “Subversive Motherhoods.”
We met a few years ago, when Alicia invited me to present a
workshop on post-porn to a feminist collective, in her house in
Triana. It filled me with strength to meet her, and I consider myself
fortunate to have had her in my life from then until now.
We conducted this interview in August 2014, in my house in
Benicàssim, surrounded by our kids, partners and pets.
María: Tell me about your conference “Subversive Motherhoods.”
Alicia: It’s an informal talk-dialogue, I don’t see it as a conference. I
develop some ideas in it and like to have some feedback
afterwards, to know what people think. Regarding the content, I
didn’t come up with it on my own, truth be told. This comes from
way back, from Silvia Federici in the seventies, and probably even
earlier.
This issue was brought to my attention by a group of women from
the Universidad Pablo de Olavide ( ) in Seville. They are all
economists, researching the labor conditions of women, whose
main ideas I strongly identify with. Their work analyzes the causes
and effects of unremunerated parenting. I first got in contact with
them as a result of the group activities organized by the 15-M in
Seville. Later on, I was able to take part in an elective course with
them at . I was then finally able to meet and hear Lina Gálvezs
speak in a fantastic meeting organized by the Andalusian Women’s
Institute ( ) in Baeza, which I attended as a speaker.
I must say that Lina’s work and that of her team is spellbinding,
but I don’t agree with the solutions they provide. They state that the
whole of work traditionally done by women is free, and it is this
work that lays the foundations for our capitalist system, which is
based on unremunerated care work.
By this they mean not only such work as giving birth, raising
children and parenting, but also other forms of work traditionally
labelled as feminine such as selling food in the street—a very
common practice in Morocco, for instance, or sewing, cleaning,
cooking, doing the laundry, etc. In Spain this isn’t so visible, though
we are seeing that it’s coming back again with the recent economic
crisis.
Another example of this kind of work is tutoring and private
language classes. There are plenty of women who finish their
 degree, don’t manage to find a job, and turn to these kinds of
activities which are really at the forefront of what is an entire
submerged economy. Women are working without being registered
for National Insurances, and it’s part of a feminist economy to
analyze all these things.
Her team says that it isn’t fair to us, women, to be working for
free, that this kind of work is to be divided in half and distributed,
50% for the men, 50% for the women. And here’s where we
disagree.
I’m against policies that encourage a compulsory 50/50 split in
responsibility, (as is the case with non-transferable maternity leave,
for instance) since every family is different. There will be families
that want to give 100% of the parenting duties to her, others where
they wish to give 100% to him, and even more who want it to be
distributed unequally between multiple parties. Or maybe some
want to split it between two men, or two women… because these
kinds of policies often have a very deep heterosexual heritage
behind them. It is assumed that every couple is heterosexual.
Those which aren’t, are pushed to reproduce the abusive power
dynamics of heterosexuality. Not every couple is willing to rear their
children with a 50% share. What if they aren’t even a couple? What
if they are polyamory groups? And even if they are man and
woman, what if they’d rather organize themselves differently?
María: That’s the solution which I’ve been inculcated, the feminism
that I’ve been taught since I was a teenager—that men need to
take care of 50%.
Alicia: And no offense to our mother’s work! It was a generation of
women who had a very rocky access to university and the labor
market, and those were the spaces they wanted to conquer. My
mother, for example, doesn’t quite understand everything I support.
She often tells me: “With the amount of effort that’s taken for all of
us to come out, you now go and defend staying at home? How
dare you return to that which I fought so hard against?”
But the thing is: I don’t want to return to the same place, or in the
same way. I want to get paid for doing what my mother did for free.
My mother or any other woman of that era, or even these ladies
from , would tell you that it isn’t only a matter of money. They
say that domestic work is alienating.
I propose the following: on the one hand, unity and solidarity
among us. Men are very united, very well organised, and have
strong institutions and a long tradition backing them. Even though
we also have a very long tradition behind us, we aren’t united in the
same way. The first thing is to agree to help each other out.
Secondly, and the principal aim, is for us women to get paid and
to have access to National Insurance. Both things are crucial:
paying contributions and getting paid. It is of great importance to
get rid of the idea that making a contribution is somehow like
paying for work—that’s just not the case.
Paying taxes and contributing to National Insurance schemes is a
right and a duty. Furthermore, it’s how one is ensured retirement
and periods of unemployment. It’s a way of being protected for that
day when you may decide to leave your partner for whatever
reason. That is, it gives you a basic economic platform and work
experience from which to seek employment if needed. The
collective image we have of women who raise children is that they
have been unemployed for twenty years.
To sum it up, our two basic objectives are to contribute and to get
paid.
But the problem is that there’s a massive legal vacuum here.
There are formulas which we could use to regularize our situation,
but there is no precedent. We basically find ourselves in the same
legal situation as sex workers. On the one hand, we generate an
invisible ; on the other, we are part of the system but no one
sees us. To get out of this situation there are countless formulas,
but first of all we must come together.
When a woman wants to take this step, she shouldn’t go to tax
consultant who, most likely, won’t have the tiniest trace of a
feminist outlook. If you go to a tax consultant he’ll tell you to
register as a self-employed worker. But for that you need to earn
two hundred or three hundred something per month. Where can I
dig up more than two hundred when, say, I am a single mom in a
precarious living situation? Or what if my husband who, in theory,
brings home the money, doesn’t bring enough? We can’t try to go
 in that direction.
There are many solutions. The ideal scenario is that of a woman
whose husband has a lot of money and she stays at home taking
care of the children. She registers herself as self-employed and
that’s it.
Or maybe the husband has some company, maybe she could get
hired as a worker for that company. It’s harder because you have to
prove that your activity is somewhat related to your spouse’s
entrepreneurial activity. That is, if your husband has a glass factory,
legally the company wouldn’t be able to hire a caretaker to look
after your kids, but, paradoxically, it could hire someone to take
care of the children of the workers while they work (in fact, many
companies do that). All this isn’t coincidental. It’s the patriarchy,
which wants to institutionalise parenting, professionalize it, while
simultaneously getting rid of the whole maternal bond and making
slight of that reproductive gift only available to people with an
uterus. In any case, epigraphs such as “self-employed” are very
ambiguous where the activity isn’t specified and you are basically
just registered as an entrepreneur. You can’t register as mother,
they don’t allow you to do that. That’s why I say we’re in the same
position as sex workers… there has to be another way, then.
Another possible path is that of associationism. You establish a
non-profit society for women. To set one up, you need at least three
people; so three adult women make a club or group which, and at
the end of the year, they have to show that they’ve had no profit.
But that doesn’t mean that the society isn’t allowed to charge for its
services, bill or hire someone. The idea I propose is for
housewives’ societies to charge for care work services to those
who benefit from them (husbands, older children that already work,
the elderly and sick with a pension… whoever). With the money
this group charges, they can pay for National Insurance and the
wages of housewives who would be hired, not by the people who
receive their care work, but by the organization itself.
María: This is the option you’ve chosen, right?
Alicia: Not exactly. My professional work doesn’t only involve being a
parent; I also have my concerts, videos, private music classes, etc.
 I work for a cultural association that offers these services and hires
me as their worker. The truth is the traditional idea of a full-time
housewife barely exists anymore. Most women involved in raising
children are carrying out other activities outside the home. Being
only and strictly a housewife was a kind of luxury our mother’s
generation had, and it doesn’t exist anymore. For me it felt really
dishonest to make that money without declaring it, and it seemed
very unjust not to be recognised as a worker. That’s where it all
started.
These changes have been progressive, it can’t be done
overnight. In people’s heads it all boils down to “how do I get an
extra 150 or 200 per month to pay for my National Insurance?”
It’s a good option which contributes to the understanding that the
household’s money is not the same as the woman’s money, which
is the basis of our problems. In my talk, I begin with the Middle
Ages and how this idea—that a woman’s money is the same as the
household’s, and that the savings of a household are, as husbands
tend to say, “also your money”—begins to form part of the
collective outlook.
Those husbands don’t bring all the money home, they bring only
60% of their wages. The other 40% has gone to pay National
Insurance contributions.
María: Sick leave from work, their retirement, etc. They’re covering
their backs.
Alicia: Exactly. And not only that, it’s called “nómina” (salary), that is,
a nominative quantity. That means that you are getting a salary in
an account under your name. This is very important.
When I was in Morocco I saw how women had their own savings
system. They would organize themselves following the Western
calendar, 12 months, 12 women, one per month. For instance: you
have February, she’s got March, the other one April, I’ve got May,
so in May I get 20 euros (or 200 dirhams) from each woman in my
group. It’s a way of helping each other save some money.
Husbands know that money is untouchable, even brutally sexist
men respect it. A friend of mine that was suffering harassment
would tell me: “This month I’m getting paid”. I’d say: “Won’t your
 husband take it from you?” “No, no, that money is mine.” Even in
the worst case scenario, that money is respected. And me, the
perfect Eurocentric, asked her: “Shouldn’t you put that money in a
bank’s account?” To which she replied: “No, because you know
what happens then? If the fridge or anything breaks, the money for
the repair will be taken from my account. This system is better, this
way it’s clear that it’s mine.”
These women understood that they have to form associations in
order to protect the feminist economy.
It was then that I realised women ought to unite themselves.
Registering as self-employed is a solution, yes, but not the only
one. Another option is that of forming groups or societies. Yet
another is cooperativism. Under this model, all members have to
be registered as self-employed, which is why it’s such an
expensive option. But it may be a good solution if there’s a lot of
women involved, since they can all, together, pay the registration
fees for those members with fewer resources. It would amount to a
cooperative of housewives, something truly revolutionary. Imagine
there’s five women whose husbands have good salaries. The
membership fees would be retrieved from the money they charge
their husbands for the care work services they provide. It would
only require three cooperative members to be fully registered with
Social Security, and the rest of the women would be hired by the
coop as workers.
María: Tell me about the historical origins of these proposals.
Alicia: Before I say anything: history is not linear, it’s cyclical. So
when analyzing it, one is to take in account cultural differences: the
situation in the Philippines or in Finland is very different from the
one we have here. But since we need to come to particulars, and
you and I are both in Spain, let’s focus on our reality, while
remembering that it isn’t the only one nor is it valid everywhere. I
don’t like to be ethnocentric, but I take my environment, the one I
know—which isn’t more valid than anyone else’s but is just the one
I know—as a point of departure.
In my talks, I begin with the Middle Ages. During the High Middle
Ages, women experienced a greater degree of freedom. I start
before the Church began to bureaucratize the totality of people’s
lives from birth, with the baptismal rite, through marriage and
death. It’s a fact that the greater the level of bureaucratization, the
greater the control one has over people’s lives and, particularly,
over the lives of women.
From the moment the Church takes hold of the social order,
women’s lives change radically. Up until the first instances of
ecclesiastical bureaucratization, unions between people didn’t
necessarily stem from monogamy, and marriage as we know it
didn’t exist. Women had different partners throughout the different
stages of their lives. In fact there’s a reference in the poem El Mío
Cid, when the two daughters are molested by their husbands and
el Cid frees them and takes them away, and later they marry again.
They had no need to remain with the two infantes who were a
bunch of assholes. That’s an example of women having the
possibility of remaking their lives.
Relationships weren’t monopolized by marriage. What happened
then? Well, women’s economic relationships were different, and
there was considerable female mercantile activity. Women were
dedicated, among other things, to healing and tending to
childbirths. This was an exclusively female line of work. Women
would work in all those things laid out for women, from curing a
stomach ache, to healing an infection, breastfeeding or parenting.
I’m certain men were much more involved in parenting than now.
The arrival of bureaucratic arrangements for marriage came with
the implicit understanding that this was to take place between two
heterosexual individuals, and have fundamentally a reproductive
aim. The husband was the one meant to bring money home, and
the whole of women’s activities were to be done for free, or in
precarious conditions. Some of the work women did was outright
prohibited, particularly that work done by women who were up to
that point considered “wise women,” and who were afterwards
termed “heathens” and “witches” by the Church. They were the
ones in charge of healing and caretaking, and they had enormous
socio-economic power. On that point, the patriarchy told us: “We’ll
let you clean our clothes in exchange for money. Charging for
being a laundry-woman or a cook is also allowed, but only in as
 much as you get very little money. When it comes to taking care of
those who are ill? With the loads of money you make from it?
That’s for us to be have a control over; women can’t have that
power. That’s how universities were established. They said:
“everyone who wants to treat a disease has to go through the
doors of this or that Medical faculty, but women aren’t going to be
allowed in.”
María: These medical faculties were created by men who had no
knowledge on the subject of healing… Bloodletting was a cure for
all kinds of infections. It’s very well laid out in Witches, Midwives
and Nurses by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English.
Alicia: Medicine began its career by scorning and making fun of
feminine wisdom. That fact is tied to everything we’ve been talking
about so far. It was a terrible blow to the female economy; an
incredible source of economic power was taken from us. The ability
to cure is immensely powerful; there’s really no greater power than
that. A campaign of stigmatization, prosecution, and crime began to
target women who cured diseases. There, the idea that women
who healed were also evil appeared for the first time.
That era, the Middle Ages, marks the beginning of a stigma which
states that every woman who charges for her services is evil. This
is true in every single field. And here is where the unremunerated
nature of women’s work begins.
María: Do the witch-hunts begin here as well? To call a woman a
witch, and to describe someone capable of treating illnesses as
illegitimate, is within the same sphere as calling evil on a woman
who charges money in exchange for wisdom. That is, they all
belong to the discourses of witch hunts.
Alicia: Evidently. And note too how this ties in with issues of class. If
you charge for cleaning someone’s clothes it’s precisely because
you are a woman with no cash. If you are a clean and proper
woman, you don’t charge anyone for anything because you have a
husband to take care of you. It’s dishonest for a woman to charge
for her work because it means she’s low class.
María: This is very important idea within the whole movement that
 promotes a different form of childbirth; at home, and not in the
hospital. It’s important to understand that this is a relatively recent
situation and a response to men being in charge of that field for
centuries and doing it so badly, conducting births in such an
inhuman way.
Alicia: Another subject that is encompassed by the stigmatization of
women’s work is the subject of prostitution. Every single job that
men can possibly do, they will. They’ll also make it an exclusive
field while charging us for their expertise. That’s not the case for
jobs traditionally attached to women. They tend to do care work in
exchange of food and a roof over their heads. As such, this system
can only be considered slavery.
What happened with prostitution is that, as homosexuality
gradually became stigmatized, it was increasingly seen as work
unfit for men. A feminized man is a man who has abandoned his
position of power; he provides a decaying image of patriarchal
order. It’s like bad propaganda because it’s living proof that men,
as such, are only a social construct. That’s why the effeminate man
was discarded and deemed an outcast, while work usually done by
women became exclusively for women. Prostitution was the main
pitfall of Christianity, and they fixed it with a stigmatizing ultimatum:
“Either they marry and do it for free, or they charge for it and
become pariahs because they’re women who earn money doing a
job we men can’t do.” What this means for us in the 20th century
and now is that we have had to become men in order to get a
salary. We do the same jobs men can do but with an entirely
erroneous interpretation of the masculine outlook. That shouldn’t
be the way. We are working as much as them, 70% of medical
professionals are women, but we take care and treat our patients
like men do. I don’t call that female medicine (understanding
female, not as a biological identity, but as the state that subverts
masculine oppression.)
María: In the world of motherhood, people continuously denounce
multiple medical practices that are truly barbarous. Even the
medical establishment (the World Health Organization, for
example) condemns abuses relating to childbirth. They’re
 denouncing their own medical system!
Alicia: It’s not only in medicine. It’s in every single field. We are pure
capitalism. Federici already stated this idea, that everything that
takes place happens so that capitalism as a system keeps on
going.
One thing worth mentioning too is how we don’t put “housewife”
in our own CVs when most of the time it’s our full-time job. I work
about 50% of the time from home. Why, then, don’t I put housewife
or caretaker in the “employment” box? I’m trying to write it more
regularly now, as a subversive gesture. For me, subversion means
a response to the model my mother followed which, in its own way,
was also subversive for her time. Subversion is cyclical, it must
always be alive, continually revising itself.
There’s a hegemonic model of motherhood that I want to subvert,
the very same one succinctly reflected in our Dictionary of the
Royal Academy of Spanish: “the state or quality of being mother”.
Mother is that “female who has given birth”, whereas father is “man
or male who has conceived a child”. That is to say, you weren’t
there when you conceived Rocachón, it was Dani who did it, not
you. All you did was giving birth. Furthermore, the dictionary states:
“Father: man or male in relation to his son”. The notion of mother is
much more animalistic. It doesn’t say “woman or female”, it’s just
“female”. Whereas in the other case it specifies both “man and
male”. There’s a clear separation between animal fatherhood and
human fatherhood; ours is just an animal motherhood.
Another basic concept is that of diversity: motherhood is different
across places and time, and non-human motherhood—that of
wolves, bitches, and cats—is one we can learn a great deal from.
The dictionary subsumes the feminine with the animal, treating
both as inferior, without noting that masculinity is but the erection of
a false pedestal, an attempt to withdraw from our animal reality.
That’s why there’s so much to learn from motherhoods that differ
from ours. We shouldn’t judge because one mother chooses to
nurse with a feeding bottle and another hires a nanny. We need to
be united in our diversity.
María: I’ve never taken care of my family, but I know that job has
 never had any value at a social level, and that creates a lot of
frustration. After taking care and working like a lioness for years, it
turns out that you’ve just been “unemployed”.
Alicia: Even we diminish ourselves. When we go visit our
grandmothers and we spend two hours with them, we see it as a
waste of productive time. Our society tells us we haven’t been
producing any capital in those two hours!
María: My grandmother is receiving some care work services and I’m
paying for them. I administer and manage my grandmother’s
finances in order to pay for the care work she receives. But the
management itself, which takes up an incredible amount of time, is
not something I get paid for at all. It’s funny because I’m her legal
guardian, and to ensure that I have used her resources in order to
care for her, I have present a report every year showing that her
money has gone only to the care home. The State goes through a
lot of pains to make sure I don’t get any sort of compensation for
my work with her.
But if you think about it you could say, hey, what about the
gasoline? I could present the gasoline as an expense too. But after
all the money is the least important, it’s my time and energy which
it takes up that I care about. That unrecognised effort and work
grows into resentment.
Alicia: And we haven’t even started talking about sex. I think it’s
crucial to differentiate work from employment. Those two are basic
concepts: work is everything, whereas employment is that work
from which you extract a salary, pay National Insurance
contributions, and is regulated by a set working calendar and the
holidays it allows.
To return to the historical development of motherhood in Europe
for a moment, it is worth noting how the traditional idea of a mother
was developed in the period from the Middle Ages up to 19th
century Romanticism. In the same that there’s a romantic notion of
a couple’s love, there’s also a romantic notion of a mother’s love,
and it’s important to analyze it. It’s that romantic idea of
motherhood and its corresponding idyllic and platonic view of
motherhood we still cling to, which provokes so much postpartum
 depression, and it’s the source of so much shit that has absolutely
nothing to do with a healthy idea of motherhood.
Equality feminism, as we’ve mentioned, turned us into men
without penises in quest for a salary. Then difference feminism
came along as a response to the previous generation’s focus on
equality. There were several hubs in the world for this movement,
such as the one in Milan which became incredibly important. The
women in this movement said: “I don’t want to be a man’s equal, I
want to be a woman with the opportunity of developing myself as
one.” I can breastfeed and men can’t do it. Why don’t we value
this? If men could, it would have great social esteem. I like many
things from this movement but, unfortunately, many of them stand
against queerness since some authors defend the biologically
feminine as difference. Take transexuality as an example. For a lot
of these activists, it doesn’t make any sense to change your body,
to turn into a man, because it means renouncing to your femininity.
It’s inconceivable for many of them.
María: I don’t see it that way.
Alicia: I don’t either, but they do. What I like about feminism is that I
can pick from here and there. And the bad—and good part—about
feminism too is that many women focus strictly on one theory and
make it theirs, often without questioning it.
I understand and agree with them to the extent that I have no
interest in turning into a man because I understand being a man as
an oppressive social construct. I reclaim femininity not as a
biological entity but as an oppressed social figure and, hence, as a
building block from which to subvert the social order. And along
these lines, we can say that transexuality is also a fascinating
subversion, because it bursts open the rules and the diagnosis for
gender. I don’t consider queer theory and difference feminism to be
incompatible.
María: Tell me about the way you develop, in your talk, the topic of
sexuality... and money.
Alicia: Throughout the conference, some men leave. Often with
profuse excuses, but sometimes they just stand up and walk out.
Usually when I’m in the process of explaining to them that they will
have to pay for what they now get for free. Very few men stay up till
the end. They get furious and leave, or they get bored and leave—I
can’t tell. Most of the women that remain are fully convinced of
everything I say. They are like “yeah, cool, so far, so good,” until I
turn to the subject of sex.
I tell them: “Men have to pay to fuck”. That notion can’t and won’t
enter their heads. They get mad at me, grab their heads with both
hands… You just can’t go there. They understand perfectly well
that you can and must charge for changing diapers, for cooking, for
taking care of someone who is sick, for cleaning, for being
pregnant, for breastfeeding; all this goes down well. But when you
touch the idea of getting paid for sex, then you’ve gone way too far.
In fact, I end up short for words and without arguments, because I
don’t understand where’s the difference. They tell me it’s reciprocal,
a give and take, and I cringe just to think of that type of discourse.
These women always measure and limit their actions within sexual
relationships so that both parties are as equal as possible. But very
often, when I get under the covers, I don’t get as much as I give,
sometimes I receive more or less, it’s a matter of chance, I’m not
measuring. That’s their first point. But secondly, we’re talking about
capitalism here, and like a good friend of mine says: “I didn’t invent
them, but if these are the rules, I can play.” Capitalism doesn’t pay
for what doesn’t have value, it pays for what people are willing to
pay for. Then it must be like that for everything everything. When I
go to buy fruit I can’t pay off my apple with a hug; the guy is gonna
charge me as much as possible. If my husband is willing to pay me
to get laid, I’m going to charge him for it. It’s not because sex has a
specific value but rather because my husband is willing to pay me.
It’s a matter of capitalism. So their natural reply to this is: “Are you
defending capitalism?” No, I’m surviving capitalism, that’s different.
When everyone stops playing along with capitalism’s games, then
I’ll stop playing along too. I’m not going to be the only idiot playing
the communitarian game, the game of gratitude, of respect, and of
working for work’s sake and all that. If I’m getting paid for other
things, well, then I’m charging for this too. If my husband isn’t
willing to pay, that’s a different matter. If you can’t charge for it, then
you can do whatever you want, keep on fucking—because it’s in
 your interest, because you derive pleasure— or don’t.
María: Let’s say the husband doesn’t want to pay, what then? Either
you stop doing it or you do it only when you feel like doing it. That
change of mentality is very treacherous. It is an obvious fact that in
monogamous relationships you often fuck for the other person’s
sake.
Alicia: But do you think any man or woman is going to admit that? No
one does. In a marriage you don’t say “we’ve been together for
eight years and I don’t feel like doing it.” The thing is you don’t say
this, either to your wife or husband, for fear they might go fuck
someone else. Or maybe it’s a fear of of recognising that your
marriage fails to imitate the traditional idea of romantic love, full of
fireworks for the rest of your life.
María: It is true that sexual passion, if you are fucking the same
person, wanes as the years go by. That sexual tension is
transformed into other and very beautiful things. But it doesn’t turn
into great sex. The book Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We
Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships by Christopher
Ryan and Cacilda Jetha explains it very well. It lays out why we are
not made for monogamy.
Alicia: Maybe the thing that sexual tensions transforms itself into is
fully satisfying in its own way. What I propose is independent of
whether the sex is satisfying or not. Maybe you love to fuck your
husband—charge him anyway. It doesn’t have anything to do with
whether you like it or not, all that matters is that you can charge
him for that. If you can, why wouldn’t you do it? If you are told that
every time you take a walk you are given 50 euros, wouldn’t you
say: “I love taking walks, how can I now get paid for doing what I
like?” Would you take those 50 euros or not? For example, I love
making videos, but I charge for them. I do it because I can charge
for them, because there’s a company that gives me that money.
Why is sex any different? I don’t understand it.
María: I think sex belongs to the field of care work, alongside taking
care of the house, preparing the meals, etc. Within this field of care
work, built on multitasking or offering many services at once, we
 also take care of our partners by offering sex when they want it.
Alicia: Many women comment that it’s just like how it was during their
mother’s time: “I got married and our relationship is based on
equality. But what if he’s the one that tries to charge me for sex?” I
say: “I hope you are not as dumb as to pay for that, if he asks you.”
What I’m trying to say is that we’re here to get ahead of them, not
to give men any more ideas.
The thing is to accept what is the reality of many sexual
relationships. It’s a fact that women give more than they get from
sexual relationships. Just think of coitus, the most common
practice. 90% of sexual interactions end up with coitus!
Coitus is a form of control. I have an article entitled “Coitus
Sucks” about this. Coitus is at the core of the sexual control
imposed on women’s bodies and their health. In coitus you are
exposed to a lot of sexual diseases that you wouldn’t be exposed
to if you didn’t do it. You are exposed to unwanted pregnancies too.
There’s no nervous endings anywhere else but at the base of the
vagina, the lower part of the clitoris; what you are touching in the
act of coitus is the clitoris, not the vagina. It is true that a woman
can have an orgasm without being touched, just by fantasizing, but
that’s different. I take coitus to be a submissive and sadomasochist
practice.
The other day I said to my partner: “You haven’t put it in for
almost a year”, and I loved his reply. He was less surprised than I
was: “I don’t feel like it, I’m into other things”. There have been
periods when we’ve had sexual lows and some friends have told
me “that’s because you don’t practice coitus.” I interpret that
statement as: “That’s because you are not fulfilling your duties as a
wife.” There’s that peer pressure that comes even from girls with a
degree, from all brands of feminists with vast educations.
Coitus was established as the standard sexual practice, as the
average one and as the only one validated by patriarchy and the
Church, as a form of control. The idea is that if you haven’t
practiced coitus, you haven’t practiced sex. This doesn’t happen by
chance. It leads to a total control of women’s lives, and that’s the
main issue we face.
María: If you tie it with the history of coitus, maybe you can find more
agreement with your public.
The truth is that I’ve always felt “forced” to practice penetration,
particularly when I was younger. It brought a lot of anguish with it,
the rueful consequences that could come with broken condoms,
etc. I’ve had to take the morning after pill many times for that
reason. And my body has suffered.
Alicia: Address coitus specifically and not sex in general. Good idea.
The question is that, regardless of whether you do it as a favor, if
you can charge for it, then charge for it. It’s capitalism, it isn’t a fair
trade. Why do we have fair trade at home and not outside of it?
An old lady—we need to listen much more to our grandmothers—
said in my conference: “I don’t know what are you scandalized
about—this has always happened. Throughout a woman’s whole
life she exchanges sex for something else, without stating it
explicitly. True, maybe there wasn’t any cash money thrown
around, but if your husband wouldn’t do as you told him, you’d
close your legs and you’d use that as a strategy.” I’ve got friends
who’ve exchanged sex for iPads, for jewels… There are husbands
who’ve swapped diamonds for children.
The thing is that these jobs are highly stigmatized today and they
tend to be associated with poverty. I’ve always tied the topic of
prostitution with that of immigration. Those women are in poor
conditions not because they are prostitutes, but because they are
immigrants. And they eat everyday precisely because they are
prostitutes. This friend of mine used to tell me: “The day when
prostitutes and housewives sit down to talk, the patriarchy is over.”
María: It’s crucial to the aims of this book to understand pregnancy,
childbirth and parenting as parts of sexuality. But I think it should
also be considered as sex work, as unpaid sex work that we offer
up for free.
Alicia: Or rather as a form of employment, because it is already work
and we now want to turn it into sexual employment. I think it was
Barbara Ehrenreich who first established the difference between
work and employment. Work is everything, and employment is only
remunerated work.
María: To conclude, what has been your experience with raising
children on a day-to-day basis?
Alicia: My lifestyle is similar to yours. I want to work at home, and
work on projects I can do from home. I’ve built a homemade TV
set! I want to work with my children running around. They are no
bother to me. I have fun with them. But that’s just my opinion.
I have to respect the run-of-the-mill equality feminist who wants to
work at the University, spends between eight to ten hours there,
comes back home, greets the nanny, and that’s about it. I don’t
agree with imposing any form of parenting on someone else. We
ought to respect them all, which is something that’s easy to say
and very difficult to make happen. It’s the first thing I say in my talk:
“There are as many forms of parenting as there are women in the
world. And we have to respect them all.” And they all say: “Yes,
yes, yes”. And then I begin to give examples and they’re like, “Oh,
no! Not that!” We have to create the material conditions so that
women can raise their children, also respecting those that want to
go out and work. If someone doesn’t want to get involved in raising
their children, let them do so. But at least we need to have the
option.
María: We have very little to choose from in a society that gives us
no options.
Alicia: We need to work together and respect all different forms of
motherhood, parenting, and care work. And in the public sphere,
we must try to conquer as many options as possible so that we
may be able to choose freely.
Isadora Duncan, the famous dancer, married a rich guy and had a
very pleasurable motherhood. She would spend all day playing
with them. Because she was rich, she didn’t need to do anything
else but dance and be with her children. She was absolutely
delighted and having fun.
Her children died in a car accident, trapped inside a vehicle that
fell into the water. Talking about their death, Isadora said
something along the lines of: “They came to me with a cry. They
were crying when they were born and I cried out when they were
leaving.”
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D L
V

D L V
Intersexuality and Gender Queer Parenting

I ? How about neither. Let’s give our children the

option of choosing their gender regardless of what they have
between their legs. Anyway, choosing between the two ignores a
very common reality: intersexual babies, children born with genitals
that don’t conform to what is ‘normal’ for either gender. It’s very
important for us as parents to respect their bodies and not castrate
them or their unique potential for pleasure by electing traumatic
surgery. There’s a really great documentary about this subject called
Intersexion (New Zealand, 2012).
Our goal throughout all of our parenting should be to transcend the
limits created by the assignation of gender. That is, queer theory as
applied to parenting, or ‘genderqueer parenting.’
Del LaGrace Volcano self-defines as an intersexual, trans* and
genderqueer MaPa. Del’s artistic work and personal life aim both to
show how limiting heteronormativity is and, more importantly, how to
escape from the narrow confines created by gender expectations.
Volcano currently lives in Sweden and is the proud MaPa of two
children: three year old Mika and five month old Nico. We have
known each other for many years because we both focus on the
same subjects within the worlds of art and queer activism. As a
result we have shared conference halls, performances, and exhibits.
We also have shared the same uncertainty when facing the difficult
reality of miscarriages. This interview took place over Skype,
between Sweden and Benicàssim in the summer of 2014.
María: My first question is related to a medical condition some
babies are born with, that I don’t fully understand yet. My friend’s
baby has been diagnosed with hypospadias and the doctors say
they have to operate. I’ve been trying to get more information on it,
but it’s difficult and I haven’t been able to find much. Can you tell
me a bit about it?
Del: What degree of hypospadias does the baby have? Is it intersex?
María: It’s severe but not the most severe, so the doctors
recommend surgery though it’s not technically intersex. It seems to
be it’s all about aesthetics and not about the child being able to feel
sexual pleasure by having a functional sexual organ. They are so
concerned about the kid being able to pee standing up! But his dad
has never peed standing up, and all of my friends with penises pee
sitting down because they’re feminists. I don’t think how one pees
is that big of a deal so long as it’s not painful or unhealthy. The
surgeon they contacted wasn’t willing to negotiate anything.
Del: Why did they say it’s not fully intersex?
María: I don’t know, they did a chromosomal study and it was .
Although I’ve been reading about it, and the chromosome does
not make a human being male. It’s not as simple as is female
and is male. Rather throughout embryonic cellular development,
one’s genes go through various evolutions, thus not totally fitting
well into the male-female genetic binary.
Del: Have you ever seen the documentary film Intersextions? There
is an intersex person in it with hypospadias, who has gone through
a lot of surgery and suffering as a result. I think is good that your
friends don’t feel pressured towards surgery. I have a friend who
had various surgeries while young to ‘normalize’ his body, and he
often wishes they would have just left him with the genitals he was
born with. Your friends should listen to their child, he’ll let them
know what he wants when he feels ready to talk about it. When the
kid is at day care, they just have to make sure that the people
changing his diapers are fine with it. The parents around him need
to be conscious that his genitals are special and some people may
not know how to approach it. Doctors now like to say that
hypospadias are anything but intersex.... because only activists are
intersex!
María: Oh, I understand. As far as I know with hypospadias they
sometimes say the child is intersex and other times they don’t.
Del: Maybe deciding and labeling isn’t that important. What matters
is what their child tells them it wants. If your friends are raising it as
a he, I think it’s important that they let it know there’s nothing wrong
with being a she
Many people think Mika is a girl because of the way he dresses
and because he has long hair. We actually think is good if people
treat Mika as a girl, maybe then he won’t grow up to be so macho.
A friend of mine made a children book about how babies are
made. In it she talks about bodies with or without uteri, instead of
about women and men. Cory, the author, is now writing another
book for older children about bodies, how to talk about them, and
sexual feelings.
María: I know that book! It’s called How are Babies Made? It’s
fantastic. The only thing I don’t like about the book is that it says
“babies always come into the world bringing pain.” It’s not always
like that, I must say.
Del: True... So, we used a fertility clinic for conceiving Mika. What’s
different for us was that the sperm donor, Thomas, was a friend of
ours. We often meet with Thomas and Helena, Thomas’ partner,
and they have a child that is 3 weeks older that Mika. Now they’re
having another baby that is only three weeks older than our second
child, Nico. It’s really great.
So Thomas, our sperm donor, is this fantastic, queer guy. I should
emphasize that he’s queer, not gay. Anyway, Mika was conceived
in just about the best way—Helena fisted Thomas in the fertility
clinic in order to get his sperm! I became friends with the
embryologist and she said is the best sperm she’s ever seen. And
that’s because it was produced while fisting. I’m sure of it. They’ve
done studies, sperm produced by masturbation is not as good as
sperm produced by intercourse. So probably sperm with anal fisting
is even better!
María: I didn’t know there could be differences in sperm quality
depending on how it is produced… How did you meet Thomas?
Del: I met him by searching for ‘queer’ in the search bar on
qruiser.com, a site for queer people (though many other kinds of
people use it). I typed in queer and the name of the tiny city where I
live, and he was the most interesting person to come up. So I met
up with him, and he had the most amazing energy so I took him
home. I later found out that he’s had sex with some of my female-
to-male friends, lesbian friends, gay friends, etc.. He’s the kind of
guy dykes like to have sex with. You know, he’s a feminist and a
cool guy.
So I had a vision, one time when we all went out on a bike ride
together. At that moment we weren’t looking for sperm donors but I
thought maybe he could be the one to do it. I knew it! I also knew I
couldn’t just say ‘I know you’re the one who will give us his sperm.’
So we thought about it a lot, and we talked through it with him too
until we came to a decision. So you can see they’re really a part of
 our family. Thomas is more like an uncle than a father or third
parent. Yet our children are all brothers and sisters. I know a lot of
people that don’t want to know their donors because they are afraid
the child may want to meet them.
María: I would have liked to meet my biological father.
Del: Why didn’t you?
María: Because he was an old priest, and he raped my mom when
she was very young and had a lot of mental problems. I saw him
once in church, giving out the eucharist. He was the priest and he
put the communion in my mouth, but he didn’t know who I was.
Del: My father is a Mormon. He didn’t speak with me for about 20
years, not because I was queer (he knew that, although he never
talked about it) but because I told my cousin, his niece, that she
was intersex. That was a big family secret; she was supposed to
think she had once had cancer. They told her that was why she
couldn’t have kids and why she had to take pills her whole life.
They also completely took away her clitoris. So I told her when I
met her in 1995 after searching for her for ten years. My whole
family told me that I could meet her so long as I didn’t tell her, but I
let her know as soon as we met up. So he didn’t talk to me for 20
years.
María: They told her she had cancer rather than letting her know she
was intersex? That’s incredibly cruel!
Del: That was normal back then. That’s what they did to all intersex
kids! And why did they removed her clitoris? Well, it was a little bit
bigger, or maybe a lot bigger, than they expected. We don’t really
know. She showed me her genitals and there’s nothing left. A
complete clitorectomy. And she has a small vagina but she was
given so many hormones throughout her life that her tits were like
enormous. She’s a lesbian now, which is good. She used to have a
boyfriend who often threatened her, saying ‘If I find out you’re an
hermaphrodite, I’ll kill you.’ They were able to have intercourse
because he had such a small penis, but she wondered: why have I
never had an orgasm?
My stepfather has dementia, Alzheimers specifically, and my
 mom is bipolar. I often think about my mother being bipolar. She
was incredibly beautiful, charismatic, interesting… and a terrible
mother. I had enough to eat, but I was physically abused from
about the age of twelve. She would be really nice and great, and
then suddenly turn around and hate you with every cell in her body.
She also hit me, so I would disappear and then she would be sorry.
It was always like that.
María: My mum was schizophrenic and it’s exactly like you put it: she
would be lovely, sweet, magical... and then everything would
suddenly change.
Del: Yeah, you never knew when it was coming… I think developed
an eating disorder around that time.
María: Me too! I was bulimic, for many years.
Del: I wasn’toverweight, yet I thought I was fat when really I was
maybe 5 kilos above average. As a child I was fit, and around
puberty I gained some weight and I thought I wasn’t beautiful
anymore. And we all know that women need to be considered
attractive at all costs… Maybe it’s a coincidence but that’s when
the abuse also started, largely because of the breakup of her
relationship with my stepfather.
So I ran away from home when I was 14 with my friend Shirley
who was running away from her adoptive family. Another piece in
this story is the fact that my adolescent body was developing in a
‘weird’ way, not like the rest of the girls around me. It was pretty
traumatic.
Her biological father lived in Key West, Florida. She called him
and he sent us two tickets to take us from Palm Springs to Miami.
As soon as we got to Florida, Shirley’s dad took me out to his car
and told me I had to fuck him. Well, he gave me a choice: I could
get out of the car 3,000 miles from home or I could fuck him. 3,000
miles is a very big distance when you’re fourteen years old. Twenty
five years later I found out that Shirley’s dad was a pedofile who
had been molesting her since she was three and raping her since
she was seven. I didn’t know she had been raped until much later.
After everything, I just said yes. I had to make a choice. I couldn’t
have gone out of the car in the middle of the night, wandering
 alone in the middle of nowhere. What sort of a choice is that?
That’s my story. We managed to escape after a few weeks and we
lived for some time with some buddhist monks in Key West. In the
end we had to go back to California. It was years before I told
anyone what had happened. Instead of receiving any type of
support, both of us were expelled from school for running away.
Shirley, who had no one but her biological father, got into a youth
center. I went to go live with my Mormon father and his family in
Tulsa, Oklahoma. Two years after moving in with them, their
marriage broke apart and she blamed me. I ran away again. So I
had terrible parents; not the worst in the world, but they were pretty
bad. Sometimes I wonder how I have been able to be someone’s
parents, and what I think is a pretty good parent at that. Maybe I
learned from their mistakes. I never felt pressured to be a mother
or father—why is that? Maybe because I’m fucking queer!
María: When you become a parent, your own childhood bubbles up.
I currently think that it’s great for me to be a mother, but ten years
ago it would have been very different. I first had to go through my
own process, my own therapy, in order to really heal.
Del: Of course. I am a proud MaPa now. I’m a person that is
intersex, intergender, queer, genderqueer and trans. All of those
labels apply to me and they are really important.
Mika has gone to daycare since he was a year old. It’s a very
good daycare that focuses on letting the kids be outdoors. They do
everything outside—even nap—and they’re less sick as a result!
They’re also great with everything relating to gender, and they use
gender neutral words like children instead of girls and boys. One
day, I was picking Mika up from daycare and I heard some kid say
‘Oh, here comes Mika’s dad!’ I tried to explain to this child in my
terrible Swedish that I was Mika’s MaPa, both male and female
together, and I could tell the child was confused. So I talked to the
caregiver and said that I didn’t want the kids telling Mika that I’m his
papa and not his MaPa. The caregiver suggested I write a letter in
both Swedish and English stating that I’m intersex and queer. It
was very important to me because I didn’t just want the kids to go
home to their parents saying ‘oh Mika has a MaPa’ and for them to
be told it’s wrong. I wanted the parents to say ‘oh yeah, that is a
person that is both male and female, it doesn’t happen that often
but it’s fine.’ It worked pretty well. Now when they read stories to
them at the daycare they include all kinds of rainbow families… and
MaPas!
Sometimes Mika wants to be the MaPa and we end up role
playing. I become the baby that is feeding from one of those bottles
that’s connected to a nipple so it seems like the milk is flowing from
the nipple. I breastfed Mika using one of these contraptions and
Matt—his mother’s—milk but I had to leave it when we went to go
live in the U.S. because it was too complicated.
Mika now actually insists on the fact that people are people and
children are children. There’s no gender pronoun other than ‘he’. I
am ‘he,’ he is ‘he’ and everyone else is too. We made a promise to
not use words like boy or girl, woman or man, to differentiate
people. It’s one of those things I do to try and slow down the
process by which people are divided into binaries. It’ll happen
eventually, but I hope it doesn’t hold us back. Hopefully Mika—and
now Nico—will develop their own forms of resisting normality.
When he puts on nail polish, all the other kids at the daycare, boys
included, want to wear nail polish. People think that if kids are
different they’re going to get bullied. I try to teach Mika that being
different is an expression of courage and strength. He’s already
showing signs of having a strong social conscience. There’s a book
by Julia Donaldson called What the Ladybug Heard, which makes it
very clear. It’s about two thieves who try to steal a farmer’s cow, but
all the animals on the farm, led by the ladybug, stop it from
happening. When the police takes the thieves away, Mika screams,
‘Bad farmer! Bad police! Bad animals!’ When I asked him about it
once, he told me ‘maybe the thieves have kids and they’ll go
hungry. They need milk but if he’s in jail, who is going to feed
them? The farmer should share the cow. Two nights with the farmer
and two nights with the thieves, so everyone has milk.’ I was so
proud of him!
I’m also teaching him that it’s very important to clean up. We pick
up trash every day including trash from other people. It has nothing
to do with gender and is all about taking care of our environment so
 everyone can enjoy it.
He’s a tough kid, and I don’t think he’ll have any issue defending
himself. Everyday I try to teach him to share, take turns, clean up
after himself, and understand that other people have ‘rights’ like he
does. I want to raise a child that’s strong but also sweet, attentive,
and supportive. So far it’s gone well, but now that he’s three there
are all kinds of new challenges. Raising a kid so that it learns to
question our authority over it, and letting him make his own choices
is a lot better than using the power one has as an adult.
María: Would you do anything differently with your second child?
Del: I used to think that I would like to breastfeed Nico more, in
public and for longer than I was able to do with Mika. But that didn’t
happen because a) Nico isn’t interested, b) Mika needs my
presence more and c) Matt, his mother, is home with us and needs
Nico to drink the milk she produces.
María: One last question: I have another friend that has a kid that’s
about five or six now. People always ask her if it’s a boy or a girl
and she tends to respond “he or she will decide when it grows up.’
Do you have an answer you use to this question that is so common
and intrusive?
Del: Oh yes, though my answer tends to change with my mood, who
asks and why. I tend to gently ask “why is that question important
to you?” or “are you asking me what kind of genitals my child
has?”, “what would you do differently if you knew?”
I sometimes tell them that if they want to go change his diaper
and decide for themselves, they’re more than welcome. Or I tell
them that both Mika and Nico have penises or vaginas, but that
doesn’t mean they’ll be a boy and a girl.
Sometimes I just simply say: “That’s not a question I want to
answer or have an answer for.”
Letter written by Del to Mika’s daycare:
A few weeks ago when I went to pick Mika up from dagis some of
the other kids said to Mika, “Här kommer din pappa, Mika.” I could
see that Mika was a bit confused because to Mika I am Mapa, not
pappa.
 One of the kids who called me ‘Mika’s pappa’ is a neighbour. So I
responded (in my bad Swedish) that, actually, I am Mika’s Mapa,
someone who is both a mamma and a pappa. I don’t know what this
child understood but I wouldn’t be surprised if the information was
confusing.
When I told one of the staff about this they were very responsive
and told me that sometimes when reading stories they change the
names from Mamma or Pappa to Mapa.
I think this is a tremendous first step, but my experience has taught
me that more information is probably a good idea if the kids (and
their parents) are being asked to understand something that our
culture says does not exist.
Most of us are raised to believe that there are two sexes and two
sexes only; male and female. However I am one of the (at least) 1 in
2000 people who have bodies that are not entirely male or female.
An old term for us was hermaphrodites, which has all kinds of
mystical and somewhat negative connotations. Today the term we
prefer is intersex.
So, without going into too much detail allow me to explain a bit
about intersex variations. Intersex is an umbrella term for people
who are born with bodies that do not fit into the standard definition of
male or female. It is estimated that as many as 1 in 500 people have
bodies that are mixed sex, to various degrees. Some intersex
variations are discovered at birth and others not until puberty or even
death. Many of us who are intersex have been lied to by our parents
and medical practitioners because they believe that the only way to
live a happy life is to be either male or female and that the truth of
our bodies must remain hidden, even from ourselves. Sometimes we
are forced to undergo non-consensual surgeries that are medically
unnecessary in order for our bodies to conform, surgeries that more
often than not have harmful and irreversible effects on both our
capacity to reproduce and enjoy the full spectrum of physical
romantic relationships.
I am an intersex activist and part of what I do as a job is to educate
on this and other subjects related to human rights. I make that which
has been hidden visible. I am proud to be who I am and to do what I
do. I am not a man, even though I look and sound like one. I am not
a woman, even though I was raised as one. I am intersex. I am me.
So in order to be true to myself and to show the world that it is
possible to live a fulfilled and happy life I choose to be visible. I
choose to reject the model of shame, secrecy and silence that we
who are intersex are told we must adopt in order to be integrated in
society.
These are the reasons I am writing to you and ask that you honour
my request to be called Mika’s Mapa. I would also like to invite you
to talk with me and freely discuss any concerns or questions you
might have. When kids in my own family have asked me if I am a girl
or a boy I say something like: “Well, even though most people are
either boys or girls a few people like me are kind of special. We get
to be both!”
Here are some links to articles in Swedish that have been written
about my life and work if you want to know more.
Me on MALOU: http://www.tv4play.se/program/efter-tio?video_id=2243302
http://na.se/familj/1.1511140-en-manniska-ar-en-manniska-inte-ett-kon
Thanks so much for your attention!
Del LaGrace Volcano, Mika’s MaPa.
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M Y
Feminism, pro-

M Y
Feminism, pro-sexuality, pornography, and maternity

T like us working in pornography and

feminism. And we also have babies. How do we complement our
experience of motherhood with our job? At the end of the day, if the
subject of our work is sexuality, we can’t cast aside motherhood as
another sexual stage.
 Mainstream pornography includes pregnancy as another fetish,
offering a very limited idea of it. There’s exceptions, such as that of
the famous actress and porn director Belladonna, who has produced
a marvellous series of porn videos where she appears extremely
pregnant and carrying out the most extreme hardcore sexual
practices, full of power and strength. She has managed to integrate
one aspect of her motherhood, pregnancy, into her work in a
successful manner. Maybe her secret is that she only works with
women…
The feminist, pro-sex activist Madison Young runs a feminist art
gallery called Femina Potens which she financed for many years
while working in the porn industry of San Francisco and LA—
she explains it in her memoir, Daddy, A Memoir (Barnacle Books,
2014). When Madison got pregnant, she decided to make a
documentary to show the different stages of sexuality during
pregnancy: Pregnant with desire. And that’s how she began to
explore motherhood in her line of work.
Madison Young is an artist, author, filmmaker and sexual
revolutionary dedicated to opening up more space in the world for
love. She’s mother of Em, to whom she’s given the freedom to
choose their gender, and she’s about to publish the book Sexy
Mama’s Guide to an Orgasmic Life.
She lives in California and we met in Seattle in November 2014,
after a sex coaching session with my partner. Madison offers sex
coaching sessions to queer parents willing to give another push to
their sexual life. It was then that we could talk about motherhood,
sexuality and queer parenting, but my baby Roc deleted the file from
my phone a few days later. Madison answered my questions again,
this time through email, in January 2015.
Young’s artwork, films and curated exhibitions have toured
internationally, including presentations on feminist sexuality at Yale
University, Northwestern University and University of Toronto. Young
is the author of Daddy: A Memoir, DIY Porn Handbook and Sexy
Mama’s Guide to an Orgasmic Life.
María: You have a beautiful portrait breastfeeding your baby which
stirred great controversy. I am also breastfeeding my baby, not only
because it’s healthy for both of us, but because it’s practical and
because of the wonderful sensations of love and physical pleasure
that you share with your baby. It doesn’t surprise me at all to see
women having orgasms when they breastfeed...
Madison: ing Marilyn was a self portrait that I created with the
help of camera technician Malia Schlaefer. My self-portrait was part
of an exhibit I curated and created only 8 weeks after giving birth to
my child. So the work was very primal, honest and raw. The exhibit
was entitled Becoming , and explored the transformations of a
woman’s identity when shifting into motherhood, while
simultaneously addressing women’s sexual identity, and how it
might mutate with motherhood. It dealt, in particular, with a
woman’s newly-acquired postpartum identity.
This self portrait, in which I’m breastfeeding my child, is meant to
embody this transitional state of being, this balance of identity,
retaining my sexual self, my sexual identity while simultaneously
nurturing my child. We embody all parts of a complex identity—
sexual, loving, nurturing, mothering, writer/artist, wife/partner—all
at the same time.
I was inspired by photographer Richard Avedon’s iconic portrait of
Marilyn Monroe. Avedon captures this really captivating moment
with Marilyn Monroe in which she is looking off camera—it’s very
real, very honest, very vulnerable, very human, and it seems like a
transitional moment. She isn’t looking into the camera seducing the
viewer, she isn’t putting on a smile, she looks a little bit worried,
contemplative, terrified at the world in front of her. This moment
tells me there is something more, and brings us into that trope of
“every woman’s” insecurities.
The first few months (or perhaps even the first year) of
motherhood was pretty terrifying, emotionally, and a huge
transition. It was a lot of emotional work and little to no sleep.I
found myself at this transitional space, yet had no idea what I was
transitioning into or how long this transitional period would last.
I was in love with my child and with the hope and change that I
had birthed.I was in love with this little person, but was uncertain of
my own identity, my own body, my own sexuality.The self portrait of
me as Marilyn is meant to encapsulate that feeling, that uncertainty,
that intimacy and devotion to someone else while existing in this
unknown middle-space of postpartum motherhood.
Regarding breastfeeding, I find it truly ridiculous that much of our
society is still so unsettled by it. Breastfeeding is truly one of the
most natural, instinctual things that we do as humans. I might add
that sex is also natural and instinctual. When mammals birth, their
young suckle. They feed from the mother’s breast. When Em was
born I brought them directly to my breast and immediately they
started suckling. No instruction needed, we are prewired to suckle,
to survive.
Breastfeeding is such a close and intimate act between mother
and child. Probably the most intimate act I’ve ever experienced.
The closeness, the emotional bonding, the physical tether between
child and mother. It’s surreal and on a hormonal level breastfeeding
does release the same pleasure-inducing euphoric hormones as
an orgasm. The reason our body releases this oxytocin is so that a
mother may continue feeding her young, despite being sometimes
in pain and going without sleep. It’s nature’s way of helping a mom
through the experience. And this release of oxytocin absolutely can
catalyse the uterus to contract. The reason our body is wired this
way is because during postpartum a woman’s uterus is still much
larger than during pre-pregnancy, and the contracting uterus
(caused by breastfeeding) helps the uterus to return (relatively) to
the same size as pre-pregnancy. And do you know what an orgasm
is? A combination of the release of oxytocin and contractions of the
uterus along with a firing off of the nervous system.
Experiencing an orgasm during breastfeeding is totally natural
and is a part of the mammalian physiology; it doesn’t make you a
perv, yet that is how we are treated. This is paired with an outward
shaming that is very prevalent around the idea that there should be
any pleasurable experience present during lactation
I think if all people were taught to love and not fear their bodies
and if they were given honest nonjudgmental information about
their bodies, how their bodies work and function—including our
sexual organs, erogenous zones and reproductive systems—then
 we could shift societal perception around breastfeeding. That’s
why telling our stories, and publishing books like the one you are
writing, is so important.
In my self portrait, it would have been impossible to imagine
leaving out my nursing child. During this postpartum early
motherhood period, our identity, as mother and child, were so
intertwined.
During my labor, which was quite long (47 hours), I found the
Hitachi magic wand and masturbating with my clitoral vibrators to
be quite helpful in managing the pain and anxiety of labor. I
experienced a few orgasms early in my labor but past the 30 hour
mark I was so exhausted, depleted and experiencing a great deal
of anxiety about how long the labor was… it became not
pleasurable but a source of anxiety, and the last 10 hours were
very difficult.
My partner and I are talking about having a second child and I’d
very much like to try to birth either at home or a birthing center
instead of a hospital. I believe I would be much more relaxed into
the experience the second time around and it would be lovely if I
was able to experience an orgasmic birth. I’d love to bring a child
into the world with climactic pleasure. What a gift!
María: I was delighted to see your film Pregnant with Desire in the
2011 Porn Film Festival Berlin ( ). I think it’s really important to
take into consideration that pregnancy can be a very special stage
of our sexuality. How was it for you? How was directing this film?
Can you tell me a little bit about it?
Madison: I went to the Berlin Porn Film Festival the year I was
pregnant with my child in 2010, that year I was the “Filmmaker in
Focus” and had quite a few films screening. It was an incredible
pleasure. I think festivals and screenings like those found at
are really changing the way we view porn and erotica.
I had an opportunity to shoot some footage for my 2014 Feminist
Porn Award winning docu/porn Women Reclaiming Sex on Film
while I was in Berlin in 2010 with Judy Minx. It’s an incredible
scene they have in Berlin. Really inspiring.
The film Pregnant with Desire that screened at in 2011 was
a film that I directed for Good Releasing (Good Vibrations’
production company). It was such a transformative film for me to
direct. I had proposed the film to Good Releasing after discovering
that several of my friends that were part of the queer, indie, porn
scene were pregnant. I realized that was a great time in history to
document our bodies, sexuality and sexual desires in that
alternative scene. It was an opportunity to see pregnancy outside
of a really hetero-normative lens.
My goal was to create a film that gave some insight from women
who had experience articulating their desires and discussing the
fluidity of their sexuality. Women who brought a lot of awareness
around their bodies and sexuality to the project.
I had only seen either educational «how to» films on sex with
pregnant women or films that fetishized the pregnant body for the
viewer’s gaze. I hadn’t found any films that celebrated the pregnant
woman’s sexual desires. I loved the idea of celebrating this part of
some women’s lives and illuminating their desires, fantasies, fears,
and documenting members of our queer and feminist community
during this time in their life.
I was also 29 and could feel my own biological clock really start to
tick. The film was a great opportunity to do further research
surrounding pregnancy and alternative imagery and alternative
faces/communities associated with pregnancy and parenting.
I had two friends that were at different stages of their pregnancy
—Miss Muffy who was in her third trimester and my friend Trixie
who was in her first trimester. Trixie performed with her good friend
and play partner Sadie Lune, who had a huge pregnancy fetish and
was super turned on by pregnant women. I had another friend—
Penny—who had just had a baby a few weeks prior, so her and her
husband at the time were able to talk about postpartum sex and
lactation fetish.
Typically porn films have at least 4 scenes so we were missing
one pregnant performer. I have to say after shooting the other
scenes and witnessing my friends and community embracing
pregnancy and parenthood in a new queer and feminist way, as
sexually self-aware individuals who were making up their own rules
—; well, I told Good Vibes that if I didn’t find another performer to
 shoot for the film that I might get pregnant myself so that we could
finish the film!
I did find another performer though. On Craigslist. Online. She
had posted regarding an interest in being a nude model for artists. I
took a chance and emailed her to see if she might be interested
and she was! We had a few more conversations and really worked
to sculpt a comfortable environment for her and all the other
women that really celebrated the way they wanted to express their
sexuality.
Creating Pregnant with Desire really did give me confidence in
the notion that I indeed wanted to be a mother and experience
pregnancy and parenthood.
María: How wonderful. It’s great to see how your work helped you
create all that. How was your pregnancy?
Madison: My pregnancy was really pretty fabulous. Emotionally it
was challenging and my partner and I had our own challenges
during this time, trying to figure out our relationship and whether we
were compatible to co-parent together. It turns out we are fabulous
at co-parenting together and a whole new relationship bloomed
between us after we became parents.
Sexually my pregnancy was great. I felt very sexy and sexual in
my body. I wanted to masturbate all the time and loved touching my
breasts that were swollen and two cup sizes bigger than my
previous A cup sized breasts. I loved touching my swollen belly, it
seemed very sexual in the way that it was so engorged. It felt so
sexy to massage and rub oil all over my fundus, it felt like an
extension of my mons pubis.
It was like my body was full of valleys and plains before and then
these lovely erogenous mountains and rolling hills rose from my
body. I was voracious in my sexual appetite. Although my cravings
for touch had erratic changes to it, I’d want oral sex, then massage,
then rope, but not that rope, the other rope—I felt much more
particular about the touch I wanted. But I feel like this just helped
me in gaining further self-reflection in regards to my own sexual
desires. I became a master at negotiating and checking in with my
own body and assertive in my communication with sexual partners.
María: You started a project called Femina Potens ( ) Family, which
is focused on programs, resources, performances, and art for and
about queer families. How is it working? I find that there’s a great
need in the queer community of embracing motherhood. I wish to
raise my kid with a creative and open gender outlook. How is your
personal experience of queer parenting?
Madison: I created FP Family in 2011 as part of my arts organization
Femina Potens, which I founded in 2000. In 2011 I had just become
a mother and I wanted to create programming which my child could
attend, and to extend art shows, events and programming to
address topics that were of major interest to me at that point as a
new parent, and as well as providing opportunities to bring together
queer, feminist, and alt families who shared common interests in
art, performance and culture. I wanted to provide the opportunity to
discuss subversive motherhood in a space that was friendly and
inviting to families without the feeling of those “Mommy and Me”
groups where I was intimidated to talk about sex or erotic film or
even what I do for a living (which is one of the first things that
people ask about).
I wanted programming in which I could be myself and
simultaneously provide space and community for others. Space for
a new generation of feminists and queers that are raising children
in a new way.
We had some great programming that really explored the families
that we came from and the families we were building. As part of FP
Family I started a writing and art group that met weekly and
attracted the little ones. We would take turns playing with the kids
and writing and building our ability to write in sprints versus
marathon writing. We also had a Sexy Mamas Social Club where
we would just meet up and support one another through the day to
day journey of being an artist and surviving recent motherhood,
while having an ease in talking with one another about sex, bodies,
kink, etc. It was key to my survival as a new mother (and artist) that
first year after birthing Em. We also had art exhibits like Becoming
MILF and Building Our Own White Picket Fences as well as
spoken word events that featured queer and kinky mamas like Shar
Rednour, Thea Hillman, Penny Barber, and Susie Bright.
 It was inspiring for me and I think for other mothers and parents—
who felt isolated in their experience. It was also an eye-opening for
non-parents in the community, giving a window through art and
written word into our lives, and some visibility around our
experience. It was really empowering.
María: What are you working on at the moment?
Madison: My curatorial work and art changes as I change, and as
the things in my life change. I’m now really passionate about
curating Performance Art and Experimental Film Festival
and working on my own performance art and visual art work. I’m
also curating a monthly film night of art house erotic films at one of
our local theaters in Oakland. I’ve found a great deal of community
with an organization in Berkeley called Hacker Moms and often I
assist in event coordination with their organization. I’m sure I’ll be
curating more programming around motherhood and families but
for right now I’m exploring other topics with in my art, film and
curatorial projects. I’m much more discerning about the projects
that I choose now that I’m a mother—whether it’s a film, a writing
project, or curatorial work. This allows me as a mother and a
woman to really give myself time to reflect and build depth to a
project and to do so in a way that feels healthy to me and doesn’t
leave me completely depleted post-project. I’ve started to
understand how important self-care is. I want to teach my child the
importance of self-care, of filling our vessels with love so we can
share that love with each other and the world around us.
Regarding Em and our relationship to gender. We raise Em in a
gender neutral way and give Em the choice to make the decision
around their gender and how they identify themselves. Generally
we use they as a pronoun and ask Em what their preferred
pronoun and preferred name is.
For about 3 months their preferred name was Femmy and the
gender pronouns she/her were consistent. Then their gender and
pronouns shift to they or kid or cat or boy. And that makes sense to
me. I believe gender is fluid and we are teaching Em to view folks
not based on their gender but as a person and that each person
has the ability to decide how they identify. That our identity is not
 something that is passively put upon us but that we are empowered
individuals with the ability to shape our own identity.
People would ask are they a boy or a girl? And I always would
just look at Em and ask Em what their preferred gender was. It
wasn’t my decision to make. I let Em shop from any area of a
clothing or toy store. I don’t believe in boy and girl sections of
stores. Generally Em likes a little of both. Some sparkle and glitter
from the girls section and rockets and trucks and hot wheels from
the boys section. Merida, the princess, totally loves riding around in
her Tonka Truck. Em knows how to ask people what their preferred
gender is, because we ask them what their preferred gender is. We
also spend a great deal of time on body positivity. We teach Em
about their body and that all bodies are different. We discuss
gender and how our body parts and what they look like don’t
dictate one’s gender. Although these concepts are sometimes
challenging for adults to grasp you’d be surprised how easily a
child understands these things.
We have found an organization in San Francisco called Our
Family Coalition. They told us about an org called «Spectrum» but
we haven’t really checked it out. is an org and has been
helpful in connecting with other families. Spectrum is an org
celebrating gender creative kids. In Berkeley folks seem pretty
accepting of different ideas around gender and parenting so we
haven’t had much reason to seek out too many resources. Em also
has several transgender baby sitters and a transgender Uncle that
they see very often so there is a wide spectrum of gender
expression that Em is around. We also have quite a few books on
the topic of gender expression such as Morris and the Tangerine
Dress, The Princess Boy and 10,000 Dresses.
María: Many of us working in feminism and explicit sexuality are
having babies now. Do you think we’ve left behind the times when
it was a tabu for sexual workers and porn actresses to have
babies? Do you feel that your work has empowered you through
motherhood and has helped you through this journey? For me it
sure has worked this way.
Madison: Sex workers and porn actresses having babies is nothing
new. However being out and public about simultaneously being a
sexual person and a mother is rather new and I think it is really
transgressive, powerful, and necessary.
I met many women in the industry that were mothers but they
didn’t talk about motherhood, and how it informed their identity,
neither on set nor in their interviews. It was very clear that they
were playing the role of someone’s fantasy and generally that
fantasy role didn’t involve being a mother. If the role of mother was
being fantasized about, it was more about fetishizing her age and
« » status rather than celebrating her sexuality and honoring
her as a multifaceted individual in which her motherhood played a
part. Many women didn’t divulge that they were married or had
children on set or publicly in fear that it would ruin the fantasy and
also cost them work, out of fear that they would be found less
desirable.
We are now finding a much more diverse range of porn and erotic
films. There has been a real shift in erotic media in the last five
years. We are now finding erotic films that celebrate the range of
human sexuality and desire. It was very important for me when I
became pregnant to not disappear from the camera and fail to
show the world the sexual nature and desire of a pregnant woman.
Shooting in my postpartum state was probably the scariest and
most terrifying thing that I’ve done on film. I felt like I had little
control of my body and I was incredibly awkward in my postpartum
body. My body was uneasy as if entering a second puberty, a body
I didn’t recognize. I had leaky breasts that would squirt milk if I
sneezed or became aroused, my round belly striped, my hair falling
out (postpartum shedding) and my uterus was inflated but empty,
still shrinking down in size. It was a body that didn’t feel like mine
but wasn’t full of a growing fetus anymore either. It was a real
exercise in self love.
I think my openness around my pregnancy and postpartum
stages of life and how they relate to my sexuality and sexual
identity has given other women courage to be more open about
their journey into motherhood and I’ve tried to serve as a resource
for women who are going through this transition.
It’s difficult, there is still a great deal of taboo around the topic of
sex work and certainly around the topic of sexuality and
motherhood. There is a lot of archaic judgment still prevalent in our
society that goes back to the whore/mother complex. It’s all rooted
back to our own body shame and sexual shame. A healthy sex life
and relationship to one’s body and pleasure is part of a healthy life
for mothers and non-mothers—for all humans.
Perhaps the greatest tools that my work provided me in my
journey through motherhood is an ability to know myself and a
language in which to express my emotions and the difficult
transitional feelings I experienced coming into motherhood. The
ability to write, create art, and film has been key to my process in
discovering my identity as a mother. Without art to process through
my own birth as a mother, I don’t know how I would have gotten
through.
It’s empowering to have that language of creativity, of artistry to
communicate where we are in our body and in our world. I’m also
making it key in my parenting to teach my child how to use art as a
mode of expression and providing space and language for my child
to communicate their feelings and their perspective.
Em has proven to be quite the artist and really loves to paint,
draw and make music. I have a wall that I let Em curate and create
art for in our house and they change out the work with new pieces
every month. It’s a real learning experience. We also make a lot of
music together. We will make morning music where we write songs
about how we are feeling that morning and what our dreams are for
the day. I want to gift Em with the same empowerment that I have
found through being an artist.
My work in the world of sexuality has helped me to become
fearless of my body, has helped me to love myself and has
empowered me as a mother to teach my child about their own
body, about consent and the agency of our bodies, to not fear their
body, to embrace and love their body. That feels like a radical gift.
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E H
Trans* fatherhood

E H
Trans* fatherhood

N , but men and people who choose to not identify

with either of these two categories, can carry, give birth to, and raise
children. There are people with uteri, there are women with no uteri,
and there are men with them. One must distinguish between biology
and social constructions of gender. Trans motherhood/fatherhood is
just one more option among many, part of a series of words that
outline infinite realities. Despite believing in the universality of
motherhood as a concept, in this case we prefer to use the word
fatherhood.
Erik Huma is a trans* person who carried his daughter in his
uterus. Eric began the process of his gender transition when he was
19 years old. Yet as he puts it, it’s a very long process that never
really ends. He became a father at 27.
Erik Huma is a trans activist that works in a center in Barcelona for
people with functional diversity. He has a five year old daughter
named Zoeh. Throughout his life, he has been a part of various
trans* rights activist collectives including the Guerrilla Travolaka,
whose manifesto is worth quoting here in full (in Catalan):
«Ni homes, ni dones. Ni disfòrics, ni transtornats, ni transsexuals. Només som
guerrilleres o guerrillers segons el moment. Pirates del gènere, buscadors de
tresors. Som Trans-resistents, Trans-guerrilleres, Trans-ciutadanes,
Travolakes, Drag-Kings i Drag Queens. Dissidents de l’heteropatriarcat». (in
English: ‘Neither men nor women. Not dysphorics, disturbed, or transsexuals.
Only guerrilla fighters. Gender pirates, treasure hunters. We are trans-
resistors, trans-guerrillas, trans-citizens, Travolakas, drag kings and drag
queens. Dissidents of the patriarchy.’)

We know each other because of our mutual involvement in

Barcelona’s activist circles and social centers, back when I was part
of girlswholikeporno and the Guerilla Travolaka.
This interview took place over Skype, between his house in Poble
Sec and mine in Benicàssim in the summer of 2015. It was
insufferably hot and Erik greeted me almost completely naked (I
suspected some tiny shorts were nearby). With his Mohawk and his
mustache he was incredibly sexy—I didn’t know whether to interview
him or suggest an online sexual encounter. Instead I dried the sweat
dripping onto my forehead, turned on the fan, and began the
interview.
María: What do you prefer to be called by your child? What’s the
identity you’re more comfortable with?
Erik: I didn’t want to be called dad. I wanted her to call me by my
 name, Erik, but I wasn’t very successful.
María: Some kids do it spontaneously; they begin calling their
parents by their first names from one moment to the next. I have
German friends that have tried to do that too. What does she call
you then?
Erik: She calls me Papa-Erik as if Papa-Erik were my full name. The
kids from her school also call me that.
María: Well, she’s found her own way. A friend of mine from
Vancouver who is a trans* father and who also carried his daughter
in his body, told me that he had decided to not use the word dad to
define his relationship with his daughter. Instead he chose MaPa. I
really remember his words because they were beautiful: ‘I ask to be
called MaPa because I want to honor the act that I carried my
daughter in my womb.’
Erik: I’m relatively comfortable with the name dad and with
fatherhood, and Zoeh recognizes me as such anyway. Sometimes,
when someone asks me where Zoeh’s mom is, I reply that I am her
mother and father. By the way, Del LaGrace Volcano uses the word
MaPa too. I’ve always found it to be very pretty.
María: Yes he does, and he’s also part of this book. I tend to use the
word motherhood as a universal term, in the feminine plural.
Although in certain interviews I tend to use other terms like
MaPatherhood, like in the case of Del’s interview. Do you maybe
feel more comfortable with the term fatherhood?
Erik: Yes. Although there are so many motherhoods or fatherhoods
that I sometimes think it doesn’t matter which term you use… it’s
after all just a game of roles. In the same way that we sometimes
play and dress up as women or men.
María: Tell me how Zoeh came into your life.
Erik: It was a conscious choice, though I had never thought of having
children. It wasn’t in my life plan nor was it in my partner’s, so it
really came as a bit of a shock. It was weird, how I made that
choice, it wasn’t rational. It didn’t come from my head….
María: But from your guts.
Erik: Of course. I had never understood how hormonal changes can
affect our selfhood. There I began to understand that there’s
something beyond the mind that moves us….
M: Do you take hormones?
Erik: I do take hormones, I have for a long time, since I began my
transition from being a woman to a man.
María: But you had to stop taking hormones throughout your
pregnancy, right?
Erik: Yeah, I had to stop taking them. But we were lucky. We went to
a clinic in Barcelona that has a unit dedicated specifically to
intersex people. It’s the only place of its kind in all Catalonia. It was
great because I didn’t have to explain anything, they understood it
all. They managed all the information regarding the hormones, for
example.
Before Zoeh’s birth they had run all kinds of tests on her because
they wanted to dismiss the possibilities of the hormones I used to
take having any effect on her. They treated me very well and, truth
be told, I was very surprised. Other people I know have had less
favorable experiences.
María: This friend from Vancouver I was telling you about, it really
went really well for him too. He told us that the person who gave
them birthing classes was crazy about not using the word ‘mother’
for fear he might feel excluded. He had to talk to her in private and
explain that there was no problem if she used it, and that he also
felt like a mother in a way.
How was your experience of raising a Zoeh when she was a
baby?
Erik: When Zoeh was born I moved to Patrice and Neus’s house. I
liked the idea of being an open family unit and not solely partners.
Even then it was complicated, because I was in the middle of the
hormonal shock and the resulting convulsions. We had so many
things to learn and so few people who we could ask... None of our
friends had children.
We had to leave so many things behind, at least for some time.
But luckily new things came along too—we got involved in an
 association of mothers and fathers who had created a school with
an emancipatory education model. We were about ten families.
We threw ourselves into it completely, and that’s what really
helped me the most in raising Zoeh. Thanks to that sort of group
project, you are able to raise a child better than you could have
ever done so alone. That was very important for me. The school is
called Circ de Puses (The Flea Circus), and it was there that I
learned everything I know. They made me think a bunch, and there
are things I learned there that also affected other areas of my life,
like my work.
I work in a center for people with functional diversity. Usually its
people with cerebral illnesses as a result of strokes or brain injury.
There are people with cerebral palsy too. I do workshops and
support work, all with the aim of making their lives more
independent. Before, without knowing it, I was trying to impose my
preconceived ideas of the situation, the contents that make it up as
it were, on the process of learning itself. In the process of raising
Zoeh however, I’ve learned that everything is easier when one
begins by considering one’s own needs alongside the needs and
interests of the child or the people involved. With children one can’t
come with a schedule or with a plan to ‘do this or that today.’ It’s
better to respond to its questions, and consider its interests at
every moment. Now I try to focus more on the specific motivations
or needs of each person.
María: Raising children has also taught me a great deal about all
aspects of my life… While raising Zoeh did you consider gender
neutrality?
Erik: Not really, not as something we could actually carry out in
practice. Although we treat everything with a feminine pronoun.
Even Zoeh is an ambiguous name, it means life in Greek.
Zoeh lives happily and peacefully in the feminine. When she was
born we didn’t want to pierce her ears but she wanted to wear
earrings… she insisted again and again and when she was only
four years old she pierced her ears.
We respect her gender expression but I have to admit I
sometimes secretly bite my nails thinking about these sorts of
 questions.
We haven’t used gender neutral pronouns to speak about her, we
haven’t gone into those topics really. I spent a great part of my life
speaking of myself in gender neutral terms, it wouldn’t be very
difficult to go back to that.
María: I once told a friend that I wanted to name my child a gender
neutral name so it could flow between genders if they wanted to.
She responded that the name isn’t what matters, but rather that the
parents support the changes!
Erik: It’s easy to change names. Children always have lots of names
anyway.
María: Have you felt the need to explain to her anything relating to
her conception and your relationship to her?
Erik: Yes, I have felt that need, and continue to feel it all the time. I
have never lied to Zoeh and that’s something she knows. I think we
have a very close relationship, and as such any omission would be
a lie. I want her to trust me.
María: And how did you do it?
Erik: In different ways. There are always opportunities to explain
things. When my nephew was born I explained to her how just as
my nephew had been in her aunt’s tummy, so she had grown in
mine. She always knew it—how could she not?!
Did you consider gender neutral pronouns with your son, Roc?
María: The name Roc occurred to me because it gave me strength
and I somehow felt that my pregnancy and my kid needed strength.
In any case, why should names be associated with one gender or
another?
Erik: Yeah. The other day Zoeh told us that it’s very difficult to tell if
someone is a girl or boy; it’s not enough to know their name (as we
had once told her). ‘What about Rafa and Karmen?,’ she asked.
They use names that they aren’t normally associated with the
gender they express.
María: How was your physical experience of pregnancy?
Erik: It was very emotional. At the bodily level it went very well...
 Though near the end it was a bit difficult because I was very tired—
the final echocardiograms and tests are exhausting…
What really marked me was the social experience of it. It happens
to everyone. I was very used to being as I was and living as I did,
but suddenly it seemed as if everyone had the right to express an
opinion on every single topic ranging from what type of iron
supplement you should take to anything they can think of. I had
exercised a high degree of independence over my body and that
has led me to where I am today. I’m aware of my body and I wasn’t
going to do anything that put my child in danger. I couldn’t
understand how people felt they could talk in such a paternalistic
way to me and to take sides over my body in such a way.
María: Funnily, there’s a great deal of feminist discourse that focuses
on that subject, that points to how a woman’s body is the common
ground over which all the world thinks they have a right to an
opinion. Despite living out your pregnancy from your masculine
social body, you weren’t free from that oppression.
Erik: No, I had to swallow all of that too.
María: How was the birth itself?
Erik: It was good, I gave birth with an epidural in the hospital. I didn’t
feel ready to give birth at home, the hospital gave me sense of
security. I was very scared.
María: What’s important is giving birth where you feel most
comfortable. Did you feel you were taken care of in the hospital?
Did they use the masculine pronoun to refer to you?
Erik: Yes, I felt well taken care of. They used the masculine pronouns
all the time. The staff was very respectful. They took care of me as
much as I wanted them to. But I don’t have good memories of the
birth because I was very scared.
María: It’s normal to be scared. A friend of mine who is a midwife told
me that, throughout history, lots of people have died in birth and we
carry that history within us.
Erik: My sister just had another child and she gleefully went to the
hospital to give birth, happy as a clam. My mom, however, gave
birth to her first child naturally, and for her two following ones, my
 sister’s and mine’s, she chose planned c-sections.
María: Did you breastfeed her? Did you want to?
Erik: Not only did I not want to, I couldn’t. I had had a mastectomy.
María: And your family? How did they take to you becoming a
father?
Erik: Really well. I talked to them to them before Zoeh was born and
they took it very well. It’s been an opportunity that has brought us
together. They’re delighted.
María: Oh fantastic, because it takes a village...
Erik: One of the greatest problems I’ve found with raising Zoeh is
isolation. In Zoeh’s school we’re in contact with more than 20
people and that’s very enriching, because you see that things can
be done many different ways. If you’re alone at home your brain
and mindset become very small, you know? But if you go out and
begin to see the world, that experience enriches and transforms
you.
María: Catalonia has an incredible tradition of free-thinking schools
since the age of anarchism, it’s a real luxury...
It’s there anything you want to add to this interview?
Erik: Yes: there’s loads of trans* people who have kids! I have a
good friend called Esther who had a kid that grew in his uterus.
He’s French and he’s living in Bolivia now.
On the other hand, I’d like to say that we shouldn’t give that much
importance to the expression of gender. If we were allowed to
experiment, we would do it a lot more. But we are not allowed. We
all have different gender expressions.
 salto de página

M K
Gender Queer Co-

M K
Gender Queer Co-Parenting

T consisting of one or more children plus a biological

father or mother is a very recent invention that has little to do with a
functional organisation of parenting. In fact, it is a system that
causes many problems. There are societies that have more open
concepts, such as that of multiple fatherhood, which consider that a
successful pregnancy requires the semen of many men. In other
societies the notion of uncle or father is closely linked, and men
function as fathers of the children of their sisters, with whom they
have a certified consanguineous relation. There are multiple
societies which don’t bestow such a centrality to the notion of
biological fatherhood.
And, furthermore, there’s always been deviations, carried out more
or less publicly. Myself I was brought up by a father that, even
though he wasn’t my biological father, always made me feel like his
daughter. I never heard him refer to myself except under the name of
daughter. And for me, he was always my father, and still is.
If we want to step outside of the imposed idea of a heteronormative
sexual couple, we must logically come up with a different type of
family unit. Co-parenting is an option that more and more people opt
for.
Mad Kate has always lived open, polyamorous, and gender queer
relationships, defying the heteronormative and monogamous
impering form of relationships. When she decided to be a
mother/father she decided to engage in a project of co-parenting. In
this way, Kate subverted the idea of nuclear family and shows us the
pleasures and challenges of creating and bringing up a queer, plural
and subversive family.
Mad Kate is a radical and queer performance artist living and
working in Berlin and all around the world. She has a baby named
C., one year old. We met in Berlin while I was living there for a year
in 2007. She belonged and still belongs to the queer scene of the
city.
We talked through Skype, between Benicàssim and Berlin, in the
summer of 2014.
María: You are involved in a co-parenting project together with Kay
and feminist performer Sadie Lune.
Kate: Both me and Kay call ourselves ‘daddy’ so Kay is Papa Kay
and I’m Daddy Kate. I don’t really know why I picked up that name;
it just seemed for me more appropriate. I wanted to be a dad
 somehow to baby C.. Also because at some point I thought I would
want to have my own child biologically, so then I could be ‘mom.’
I’m genderqueer so it felt like I could own that word, ‘dad,’ without
being male, without having to conform to that particular gender
role.
María: We all have to find our way of parenting. For example DeLa
Grace Volcano uses the word “MaPa”.
Kate: You just have to choose the one that works best for you.
María: I wanted you to tell me about your own work as an artist and
then becoming a dad.
Kate: The decision to coparent with Sadie was kind of complicated in
the beginning. I am in a polyamorous relationship, so my then
primary partner (and husband) has a girlfriend himself; her name is
Katharina. She got pregnant and decided to keep the baby. This
was a big shock. I had been thinking for several years about
different ways of parenting. I had also done some writing about
how I didn’t necessarily want to be in a nuclear family with my
primary partner. I had a bit of a fear about getting pregnant in that
constellation because I though it might naturally put us in a position
where we would be very insulated. So I was thinking about how to
subvert the idea of family but I didn’t know how to do that, even
though we had a polyamorous relationship and we are queer. If we
were to have a kid together, would we do it in a heteronormative
way? Would we be able to get over the first years of theoretical
insulation and still expand our family in a queer way? Not that we
couldn’t, but I was searching for ways to really do it. So in a sense,
when I first heard about the news with his girlfriend, it was
shocking, but I also had a certain sense of freedom because I
thought: ‘well maybe this is the answer to how can we subvert or
shake up our family, if we accept it in a positive way.’
Around that time I had a dream about what I was looking for as a
parent. It wasn’t like ‘is my primary partner the right person to have
a child with.’ It was more like ‘what kind of people do I want to
parent with.’ I started to think about the fact that I have the power
to make choices about family. Many queers do that—they choose
their own family, ie. groups of people we live and have community
with who are like chosen brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers.
But also we have the power to choose parenthood, outside of our
sexual relationships. I was thinking about how to choose who I
wanted to parent with, and how it’s not just dependent upon whom
I’m having sex with. And I thought of Sadie right away. I really
thought both Sadie and I were like-minded in terms of values. And
then about 2 weeks after that dream, I was talking on the phone
with Sadie and she told me she was pregnant!
So for me, from my perspective, it was a kind of alignment—a
star alignment. That dream, Sadie being pregnant and my partner
(his girlfriend) being pregnant, it all came at the same time. And I
thought, ‘well, all these babies are coming my way, so the thing to
do is probably to figure out how to be part of it instead of trying to
get away from it.’ And so I asked Sadie to be a co-parent, a dad,
and she said ‘great, I’ve been looking for people to co-parent with
me.’
I decided I wanted to be part of the life of Sadie’s child and to be
part of raising Sadie’s kid as a dad. And then I saw an
undetermined amount of parents being involved as well, like Kay—
Sadie’s partner around that time—and possibly some other people
I didn’t know at the time, who are still to come into our lives.
Because I think there’s other key people that maybe are going to
be more involved in the future.
When I made the decision to co-parent, it was, and is, a life-long
decision. I committed myself. And it’s the same for Sadie,
obviously. So I said to myself: ‘at least I feel committed to my
relationship with C., my daughter, in whatever capacity.’ That, for
me, is important. There’s been a lot of challenges along the way.
Especially I think a lot of tension and pressure has come into my
relationship with Sadie, because I think it’s just not easy to decide
to co-parent. There are a lot of things that are really great about the
fact that there is not a sexual or romantic relationship between us—
I think there are some great things about that, but there are also
difficulties about that.
Sadie moved to Germany from the when she was pregnant.
There was just a lot of changes involved. Not only she moved here,
we were suddenly in a situation where we were much closer—we
 had to be much closer—than we had ever been before. So if I
could step back from it for a little I’d say that one of the biggest
challenges is the amount of change that has taken place in the last
year and a half. I think it just takes more time to really form the
bonds that you need, and those bonds are still being laid in this
moment.
Kay is a French national and both Sadie and I are American
immigrants in Germany. I have to renew my visa every two years to
continue to be here. My status is not completely shaky but I don’t
feel completely secure either. I can’t get government assistance.
María: All these legal, practical issues come with babies too; they
are part of the process.
Kate: Totally. So there was the thing of, first of all, getting Sadie set. I
told her she could apply as an artist, same as I did, but she told me
that as she was pregnant, and about to have a kid, she wasn’t
going to be able to perform as much. So we were like, ‘ok what are
we gonna do about that?’ And secondly, the father of C. is a sperm
donor who is not involved.
María: Not Kay? I though Kay was the father of C .
Kate: No. In fact he’s a transman. I’ll tell you later about being
recognized as a family of 3 because Kay definitely gets interpreted
as male. Also he looks like he could be C.’s biological father, even
though in fact he is not. So, yeah, there were many questions
about how we were going to get legal status for C. and Sadie to
remain in Germany. It is not that simple. C. was born in Germany
but Germany is different than the ; being born in Germany
doesn’t give you automatic German citizenship. So there were a
number of things that were really important and tricky, for example:
how were we meant to get healthcare for Sadie? She didn’t have
healthcare in the actually... And then she wanted to have a
home birth, which is actually illegal in the and not really that
supported here in Germany, let alone without health insurance.
So at the time she had been pregnant for a while, she was in the
, and she had a midwife that had been helping her. And the
midwife was working illegally. And Sadie had no health insurance,
and she is a sex worker, which is illegal in the United States. In
other words: she was entirely unsupported. There are different
clinics where you can get anonymous care, but she didn’t have any
kind of official healthcare. So it could get very, very expensive in
the to have a home birth. It depends, if the home birth goes as
planned and everything is fine, then it’s free, it’s cool, and the same
goes for Germany. But if something goes wrong, and you don’t
have health insurance, it can be a real nightmare. So it was kind of
a big risk for all of us.
So I started to look for midwives in Germany before she came
over. We found 2 great midwives. One was very old school, very
sort of witchy: she had done over 200 home births, she was very
relaxed, had travelled all over the world and her husband was
Gambian so she had spent some time in Africa. We had this other
young midwife with very little home birth experience but was a
young hip queer midwife, who knew all the people in our Berlin
queer-art scene. So it was an interesting combination and that’s
why we decided they would both be with us during the labor.
We also read a lot. We read the book Spiritual Midwifery by Ima
May Gaskin. And so, one day, we went into labour. It was really
long. From the time the contractions were about 10 minutes apart
to the time that she gave birth we spent 60 hours. And what
happened in the end is that the older midwife, the one that almost
never takes women to the hospital ever, she told us that Sadie had
to go to the hospital. I guess I should’ve known at the time but I
didn’t realize: basically, this midwife had so much experience that
she would never take a woman to the hospital unless she knew
that it would end up in cesarean. But she didn’t even want to
vocalize that, understandably, so as not to stress us out even more.
She just said, after many long hours, ‘okay, you have to go to the
hospital.’ So we got to the hospital but we continued trying to have
a natural birth. And at that point things got really horrible. Because
from the minute you get admitted in the hospital, the switch from a
home birth to a hospital is like night and day. From the minute they
admit a woman to the hospital, she is just medicalized. It is just
much more invasive, and you have all these machines on you. You
go in, they check you out, in and out. It was quite rough, invasive.
María: I don’t know how it is in Germany, but in Spain they treat you
with some kind of contempt: you have tried it at home and you
have kind of failed, and their attitude is like ‘oh, so you want our
help now?’ At the same time my doula used to tell me that if you
happen to end up in a hospital, be thankful that you have this
option! Don’t see it as a curse—‘Damn, I had to go to a hospital’—
but on the contrary, as a blessing: ‘Oh, I could go to a hospital.’
Seeing things from that perspective helped me a lot. But having
said so, they can be so rude, they can be so invasive as you say,
so disrespectful.
Kate: You’re exactly right. And I think it is an important issue
because it’s also about queer politics and how privileged we are.
On the one hand, I think it should be a basic expectation to be able
to say, ‘hey this is my family, this is who I wanna be here with and
be treated with respect.’ But at the same time I think they were
contemptuous because we tried at home, because we speak
English, because we are immigrants and don’t speak fluent
German. They are contemptuous because we are a queer family,
we are 2 genderqueer women and a transman, and all three
wanted to be in the birth; not just 2 queer people but three! But on
the other hand, as you point out, of course, I also felt extremely
grateful that, yes, we had access to excellent medical care. They
did a great job doing the cesarean.
María: So how did you dealt with the fact of not being able to be
there, the 3 of you?
Kate: Well, that’s the thing, we were able to.
María: Oh, yeah? Did you have to fight for it a lot?
Kate: Yeah, Kay did actually. Kay fought for it; it was very cool. It was
cool, too, because it was a turning point for us. He just fell into a
really great advocate role, and he was really like ‘no, we are a 3
parent family.’ I suddenly felt, ‘ok we are in this together.’ And I had
a strong bonding moment. It made me feel really safe with Kay. It
was great. So what that meant is that when Sadie had to go in for
the cesarean, all 3 of us were there. It was very cute because Kay
and me had to be there with this silly blue outfit. We were each one
on either side of Sadie.
María: I have a friend who has recently had a cesarean but it was so
respectful that she said it was better than her first vaginal birth.
There was no mum-baby separation as they did everything they
had to do with the baby on her. She says it was very sweet. There
can also be cesareas that are respectful and feel nice.
Kate: Nice to hear that. In our case I really didn’t like the demeanor
of our hospital midwife. Our chosen (homebirth) midwives had to
be away, and that was also hard because you’re with somebody for
so much time and then you have to work with completely new
people. It was just not very pleasant.
So C. got removed and then they took her into another room,
where I think they took her measurements. And that was weird
because she was behind these sealed doors for like 2 or 3 minutes
and that was really scary. Sadie was on this cloud nine because
she had all these drugs in her from the operation. But Kay and I
had watched C. get taken out of Sadie. And in the first moment Kay
and I looked at each other and we could see in each other’s eyes
and we had a telepathic moment, when we both thought there was
something wrong with C. It was a very scary moment. C. made no
sound. They fished her out and she looked like a dead fish. It was
really scary, they took her behind steel doors straight away, they
didn’t give her to us, and then she was there for like 2 or 3 minutes.
Kay and I sat there terrified. And then they got the doors open, and
she was fine, it’s a girl. Everyone was relieved. But the suspense
was horrible. And then, finally, they put C. with Sadie, but it was not
immediate. But then the problem was that C. had an infection—
which was the reason why Sadie had to get a cesarean—. There
was an infection in Sadie’s fluids. So she had to be treated. They
let C. stay with her for a few hours. C. was born at 4 in the morning
and then they took her to another hospital at 7. And Sadie had to
stay in that first hospital, they couldn’t transfer her right away.
I went over to the other hospital to claim C., as she was put in the
Intensive Care Unit. She had to get antibiotics. In a way I feel that
was a key moment for me, when I walked into the hospital on my
own and I went to claim her as my daughter. That was very defining
for me because it is one thing that you agree to co-parent, but if
you are not biologically part of the kid—and Sadie and I were not
 lovers—it was like, a moment of: ‘ok, this is really real, will I be
claiming this or not.’
The first hospital gave the placenta to Kay and me but before
they gave it to us, the nurse showed me and Kay the placenta and
made a little demonstration. She had the content out on the table
and showed us the different parts, and I don’t know if you saw it,
but it’s enormous.
María: Mine was very little because there was a pregnancy problem,
it was too small. You could hold it in your hand.
Kate: C. was huge, almost 10 pounds. So the thing was that she was
too big and we were afraid that she could have diabetes: there was
too much sugar. So at first I went to drop off the placenta to my
friend Ena’s because she had a big freezer, and then Ena came
with me. And thank the goddesses for that. She accompanied me
to the hospital but couldn’t come inside because only one parent
can come inside. That was the first time that I thought, like, ‘I am a
parent.’ And they asked me, ‘so are you a co-mama?’ and I said,
‘yes, but I wanna make sure that her dad can come in.’ And they
asked, ‘so it’s the biological father?’ And I said, ‘no, but he is the
third parent.’ So we had to explain again and again in order to have
access, because only parents have access to .
They were confused but they ended up being ok with it. I felt like
they treated me ok because I was communicating with them in
German, and I have a German surname. I didn’t feel like they were
as cool with Kay for example because he has this thick french
accent, and he is darker. I think there is a lot of racism operating in
Germany, among all the institutions.
But they got used to us. After a couple of days they were like, ‘oh,
yeah, here are the freaks.’
María: Hahahaha!
Kate: Luckily, later that day Sadie got transferred to that hospital. But
the thing that she found challenging was that C. was downstairs in
the and Sadie had to stay upstairs. So she could breast-feed
her but only during those particular times. This is even more
ridiculous but I guess that due to hospital funding cuts, it was like
there was only a particular amount of wheelchairs. So at the time
 Sadie couldn’t get a wheelchair to get down.
María: Did she manage to breastfeed L.?
Kate: Yeah, but it really was a struggle, every day. To get there in
time. If Sadie didn’t get there in a specific time to do the
breastfeeding then the nurses downstairs would say, ‘oh, you came
too late, we already fed her.’ And it was like shit!
María: Bottled formula?
Kate: No, they let Sadie express milk. And getting a breast pump for
Sadie after that, was not easy. Every step of the way was a
challenge. And the question is: why? It should be easier.
Then, finally, we took them both home and Sadie’s mum came. C.
was ok, Sadie was ok, but the first two weeks seemed like forever.
Afterwards it was fine. We took Sadie back to the house where she
was living at the time, before we moved in together.
María: Now you live together?
Kate: Actually no, not anymore. It was that first month that was very
very intense. Sadie had to recover, she didn’t really want to go
outside. She didn’t feel like really wanting to go anywhere at all.
And I think those are the moments, especially at the beginning,
where the hormones of the mother can be completely different from
the hormones of her partner. For me, I wanted to take C. out and
show her the world, and see people.
María: But she was not ready at all, and neither is the baby. For most
cultures the mum and the baby have to stay about 40 days
bonding, in a safe place, not doing much, just enjoying themselves,
breastfeeding, loving.
Kate: Yeah, she took her time. And this is when the community really
came in. We organized the people to be able to come by with food.
It was really nice. I mean not really like coming over to hang out,
but just coming to bring food and help with the house. We just took
it very easy in the beginning.
María: Oooooooh, can you hear my baby crying?! I gonna check on
him, one second. (María leaves and comes back). Katie, I’m back.
Kate: Oohhh! (Roc is in the screen).
María: I’m quite busy lately, with the book and all this stuff, and I
think he just needs more time with me. Is it ok for you if he stays
here with us?
Kate: It’s fine, I do things all the time with C., I take her everywhere.
If I’m with C. she’s generally doing stuff with me, because my life is
crazy. She’s been to concerts, she’s been backstage, here and
there, and in all kinds of meetings.
María: I’m curious to know how you did the whole living together and
co-parenting thing. How was the first year?
Kate: It was hard. At some point we made the difficult decision to not
live together. I don’t really know all the answers and what the future
holds. On my end, I had been living for like eight or nine years with
my husband. Throughout the last year we had been living in our
studio, but I was also living with my girlfriend… I was on tour and I
was kind of all over the place. And then Sadie and I started living
together. So it was a very difficult time in general. I was in a big
period of transition in my life, and Sadie was also going through a
big transition, and C. was there too as part of all the changes.
María: I have to say that the first months of having the baby at home
are so demanding! You need so much help that even 2 or 3 added
people are not enough, you really need a big family or a
community.
Kate: I go on tour a lot. I go whenever I have to go. When I can get
work I take the job, because I make a living solely as an artist. So
when I get an opportunity to take work I take it. That’s the
downside. But when I’m around I can be around a lot, for days,
weeks or whatever. I think that is hard for Sadie, the inconsistency.
María: My partner was at home with me. He had quit his job so he
was there to help 200% and I still felt it wasn’t enough! You need a
whole community to support you.
Kate: I appreciate you saying that because I did feel a lot of guilt. I
just felt that I was not able to give Sadie as much as she wanted, or
needed. And I also felt very torn because on the one hand I wanted
to do more and on the other hand a) I didn’t feel like I was in a
good enough financial position to quit my job and b) I didn’t want
 to.
María: But if you left your job to take care of Sadie and C., you would
have gotten overwhelmed. Taking care of the mum and baby while
they’re bonding (just like taking care of the elderly or sick relatives)
is a hard job that no one should do alone. The whole community
around them should help out. An wise woman in Castellón who
owns an art gallery called Canem once told me: ‘the State has
broken the communal care system provided by families and has
failed to offer an alternative.’
Kate: I had never heard anyone put it like that. I am still carrying
around a lot of pain. The good thing is that we do have a great
community around us and in the end we actually have a lot of
people that are willing to take care of C. That’s wonderful. But you
know, it took time. And then, Kay was there but he is also like me:
when he is there he is there 200%, but then he’s gone, totally gone.
María: Is he a performer too?
Kate: Yes. And he’s also a sex worker. He was also traveling back to
France to take care of some legal and medical matters regarding
his transition. So he was going back to France often. Actually he is
there now, I think he performed yesterday, and Sadie is there
visiting him with C. right now. I think that between the 3 of us it was
not really enough. Over time we found other people that could
come in and that was super helpful.
Sadie went to the for 2 and a half months because her mother
really wanted her and C. to be at her home over winter. C. was 6
months old. So when C. was between 6 and 8 months old Sadie
took her to the U.S. And I think this was also difficult for us a 3
person family. Which was ok, I mean, my perspective was that I
wanted to support Sadie as an artist. That was one of my reasons
why I wanted to co-parent with her. I saw other families where I felt
either mother or father had to give up their creative life in order to
be a parent. I was really interested in figuring out how we could
make that not happen, and I thought that was part of what we were
doing. Figuring out how to support each of us staying active in our
creative life.
When Sadie came back, she and Kay broke up romantically and
 that was difficult… but what’s good is that we agreed to co-parent,
the 3 of us together. So it wasn’t dependent upon their romantic
relationship. Of course it complicates everything, to have those
things happen despite what you intend. Then again all relationships
are complicated, whether it is friendship, or sexual, or whatever it
is. Yeah, we are three different people with different perspectives,
different interests, etc… It’s a matter of negotiating those things as
a family and talking it through. I think that overall I would just say
it’s a challenge.
María: How is Juan, your husband, and Katherina and their baby?
How have those relationships been going?
Kate: Well funnily enough it was easier for me than I expected! But I
think it was difficult for Juan because he didn’t want to have a kid.
His girlfriend got pregnant accidentally but she didn’t want to have
an abortion. Then she had the baby and he really didn’t want to be
part of it. But he was like: my father did that to me and I can’t do
that again to someone else. With Juan it was hard having to go
through all of that because his own father didn’t recognize him as
his son when he was a child...So he decided to break the cycle and
say, ‘I’m gonna be there for the kid even if I didn’t want to be a
father.’ Which is not an easy decision at all.
I think one of the things that helped was actually that the two of
us were like ‘listen, we talked about having an alternative family,
now suddenly we are in this situation that might allow us to have
this kind of really crazy thing, and we should do it.’ I think it helped
that in the end we were still approaching it from the idea of being in
it altogether.
María: So you’ve been able to share the whole process and go
through it together! You share parenthood.
Kate: Yeah, it was really cool because we’re very good friends.
María: Is he still your husband?
Kate: Yes. For nine years my husband and I were primary partners in
a committed open relationship.
At some point we transitioned—I became primary partners with
my girlfriend, and my husband became primary partners with his
 girlfriend. But we remain married and partnered. It was a big
transition for us. We were primary partners together, but we
changed to be in a polyamorous relationship as opposed to being
in an open relationship. The difference is that we began to
recognize multiple partnerships with other people that weren’t just
about sex, but about love too. Our relationship became more about
love than about sex. I also had a relationship with Sadie that was
based on co-parenting, and a relationship with Sadie’s partner and
Juan’s girlfriend… more people came into the picture in a short
period of time. It was hard; good but hard. Juan and I have been
together for ten years. We knew we wanted this, but we never
expected exactly this. We did know however that we wanted to live
a polyamorous lifestyle.
Something that has surprised me, in a very positive way, is my
relationship with Juan’s girlfriend, and with Juan’s son. There’s no
drama. It’s fine, it is really nice. She sometimes takes care of C.
because she has a really nice play space at her place, and C. and
her son play together too.
María: Nice. What is the age difference between the 2 babies?
Kate: 13 days.
María: Really?? I didn’t know it was that magical! You have a very
nice family! Juan, Katerina, their baby Bela, your baby C., Kay,
Sadie… You are linked together in a very nice way. It’s organic and
magical; a true family.
Kate: And my girlfriend Adrienne too. All of us.
María: How is your partner Adrienne with C., how does she take to
the fact that you’re parents.
Kate: She’s very understanding and supportive. She has never
wanted to be a parent and still doesn’t want to be a parent. I think
she’s still pretty skeptical about how all of this will turn out. But she
did say the other day that she looks at things differently now
because she knows a bit of what it’s like to be with a kid. Recently
C. was with us for eight days while Sadie was in San Francisco. It
was just really nice because I found that we were all loving it.
Sadie and I recently talked and she said, “C. is the center of my
 universe.” And I said, “well, C. is a very big part of my life but is not
at the center of mine.’ I think the reason for that is because, in a
way, I wasn’t a part of the decision to bring C. into this world. It
wasn’t like Sadie and I decided as partners to have a kid together;
we considered it after she got pregnant. Maybe because of the
combination of not being in a romantic relationship with Sadie and
also not being the biological father, the distance exists. I wanted to
be a parent, and I wanted to have a relationship with C., but I can’t
say that I have the same perspective or relationship than the birth
mother does.
María: But why should you? Would that be necessarily better for C.
anyway? Does C. need to be the center of the universe for two
people? Wouldn’t it create a crash between constellations then?
Kate: As a co-parent I committed myself to a life-long relationship
with C. For me that was the number one thing. I don’t know if we
are always going to live in the same place. In those terms, at least
right now that Sadie and I decided not to live together, that’s a
change in my original constellation. For one thing, I basically live
with my girlfriend, we travel a lot together, and so we have a home
together. We also spend a lot of our time together in the studio
where Juan is too, so I sort of now live with my husband Juan and
my girlfriend Adrienne.
María: So you live in Juan’s house, not in the studio? Isn’t Juan living
there with Katharina and the baby?
Kate: No, Katharina and her baby live alone. And Juan sometimes
stays there. Sadie recently moved in with a new person, who I
think, because she is there living in the same place, is gonna be
also a primary figure in C.’s life. I’m starting to sense that she might
be another co-parent coming into the picture. But Sadie and I
haven’t directly addressed that issue, whether other primary
parents will enter the relationship, and at what point. I think that this
is another general topic—like to what extent does the birth mother
have the final say in how things go. I think that in a way both me
and Kay feel that Sadie is the one that has the final decision-
making power about certain things.
María: And how does this feel?
Kate: Well, on the one hand, I think it’s hard sometimes because it’s
like ‘ , Sadie gets to decide.’ On the other hand, I think it’s also
good because there are certain choices I want to make in my life
without asking Sadie about them. I think that if I start to restrict
certain choices she can make in her life with C., we would just be
limiting forces to each other. I don’t want that to happen.
I would say that now we are more like divorced parents. We are 3
parents living separately. I think at the end it’s good that we have
this dynamism in our relationship. Our flexibility makes sense as
part of our queer parent constellation. It’s also that we all get along,
because in some divorced family models they don’t even talk to
each other.
María: Yeah and that’s the worst part. I think that the most important
thing is making sure that the relationships are good, in whatever
constellation that may be. With the lives we live today, we travel so
much, meet so many people, so that we don’t stay too long in
relationships. If life is like this today, so too parenthood must be.
You can’t become a parent and be another person or live a
different life.
Kate: Yeah, exactly. I’m really curious to see how this will affect C.’s
sense of stability and home. I have a very amorphous sense of
home, because my life is practically lived ‘on the road,’ and I think if
I was a birth mother and had my child with me at all times we would
probably have a similar idea of home. Even when I’m with C., she
comes to the weirdest places with me: she sometimes stays with
me in my studio, sometimes at my girlfriend’s, sometimes at my old
apartment, or she can come on the road with me, she stays in
hotels with me, etc... C., though, has a particular situation because
on the one hand, she has some kind of stable home with her birth
mom, and then on the other she has these homes that she
sometimes stays at like mine and Kay’s. I think right now it’s more
or less ok, but I’m curious to see how it will be in the future. I’ve
had some people say to me, even from personal experience
working with kids, that is very hard for some kids to spend nights in
different places and changing basic things like who takes you to
 school from one day to the next. I’m not saying I know all the
answers, but I think it’s important to be realistic about and think
about them.
I love to travel and I know that’s going to be an issue. I guess
that’s my gut feeling, and because C. is not my birth child, it’s not
only up to me to say how often she travels. But I don’t know to what
extent I will be able to travel with her as she gets older.
María: Well, she will be able to tell you. I mean, from a very early age
they know what they want and they can express it. And I think it is
very important to try to respect their wish, in whatever way
possible.
Kate: Yes. Maybe there will be events or opportunities she’ll want to
share with me, and maybe there will be a time when she’ll want to
spend half a year with me. I don’t know, I really have no idea.
There’s a lot of feelings involved, and specifically my own feelings
about being a birth mother. I don’t know whether I will have an
opportunity to be a birth mother, or how to make that happen really.
María: So are you thinking about becoming a biological mother right
now?
Kate: Not now, but I thought about it my whole life. That’s another
part of the whole story. Because when Juan had the baby with his
girlfriend, it changed the way I had thought I would have kids with
Juan. It wasn’t that the possibility was now cut off but rather
accepting that the story wasn’t going to go according to what I
planned.
María: You thought that Juan was the person with whom you’d have
biological kids?
Kate: Yes, I did. We talked about it, but we never got around to doing
it. Now it’s back to being a big question mark in our lives. Before I
married Juan it was question mark because he didn’t know if he
wanted kids, etc… That was when I was 23. Now I’m 35 and we’ve
been married for eight years. I want to have kids, maybe I even
want to be a birth mom, but I really don’t know who to have a kid
with. I also sometimes think that maybe because I am now a dad to
C., that’s all the parenting I really want. It’s just thinking about a lot
 of things I hadn’t thought about before. I didn’t even consider it
before because I was in a relationship with a man that gradually
became more queer over time. I think there is more room for
making alternative decisions about parenting when you are in a
queer relationship, irrespective of the gender of the people in it.
And at the same time I am totally overwhelmed by parenthood
right now. With all the changes that have happened over the last
few months, I totally do not wanna be pregnant. Not at all! I have
never actively wanted to not be pregnant until now, but this year
has been too much for me!
I think the only thing I haven’t talked about yet is my relationship
with my actual family. It’s challenging and complicated because,
had I been in a lesbian relationship, then maybe my mom would
have accepted my having a kid via artificial insemination or that I
would be a father to my girlfriend’s kid. But because I was married
to a man, I think my mum and my family thought: ‘ok, you’re gonna
have a kid at some point, and I’m going to be a grandmother
because you’re in this seemingly straight relationship.’ Even though
I was out to my mum and she knew I was queer and in an open
relationship, I think she still believed all that. I still don’t think
anything could have prepared her for what ended up happening….
María: So how is she dealing with it?
Kate: To be honest, she’s been amazing! It was a huge amount of
work for me to talk to my mom about everything. In the beginning
she was really upset. I think she was so disappointed with the
change in my relationship with Juan, and sad to find out that
maybe I wouldn’t be pregnant any time soon. She also had a hard
time understanding that I was parenting with a person who wasn’t
my girlfriend. She didn’t know what it meant for her, how to talk
about it, all of that. It wasn’t that she was embarrassed or anything
like that, she just didn’t know how to deal with it.
María: Yeah, I imagine she must have not known how to explain it to
her friends.
Kate: Yeah, exactly.
María: And how is she dealing with it now?
Kate: She’s been amazingly open. She visited us here, she met
Adrienne, Juan, Katharina, Bela, Sadie and C. and she spent some
time with all of us together. Overall it’s been really good, but it’s
been a lot of work to talk through it all. Not just with her but her
sisters, my aunts, and all the other people in my family. I mean
when a baby comes into a family everyone gets excited about it. In
my family especially—we have tons of kids, and everyone loves
kids. I really feel like most people in my family don’t really know
what kind of relationship I have with my kids—and I say my kids
meaning Juan’s kid Bela and C.—in part because I’m so far away
from the United States!
It’s just so hard. Sometimes I think that I would love to have
counseling from someone who has experience with alternative
families. I want to talk about how to integrate this home family with
my chosen queer family.
María: Is nice that we ended up talking about your mom.
Kate: Yeah! I’ve always had a very complicated difficult relationship
with her. She hasn’t been always close to me, and I think about her
a lot and our relationship.
María: I don’t think all families are so normal or normative…. The
queer parts are just hidden!
Kate: Yeah! My family in fact is really open, and several of my aunts
are lesbians and have queer relationships. So I guess we’re not
normative in that sense… but nevertheless there is this distance
between us because of the alternative nature of our family in Berlin
and the new members in it that they don’t really know… It’s
challenging to explain it to them. Thank goodness that I’m not in a
family that would disown me. Like, they could very easily say: ‘you
make porn, you are a sex worker, you have a queer relationship,
you’re parenting with someone we’ve never met … we want to
disown you!’
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T ’ , even though it is an
essential part of us, from our earliest age. Every single baby
masturbates, because exploring one’s body is a central part of their
growth. Allowing them to develop their sexuality without fear, freely,
is a challenge to all of us. It’s the other side of the coin: if vindicating
motherhood as a sexual stage is one of the aims of this book, so it is
to vindicate the beautiful sexuality of our babies.
Poussy Draama is a French artist whose work attempts to talk
about sexuality… directly to children. That’s what she does in the
playful and funny video Baby, love your body! which she co-created
alongside the feminist activist Fannie Sosa.
Her work has tackled other issues relating to health self-
management, such as self-managed spontaneous abortion, which
comes up in our conversation as a parallel topic. I include at the end
of the interview my Guide for an easy and (wild) miscarriage which
she makes reference to, and which I published in 2011. The guide
intends to be of help and use to any woman who wants to have an
abortion at home. In hospitals and medical centers we are subject to
a series of protocols which include interventions which are
unnecessary and which are also a form of obstetric violence.
Poussy Draama is an artist, activist and alter-narrator. She lives in
France between Marseille and the countryside. Google her or meet
her on the road, in the School of No Big Deal truck. We know each
other through Fannie Sosa, whose interview is also compiled in this
book.
We talked through messaging services between France and
Canada around early 2014.
María: Tell me how did you end up doing a video to explain sexuality
to children?
Poussy: Our work is considered ‘explicit’ and kind of ‘for adults only.’
We wanted to start working on pieces that were also for children
(and not only for children). Because we love children. Because we
can’t ignore them. And maybe because we couldn’t bear the lack of
confidence we have in children and in ourselves when we censor
ourselves (especially when it’s “unconscious” censorship). So
basically we didn’t want to start any serious/official pedagogical
project, we just wanted to make something that has the same spirit
 of our usual work, except that kids under 12 can watch it with no
shame or secret.
María: Do you think there is a need to explain sex to children in a
funny and beautiful way?
Poussy: Yes, of course. If you try to get an overview of sex education
for children nowadays, besides some exceptions, everything is
about procreation. So basically what children are taught (out of
their families) is: first, how to procreate, and, secondly, how to
avoid procreation while having sex. But they have almost zero
spaces to talk about why we have sex, what it is (outside of
procreation) and how various it can be. Then, what happens? Don’t
be surprised if they hate their bodies then. We are in 2014 and we
still tell children their bodies are mysterious machines they can
hardly control. If we do what we do, it’s just because we hope for a
better world for the upcoming generations. For me, there is clearly
no future for the human race, but there’s a present and this present
includes several generations to come. So before the human race
dies, we gotta work hard to tell these generations we love them,
and to minimize their pain. Keeping people in ignorance and
darkness concerning their bodies and sexualities is an excellent
way of controlling them, and it’s just causing pain. . Useless
pain. I don’t like it.
María: You have produced great work around feminism, queer
identity and sexuality. Do you think motherhood could become a
field of exploration in your work?
Poussy: For as long as I can recall, I never wanted to be a mother.
When I was younger I was absolutely sure I’d never have kids, but I
learned to never say never. And my art is always closely linked to
my present life and experience, so I don’t feel very legitimate to talk
about motherhood! But I like to read, listen and learn about it. It’s
very important.
Two weeks ago I was (consciously) pregnant for the 1st time of
my life at 27, and I aborted spontaneously, at home, by myself. I
just could do it because I knew how to, principally from online texts
I used to read (including your Guide for an easy and wild
miscarriage) and plants use. But it is very experimental when
 you have no mother/mentor/shaman/doctor to talk with. So it was
very strong for me, because all that I prepared or imagined in case
of pregnancy during all these years of research, I had to put it in
practice, and it became real. Like physically real. It’s the contrary of
going to the hospital and being under anesthesia. It’s feeling and
trusting you. You have to be very self confident to make it happen. I
couldn’t do it at 19 or 22 years old.
I was simultaneously working on a performance where I
impersonate a kind of doctor, which I call “sexologist, witch and
alter-gynaecologist”. So I had to include this experience into my
work. So at the exact same moment, I was both miscarrying and
reading about it, and preparing how to talk about it with my
audience. It was super intense, so much simultaneity. I was happy
and proud at the end of the performance, but i was like: “where are
we living in? In a world where poor young artists and activists like
myself have to experiment on their own bodies, quite alone,
sometimes dangerously, to orally give some knowledge during
ephemeral events?” It’s my work and it’s what I love to do, but it’s
very, very precarious. It was a triple work: I was learning about
myself and teaching my lover and my audience at the same time.
And miscarriage is one of the most global and frequent situations!
María: I consider pregnancy, labor and breastfeeding as sexual
stages. I think feminism should embrace motherhood as the
pleasurable act it can be.
Poussy: Once again, I never experienced motherhood, but yes, what
you say sounds accurate. Fertilization itself is intimately linked with
orgasm. In the minute I got fertilized, I felt it, simply because I’m
both connected with my cycles and my pleasure. A few weeks later,
I was waiting for an abortion, but at some point I said to myself: girl,
let’s live out your pregnancy! Let’s experience it and share it. Of
course I felt nauseous and I had an annoying vaginal mycosis, but I
also felt like a super-ego. I felt desirable, desiring and powerful.
Because I wasn’t considering it as a disease or a problem, and
above all because I was just considering it instead of ignoring it.
Women that don’t want to have a baby are taught to consider their
pregnancy as nothing but a mistake. Hey, it’s not a mistake, it’s life.
Come on.
I posted a picture of me with a positive pregnancy test in my hand
and a half-smile in a social network, and some people were like :
«Congratulations! You’re gonna have a baby!” As if an abortion
was not an option anymore from there. It’s quite a good example of
the hypocrisy of the society we live in.
What was the more shocking for me in the french debate around
medically assisted reproduction & gay parenthood was that
parenthood was only talked about in moral and intellectual terms,
while it’s also super physical. And super sexual. As soon as the
medical system helps you, you have almost no body (you are
nobody). Bye-bye pleasure, hello science! You want a baby? You
are going to be watched and monitored all over. This is such a
violent way to keep people far from their bodies and pleasures.
So if we wanna talk differently about pregnancy and motherhood,
we western people have a double work to do: (re)connecting with
our bodies, and being politically very active (since motherhood is
tied to the classical «family» notion in the dominant narratives).
Today you can’t be lazy about it.
There is no one way to conceive motherhood in feminism. There
is no monolithic feminism. It’s moving, it’s growing, it’s changing.
It’s us. We make feminism.
 An Easy (and Wild) Guide to Miscarriage by M
L (published on Mariallopis.com, 2011)
1.- Definition of terms.
What is a spontaneous abortion?
A spontaneous abortion or miscarriage refers to the loss of an
embryo when it is not intentionally provoked. As such, it differs from
an induced abortion. The term only applies where the loss happens
before week 20 of a pregnancy, when it becomes known as
premature birth.
2.- Before aborting.
The causes of miscarriages remain a mystery to Western medical
science, and doctors cannot do anything to prevent them. If a doctor
tries to prescribe progesterone to you, say no. There is no evidence
that it works, and it will just put you in a depressive, suicidal mood.
If anybody tells you not to have sexual relations, don’t believe
them. It is common to advise against sex when there is a risk of
miscarriage (such as spotting), but there is no scientific proof that
sex induces spontaneous abortion. You may find that you start to
miscarry after having intercourse. But the sex isn’t the cause, it
simply stimulates a process that has started inside of you.
It’s like when you get your periods after fucking. You don’t get your
period because you fuck, but because you did not get pregnant.
Don’t let them confuse you. Some gynaecologists love to play
priests.
3.- Don’t go to a medical centre.
If you have an ultrasound and there is no heartbeat (that is, the
embryo has died), you are going to miscarry. It is only a matter of
time. You need to be patient, because it can take weeks. Prepare
your body and say goodbye. Every case is different. You’ll know
when it starts, you’ll start bleeding and having cramps. Don’t go to a
medical centre because you will probably end up undergoing a
highly aggressive and totally unnecessary intervention.
Miscarrying is painful and difficult. It is much more comfortable to do
it in the privacy of your home, or a familiar place, than in a hospital
surrounded by strangers. You can do it yourself, you just need the
help of a good friend. Several friends, if possible.
I personally recommend going to a beach (nudist and deserted, to
avoid an unwanted audience) or the mountains. You will feel the
need to squat down and push. Do it. It’s obviously not very practical
to do this in your living room, as the furniture will end up covered in
blood. That’s why it’s much more practical to do it in nature, where
the seawater and the soil will help you to clean and absorb the flow.
But only if the weather allows, of course. If it’s cold, it won’t be a
good idea, because the cold will make the cramps stronger and
more painful.
But if it’s summer and it’s warm and you have a beach or mountain
nearby, don’t think twice. Ask your friends or your partner to put you
in the car and take you into nature. All you will need is some
painkillers.
If in spite of my recommendations for a natural, wild, miscarriage
you have decided that nature is not for you, and you choose to stay
home, my advice (and that of many manuals) is to sit comfortably on
the WC. You will bleed so much that there’s no point endlessly
changing pads and getting dressed and undressed. Everything will
end up bloody.
One of the main drawbacks of this option is that it will be difficult for
you to inspect the tissue that you expel. And this is a very important
step, because apart from all the blood tissue, you will also expel
what is known as the “gestational sac”. Its size will depend on your
stage of gestation. It is important to expel it, so make sure that it
comes out. When you have it, you can bury it in the ground, throw it
into the sea or carry out whatever farewell ritual you like.
4.- Final ultrasound to check that everything has gone wildly right.
Once you have finished miscarrying, go to a gynaecologist to have
an ultrasound so that you can be sure that the abortion has finished
properly and that no tissue remains in the uterus. Wait a while before
you go, because the process may take up to ten days. It is a routine
visit the gynaecologist. These kinds of visits make gynaecologists
somewhat frustrated, because it is all too obvious that we are only
interested in the gadget for the ultrasound. Look at the scan
carefully, ultrasounds are relatively easy to read. In this case, the
uterus should look smooth and beautiful, with a fine line that
indicates where the gestational sac was implanted.
5.- Don’t stay on your own.
Make sure you line up some help for at least a week. Somebody to
cook for you, to make you got drinks, go and buy you painkillers,
hold your hand when you have cramps, and, above all, to support
you psychologically. If you stay on your own, you will have a very
hard time. Remember that the pain will make it difficult for you to
even walk.
Cancel work and personal appointments as far as possible. For the
next few weeks, you won’t feel well at all. Don’t start a new job or
move to a different country or another house. You will feel very tired
and sad. Make it easy for yourself. Don’t stay on your own. The
weeks after you miscarry are like an eternal downer after taking
party pills. You think you’re going crazy. If you’re by yourself, you
might. If you surround yourself with friends and affection, you won’t.
6.- Don’t blame yourself.
Western medical science does not know what causes miscarriages.
They have only been able to come up with some hypothesis linked to
chromosomal abnormalities and mysteries of various kinds. So don’t
blame yourself.
One of the most highly respected books on the subject, written by
the director of the Recurrent Miscarriage Clinic at St Mary’s Hospital
in London, concludes that a pregnancy is more likely to continue if
the woman feels loved and cared for. The world’s best specialists
have spent years and years on research and studies, in order to
come to this conclusion: the thing a woman needs in order to go
ahead with a pregnancy is tender loving care. As simple as that.
 The book in question is called Miscarriage: What Every Woman
Needs to Know, by Lesley Regan. I highly recommend it.
The statistics on spontaneous abortions are very high. In fact,
miscarriage is the most common complication in pregnancy.
Apparently, one in every five pregnancies ends in miscarriage.
Perhaps even more. Nevertheless, it is a subject that is rarely talked
about, and in a sense our society considers it taboo. The tradition of
not announcing a pregnancy until the fourth month is due to the high
possibility of miscarrying in the first three months. But when you
make your own miscarriage public, other women start to talk about it.
Mothers who had never admitted to their children that they had
suffered miscarriages, neighbours, aunties, cousins, admit their
spontaneous abortions when you mention yours. Talk.
7.- Trust your instinct.
Our instinct is all we have. Medical science will try to convince you
that you don’t know anything, that it is impossible to feel the death of
an embryo in your uterus, or to know the moment you get pregnant.
Ignore them. If you listen to your own body, you can be aware of
everything. The hardest thing will be ignoring the outrageous things
that gynaecologists, lovers, friends and neighbours say to you. You’ll
find everybody wants to have a say, and worst of all, many of them
will judge and condemn you for refusing to follow the patriarchal
game rules.
Long, long ago, in the time of witches and matriarchy, women knew
much more about their bodies and their lives. They knew how to
listen to themselves and society respected their decisions in relation
to their bodies and children. Nowadays, any woman who doesn’t
want to obey the orders of an inconsistent medical system is
attacked and insulted. Wait till you see the comments in response to
this post.
I asked the Recurrent Miscarriages Clinic at St Mary’s Hospital in
London what protocol should be followed in the case of miscarriage.
The gynaecologist answered that it depended on the woman’s
wishes. That each woman had different needs. I was incredibly
surprised by the logic of this response. I assure you that this is not
generally the attitude of the health system in Spain. I think that St
Mary’s is a good hospital.
Follow your instincts and insist that your doctors, friends and
relatives respect your needs. This guide aims to assist in a relatively
simple process, so that we can break free from unnecessary, painful
medical practices that have been proved ineffective. As the
gynaecologist at St Mary’s said, let each woman miscarry however
she wishes.
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W been able to count on other wiser, more

experienced women as advisers on topics like sexual and
reproductive health, childcare, etc… the figures of doula and midwife
have always existed. The word midwife comes from Old English and
it means ‘with woman’. In French one says sage femme which
means wise woman, and is also an ancient term. In Danish one says
jordmor which means mother earth, and in Iceland mother of light or
ljosmodir. Socrates’s mother, Phaenarete, was a midwife. And in
Latin America there have always been traditional midwives.
Pabla Pérez San Martín is currently working on a project called
Ginecosofia where knowledge about female health and sexuality is
brought together, studied at length, and shared. The focus is on
collecting and salvaging ancient wisdom brought down from our
ancestral mothers and grandmothers in order to spark the
empowering potential of female self-knowledge. In this interview she
unearths various traditional midwifery techniques used in South
America, and explains me the mysteries of children that are born
within the amniotic sac, like my son Roc.
Pabla is a researcher in the field of traditional medicine, a feminist
libertarian and the mother of two children. Born in Chile, she has
studied traditional midwifery in Brazil from 2012 to the present. She
is the author of two books, Manual introductorio a la ginecología
natural (Introductory manual to natural gynecology) and Del cuerpo a
las raices (From body to roots). The manual is a guide for those who
struggle or clash against the fears and hormones traditional
medicine has tried to fill us with and sell to us. From body to roots is
a practical guide to medicinal plants, and a book about autonomy,
self-management, and health. She has also given various workshops
on natural gynecology and independent healthcare.
I have known Pabla’s work for years, ever since she first wrote to
me and proposed we begin a book exchange. In our exchange,
we’ve trade the wisdom of various prodigious beings by sending
each other books from one side of the Atlantic to the other.
She replied to my questions via email in 2015, from her small town
in Putaendo, Chile.
María: I would like you to first introduce yourself, and to tell me when
 and how this interest of yours first began to take root, and about
the multiple projects you’re taking part in now.
Pabla: I was born 27 years ago in the valley of Marga-Marga, in
Chile. I was raised in the countryside with my paternal
grandmother. She showed me a great deal about nature and
medicinal plants. When I got older, I studied Sociology for some
time. I never finished the degree though, largely because I wanted
to dedicate my time to learning at my own pace, and I wanted to
meet people and their diverse cultures in everyday practice, not
only through statistics or theories. So that is how I came to
dedicate myself to traveling at a young age. I wanted to rescue and
preserve the ancestral knowledge of women in South America,
especially the wisdom of rural and indigenous women. Here in
South America there are many traditional cultures that still
prevail…. And so I went mixing what I learned about investigative
methodologies in university with my feminist militancy. It was
particularly important to me to do so because of my involvement in
the struggle for egalitarian healthcare for women, given that
healthcare remains a hetero-patriarchal space. Our views of
healthcare are fundamentally made in the image of men. We
speculate and diagnose from a point of view established by men
and as a result are mistreated, manipulated and disrespected, in all
of our sexual processes.
I am an investigator researching the use of medicinal herbs in
women’s sexual health. At the same time, I continuously grow and
learn as a mother and a midwife.
Besides the research done for the publication of my two books,
Manual introductorio a la ginecología natural (Introductory manual
to natural gynecology) and Del Cuerpo a las raices (from body to
roots), my investigative work takes place within the frame of my
project named Ginecosofia. The focus is on rescuing the most
ancient wisdom from our grandmothers, and on awakening the
power of self-knowledge based on our shared ancestral memory in
order to benefit female sexuality and health.
María: I would like you to tell me about the tradition established by
traditional midwifery, its distance from the patriarchal medical
 institution, and the necessity of appreciating and empowering the
knowledge it contains.
Pabla: A traditional midwife ( ) is historical figure who, throughout
time, has accompanied women giving birth. They were the first
obstetricians in human history (even though today these two are
very different careers). In the vast majority of the world, these s
continue to assist and accompany women throughout pregnancy,
birth, and breastfeeding. This key figure is a woman rooted in great
ancestral knowledge whose expertise spans the vast and
mysterious sexualities of women, natural remedies, herbs and
plants, diet, etc….
According to the World Health Organization, a is a person who
assists the mother during childbirth, and who has come to her
knowledge through her own experiences or in learning alongside
other midwives in action. This knowledge leads her to be
recognized as an ideal agent for healthcare, who advises, assists,
and accompanies the whole process from pregnancy, to childbirth,
and postpartum.
Births attended to and accompanied by s are certainly not new
to human history, nor are they exclusive to certain countries (and
cultures). It wasn’t that many generations ago that people were
born as many still continue to be born, accompanied by traditional
midwives.
Today, with the great technological advances made in the
patriarchal medical world, the space this job occupied has largely
been displaced by allopathic medicine. These days, it is primarily
the man who manages and directs knowledge relating to these
aspects, encapsulated in the medical field called ‘gynecology’
(science of women).
A similar job to that done by a s is that of an obstetrician, a
specialist in sexual and/or reproductive health within the medical
sphere. Nevertheless, the academic paradigm from which these
specialists acquire their knowledge is that of the patriarchal medical
system. A system which is invasive, interventionist, pathological,
violent, etc. The profession of an obstetrician is the one which best
approximates the work of a , but the ways in which each group
learns to manage the process of childbirth comes from very
different schools of thought and histories.
We reclaim the name of ‘traditional midwife’ to mark the
distinction of our knowledge, acquired from tradition and ancestral
practitioners, and not from patriarchal medical institutions. We work
closely with the sacred and feminine, which is tied to the all-
knowing natural cycles of life. We have learned from oral tradition
and observation, to feel and reconnect with our great mother earth.
We have learned from grandmothers, our expert midwives. Each
one of us learns by following and observing the traditions of one
wise woman with great experience… so the transmission of
knowledge and understanding is central to the trade.
In South America, there are many s among rural populations
and in indigenous areas. The is their highest authority on
questions regarding health. She, at the same time, is always bound
to what can only be described as spiritual work: praying, cleaning,
working with energy and knowledge of the baby in the uterus. She
can read, without technological machinery, the health of a woman
based on her iris, her eyes, her nails, her urine, her tongue, etc.
She can detect with the touch of her hands, the baby’s position, its
heartbeat, its growth, and she can converse with its soul.
s are the representatives of healthcare in all the isolated
communities of America. They are those who protect and save the
lives of women and children in high-risk situations.
In an attempt to over-medicalize the health of women and
children and to discredit the knowledge represented by ’s, it has
been said that the profession must be replaced by another for the
sake of efficiency. As a result, there are many zones around the
world where s are denied the right to their trade, are
marginalized, and are threatened in what can only be described as
witch hunt. Nevertheless, the mortality rates of infants and mothers
in births attended by s can’t be compared with those that take
place in hospitals. Of the two, it is those medical centers and
hospitals that have the highest mortality and c-section rate. As
Suley Carvalho, my teacher and main professional guide says: ‘We
midwives have never been responsible for the death of a mother or
baby in childbirth. It is, rather, the lack of food, the lack of water, the
exploitation of the earth, the expropriation of people from their
 land…. It’s poverty which global economic systems don’t take
responsibility for that causes death; it is their incompetence that
kills people. All that we midwives have done, above everything, is
save lives and respectfully accompany natural processes.’
María: Could you tell me a bit about Suely Carvalho’s work?
Pabla: Before I met her, I began as someone who would accompany
home births, working from my own intuition and experiences I had
acquired while working with traditional midwives I met on my
journeys in South America. Nevertheless, at that time, I felt
insecure and a tad bit lost. It was then that, one day, I received a
strange invitation from Alice R., one of Suely’s apprentices, from
Brazil. The note said that her teacher wanted to meet me and invite
me to her school as an apprentice. It said that she had read my
books and recognized me as someone on the same path as her. If
I didn’t have money to go to Brazil every two or three months she
would finance my going…. That’s all the information I received. And
I trusted her completely and somehow got all the way there.
Suely has been a for forty years. She comes from a long line
of midwives; her great grandmother, her grandmothers, her
daughters and now even her granddaughters continue her trade.
She has attended more than 5 thousand home births, and her
experience has no parallel. She’s the vice president of (The
Alliance for Latin American Midwives) and she militantly and
tirelessly works to ensure the trade doesn’t die off. Everything she
teaches is imparted to a group of apprentices she handpicks from
all over the world. And learning with her never really ends. Given
that we apprentices come from all over the world, we share our
traditions and stories between us and we help each other from a
distance through every birth we assist. I would love to talk about
her more, but I think it would be even more incredible for her to
speak about herself in her own voice.
I would love to talk to you about what my teacher says can be
interpreted when a child is born inside the bag of waters
María: Like my son!
Pabla: Well, we ’s never break the membranes in labor. It’s
something doctors practice in order to accelerate the process, but
 it’s an act that violates our vision, as do many other routine
practices carried out by clinics and hospitals… all the secrets of life
are hidden in those waters. Water is necessary in maintaining the
child’s life and its uterine existence. When a child is born inside the
waters it means they carry a strong spiritual mission. They carry
their own world with those waters, what we call ‘the world of
mysteries.’ Once the child is outside, we then open the sac,
respecting the way the baby decided to be born. Later, we guide
the parents or mother by giving a reading of the child’s unique birth
story, predicting the kid’s characteristics and the challenges they
will meet.
At three years old, when this child begins to develop and use their
faculties of reason, when it truly uses language, the parents won’t
be surprised by their behavior. There will be nothing to talk about
because we can guess the way they will behave or speak in certain
situations, something which is considered inexplicable at such an
early age, and all depending on the way in which the child was
born. Later, when its seven years old, the child will pass through a
grave sickness but not die. The sickness will just mark its transition
from one phase to another, a maturing of their spirit. At fourteen
years old, societal forces will tend to treat the child as ‘different,’
‘crazy’ or ‘schizophrenic’ because they fail to understand that this
kid has an ability to see and is a being with great potential. While
facing all these challenges, the child will need to be guided and
understood, not sent to a psychologist or psychiatrist to be
‘normalized.’ For s, a child born in this special way will bring
both mysteries and messages. It is a being with a great capacity for
spiritual work, so much so that they can become possible teachers.
For that reason they must be taken care of, guided, and
understood along their journey, and the needs they express have to
be respected.
María: I’m very interested in the idea of motherhood and its stages
including, for example, the birth experience as a ritual, or the work
you do as shamanic, existing within a sacred space of
transformation. Could you expand a little on this subject?
Pabla: Bringing a child into the world is a fantastic process when it is
lived out in a conscious, desired, full of love, and contained way.
Throughout the period of gestation, all of our physical and spiritual
existence prepares itself to welcome this new component. The
placenta, naturally, takes care of all the babies necessities while
the uterus sustains it within its nest. The woman’s body is the crib
that takes in all the vibrations and movements of the being we
treasure inside. We transform together, growing step by step until
the moment of maturity. Then we both give birth (the child gives
birth to us too, certainly: the body of the woman, her sexuality, and
the sensations she feels, it all changes. It’s truly a metamorphosis).
The child knows, in its ancestral conscience, the path it must
traverse and how to act in the moment of birth. It also knows how
to stop its heart when the path isn’t favorable in order to stake its
claim and alert us when the natural process is being altered. That’s
how miscarriages take place.
The period of gestation is exclusively one of joy. Our sexual body
feels an orgasmic expansion; it’s plainly strong, sensual, and
extremely perceptive. It’s a beautiful moment in which to feel at one
with the forces of nature that wrap us up, give us oxygen, nourish
and sustain us. At the same time we are ourselves one with our
children.
On the other hand, giving birth is an act of healing, it’s a moment
of great recovery, in which we connect ourselves with life and all
the lives and uteri that had to exist in order for us to be here. We
connect ourselves with all the women who had to give birth
throughout all the history antedating us, with our ancestral mothers,
with history in its never ending repetition. Childbirth is the beginning
of a new story. Birth is the moment when the spirit of the self we
will give birth to is materialized. For that reason, before the
‘delivery’ of the child takes place, the woman lives through a
powerful spiritual and energetic ‘labor.’ It is a transmutation from
worm to butterfly, where the primitive brain takes over us, turning
us into wild animals and beasts in the delivery. The work that labor
implies, if we allow it, can be the same as going through an
hallucinogenic experience with a plant of power. It’s a question of
dissolving traumas and, above all, cultural fears. And, of course,
also of surrounding oneself with a team that provides us in that
 moment with the confidence, love, and liberty to give ourselves up
completely to the mystery we give birth to.
Life itself is full of rituals. Birth in and of itself, if it takes place
naturally, is a sort of trance and a fantastic ritual. It doesn’t need to
be spectacular or theatrical in order to be lived out naturally and
fully. The capitalist outlook we have today makes us believe that
giving birth in a pool with dolphins is the highest form of natural
birth to which we should aspire. As a I could tell you about
thousands of rituals we take part in as part of the work of childbirth,
but I think each ritual is specific to every life and context, each
woman and family. Speaking about them outside of their context is
selling a sacred moment that doesnt deserve to be cheapened, but
I can speak to what I consider to be fundamental as a TM: working
with women and families in order to make labor and birth a moment
for rebirth and healing.
So, for me, the connection with our child and with our ancestors is
the basis for a good life and path. Healing the wounds of our
personal life stories, healing our stormy relationships, our childhood
rooted in abandonment or mistreatment. Healing and connecting
with what we are and what we desire can open our hearts and our
spirits in order to draw and point to a better path beginning from the
window of opportunity that motherhood brings.
María: I would like to know how your political struggle has
contributed to your experience of motherhood and vice versa.
Pabla: Like the majority of my contemporaries in my country, I was
born under a military dictatorship. The times surrounding my
childhood were difficult for all, except the rich, obviously.
I was raised with a lot of political disillusionment and so when I
became an adolescent I familiarized myself with libertarian ideas. A
great deal of my political grounding comes from them. As a
university student, I became a militant ‘libertarian feminist’ and from
then on I began to have a different view of motherhood. I started by
coming to understand my experience as a daughter and my
relationship with my mother, who is my central reference point. Our
relationship was broken very early on as a result of my mother
separating from my father and our home, leaving behind five young
children. That whole process and rupture has led me to see that
role within society, the space occupied by mothers, as a
fundamental one that is routinely undervalued and not taken care
of.
The political and social analysis of what it is to ‘be a woman and a
mother’ made me understand the decisions taken by mine, and her
courage in choosing another path. Her experience of motherhood
was very rough. At 23 she already had five children, and a
workaholic husband who was cheating on her. She lived a life
submerged in poverty and she wasn’t happy. It was difficult for me
to understand her decision at first because, as is natural in a child, I
needed her love and her presence in my life. My political
experience as a feminist and a mother has made me see her
process with more empathy and love. Who can take on five
children without any social, economic or romantic support? She, as
a woman, didn’t exist. She hadn’t known what it means to get a
good night’s rest since the age of fifteen. She nursed us all with
dedication; me until the age of three. She had dedicated herself
fully for ten years and she couldn’t take any more self-denial.
Understanding, supporting, and embracing her context, like that of
so many women, is part of my job. As it is recognizing motherhood
as a fundamental pillar of transformation within society, making it
more visible and understood as something that has to be protected
and embraced in its different manifestations, valuing it outside the
terms of the heteropatriarchy. My job is embracing the light as well
as the dark in motherhood in order to liberate ourselves from so
much blame. In order to understand that it is natural to commit
errors, it is natural to give birth with an orgasm, to be sexually
excited by breastfeeding. To show that it is natural to sometimes
only want to be with our children and other times not want to be
with them at all.
My job is also to show that maternity is no easy matter, that we
struggle and fall all the time, because motherhood is only learned
by doing and living. This is even more true of women who cannot
count on sufficient support; one needs all the love and support
humanly possible in order to fully be a mother.
As a mother and libertarian feminist, I think it becomes
fundamental to open up support circles and groups that bring
visibility to our role. Society needs to understand and see how
much of ourselves we devote in motherhood and how much of their
devotion is needed to bring health, emotional well-being and vitality
to a new being.
It is often a terrible punishment in itself for a mother to make a
mistake, as if making mistakes weren’t a part of learning and
growing. It’s as if the woman-mother passes to become a social
category with no consideration given to the person behind the
category-the one who lives it out, feels it, is tired, feels pleasure,
etc. The woman with the same right as any to error and the
opportunity to mend it...
I think mothers have a lot left to say about what happens to us.
We tend to hide ourselves and not explain ourselves as much as
we need to. Likewise, we also see that we lack spaces and ways.
We are lacking spaces and resources, something which leaves us
out of the feminist movement, because, naturally, the feminist
struggle is more focused on the depenalization of abortion than on
a comprehensive dialogue between all the artists and vast
sexualities we represent. It’s a crucial struggle, which sometimes,
oddly, gets in the way and is set up against elective motherhood,
when it shouldn’t be that way. These two sides of the struggle
should complement each other as necessary and paralleled rights,
full of political perspectives and gaps that we must all resolve
together.
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K K
Transhackfeminist

K K
Transhackfeminist Motherhood: on the origins of
gynecology
W ’ a punk-gynecology mashup for a long time
now. Transhackfeminist motherhood brings together the strengths of
ecology, of body and machine hackers, of the -
communities (Do It Yourself, Do It With Others, and No Ecology
Without Social Ecology) and of the anticapitalist-punk struggle.
Klau Kinky advocates for the autonomy of our bodily self-
knowledge, and fights against obstetric violence. Her work reveals
the hidden origins of obstetrics, gynecology and urogynecology.
Klau is a spic bitch, tech-witch, junk junkie, machine and body
hacker, and noisex. She lives in Calafou, an eco-industrial and post-
capitalist commune in Vallbona d’Anoia. Her most recent projects are
Pechblendalab, Anarcha and punk.
We have shared projects, friends, dreams and desires throughout
the last few years in Barcelona’s post-porn and transfeminist scene.
It was a pleasure to meet up with her once again at this point in our
lives, when —once again— our work overlapped with our pussies.
I had the chance to meet with her while she, Karmen Tep, and
Diana Pornoterrorista were on tour around the peninsula in April
2015. They were presenting their collective project Anarcha Gland
Gyne Punk as well as Diana’s book, Coño potens. I hosted them in
my humble abode in Benicàssim. While my son was going crazy
over all her chains and mohawk, I soaked in all her wisdom.
María: Subversive motherhood means so much more than biological
motherhood to me.
Klau: Personally, I should say first of all, that reproduction and
motherhood are not for me; my line of research tends towards
contraception, abortion, techniques of menstrual extractions, etc.
This is alongside my attempts to recover the veiled historical
memory surrounding the fields of obstetrics, gynecology and
urogynecology. I consider them to be completely complementary
fields of knowledge.
María: I also consider them to be complementary. Motherhood
encompasses both abortion and contraception. The point is to
empower our uterus, regardless of whether you want to be a bio-
 mother or not.
Klau: Both require, very often, the same human and technological
infrastructure (uterine and hormonal knowledge, tools for fluid
diagnosis, ultrasound, cannulas, endoscopes and other medical
equipment). Now, the knowledge acquired and the practices
developed in clinics or hospitals are very often dependent on the
technical infrastructures of hegemonic and institutional gynecology.
Doubtlessly, this has to be subverted at all costs. I strongly and
furiously believe that self-managed, collective and horizontal
healthcare must be radicalized in crescendo and strategically.
That’s exactly what you are doing.
And here’s where I’m bitten by the nosy bug, and my minds
begins to wonder. In your case, for example. How dependent were
you, during the different stages of your pregnancy, on medical
techniques? Did you have an institutional / doctor?
Ultrasounds at the hospital? Hormonal tests? tests?
smears?
María: We have to fight, at every point, so as to avoid an endless
string of tests which are commonly known as prenatal diagnostic,
but should be more accurately named psychological torture to
pregnant women. At the beginning I fell into the trap, maybe out of
the fear caused by my former abortions, and was soon caught up in
that loop of horror. By the third month of my pregnancy they
conducted a test known as the triple screening. It showed a
considerable risk of Down Syndrome, so they suggested an
amniocentesis test. I refused since they have a 1% risk of loss, and
I personally know more than one case that’s fallen within that
percentage. In any case, I also had to consider whether I wanted to
have an abortion in case the fetus had Down Syndrome. It was all
very confusing, so I ended up doing two tests as a substitute for
the amniocentesis, which are less invasive: an analysis of the fetal
blood’s and a morphology scan. With the test I was told
the baby didn’t have any chromosome abnormality, and they also
said it was a boy since the chromosomes where . But that was a
misleading information anyway, because the sexual identity doesn’t
depend on the chromosome reality.
 Frankly I had a rough time during the first months of my
pregnancy, particularly as a result of the bad treatment I received
from the medical institutions I went to. From the fourth or fifth
month of pregnancy onward, I discontinued the tests, avoided the
scans, and paid no attention to anything their medical technology
could offer me. I felt it was the safest thing I could do for me and
my baby. It’s very important to follow your instinct during one’s
pregnancy.
Klau: I’m asking because the high tech, “professional,” and restrictive
laboratories tend to be more simple than they seem when it comes
to these kinds of tests. At the end of the day all they create is an
induced dependence on certain technologies that seem complex,
expensive, unreachable and exclusive. Thanks to the time I’ve
dedicated to experimenting with biohacking and biopunk
communities, I’ve confirmed something that I had already guessed,
though I couldn’t really conclude it at the time because I didn’t have
a scientific background. Anything can be learned if you’re bit by the
bug of curiosity: I’ve confirmed that about a 90% of that
technological dependency could be reduced.
María: Wow! We need that form of appropriation! Tell me more about
your research project, about Pechblenda .
Klau: Penchblenda is a Hardlab TransHackFeminist,
experimental lab focused on bio-electro-chemistry and free-
hardware. It’s a mutant that first came to life in 2013, in the
alienated crossroads of darkdrag, and pin & piroska in Calafou, as
a response to the urgent need to create spaces fit for our rituals. It
was something we had dreamt and written about in a sci-fi sort of
way, but which hadn’t taken shape until then. A
TransHackFeminist, non-patriarchal space, where learning would
arise from raw experimentation, encompassing noise music, the
body as a performative and ludic field, electrical household
appliances repair, turbine experimentation, automatization of
processes, sustainable lighting, and the technology of fluids. The
aim is to deactivate the logic of planned obsolescence, thus
producing an active change of behavior in how we relate to our
surrounding technologies, from the perspective of reverse
engineering, and strongly stressing self-taught and - -
 elements (do it yourself-do it with others-do it together), which are
crucial for the production of free knowledge, and the advancement
of collective net creation. For the implementation of open and
dynamic webs.
Within this loom of relationships, around 2014 we had the
pleasure of conspiring at the 2014 . There, the
tentacular world of Pechblenda unfolded a rhizome leading towards
self-managed gynecology: punk biolab, which directly
connected with another strand, AnarchaGland.
Penchblenda is a biolab/biopunk research group focused on bio
autonomy, both energetic and diagnostic, and on accessible
laboratory techniques. The idea is for the lab to be capable of
examining blood, urine or other corporal secretions such as tissues
in order to obtain information regarding our health in various fields
such as gynecology, urology, obstetrics ( / & / ),
hematology and endocrinology. Even to be capable of synthesizing
hormones. (You can find more information here:
www.hackteria.org/wiki/Pechblenda; www.pechblenda.hotglue.me/?
transhackfeminismo; www.network23.org/pechblendalab/; y
www.we.riseup.net/gynepunklab.
María: How did you begin to investigate the dark origins of
gynecology and its links to the murder of women in medical
experiments?
Klau: Around early 2013 it was my turn to propose a text for the
reading group at Calafou, and I decided to present “My Pleasure
Comes like Daggers,” by Chiara Schiavon (from the collective
ideasdestroyingwalls), about female ejaculation. While preparing
the presentation for the group, I began to research a bit more about
Skene glands and glands relating to female ejaculation. I read
about everything from the composition of the fluids they secrete, to
the history and origin of its name.
This led me, inevitably, to investigate the origins of gynecology
and to run into Sims, the guru of Skene glands. Sims ran
experiments and studied the vesicovaginal fistula of the black
slaves of his cotton plantation in 1840s Alabama. Anarcha, Lucy
and Betsey were some of his patients. This information has
 reached us through Sims’ diaries which document the pseudo-
hospital he set up in his backyard. These women were subject to
an endless series of operations without anesthesia in order to
study the treatment of the vesicovaginal fistula. These and
countless other anonymous and invisibilized women have the
history of gynecology written into their own skin.
María: Tell me about the origins of gynecology.
Klau: William Hunter (1718-1783) and William Smellie (1697-1763)
were pioneers in the field obstetrics. They were also known as
death’s doctors. With their anatomic drawings of dissected uteri,
they set the foundations for what we today call obstetrics.
They even went as far as to confess that it was very difficult to
obtain corpses of pregnant woman in their fifth month of pregnancy
who also had a fetus in a decent birthing position. Apparently there
was a wave of murders, targeting poor and pregnant women in the
last months of their pregnancy. Evidently, these two men were
investigated for these crimes, as they had published books with
detailed drawings, which were the most unquestionable evidence
of their being involved in the murders. A great deal of these
drawings were found in Hunter’s masterpiece, Anatomia uteri
humani gravidi (The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus),
published in 1774. But the investigation was interrupted because
both doctors were widely reputed around that time. The murders
abated while the investigation was being conducted but shortly
after another crime wave ensued.
In 2010, the New Zealand historian Don Shelton proved, through
demographic data and their medical diaries, that it was impossible
for Hunter and Smellie to draw an uterus of a pregnant woman with
such precision without a corpse, and that legally finding corpses of
pregnant women was very difficult at that time.
María: In what stage of your research are you now?
Klau: Since that moment on I continue to research in an independent
and autonomous manner. I investigate the history of gynecology,
the medical apartheid, and the gynecologists and anatomists tied
to this history. I also scour books and the internet for information on
their tools and history, the birth of urogynecology and its
 derivations, the discourses regarding the prostate, female
ejaculation, incontinence surgery and vaginoplasty, on the current
assisted urogynecologic practices in Africa. All of these subjects tie
back to the same problem which, 170 years ago, founded what we
known today as modern gynecology: the vesicovaginal fistula.
All of this inevitably led me to the practical and active foundation
of GynepunkLab, developed at Pechblenda.
María: I’d like to know more about the TransHackFeminist event you
organized.
Klau: It took place in Calafou, an eco-industrial and postcapitalist
colony, found 60km from Barcelona, in Catalonia. For seven days,
from the 4th to the 8th of August, 2014, a hybrid of feminists, queer
and trans people of all genders gathered together in order to have
a greater understanding and development of freed and liberating
technologies for social dissidence. One of the areas of
experimentation was the development of our Gynepunk practices.
Gynepunk is about getting involved in a radical change in how we
understand medical technologies and the so called “professional”
medical institutions. Gynepunk is an extreme and rigorous gesture
to unplug our bodies from its compulsive dependence on the
fossilized machine structures of our hegemonic health system. The
aim of Gynepunk is to make - laboratories and diagnosis
techniques visible in experimental spaces— under rocks or in
elevators, if need be. It’s about having these labs and their
manifold possibilities anywhere—in a stable place and in nomad
laboratories—so we can conduct cytologies, fluid analyses, s,
hormone synthesis, blood, urine tests, tests, pain relief or
whatever, whenever we need to do so. It’s about hacking and
constructing our own ultrasound devices, endoscopies or
sonographies low cost. This whole experimentation is done hand in
hand with a deep knowledge about medicinal herbs, oral traditions
and underground recipes, and is led by an unquenchable quest to
generate an array of lubes, contraceptive methods, open
domains for doulas, savage care-work such as menstrual
extraction with the use of visceral and crafted technologies. We
want to bring everything to its maximum potential by sharing
 knowledge and radically empowering our bodies.
Gynepunk is based on scientific methodologies and disciplines,
and it springs both from the knowledge extracted from each bodies’
self-experience and from our ancestral bodily wisdom—yet another
example of how crucial memory and archive is, in any given format!
Visual treasures, sound mines, microscopic riddles, biological
showcases, centers of biological growth, online seeds bank,
archives of fluids, fanzines, choruses of oral decoding, vudú self-
healing rituals.
Gynepunk will ferment and mutate alongside all of this, initiating
an expansive and explosive movement in the direction of radical
experiments, and strong collective trust in our body politic. It’s
crucial to share these ideas and make them viral through an infinite
pandemonium! No one can burn us! No one! The witches have the
flames now in their hands!
A detailed report about the event can be found here:
http://transhackfeminist.noblogs.org/post/2015/02/14/informe-del-
encuentro-transhackfeminista-thf-2014/
María: How do you understand motherhood within
TransHackFeminism?
Klau: As a body-hack, as a form of corporal hacking. If “hack” is the
act of making and unmaking things, of understanding them in a
more active and deep manner, then hacking means to resist, to
sabotage and transform. Transhackfeminist motherhood is a
subversive, sexual and battle-ready; it stands against obstetric and
medical violence, which rejects and denounces forced sterilisation;
it collectivizes the knowledge, practices and processes of the body.
It generates particular narratives in the form of how to or collective
decoding tools, which supports abortion, and free, safe births.
The reproductive dimension of motherhood can be read as ‘hack’
from the perspective of infection and pollution. Or, like Sayak
Valencia puts it: motherhood as a subjectivity factory. It bleeds into
concepts like virality, tied to that of authorship and public domain in
the sense that it is there to be re-distributed, re-mixed, re-
understood and logically also hacked, breaking and destabilizing
binary structures (man vs woman, theory vs practice, those who
produce vs those who consume knowledge and technologies,
nuclear family vs an affective, chosen and decentralized family…).
Transhack Motherhood debunks privilege from its source,
depatriarchalizing and decolonizing, as well as making one aware
of one’s own privileges and understanding the relation between
privilege and oppression. Can we conceive a transfeminist
fatherhood? I understand that as a way of collectivizing bodies,
generating networks of support from a libertarian unattachment. It’s
in a constant work-in-progress that creates tools for radical
independence.
I’m reminded of that character, Franck, from the 1982 film
D’amore si vive by Silvano Agosti. Only recently, with the arrival of
Èlia to our community in Calafou (01-10-14), have I begun to think
about this matter from a different angle. But, anyway, I’m not a very
good example when it comes to this theme: I’m quite a greenhorn
when it comes to motherhoods, if not, as it were, consciously
barren.
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E M
Guijarro Lactivism

E M G
L

L supporting free maternal lactation as a

fundamental right of every person to breastfeed and be breastfed.
Without the need to be hidden—without the photographs of such an
act being subject to censorship. We want to breastfeed, lick, suckle,
and freely relish in ourselves. Both mother (or father and nursing
MoDa’s) and babies.
I remember breastfeeding Roc in a bar, he was barely a few
months old, when an old man came in and told the waiter, adding a
few theatrical sighs: “What a fucking good life that is, all day
grabbing on to titties!” And those who don’t want to suck, well then
don’t; it’s their choice. As Carlos González says in his book Guia de
la lactancia materna—a book that help me a great deal, at a practical
level—, the drama for many women is not about them being
unwilling to breastfeed, but about wanting do so and being
incapable.
Ester Massó is a lactivist whose work tackles the complexity of
breastfeeding in our capitalist and patriarchal society. She tells us
about the enormous and still unexplored positive effects it has in the
mother’s health; a crucial point to be stressed since we often talk
about the effects of lactation on babies, forgetting the multiple
scientific studies which prove how it reduces the risk of ovarian
cancer on lactating mothers, for instance. This vision of motherhood,
where the mother herself is forgotten and only the baby is taken into
account is unfortunately very widespread. The mother is turned into
a “container” whose health, well-being and pleasure don’t matter in
the least and are only considered in relation to the baby itself, as
though the well-being of both mother and child weren’t absolutely
connected.
Ester Massó Guijarro is a philosopher, anthropologist and lactivists.
She also teaches in the Social Anthropology at the Philosophy and
Humanities Faculty of the University of Granada. She is a mother to
a six year old boy of and a four year old girl. She’s published several
articles with the aim of expanding our understanding of the socio-
political implications of lactation in such journals as ’s Journal of
Spanish Cultural Studies.
She got in touch with me when I was beginning to write this book.
She sent me her articles, and I sent her these questions so that she
could be a part of this work.
She replied to my questions from Granada, in the spring of 2015.
María: “Breastfeeding is free of charge and hence a capitalist sin.”
That sentence comes from your article “Lactation and revolution, or
the Tit as Biocultural Revolt: Calostrum, Body and Care Work.” Can
you expand a bit on the theme of the anticapitalist tit?
Ester: Evidently the term “anti-capitalist tit” is meant to be strategic,
to make noise and spark debate. Those are tactical terms, so to
speak, or metaphorical (I tend to say that “tit” is a metonymy or a
part of a much larger whole, from the maternal body to a whole
form of social practice). It is a metaphor, but a very powerful and
real term. That is: the tit is anti-capitalist because it is —in principle
— free. It enters into the sphere of things not yet commodified, and
provides essential nourishment (among other things). Said in other
terms, “the tit” secretes a substance produced by the human body,
which nourishes and nurtures life with a quality impossible to
replicate in a laboratory. Against it, they’ve proposed an artificial
and very expensive alternative, formula milk. Formula not only
represents a form of nourishment less rich than the tit, but it also
has to be produced, and purchased, at a great cost. Furthermore, it
entails greater risks of disease for babies (and the same goes for
mothers who don’t breastfeed), which in its turn would entail a
greater pharmacological expenditure and a large-scale decline of
the population’s welfare (through what is termed as “indirect costs”
in health economy, that is, for example, a larger number of work
leaves). In all this smorgasbord —and moving just a little bit into
the field of conspiracy theorists— who do you think wins? Capital,
evidently, the pharmaceutical firms, the distributors, dream
psychologists, and an endless etc. Ah, and also pediatricians, who
would go on vacation to the Caribbeans out of the money made
recommending formula milk.
This only relates to the physiological aspect. Going now into the
twinned field of the psychologic—that is the emotive, productive,
and organisational aspect—, we can say that the “tit” is anti-
capitalist because it requires an arrested moment. It asks you to go
 more slowly, not to rush things. It cancels out the possibility of
developing a money-driven full-time job (unless you have certain
flexibility and a great economic support behind you); it implies self-
management, gratuitous labor, and the very valid concepts of
generosity, and altruism. Not incidentally, this form of “anti-
capitalism” tends to go hand in hand with ecological struggles,
degrowth movements and other forms of militancy. Mothers rebel
when they discover their tit after childbirth, and use it against the
various forms of tyranny characteristic of our particular form of late-
capitalism such as unpaid and much too short childcare leaves. Or
against the brainless “anti-gravitational” breast, forever as perky as
a teenagers, which is a quintessentially fetishized object of
sexualized ‘adult’ content. Or against the constant rush of
hyperproduction, or the constant battles (often from within
feminism, in its, let’s say, enlightened, white or patriarchal forms?)
against women opting to stay with their children. I don’t even mean
at home when I say this, what an obsession with the “domestic”... it
was precisely when I was parenting at full-time that I was going out
more often, travelling and taking walks, and re-discovering public
spaces… Against all these chains that are both brought upon us
and chosen.
María: There’s another section of your article where you touch on the
subject of feminism: “Lactation is a feminist claim, it’s good for all
women in particular, and for cultures, at large, and hence maternal
lactation is a feminist objective.” I think it’s fundamental to
understand lactation as a feminist revolution. Can you tell me more
on this point?
Ester: I understand lactation as one of the fundamental points the
feminist movement must vindicate. A big part of that includes
safeguarding it through the development of strong social legislation
(for example, funding to the mother-father who wants to breastfeed
themselves rather than hiring external care worker), for various
reasons. Of course one of the main reasons for creating social
protections for breastfeeding is that it’s highly beneficial for the
body of mothers. I’m strictly talking about the physiological aspect
here, or the biological if you will. Let me explain: it’s been shown
that a human mother is susceptible to far fewer diseases if she’s
breastfed for a long time. We know that the risk of bone fracture
and female osteoporosis diminishes notably when women
breastfeed for a long time, and that the risk of blood loss in
childbirth diminishes considerably when the woman has been
lactating. We also know that long lactations diminish the risk of
ovarian cancer, that satisfactory lactations bring down to almost
zero that western morbid tendency towards postpartum
depression…. Everything I’ve said could be summarized in this
simple phrase: to refuse to breastfeed when one has decided to be
a mother, to get pregnant and give birth to a baby, greatly
increases a woman’s susceptibility to various physiological risks.
And we still haven’t said anything about the babies themselves and
the diverse benefits they reap when they are breastfed. But I’m not
going to say anything about this here because I want to focus on
what you’ve asked. Everything I’ve noted so far presents lactation
as one of the main objectives to be vindicated by feminist
movements to the extent that any group which aims to discredit or
diminish the radical importance of lactation for women who have
given birth aligns with the forces of the patriarchy. I mean, if we had
such piles of evidence about certain practices in men’s bodies ( ,
males, or whatever we want to call them), proving that they
diminish this or that disease, it would immediately become a matter
of public healthcare.
Beyond the physiological arguments, lactation contributes to the
feminist cause because it contributes to a re-appropriation of one’s
own body, its functions and its potentialities, and allows for a
reappraisal of every potential and magical thing that can be created
with the fluid pouring from those breasts. Men’s bodies enjoy and
derive pleasure from their seminal fluids, whereas women’s bodies
opt to medicate themselves in order to inhibit lactation…. How can
someone end up wanting that? We are evidently a cultural whole,
and milk ejection can be either liberating or constricting depending
on how it is experienced. The question is then: how have we ended
up in a society where we prefer—and feel more liberated—by
inhibiting that fluid, removing it from our body just like we remove
ourselves from that neonate creature, and then turn that practice
 into a form of emancipation?
María: “Neither is the home an evil den, nor is the tit merely
domestic. If the tit hasn’t been a public affair till now, it’s because
men weren’t breastfeeding, only women were—or in other words—
their controlled, submitted and subordinated bodies whose
potentials were to be supervised and delegitimize.” In this section
you speak of a fundamental theme, which is the control over
women’s bodies, and their lactation as yet another function to be
controlled. Philosophers such as Paul B. Preciado compare the
control put on nannies to those placed on sex workers. It’s about
putting a limit on everything that only women can do, especially if
it’s something that pays them.
And yet another quote: “Maternal lactation must be reclaimed as
work.” I couldn’t agree more. Tell me more about this.
Ester: That sentence could be interpreted in two separate and very
different ways. The first considers breastfeeding (and care work in
general) as a form of contribution—let’s say, in an “indirect
manner”—to the . Feminist economists have been saying this
for a long time; take Waring for example, with her classic work If
Women Counted. And that should translated, at a policy-making
level (Hear me out, , or whatever party claiming to be
truly new!), to it being a fully-funded endeavor that encoupases all
of these contributions and treats them as a job or post—like it’s
done in Sweden! We are not asking for the moon, it would be
enough if they copied certain models that already work quite well.
That on the one hand. All the joy, and all the aesthetic, bodily, and
emotional pleasure that we may experience through lactation—for
those of us who choose to experience it—, shouldn’t leave out that
other great part of this issue. That is, the socio-political value of
care work, and the urgent need to grant it the prestige and public
recognition it deserves, as well as a fundamental economic
remuneration.
There’s, like I said, another possible way of understanding
lactation as work, and that’s what nursemaids have done for
centuries: salaried or mercenary breastfeeding. I think it may be
legitimate to recover this employment within certain contexts and in
 certain moments, as long as it is well-regulated and remunerated.
María: I’d like to talk about lactivisim and how can we change the
world by breastfeeding.
Ester: Lactivism, a form of activism supporting maternal lactation,
can change the world in the only way I conceive an actual change,
by uniting itself with a myriad of plural and much larger movements.
Lactivism has to keep on “militizing” for its own ends at the same
time as it fights within other movements—animalist, ecologist,
indigenist, queer, reproductive rights... It’s one of those many small
ropes with which the lilliputians of the world go on tying down the
big Gulliver, the “big neoliberal system” that exists on an
international scale, to use Taibo’s beautiful and libertarian image.
And the tit can change the world in the sense that it brings with it a
reappraisal of the body that has given birth, and a reevaluation of
the intrinsic relationship that exists between this body and the
neonate creature, revolutionizing and expanding how we
understand the concept of human interdependence against that of
sheer individuality. It radically changes our conception of this zero-
sum game, reframing our notion of exchanges between bodies and
people, since both mother and baby benefit from lactation.
Furthermore, it reclaims the need for solidarity within one’s social
group, since it requires strong support from one’s affective and
social environment. It even ties in with marvellous concepts such
as the South African notion of Ubuntu, which understands that to
damage a part of the whole means to damage the whole and
viceversa, contributing to a part contributes to the whole… and that
the whole is the totality of those, all of us, who are here. Casilda
Rodrigáñez-Bustos recovers that old and beautiful concept of Gaia
too...
María: How did you reach this field of study? How have you
personally experienced lactation?
Ester: I could fill pages and pages just with that question, but I’ll try
to make it short. I reached this field with no clue of what awaited
me… When I got pregnant with my first child, Elias, almost 7 years
ago, I was still debating whether or not to take him to kindergarten
once my 16-week work leave ended. I didn’t know anything about
co-sleeping or anything of the like (co-sleeping turned out to be
self-evidently necessary from the first night on, when it seemed
very irrational to put the baby away from my body). I came as a
virgin to this field; until I lost my virginity when I gave birth and
began to breastfeed. Then I started to discern things, sensations,
everything, through milk, as the source of all things and as a
symbol. Well (and even though this is very intimate, I’m telling you
because the personal is political, and this is a just cause), it was, in
fact, during my first pregnancy that I began to understand
something about sexuality that is entwined with lactation. It was
then that I experienced an orgasm, and saw the first drop of milk
coming out of one my breasts. It was truly a revelation to find such
an obvious connection—while at the same time such a difference—
between sex-milk. The second great revelation, after I began to
lactate, broke the dichotomy that is deeply entrenched in social
sciences: that division between “public-private,” and “productive-
non productive.” It became clear every time I went to conferences
with my baby, or when the father of my child asked for a parental
leave in order to support me with my parenting and lactation while I
did my postgraduate degree.
I’ve experienced very diverse things throughout my lactation, from
the most pleasurable sensations to some rocky experiences, like
my ambiguous reaction to tandem nursing (nothing is more cultural,
and less natural, than breastfeeding babies of different “litters”)
after getting pregnant and giving birth to my second daughter, Paz,
now 4 years old. I can summarize my experience of lactation in one
sentence said by a great friend of mine, a lactivist I greatly admire:
it’s a story of empowerment. Of learning, of pleasure, of
knowledge.
I wasn’t devoted to any of these things before I was a mother. My
work as an anthropologist focused on issues of politics and
ethnicity in southern Africa, about the Senegalese diaspora….
Since 2008, unexpectedly and little by little, I have been finding
more and more points of interest in this absolutely fascinating and
complex field. There’s lots of things we still don’t know, though
some marvellous pieces have been published, about the radically
protein-filled subject of human lactation, the tit, and our biocultural
or “nalture” (natural culture, or culturaleza) condition, as some call
it.
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J R
O

J R O
Matriactivism

M coined by Jesusa Ricoy Olariaga

which brings an actualized and revolutionary revision of matriarchal
values. It fights against obstetric violence and the widespread
ignorance that exists in the field of medicine toward the physical—
and spiritual—processes that take place in the body of a woman:
pregnancy, childbirth, postpartum, menstrual cycles, orgasm and
pleasure, menopause, etc….
In her work, Jesusa intertwines a precise scientific knowledge with
a deep reflection on our mammalian and instinctive nature.
Jesusa Ricoy Olariaga is a matriactivist, antenatal teacher (a
degree which doesn’t exist in Spain), placenta encapsulator and
teacher of hypnobirthing. She’s from Alicante and lives in London.
She’s the mother of two boys and one girl which she educated at
home until they decided to to attend school.
I had the pleasure of meeting her— over a cup of tea, in her house
in London — when I was pregnant with Roc. I was only a few weeks
pregnant and dead scared of having another miscarriage. She gave
me the best piece of advice anyone can give a pregnant woman:
don’t let the power over your body slip away.
She answered replied to my questions from London, by email,
around late 2014.
María: Tell me about your line of work and how your career has
changed since you became a mother.
Jesusa: I’m an antenatal teacher, which is a specialisation dealing
with adult education and obstetrics. In the you can study it in
some universities or through the National Childbirth Trust ( ).
We are trained in order to prepare and give lessons on everything
relating to pregnancy, motherhood, fatherhood, the baby’s death,
lactation and postpartum.
My professional career comes from an early fascination with
pregnancy and childbirth, something that has obsessed me since I
was kid. When I felt it in my own body, that curiosity only increased.
When I was searching for a career path, one that would fulfill me
emotionally, this one presented itself as almost the only logical
choice. One day I was reminded of a childbirth professor that works
here in London and, as soon as she came to my mind in the middle
of the street, I popped into an Internet-café and began to look up
information in order to make this job a possibility. That was followed
by a few tough years of research, internships and plenty of
academic papers written in English. All this while being pregnant
 with my second son and following a very severe postpartum
depression…. I still can’t believe I made it through! After that I
began to lecture. Even though I’m creatively very happy with
everything I learned during those three years of study, it was
thanks to them, paradoxically, that I came to the conclusion that I
really wish my career didn’t exist.
Childbirth shouldn’t be an intellectual and critical choice made
between a series of procedures. But, unfortunately, a successful
childbirth requires professionals like myself, dedicated to educating
and un-educating future parents on issues such as: what is and
isn’t childbirth, risks tied to certain interventions, alternatives to
these medical procedures, and how to choose freely and in an
informed manner. But childbirth, in reality, is and ought to be
understood as a spontaneous and instinctive process— though,
evidently, there wouldn’t be a need for my lectures if that were the
case.
The rest of things I’ve done at a professional level have been
parallel or complementary to this. For example: when I began to
work as a doula, I never had the intention of doing it full-time but
rather pursued it in order to have the opportunity of listening to
Michel Odent, a French doctor and expert on childbirth. While I was
in the middle of training, a client showed up one day looking for a
Spanish-speaking, maternal figure to attend her birth because her
mother, who was Spanish too, couldn’t be present. She was the
best and worst possible person to lead me into the practice of
being a doula. Why? Because she had an ecstatic birth. I told her it
would be very difficult to top such professional experience.
María: I also did a course on being a doula with Michel Odent and
Liliana Lammers. It was an incredible learning experience to hear
from such wise and experienced people. Where does the term
matriactivism come from?
Jesusa: It comes from a rhetorical problem. Whenever I was asked
to describe what I was doing, I would get into all kinds of long,
convoluted rants. It occurred to me to summarize it all up with the
term matriactivism, since my work as an activist consists of pushing
for change on matriarchal issues that currently stand outside the
 physiological reality of the system we live in.
María: Tell me a little bit about one of your projects on
matrieducation, 3 Colors.
Jesusa: The project 3 Colors dates back to a week I spent in Brazil,
attending a round table discussion in an incredible environment.
The colours of hummingbirds and plants flooded my senses, and I
realised that in London and other large cities environmental
protection is a very abstract concept because the environment
there is grey, full of concrete and petrol. When you see the beauty
that exists in other places on this planet, you begin to understand
why there are people who are willing to risk their lives to defend it.
Along the lines of that reflection, I realized too that we women think
of ourselves in the abstract, in general. We don’t know our cervix,
our vulva, our cycles, our clitoris.… We inhabit our body
pathologically, and that’s why it doesn’t surprise me at all that that
we give up our bodies, without a single complaint, to episiotomies
and Cesareans. Or that we understand childbirth as an anomaly
and lactation as a far-off possibility. 3Colours seeks to recover and
bring back our former knowledge of that interior jungle in order to
launch our fight, tooth and nail, from there.
María: I understand obstetric violence as a part of the patriarchy’s
systematic oppression of women. I think it is essential to
understand that we come from a matriarchal society where
motherhood used to have a very different place than it has now. Do
you agree on this point, that patriarchy bases its strength in
unempowering maternal experience?
Jesusa: I think so too. It is one of the fundamental requisites for the
perpetuation of patriarchy, and this is true on many fronts. In a
culture built on masculine power, it is central to debunk maternal
power. The issue here, perhaps, is precisely the disproportionate
importance we give to power, but that’s another debate. I think
obstetric violence is the product of a specific outlook. It is based on
the physical ignorance of those who haven’t experienced it and
understand it in pathological terms, which, consequently, requires
the disempowerment of women in order to control the processes
that rule their bodies. Obviously there are midwives and
 obstetricians who are women and mothers, but the basic questions
and the general approach which is still followed today, was created
with a patriarchal mindset in an age where women had very little
space to state their opinions. Something as simple as the lithotomy
position (a woman lying facing upwards with her legs on supports)
is deeply illustrative of this point: that posture is established by an
observer who feels himself or herself to be in a position of authority,
thus facing the medical event without the least bit of physiological
empathy.
María: Along those lines, over the last few years I’ve realized that
empowered motherhood connects us with the strength of our
sexual bodies as creators of life, and therefore with a sacred and
divine notion of nature which we’ve lost, though it used to be the
core of matriarchal societies. What’s your opinion on the relations
and exchanges between motherhood, spirituality and sexuality?
Jesusa: I tend to feel somewhat uncomfortable when dealing with
issues of spirituality, since I am a very pragmatic person and I think
we often trivialize these topics. Unfortunately, the quest for
matriarcality tends to bring in its wake an assortment of new agey
charlatans selling a reinvented religious packaging filled with all
kinds of odds and ends which leave me utterly slack-jawed.
Having said this, I think that you do approach this topic from an
angle I can agree with, because you consider that our
contemporary system, which trails behind a deep religious history,
is profoundly masculine and lineal, and has severed us from a
cyclical understanding of multiple things. To summarize, our
understanding and expression of the world lacks so many voices,
sexes and colours; our society is utterly unhinged on these points
and, consequently, on all fronts. I also think that there’s been a
supremacy of the intellect over the animal and instinctive. We
haven’t learnt how to use them both in order to nourish the other in
a reciprocal manner. We understand our instincts as precarious
and regressive when they actually dictate a large part of our daily
interactions; we are animals no matter how much varnish we
spread all over us. Women, when they understand themselves
physiologically, are closer to that instinctive part of themselves than
 men, because they are bound to know themselves as mammals,
and so understand themselves beyond culture.
In any case, from the time I was a child studying in a school run
by nuns (where I openly confessed my atheism at 9 years of age), I
was already thinking that if there was such a One who made His
children in His image and likeness, that one could only be a
woman. Reproductive capabilities always seemed somewhat
mythical to me.
María: Ecstatic births are a reality. I think it’s best to refer to them
using this term, as opposed to orgasmic, since it would otherwise
imply that you haven’t enjoyed giving birth unless you have come,
when you can actually have a perfectly pleasurable childbirth (or a
sexual relationship) without reaching orgasm. What is your
experience with this subject?
Jesusa: Like I was saying, my first experience with childbirth was
ecstatic. I rather not call them orgasmic either because it is a very
limited and polluted term. For me, it’s an ecstasy which belong to a
form of female sexuality that is still unexplored in our culture. As
such, we lack the language with which to describe it.
My experience has shown me that, by eliminating any cause of
stress (something very difficult within our culture and social
structures), women can sometimes achieve a state where labor is a
sheerly physical and instinctive experience. In that state,
contractions are an intense sensation that are merely a part of a
physiological process, and as such cause no alarm, fear, or worry.
When you observe these kinds of childbirths the facial expressions
of the women move from abandon first, to disbelief and awe
afterwards, once they see the baby coming out. It’s as though they
still can’t believe they’re capable of doing something so amazing.
María: Why is it good to eat the placenta? In my case I had a
milkshake prepared for me, with rice milk and a piece of placenta. It
gave me all my strength back when I really needed it.
Jesusa: I always support free-choice and scientific evidence, and
avoid all forms of preaching and advice-giving. That’s why I
wouldn’t be so bold as to say that it’s good to eat it. I’d say that it
could make sense, and that one is free to do as one wants. At a
personal level, I could tell you that I did it myself. It’s a very
interesting subject which still has to be investigated further.
For example, vitamin K is given to babies when they’re born
because they are often said to be lacking that. But then the
placenta and the vernix (the white waxy substance that covers
recently born babies) that we remove from babies when they are
born are actually both full of vitamin K. So, who knows.
On the other hand, if you observe nature, it is rare for her to
create something redundant or any type of non-reusable waste. At
a nutritional level, the placenta contains a lot of iron, hormones and
vitamins, so it wouldn’t be surprising if the placenta was in fact a
restorative substance, which is how other mammals seem to use it.
But here we come back to the topic of matriarcality: there’s
absolutely no problem when it is used on a football player’s knee,
but it’s an untold scandal when her owner eats it.
This is what ought to make us reflect and realize that this need to
fashion ourselves as scientific and intellectual beings is
incompatible with our identification as mammals, as primates, and
— however intelligent— as animals. I think that an integration of
matriarcality and instinct in our way of understanding ourselves
would be one of the most enriching steps taken in our evolution as
human beings
 B I
Co-breastfeeding
E t ti bi th

B I
Co-breastfeeding Ecstatic birth, sexuality and
parenting

I , non-patriarchal structures for

motherhood and parenting. I want to create patterns and molds that
are distinct from the single model imposed on us. Co-breastfeeding
is comfortable and practical; it can ease the already difficult process
of raising children. Despite all this, we still live in a society that
promotes a monogamy of the breast; it’s better to extract milk with
hurtful and expensive machines than allow your baby to feed on the
milk from another mother. It is better to give them artificial (and also
expensive!) formula in a bottle, than to take part in something as
straightforward, easy, and anti-capitalist as taking out your breast
and sharing.
Barbara Isetere offered to breastfeed my baby when I had to pass
through surgery a few weeks after giving birth. I found her stance
against what she calls monogamy of the breast to be inspiring. She
made me reflect on how easy it is to support each other and how
needlessly complicated we make things sometimes.
Barbara has also experienced an ecstatic birth and her reflections
on sexuality and parenting as a single mother have always left me
thinking.
Barbara Iserte is a professor of Spanish language and literature,
and a mother to a two year old girl. She has loved the experience of
motherhood so much that she wants to repeat it. She was born in
Castellón, as yours truly, and we first met in a breastfeeding circle in
Almazora, organized by my doula Ana Claramonte. I was fascinated
by her freedom and bravery when tackling motherhood; she is the
person who encouraged me the most to begin this book when Roc
was just a baby.
We spoke in the living room of my house in the summer of 2014,
despite her initial reticence to being interviewed….
Barbara: I don’t think choosing to be a single mother is a topic
anyone would find interesting, I don’t know why you want to
interview me.
María: What I’m interested in is not the fact that you’re a single
mother but rather the way in which you live out your motherhood.
Do you remember when we met each other in that breastfeeding
group? I was going to have surgery because of a lump in my
vagina that appeared after giving birth. My kid was four months old
and was exclusively breastfeeding from me. I was worried about
the effects of the anesthesia on my ability to breastfeed and
worried that my son wouldn’t be able to eat when he was hungry.
 You know the kid won’t starve to death and that he’d be given
artificial milk (or milk pumped from one’s own breast) but I none of
those options convinced me. You then offered to come with us to
the hospital in order to breastfeed Roc if I couldn’t do it.
Barbara: I think it’s not only normal, but natural.
María: Had you done it before?
Barbara: A few times with my niece Aina. Sometimes, during a
period where I was spending lots of time with her, my sister would
ask me to breastfeed given that I was lactating as well. And so I
did; Aina has suckled from me. Sometimes it does feel a bit weird. I
have some friends who say they couldn’t do it; they find it very
intimate. A friend of mine from Barcelona says she couldn’t even
think about doing it; she couldn’t have her son drink milk from a
breast other than hers or have another child suckle from her breast.
However, another friend of mine says that there’s no doubt in her
mind, she would gladly take part.
There are other cases like yours where it can simply be a very
helpful act. A friend of my sisters had problems with latching and
she thought maybe she was doing it wrong. She had her doubts so
I proposed we try my breast.
María: Was the child very small?
Barbara: About a month old. In the end the problem had to do with
the palate. They diagnosed it much later on, some issues with the
frenulum. That’s exactly what I noticed—I would give her my breast
and she didn’t latch on.
María: I remember one case of two moms, one with inverted nipples,
and another one with an already established breastfeeding routine,
who swapped babies. The baby who knew how to breastfeed
helped resolve the problem of the mother’s inverted nipples and
the other child breastfed from the other mother. Problem solved.
Barbara: Sometimes it’s the children themselves, because of the
different smell, who don’t want to breastfeed from another mother.
María: Unless they’re very hungry, right? Roc latched on to you in
the hospital.
Barbara: Roc breastfed for a while, then was satiated and was like:
 ‘I’m done! I’m not hungry anymore, that’s it!’ With Baruc, my
nephew, I was also available until my sister began to lactate. I
heard once that there was a woman who had been hospitalized in
Castellón, and all the women in a breastfeeding group organized in
order to breastfeed that child. Every two or three hours one would
go to the hospital to feed the baby. The kid was only two months
old. It’s really beautiful; I think it’s a lovely way of showing and
giving love. When I first heard about it, I really thought it was the
most normal and logical thing in the world. I know there are milk
banks in Barcelona but it’s not the same as putting a baby to your
breast, right?
María: The whole breast milk banks idea is something I find
interesting, but the thing is I’m more interested in the whole sharing
breasts directly. I don’t have a lot of love for breast pumps.
Barbara: I’ve never used one so I don’t know what they’re like.
María: They annoy me. If there’s something so simple as the act of
breastfeeding, why must we make it so complicated?
Barbara: I remember my grandpa once had a wet nurse. A wet nurse
was a mother for breastfeeding. He used to talk about how he had
shared a wet nurse with other babies.
María: Some time ago high-class women didn’t breastfeed because
there was a sexual taboo that prevented women from considering
the pleasurable aspects of breastfeeding. It was seen as a sort of
job. Or maybe it was the other way around.
Barbara: It was also for them to always be available to their
husbands.
María: And then these women gave the kids to the wet nurses.
Barbara: There are many people who are milk brothers or sisters
because they have breastfed from the same woman. I remember
hearing of this as an idea before, but I think its been lost a bit.
María: The genealogist Mireia Nieto, in her book Nuevas
Genealogías (New Genealogies), talks about this subject and
about others relating to queer genealogy. If I had been born in
another era, I would have liked to be a wet nurse. Imagine what a
 wonderful job! Although it must be very tiring too. I felt very tired
throughout the first few months of breastfeeding.
Barbara: The postpartum stage and the lack of sleep it brings are the
most probable causes of that tiredness. I would also sign up to be
a wet nurse. It must be a beautiful job to give one’s breasts as
something pleasurable and not, as some people say, as a sacrifice.
So many people say: ‘She has sacrificed herself in order to
breastfeed,’ and I don’t get it. I think it’s the most romantic moment
I can have with my kid. The caresses my baby gives me when I
breastfeed are really the most wonderful.
María: And for them too, it’s really the first way they learn how to
relate to another body.
But coming back to the question we were discussing before, is
there a socially-determined monogamy of the breast? There’s an
obvious parallelism with sexual relationships to the extent that one
is expected to only breastfeed their own kid in the same way one is
expected to have monogamous relationships. And giving milk to a
child that isn’t your own, or for your kid to do the same, is seen as
‘cheating’ but with milk.
Barbara: That’s really an expression of the fear mothers have of
someone giving their child something they themselves cannot give.
It’s as if one said: ‘breastfeeding is exclusively for my own use and
pleasure, with all the bad and good that comes with it. If something
doesn’t go well, I’ll be the one to suffer, but I don’t want you to enter
into my relationship with my child in any way.’ For me it’s
something natural, it’s a way in which we can help each other out. I
saw your need, you didnt want to pump milk for your son, and I
thought: ‘here’s my milk if you want it.’ But there are people who
run the other way in horror if you propose something like this.
I was only really worried about how my daughter would perceive
the fact that I was breastfeeding another child.
María: And how did that go?
Barbara: Very well! At the time I offered to help you, she was about
one and a half years old. She had seen me offer myself to
breastfeed other babies before and so she took it well. Maybe now
that she’s older she’ll react in a different way or maybe she won’t
 care, I don’t know.
I don’t know how I would deal with the situation that would arise if
Irene someday reclaim me, given that breastfeeding another child
is not a one-off thing; the other child takes a while to really latch on.
I think there should be a bank. But not a bank full of milk, a bank
full of people who can mobilize themselves. A list of mothers, just
like there are lists of apartments to rent. Maybe a phone application
would be a good idea—each person who wants to offer themselves
to breastfeed in a specific zone at a specific time could say so on
their profile and the persons who need it could just contact her.
There could be various breastfeeding groups and circles that could
help out. One just needs to sign up and join this network.
María: It could be called ‘Not without my titty.’ (laughs)
Let me ask you some other questions. A great benefit of being a
single mother is that you haven’t had to suffer through the issue of
a partner’s sexual demands while you’re producing milk and
prolactin. Let me explain; when you breastfeed you produce
prolactin, and as a result your sexual desire for other people is
limited. The entire scope of your desire is completely turned to the
baby in your arms. So many women complain that their partners
want to have sex and they don’t feel up to it at all. And many men
also complain that there partners are no longer sexually available.
A benefit of having a kid without a masculine partner is that you
don’t have to deal with that conflict and demand. Or a feminine
partner as well, if you have children with a woman I suppose she
would also ask to continue the sort of sexual relationship you had
before. In reality it’s not a question of male-female, but a question
of relationships with other bodies, and also respecting the bond
between mother and child.
Barbara: To be honest I’ve suffered more from a lack of sex.
Throughout the months of my pregnancy I had a great need for
sex, but it was difficult. You can find sex, yes, but it’s more difficult.
It depends a lot on where you live. I passed the months I was
pregnant in a small village because of my job. I had no social
safety net, I was alone, with no family or friends.
María: And I assume you ran into the taboo of having sex with a
 pregnant person...
Barbara: Of course; and the added difficulty of finding someone
appropriate. When I found someone, he had separated. He was
like scared—and his previous experience with his ex who had been
pregnant was that she didn’t want anything. And I wanted just the
opposite.
María: Maybe for that person it also helped heal a previous
experience in which he couldn’t get close in any sexual way to a
pregnant body.
Barbara: I was fearless. I thought that if I was happy that would be
good for my pregnancy. I wanted my kid to feel an orgasm that did
not only come from its mother but from contact with another body.
And now that I have passed through the first stage of postpartum,
I’m beginning to want to have contact with other bodies again.
María: When did your sexual desire towards others come back? I
know it’s gradual and not something that happens from one day to
the next….
Barbara: Irene was born in August, and I needed flesh about a year
after I gave birth, ten or eleven months after. It was also a need to
have some time without my daughter. Before it was 24 hours a day
of just me and her, but by that point I needed a space for myself
and some form of intimacy that didn’t involve her. Until that moment
the only intimacy I had was with her. I needed to re-find myself and
the intimate relationships I had had before. But before that
moment, before passing through the first stage, I didn’t have that
need at all. I felt it was something I wanted to reclaim. To make it
real is another thing entirely.
It’s not only a physical matter but a psychological one. I was
talking to another mother and she was telling me that with a two
and a half year old child, she did it with her partner out of a sense
of duty. I don’t know if it’s only chemical or if there’s also something
emotional there.
María: I’ve spoken to colleagues of mine and they say that the
chemical component of prolactin is only at the beginning, and that
there’s a change in your own sexuality and how you experience
 your relationships. Sometimes there’s a need to reject continuing
sexual relationships as they were being carried out with your
partner, but that’s more because you are another person and aren’t
willing to accept certain things. There are partners that just fall out.
Barbara: Another interesting topic is how to live out my sexuality with
Irene, who often has to be present. But I also don’t want her to be
present in everything. There’s a new way in which I face my
sexuality, knowing now that I have a daughter. I don’t want to
exclude her from everything but I also don’t want her to participate
in certain things. Maybe people who have a constant partner
experience it a different way.
María: All this is new to me. My son is ten months old and, though
it’s not like I have a great sex life, but when I do have it, my son is
near.
Barbara: Your son has a link with the person with whom you have a
sexual relationship but my daughter doesn’t have a link with the
person I could have a sexual relationship with. Being physically
intimate with a familiar person is different. How does Irene relate to
these strangers? There’s a fear there of what is normal and most
safe for her. If I had a partner with whom I had emotional ties, she
would be more present just as a result of meetings that would
happen naturally. My problem is how to relate to my daughter with
people who are strangers to her. What is normal and what isn’t.
What one has to do or not. I wouldn’t want to leave her out and for
it to be completely foreign to her; I think sex shouldn’t be alien to
anyone, but what’s normal and natural in this instance?
María: Another one of the subjects I wanted you to elaborate on is
your experience of childbirth, specifically ecstatic birth.
Barbara: I don’t remember feeling any pain, but I also don’t
remember having an orgasm.
María: Maybe one doesn’t need to experience an orgasm, if the birth
was pleasurable and joyful, that’s more than enough. I would love
for you to talk about that.
Barbara: Labor itself begins for me some days before, when I notice
that I’m ready to give birth. At the time I was going through a series
 of moves and relocations, so I didn’t even consider giving birth
because I wasn’t prepared. But the very moment I prepared the
room in which I was to give birth, the labor began. I had some
posters, all very personal, all around the space so I could read
them: ‘I am open, when you want to, you can come out,’ ‘everything
with great peace and tranquility.’ And I went over the due date, by
one week.
María: Did you go to any check ups during that week?
Barbara: Only once. A revision and checkup, but I didn’t open my
legs at all. As I lived outside the city, I wanted the hospital to have
my records, so that’s why I went to the checkup. I wanted to give
birth at home, but if something happened I wanted to know clearly
what hospital I would go to and for them to have my records just in
case. That’s why I went to the checkups I was supposed to go to.
But every time I made it clear that I wanted a natural home birth, so
they knew exactly what the situation was.
The same day I gave birth, I was walking along the beach as I
usually did, but that day I noticed how my body seemed to tell me
‘stop walking.’ I felt odd and much heavier. My sister was going to
accompany me throughout the birth, and I told her that I felt unlike I
had ever felt before. We went to the store, and we made the
grossest meal one could make: french fries and tofu sausages. My
brother in law wanted a sauce and so we ran to Lidl before it
closed for the night. A dinner with so much grease that I would
vomit only hours later, of course. When we were cleaning the
dishes I realized that I had to stop. Up to that moment my body had
never stopped, I’m a very active person. ‘I have to take a rest,’ I
told my sister. We all got into bed and left it all ready, including a
bag for the hospital in case that was needed. I wanted everyone to
know where everything was so that no one would interrupt me once
I went into labor.
In bed, I began to notice contractions about every 15 minutes.
María: Did you try to sleep?
Barbara: The light was off, and I did try, but I couldn’t. It was a hot
Friday night, in August. I went out onto the terrace, I don’t
remember pain but rather a great physical tiredness. I lay down on
 the outside sofa and soon I began to heave. I went to the bathroom
several times to throw up. I drank a lot of water, but at some point I
lost all my strength. I no longer had enough energy to drink water. I
needed someone to give me water, I was terrified of being
dehydrated, it was really very hot. My posture changed completely,
your body tells you what shape to take when a contraction comes.
Sometimes I would stand, leaning on the door, and at other times I
would be on all fours on the floor with my head leaning on the sofa.
I had to be very stretched out, facing up or down. It’s like a small
dot of pain that passes quickly. At 6 am I woke up my sister and
told her.
María: You went through all of that alone?
Barbara: Yes, alone. But the moment I couldn’t go get my own water
I saw that I needed help and I woke my sister up. I vomited twice
and tried to poop… I remember the sensation of needing to poop
and not being able to.
María: Funny, I recall that too. The sensation of having to empty your
body of everything because you’re going to need all the energy you
can possibly muster.
Barbara: The feeling of total emptiness, of having to let out all liquid
in your body. I had an incredible need to drink water, I really really
needed it, it was horrible. I’m not very sensitive to heat but I really
was then. The moment I woke up my sister I lost all notion of time. I
both was, and wasn’t there. It’s like I was only with my baby,
enjoying the feeling that it was like a journey where I don’t know
where I am, but I’m there inside. It was a mix between a journey
and a dance. A dance because my body moved according to
something inside me dictating how to do it.
I do remember asking my sister ‘do you think I’m ready?’ and she
answered ‘you’re dilated 6 centimeters.’
Without touching me or anything she knew. She ran to call the
midwives because they wouldn’t make it on time...
I don’t remember much more, but I can reconstruct the scene. I
woke up my brother in law, my niece, who at that time was 13
months old, and they took her out of the room. My brother in law
began to inflate the pool so I could give birth in it.
 Carlos took care of his daughter and the hose. We didn’t fill the
tub until the midwives arrived. I didn’t know how the birth was
coming along, and I almost didn’t believe what was going on. ‘Is
this what labor is?’ My sister helped me walk. The contractions
were very close, though I didn’t have a watch and didn’t take any
notes. We went slowly. She helped me and held me so I could
make it to the room. In the room all I can remember is being on all
fours; on top of the bed and on all floors. That’s when the midwives
got there. I wasn’t conscious of anything that happened outside of
me or around me. According to what my sister told me, they got
there at 9am. Everything was dim, the light didn’t change. The
midwife came with her younger sister and the vibe was sort of a
‘come on, girls and women, pile into the room.’ I was still in my own
world and the midwife kept on telling me: ‘You’re ready. The dilation
is complete.’
She asked permission to touch me but there was no need, the
baby was already crowning. And they were with the Doppler, the
whole time trying to see the baby’s heartbeat. That was quite a
nuisance.
I got into the pool and felt relief and a lot of heat. I didn’t want
anyone to massage me or touch me. Just a wet cloth with cold
water on my face and a fan. My sister fanned me. I didn’t have to
ask for anything, I would look at something and they would give it
to me. There was a fascinating level of communication between the
two of us. I know they brought fruit but I didn’t want to eat anything,
my body didn’t need anything. I was physically tired, but I don’t
remember feeling any pain. I was tired because Irene wouldn’t
come out. She was badly positioned and so would come in and
out, in and out. The actual delivery lasted four hours and 15
minutes. I remember myself in the water, trying to put my belly as
far down as possible so it would be completely submerged in water,
but everything had gone so quickly that there was no chance to fill
the pool to the top. And I thanked my baby the whole time (I didn’t
know if it was a boy or girl at the time) for giving me time to rest. I
remember them asking me: ‘do you want to push?’ And I said, ‘yes,
but Irene doesn’t want to rush.’ The contractions were really strong
but they would give me enough time to rest. For me it was like
 ‘here comes another one,’ and we would dance and rest a
moment. But in the end, dancing tires you out too and you tell the
baby: ‘come out now I’m exhausted.’ I recall some burning
sensations when the head came out (the ring of fire), but it was
very subtle. For me it was fast. Later it took some more time for the
rest of her body to come out and I remember repeatedly asking my
sister: ‘is she out yet? If this is what giving birth is I want five!
Where is the pain I read about? Where are the ghosts? Is it gonna
hit me in postpartum? Or in breastfeeding?’ I kept on waiting for the
pain to come and it never came.
María: How was breastfeeding?
Barbara: Great, Irene took her time to latch on because she was
tired. She would latch but would breastfeed very little, falling asleep
almost immediately. My sister was worried she would fall into that
pattern, becoming weaker and weaker, sleeping more and
breastfeeding less. That Sunday night I had a chat with my
daughter and on Monday she really began to breastfeed.
María: Did you tell her something along the lines of ‘you have to feed
and that’s it, sweetie?’
Barbara: Yes, I told her: ‘I’m very calm, but I don’t want to get
nervous.’ I had gone to breastfeeding groups since the summer
before giving birth, and I had observed that for women who had
recently given birth a recurring issue was the baby’s weight and the
obsession with the baby’s weight. I didn’t want to get like that, so I
told the baby that I understood why she was so calm, but I needed
to feed her. And that night she began to breastfeed more regularly.
It was really a very calm and respectful birth, not only in the
sense that my needs were respected but Irene’s as well. We went
according to the rhythm she imposed on me.
María: I think it’s very practical to go to breastfeeding circles before
giving birth.
Barbara: It’s great to meet up with other mothers and see what’s up
with them. The change in your lifestyle is so great that most people
don’t expect it.
María: My doula really helped me with that.
Barbara: I really didn’t have the easiest situation, the best cards, for
it to have been an easy birth. I had just moved houses, I had quit
my job in order to dedicate myself fully to being a single mother… it
was really an intense year.
María: Has your sexuality, and, generally speaking, your way of
being in the world changed at all?
Barbara: I’m sure they both have. I think I have more confidence in
myself when confronting the things that life throws at me. I’ve
always been sure of myself, but now I am even more so. And I’m
different at the level of comradeship too. I now understand women
who I would have previously found too different or distant from me.
It’s in how I approach other mothers including those that are
completely different from me. I can understand any point of view. I
can like it more or less but there’s a level of equality to it. It doesn’t
matter what I think about it, I understand it too.
And above all I understand that we’ve been tricked, silenced, that
they’ve taken away our power and strength. We’ve been deceived
and lied to about what makes up a family.
María: As a single mother have you felt a lack of support? I would
like to compare it to women who feel alone as mothers despite
being in a relationship.
Barbara: For me, all the support from my sister and her family was
really important, they took me into their house during and after the
birth. And that’s a really supportive network to be in.
It also has a lot to do with how one lives out one’s solitude. For
me it comes naturally, and if I need help I ask for it. The knowledge
that I can ask for help, knowing who I can count on and who I can’t,
defining who forms my support network—that helps a lot. I can’t
expect one person to fulfill my every single need, that’s impossible.
One can give me sex, another love; one can fulfill me as a woman,
another can fulfill me as a working person. It’s all a question of
expectations. What expectations do I have? What do I expect from
in my partner? What does my partner expect from me? It’s such a
mess, sometimes… I have read a great deal about all of this.
Maybe if I had had a partner, someone to go through this with, I
wouldn’t have to read that much. I think being a mother in a
relationship is much more difficult than going through it alone.
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H T
Parenting,

H T
Parenting, maternity and sexuality

T that grows between a mother and her baby is

always something difficult to explain. It would be easier to talk about
ecstatic childbirth or orgasmic lactation. But to speak of the libidinal
relation between these two—a relation which includes pleasure for
both parts—is complicated. You bump into the taboo of incest, the
fear that an adult may use violence—of a sexual kind—over a baby
(an unjustified fear if we take into account the number of abuses that
we suffer from our childhood onwards).
Helena Torres is that odd individual who has an immense capability
for speaking about this subject, without any restraints. She does so
with an honesty and lucidity capable of knocking us down,
undressing us and making our whole world shake over.
This interview has been collected in the 2014 anthology Relatos
Marranos, edited by herself and Aida I. de Prada, for the publishing
house Pol·len. They’ve already reprinted it a few times.
Helena is a sociologist, writer, educator and transfeminist activist.
She’s the mother of Lucas, currently in his teens. She was brought
up in Argentina and lives in Barcelona. She’s the author of the article
“El Amor en los tiempos del Fakebook” (“Love in Times of
Fakebook”), published in the book Transfeminsimos (Txalaparta,
2013) and the autofiction Autopsia de una langosta (A Lobster’s
Autopsy) (Melusina, 2009).
We’ve known each other for a very long time in the postporn and
transfeminist scenes in Barcelona. Helena has always been an
influence and source of inspiration for me in my work.
We talked through Skype, in the summer of 2014, between
Benicàssim and Barcelona.
Helena: Tell me about your project on subversive motherhood.
María: I’m full-on, completely dedicated to these themes of
motherhood and sexuality. I just did a workshop on subversive
motherhoods1 in Olba, a small town in Teruel, and a bunch of
marvellous punk mothers and neo-rural hippies turned up with their
babies and their stories about orgasmic childbirths, and orgasmic
lactations, and their orgasmic lives… They came over bringing
news of all things orgasmic!
Helena: What rubs me the wrong way about the orgasmic thing is
that not everyone partakes of the same experience, for a thousand
reasons that don’t depend on us. My childbirth, for example, was
very well prepared so I could go through it at home. That’s why I
 know the orgasmic birth thing is real: because I began to feel it. But
I ended up in a hospital and there was nothing orgasmic about that.
The first contractions surprised me, because I had never
experienced period pain and I didn’t get what was going on at all,
where was it all coming from, or what to do with that. Then I began
to take deep breaths as I had learnt while doing Kundalini and I
disappeared, I flew away. I suddenly I felt I was somewhere else
where there was no pain or noise. I knew there was people and
sounds, but I wasn’t there. I guess that sensation is the one which
opens up the possibility for orgasm; that is, for pain to become
pleasure. But still what seems frustrating when talking about
orgasmic childbirth is that it’s somehow understood as an
obligation.
María: As though it wouldn’t be fun enough unless you came when
giving birth. If you look at it from that perspective, it’s like being
Super Woman: every time you fuck, you have to come, and if you
come, then you have to ejaculate too. We talked about that in the
workshop and one of the things we did was to change the name
from “orgasmic birth” to “ecstatic birth.”
In fact, there are many births where women don’t experience an
orgasm, but still experience, all throughout labor, a sort of ecstatic
state which keeps them away from their pain threshold. It’s like
having sex, some bomb-ass sex, even though you don’t come. Has
it been a shit shag? Not at all!
Helena: It’s crucial to highlight that, just like in any other form of
relationship, there’s pleasure in childbirth. The perception of pain, if
there are conditions for a ecstatic childbirth to take place, have
nothing to do with the perception of pain in any other state. In that
moment you have different kind of sensibility, you smell things
differently, see differently, with a different intensity. That’s why it’s
crucial for me to define labor as a sexual act, beyond (and closer)
to orgasm.
María: Exactly, to understand that it is a part of sexuality. In my labor,
the whole dilation part was magical, I connected with that
sensuality, that sexuality. I was down on all fours like a bear on top
of my partner, who was lying down in bed below me. I was bitting
 him, licking him, enjoying myself, dilating… I had read somewhere
that is good to dilate the jaws because it contributes to the dilation
of the vagina, the uterus and the cervix, and so I was all over him,
sinking my teeth in. Anyway, I enjoyed that whole part enormously,
though I don’t have a clear memory of any of it.
Then came the moment known as ‘Pandora’s Box,’ which is when
you are completely dilated, and you enter the stage of delivery.
That’s the moment when the lions come out, the beasts, the
butterflies or whatever it is that you had inside but didn’t know you
had.
In that moment, I had the vision of a man, far away, who was the
bad man. I began to say out loud: ‘The bad man has come.’ Dani
told me that the midwives, who had been very calm up to then—
their faces changed completely. Luckily, my doula was present,
who took it all calmly, and was resolved to kick out that man with
the help of Dani, who knew me very well.
But with the bad man came the pain. A pain from another world,
which broke me in two. That was only during the final delivery,
which wasn’t very long, about two hours or so. And so Roc was
born.
I think the bad man was Mr. Patriarchy, hidden inside my uterus.
Anyway, despite that intervention, I remember my labor as an
immensely pleasurable experience.
Helena: Me, even though I didn’t give birth, it was my (non)labor that
marked the change in how I began to experience my sexuality. I’m
not talking about who I was or wasn’t fucking, or about my identity
(that came later), but about how I felt inside my body and how it felt
for me to have an orgasm. It was three years after (not) giving birth
that I began to ejaculate like a fountain. At the beginning I didn’t
even know what it was; later I realised that this had been
happening all throughout my teenage years but, out of shame, I
had erased it. Then it came out what could be called my concealed
lesbianism. Up to that moment I had been making out with girls, but
politically I didn’t feel aligned to the lesbian movement, I didn’t feel
this was something that touched me in any way. What was
happening, in fact, was that I was suppressing my sexuality,
because I wasn’t living like I wanted to live. But I didn’t know the
 least thing about this stuff then.
María: That’s very interesting because that is precisely one of the
questions that came up in the workshop: the fact that being a
mother and going through that experience (whether you give birth
or not) makes you fuck in a different manner.
Helena: The relationship you have with your body, or better yet the
way you feel it, changes completely. I knew way ahead of time
what had been the exact fuck that had made me pregnant. A week
later, my body had already begun to change. Not only the tits,
everything—my fluids, how my blood was moving, etc.... I didn’t
have an orgasmic labor, true, but my pregnancy was a constant
orgasm! I was fucking every single day.
However, the funny thing is that during the first year with the
baby, I didn’t feel like fucking. I couldn’t do it. At the beginning I was
frustrated, I didn’t understand it—this had never happened to me. I
would talk to other mothers and they would tell me: “Welcome to
the club.” Then I realised that I didn’t feel like fucking because I
was already doing it... with my baby. And it was a monogamous
relationship! No fucking one could touch my tits. I had one, and
strictly one, lover. I was head over heels in love. I would spend
hours looking at him in absolute ecstasy. When I see photographs
of him as a baby, I don’t recognize him. The whole time I saw a
being that encompassed everything, with its beauty and frailty…. It
was like being with someone you’ve fucked, because it’s another
body but it’s your body too.... It’s a sensation that you can’t
verbalize very well.
When I saw a friend of mine for the first time, a few months after
she had give birth, we hugged for a very long time until she broke
away, searched for my eyes beyond her tears and told me: “It’s
devastating.” During the first year, that complicitness, those stares
and that understanding, create moments where, if there’s a father,
he can only exist as a being outside of the relationship. Many
fathers feel cast aside, because it’s like you aren’t paying any
attention to him, and the baby doesn’t need him like it needs you
and your body…. But anyway, I was on my own planet. And that’s
where I spent those three years of my life.
 When that stage passed, I began to fuck every single thing that
moved.
That’s when I realised something that they’ve kept secret: that
when you give birth, you have a sexual relationship with your baby.
María: A pleasurable sexual relationship. A sexual relationship, and
an infinite form of love.
Helena: Exactly, infinite!
María: You are crazy about the baby, the pleasure you get is 100%,
your partner is flipping out about you—it’s the most perfect
relationship! It made me think a lot about all the different romantic
relationships I’ve had in my life, and how much time I’ve lost with
romantic love in those relationships! Love was that! That feeling of
completeness!
Helena: That’s the meaning of love!
( ! Something crashes against the keyboard.)
María: We’re losing our shit here, Helen, we’re done for! They’re
gonna call us bio-mothers! They are going to drop every single
label on us! (Boom! Boom! Boom! Now it’s books, falling on the
desk.)
Helena and María: (Laughter).
Helena: I think this extremely intense relationship that we’re talking
about is precisely that which becomes the basis for what will come
afterwards. Because you are not going to remain like that your
whole life, that would be harmful for everyone. But that initial,
strong connection doesn’t disappear, it only transforms itself. You
learn to let it go bit by bit. And we should take something away
from that, we should see that this really is true love because you
don’t always need to be with the other person: you’re already with
them. The entire possibility of letting go is based on that
connection. And that’s where you find that kind of understanding
you have with those whom with you’ve had a very intense
relationship, where you understand each other beyond — and still
closer than— words.
If there is a strong connection, then not only you, as a mother,
understand your child. The other person understands you too; they
 know you too.
María: I hadn’t thought about that.
Helena: I’ve actually been experiencing that feeling lately.
María: But we have to be careful with what we are saying now
because it would seem that a woman who can’t or doesn’t want to
be a mother will never know what love is…. Maybe the the
conclusion to draw here would rather be that each person finds
things in different ways throughout their life, and motherhood is one
of the ways that can lead you to love. Though maybe it doesn’t. It’s
about trying to not deny any reality. It’s important to respect
people’s decisions, but in respecting them we shouldn’t deny the
existence of other realities.
Helena: Exactly. Just like with orgasmic birth, we are not trying to
present models or guide books, but rather possibilities,
experiences…. Not every mother has to love her daughters and
sons. She can bring them up with affection, without being crazily in
love. It may happen to you or it may not, and we are not to deny
any of the two possibilities. Models are always frustrating. They
always leave something out. What happens if you reject it, if you
can’t stand that bleating baby, if you hate your fat belly, their
thumping steps and their unclean ass? They run you over just like
they smash whoever breastfeeds them till they are 3 years old….
María: But the thing is that the standard parenting models, at least
those in the part of the world in which I live, come from a rejection
of the possibility of that romance. These models of parenthood
tend to argue that, at the latest, the kid is to begin to attend
kindergarten from year one, for example. The sooner you get rid of
the baby, the better. And what happens if you are all lovey-dovey
with the kid and you don’t want to separate yourself from it?
It’s a touchy subject. I think most problems related to parenting
have their roots in the conception of a stable and monogamous
couple, which doesn’t work at all with the condition of motherhood.
Helena: And it’s that model of relationship, the stable monogamous
couple, which needs to deny the existence of sexuality during
motherhood in order to exist. It’s not only a denial in that specific
 moment when one becomes a mother, but rather all throughout a
woman’s life, beginning with infancy. Just think of when someone
asks you when you’ve had your first sexual experience. They’re
asking about coitus, about fucking someone, since it’s well
understood and agreed upon that sexuality doesn’t exist up until
then. Come on, even babies jerk off! And there’s also that
exploration of each other’s bodies between a mother and its
baby… touching, caressing, discovering.
María: That produces a great deal of terror. I have a therapist friend,
a mother, really into all this stuff. She was telling me the other day
about those sexual interactions with her son, where she allows him
to explore her body, including the genital area. She was saying that
the difference between a healthy or natural form of contact and
those which aren’t lie in the position of the mother. It’s very different
when a mother allows her son to explore his sexuality without
involving her own sexuality as a woman, to that other one where
the mother—in her confusion—plays the game the child is playing
as an equal.
Helena: It’s crucial not to lose sight of the context. Like when the
situation gets complicated because both mother and child live in a
society where that mutual exploration and discovery of sexuality is
considered an abomination. In those cases you’re forced to stop, or
to tread very carefully, because the children are too little to run
around saying that they want to fuck their mothers and you can’t
expect the world to hear this without thinking that that’s the most
unforgivable perversion.
1. In this workshop we reached an interesting conclusion: many of the women who had
experienced an orgasmic birth had locked themselves up for days before going into labor in
order to see Youtube videos of orgasmic births. It seemed to us like a little work of auto-
hypnosis and that it would be a good idea to create an online archive with this kind of
material so that pregnant women will have access to it before giving birth.
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R A
Love, motherhood

R A
Love, motherhood and feminist activism

L , in every aspect of our motherhood, is a feminist

revolution, a blow against the system. Within radical feminism, we
talk about romantic love as one of many backwards ideas inherent in
patriarchal societies in as much as it perpetuates stereotypes of a
sexist kind. And, of course, it’s the social excuse wielded as social
alibi for the large-scale murder of women.
At a personal level, I think I’ve found love—which I was seeking
fruitlessly in relationships—in my love for my baby. That is the
unconditional and eternal love I’ve always yearned for. And I notice
that the father of my baby feels likewise, and we are capable of
enjoying it together. And let nobody wring their hands and tear their
hair out: everyone can find love in different places!
In this interview, Roberta Artavia talks to us about her experience
of motherhood, which led her to understand love as a revolutionary
and empowering force, and to understand herself a feminist woman.
Roberta tells us about the necessity of creating alliances between
us, of the need for unity, and of the impossibility of advancing in the
feminist struggle if it doesn’t include mothers and children.
But Roberta also talks about growing as a person through
motherhood, and about the reconnection with one’s own sexuality
and self that it entails. This is something that I relate to very strongly,
since motherhood has helped me find myself, and to feel, in a very
clear way, what I need and don’t need. It has really helped me be
happier.
Roberta Artavia is a feminist activist in Costa Rica. She’s mother of
a girl who came to shatter what was her life, and helped her build a
new one, full of power. “Thanks be to the goddesses that did it!”
Roberta wrote me a long letter when she learned about my project.
Her words really moved me and I felt that she was a fundamental
part of this book.
She replied to my questions by e-mail from Costa Rica, in the
Autumn of 2014.
María: Who is Roberta?
Roberta: I am the daughter of Evangelical priests, a harassing father
and a submissive and over-protective mother. I always felt that life
was made to be disobeyed and that the system was wrong, but I
didn’t have any other form of ideological education save an
orthodox Christian one throughout most of my childhood and part
of my teenage years. I somehow look down on myself when I
remember how I was when I was fifteen or sixteen. By that point—
without having any feminist or left-wing education—, I already
questioned many of the golden rules with which I had been
inculcated. I wasn’t confronting them in the typical way teenagers
do, evading a deeper analysis that goes beyond the mere “I don’t
want to do this.” Rather I was questioning things so as to
understand their origin, their political uses in the age they stemmed
from, and trying to understand why I was determined to get those
things off my chest in order to breathe.
No one ever talked to me about sex or about empowered women.
I was taught for decades that the only role a woman could have in
her life was that of a housewife, a mother and spouse, and that if I
were to choose another path, I would lose happiness and “true
love.” For a long time I lived thinking that I had disobeyed the
system by performing the only role available to me: the whore, the
bad girl, the widow-maker.
My daughter was born and she changed the world—destroyed it.
And thank the goddesses she did so! I was a bad alloy of things I
didn’t like, things I had accumulated while searching for love,
because I didn’t love myself. My daughter made me stop, she
made me breathe. I stopped following that universal logic, chasing
the only motivation which according to our capitalist society, has
any value: money. Or by its other cute names, professional growth,
success, ambitions.… At the end of the day they are just numbers
in your bank account.
My daughter makes me stop in my tracks when running after a
bus (which goes by every hour) to look at a butterfly or touch a
flower. Even if the bus stops and we don’t manage to get there in
time... it doesn’t matter anymore!
My daughter makes my life spin around other motivations more
powerful than material ones: love, sorority, solidarity. What a
capability they have, our kids, to make us more socialist, humanist,
feminist… if we would only let ourselves be seduced by them, if we
would just arrest our accelerated rhythm and look at them while
they play, while they talk to us. If we let them kiss and hug us
without looking at the time or without squeezing our phones, paying
attention to any call or message we may receive.
 Don’t you think it’s revolutionary? Don’t you think that it’s a blow
to the system to stop for a moment and be a kid a few hours every
day? I thought that the transformative power of a attachment
parenting was in how it could change the life of the kid, and mold a
critical, conscious, and loving human being… I still can’t tell how
different the life of my children will be in comparison to those kids
brought up by kangaroo mothers or nannies, but, for me, the
experience of subversive and attachment parenting has changed
my life. And that’s something which makes me forever grateful to
all those women who opened up the path to me.
María: What’s your experience of being a mother in Costa Rica?
Roberta: Costa Rica is an openly sexist, religious and hypocritical
country. Motherhood here means, in most cases, that you can’t
progress in any other life path.
They demand that you be “pure” and devoted to your home and
husband (because being a single mom is looked down upon with
abhorrence). Women are not told about the changes that the post-
partum period inflicts on their sexual life, and there’s no talk about
how to recover your sexual desire or about how common it is to
feel little sexual appetite during the breastfeeding period. This in
turn causes fear, insecurity and even systematic rape from your
partner who might not even know that his partner doesn’t want to
have sexual intercourse.
When a young woman gives birth, both her mother-in-law and her
mother take on a starring role in her life and in that of the recently
born. With their ‘good intentions,’ they replicate myths and impose
their beliefs above those of the mother on all things relating to
postpartum, lactation and parenting. This in turn produces an
“emotional castration” of the mother, where the woman isn’t given
the chance to follow her instincts and to love her children as her
guts beg her to do.
All our education regarding motherhood, fatherhood and anything
related to it is solely directed at mothers and future mothers,
excluding and misinforming men who are hardly ever involved in
raising their own kids. In Costa Rica, poor women must view a
pregnancy is as almost always a synonym for motherhood, since
 abortion is illegal.
María: How was your personal experience of motherhood?
Roberta: I allowed my mother to be extremely involved in my
motherhood, and suffered obstetric violence and postpartum
depression. I couldn’t feel that I was my daughter’s mother.
On account of many prejudiced ideas about the “sanctity” of
mothers, my sentimental partner couldn’t feel sexually stimulated
throughout my pregnancy, so we didn’t have sex from about the
20th week onwards. As expected, we had too great hopes that
we’d recover our old relation after childbirth. But I didn’t feel any
sexual desire at all, I faked it all, including orgasms. I would cry
because I felt raped by someone who didn’t know what I felt; I
would blame myself. Later on my partner began to know about my
problems and he started to get worried that they were symptoms of
a lack of love or maybe of me having an affair.
I gained 20 kg on account of my postpartum depression, my
sexual problems and my dependant relationship with my mother.
And then alongside all these emotional ups and downs, I
discovered that I was pregnant again. That’s when the subversion
kicked in! That night I talked to my partner and told him that I didn’t
have the emotional capacity to bring another human into this world,
and that if he didn’t support my decision to have abortion, I would
do it anyway. He looked at me, and despite all of our relationship
problems we were having, he said: “What do you want me to do?”
The next day, and even though it’s illegal in my country, I had an
abortion with Misoprostol. I followed the instructions of
womanonwaves.org and bought the medicine illicitly.
I had the abortion with my partner, absolutely terrified about
everything and just wanting it all to end. I had that Christian
education I had received, yelling at me from the inside out. It was
inside my chest, telling me that I was sinning, killing, that I was
defiled. I was scared lest my mother find out, or the police… I had
to deal with the anxiety of not knowing what to expect, the fear of
dying out of bleeding. After a few contractions and a lot of waiting,
the abortion was over.
I saw this as an option that the feminist struggle, and the
marvellous women involved in it, had afforded me. I decided that
my motherhood was mine, and mine only, and that I was not going
to allow anyone to take that away from me.
Around that time, a mall prohibited a mother from nursing her son
and some mad feminists decided to protest, breastfeeding their
children in that place, to make their complaint known. I heard of the
protest and I felt it was the to settle my debt with feminism, or
rather a way of helping another woman in the same disinterested
way that womanonwaves.org did for me.
I went to the demonstration and met many mothers who were
empowered, full of sexuality, happy, and in love with their kids. We
talked about how important it was to keep on meeting, and that’s
how the Tribe was born. We opened up a Facebook group, a
Whatsapp chat, and we would call each other to share our worries,
our fears...We would also share recipes or book recommendations,
medicines, places, etc... Little by little my mother left the position
she had, center stage, in my life. Her demands and her
requirements, her reproaches and her religion, went with her, and
she left the place vacant for these women who didn’t blame me but
supported me and in every moment of weakness they’d show me
affection.
I made attachment parenting my Gospel, and little by little my
relationship with my daughter improved. I learnt to love her and I
learnt to erase that idea of parenting which establishes that a
woman’s life is over once motherhood starts; mine was just
beginning. With time we’ve become thick as thieves again.
Shortly afterwards, a friend from The Tribe recommended Sex for
One, by Betty Dodson to me. Around that time I was trying to
improve my sex life with my partner. I was only thinking about trying
new things, of ‘getting better at it’; it didn’t occur to me that knowing
myself better was probably the best path. I still thought about
masturbation as a ‘disgusting’ idea, and considered it from the
christian perspective I had been brought up in.
But as I flickered through the pages of this book, my curiosity
awakened. I began to explore my body and ended up with a
stampede of sexual energy that extended and pulled in my partner
too.
 The Tribe still exists and we do a lot more projects together, and
help parent more and more children. I’ve gone down 10 kg. I’ve
also been put boundaries around my mother’s interventions, and
have decided to leave behind the Christian ideas and limits
surrounding sexuality and motherhood. I was and am very happy.
María: It is very frustrating to see that your mother’s frustration
regarding motherhood had to be something you inherited too. I
think your life experience is very pertinent, because you’ve broken
from a chain of abuse, refusing to reproduce a castrating and
patriarchal idea of motherhood. I’m realising more and more that
one has to work with oneself through therapeutic processes so as
not to pass down the worst of you to your children, like a pointless
chain. I’m talking about repression, but also about sexual violence
and abuse experienced since childhood. God knows what you
mother had to experience as a girl and the origin of that lack of
emotional care towards you. As feminists we need to be very
conscious of breaking the chains of abuse that are carried down
across generations. Have you found anything in your feminist
activism that problematizes with being a mother? How do you think
being a mother complements being a feminist? How can we do it
better?
Roberta: Apart from the Tribe, I belong to other feminist
organisations and feminist political parties. In the Tribe we are all
mothers, so I’ve never felt discriminated against. In the rest of
groups, most feminists are not mothers and they see those who are
with a bit of contempt. That’s the hard truth. They see us as pro-
system because we let ourselves be inseminated by a male, and
they don’t understand our needs, and those of our children. In the
political party I belong to, we’ve tried to promote projects like
nurseries during meetings and assemblies (we hope it gets passed
soon), but the truth is I’ve often had to miss invitations, reunions,
tours, etc… because of my daughter. That brings with it the stigma
that mothers “aren’t committed enough.”
María: Instead of helping each other out so that we can have better
motherhoods, we are blamed for being a mother— a fundamentally
misogynistic strategy, used by our society in our daily lives. Tell me
 more about how you’ve fought to live a subversive motherhood.
Roberta: I read and talk about sex. I enjoy sex alone or with my
partner. I give advice to and receive advice from other women. I
decided to terminate my second pregnancy. I raise my daughter
without any limitations based on gender. I fight for gender equality
alongside my daughter; I don’t allow sexism in my home; I don’t let
anyone decide for me. I keep on studying and working. Above all
else, I stopped regarding myself as a victim. You can fight while
being a mother. It’s three times harder than it is for others, you go
more slowly, but you start with the motivation of having a baby who
deserves a better world. They say women are the revolution inside
the revolution. Mothers are the revolution inside the revolution
inside the revolution. I’m not going to shut up when faced with a
patriarchal system that threatens us; I’m not going to stay at home
as they want, I’m not going to withdraw from these fights. We all
fight together.
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F S
Motherhood and

Motherhood and decolonization Parthenogenesis

F S

O , there was a matriarchal society that worshiped

nature and motherhood above all else. It was a nomadic society, and
as such it gradually began to find itself pushed towards agriculture
and the domestication of animals in order to better face the changing
environmental landscape. The new forms of social organization
forced this once matriarchal society to become the patriarchal
society we live in today, and saw the imposition of concepts like
private property, inheritance, marriage, and the binding of female
sexuality within these structures. This last feature cemented the
centrality of biological fatherhood, which up to this moment had been
considered secondary, given that children were raised abundantly,
communally.
The ideas of motherhood underpinning this patriarchal and
capitalist set-up are those of a disempowered motherhood: the
patriarchal and libidinally aseptic mother. Since that moment, our
uteri lost the capacity for pleasure; pain defines out menstruation,
childbirth, and even how we raise our children; but our bodies are
precisely made to enjoy each one of these stages. Subverting this
spiral of pain consists, fundamentally, in reconnecting ourselves with
our creative and life-giving capacities, those forces that were so the
core of the early matriarchal societies. Motherhood is truly a sexual
stage, and here I ask to be allowed to become mystical and
somewhat tantric for a moment: this blissful sexuality supposes the
existence of a transcendental and profound connection with nature
and the universe. Subversive motherhood is blissful sexuality; it is
transfeminist, ecological, eco-sexual, spiritual, magical, healing.
Fannie Sosa addresses all these topics, from the decolonization of
the mind-body divide, to the necessity for re-establishing the
connection with the maternal and sacred through feminism. Her work
is crucial for the rediscovery of the lost history of matriarchy, and
more generally for a the creation of a decolonial feminism, one which
she defines as re-indigenizing.
She also deals with a subject I consider crucial to the rediscovery
and subversion of the limited vision of motherhood that patriarchal
history offers us: parthogenesis, or the process by which the ancient
goddesses of antiquity impregnated themselves.
Fannie along with Poussy Drama are the creators of a viral video
called Baby, Love your body! In it, they explain sexuality to children
and deal with taboo subjects in children’s pedagogy such as
consent, and the possibilities of enjoying sex by oneself, with two
people, or with a group of people.
Fannie Sosa is a doctoral candidate in Paris—her focus is on
twerking and new strategies of decolonization. She is also an
activist, artist, and healer. We know each other through our mutual
friends, the talented and marvelous Eduardo Bonito and Isabel
Ferreira—who live in Rio de Janeiro. This interview took place over
chat, between Canada and Argentina, at the end of 2014.
Maria: There’s a tremendous taboo on anything even distantly
related to sexuality and childhood.
Fannie: The word taboo itself is very interesting: it comes from the
Polynesian words tapu or tupua, from the Pacific South East. It
actually means ‘sacred’ not prohibited.’ White ethnographers
translate it as sacred in almost any other context, like war or
bartering. When it’s white men studying men of color, there’s
already confusions and ‘castrating’ translations. Imagine how it
must be when white men study women of color….
For example, when the white ethnographer finds himself in
spaces dedicated to menstruating women in Maori societies, he
translates this space as ‘prohibited,’ interpreting the fact that Maori
women move to a specific space while menstruating as the
banishment of these women from common spaces. But these
women retire to these spaces because menstruation is considered
sacred and they must move away from mundane life, or noa, in
order to fully take advantage of this blessing. The menstruating
body is seen as immensely powerful, it connects with the sources
of life (fertility, youth) and of death (the passing of time, the
absence of fertility). Maori cosmology is very centered on
relationships with the land and ancestry, and they see these
menstruating women as those which carry a clan’s genealogy
within them. Therefore, women in these spaces dedicated
themselves to investigating and studying genealogy (the past),
having visions of the political future, and taking care of themselves
or being taken care of by the rest of the clan (in the present). It was
like a university of menstrual blood
Maria: I think there’s a strong connection between spirituality,
 sexuality, and the maternal.
Fannie: I think that when feminism presents us with pregnancy and
maternity as inherently oppressive, it becomes a campaign of
misinformation. It’s so twisted. For me the act of creating life is a
subversive act. As I continue to empower myself through my
femininity I become more and more aware that I am made to build
up, to mother, to create. Maternal energy, because of its
uncontrollable creative force, is being persecuted. Especially in
indigenous communities and among those peoples who want to re-
indiginize. Re-indigenize is my new favorite term. It’s a word that’s
complementary to the word decolonize.
Maria: Tell me how did you come to participate in projects related to
sexuality and children.
Fannie: Poussy and I had known each other for about a year and a
half when it began. I was heartbroken, and I called her because
she had also been seeing this heartbreaker. I didn’t know her but
we talked for an hour and, after that, we were in constant contact
over social media. After a few months, she asked me if I could be
in a performance of hers focused on video games. I told her that I
had never taken part in any ‘conceptual’ performances, and
furthermore in anything directed by another person, but I was
willing to try. When we saw each other in the rehearsal space we
knew very quickly that the performance was between the two of us;
our ideas, our laughter, our anger, our bodies. The blonde barbie
and the brunette. We then steered in a different direction and wrote
the piece ‘I still believe’ in a week, and presented it very soon
afterwards. I think that, for the two of us, it was really a revelation to
be able to work and create like that. It was a mix between a
conference, a performance, a bit of leg-pulling and also a dead-
serious critique. It was about sexuality, knowledge systems, power
and control, the internet, agency, peace, healing, and freedom. Bit
by bit we began to be fashioned as the enfants terribles of certain
French or European art circles because neither Poussy nor I felt
the need to make the rounds of the art institutions. We began to
gain a bit of visibility and then began to ask ourselves: ‘who do we
want to speak to? A closed circle of art ‘initiates’?’ This was after
 our second artist residency The school of no big deal. School of no
big deal was a name my partner, Christian, came up with. He
based it on the pedagogical dimension of our artistic mission which
is essentially an attempt or a ‘school’ for unlearning behaviour that
is considered to be a ‘big deal’ in our culture—capitalism,
patriarchy, sexuality, childhood, private or intellectual property,
feminism.... We then realized that a central part of what we are
interested in is the transmission of knowledge about pleasure, or
the spreading of knowledge we have developed in our lives as
femme, queer, healers, etc… For example, I think there’s not
enough information on how to say ‘no’ in sex education. We are
told that sex is something scary and dangerous, difficult to manage
and navigate, and potentially disastrous. At the same time, we are
pressured on all sides with sexualized images of actors and places
that only build up our desire.
Maria: Sex education really only teaches you about illness and
contraception, as the very wise feminist sexologist and writer
Valerie Tasso says.
Fannie: Exactly. It never teaches about pleasure. And we’re
unilaterally taught that it’s women who say no; consent is taught in
a one-sided way. This creates in turn enormous sexual frustration.
Wilhelm Reich talks a lot about that, about the creation of sexual
frustration by fascists governments and how that creates a form of
fanaticism in its citizens.
Maria: Casilda Rodrigáñez, in her book titled El deseo materno y la
génesis del estado de sumisión inconsciente (Maternal Desire and
the Genesis of Unconscious Submission) also talks about that topic
using of Reich’s theories. She says that in canceling out the
relationship between pleasure, love, and sexuality that is naturally
formed between a mother and her child, the state and capitalism
create individuals that are submissive to the system. The best way
to destroy this relationship is to medicalize childbirth and separate
the mother from the child. She says that that’s the basis of our
patriarchal system, destroying that libidinal relationship between
mother and child.
Fannie: Privatizing fertile bodies and knowledges relating to the
 fertile body. I think that capitalism is a fascist government that
manufactures sexal frustration in order to make us continue to
consume. When sexuality is at the service of the patriarchal gaze, it
is accepted and stimulated. When sexuality is used for our benefit,
aimed at healing and autonomy, the witch hunt begins. This is all
part of a constant conversation I’ve been having with Poussy. But
anyway we talked and talked and then thought: ‘why are we still
trying to yell at these submissive adults when both of us have had
great and fluid relationships with children?’ You see, I’ve always
liked to talk with children, not at them. And there, pulling all these
strings together, in a mix of tiredness and enthusiasm, we talked
about focusing on and addressing children. Of course, at least in
my case, I love saying fuck to to the establishment in a constructive
way, with a smile on our face. Pretty early on we decided that we
didn’t want to be moralizing or to take a message like ‘kids,
remember to always….’ We reminded ourselves one more time:
‘we’re going to talk with children, with the child we carry within
ourselves.’ I would have loved to have seen something like that
when I was a child.
Maria: Me too. Not only would I have loved it, it would have helped
me so much in building up my sexuality. It would have started from
a positive place, not from what is prohibited, morbid, wrong…
Fannie: Another thing that came to our minds was also the absence
of children in our lives. We grew up completely alienated from
infancy and old age. I need other generations and ages a great
deal…
Maria: It’s terrible for raising children! One brings them up in solitude
and isolation!
Fannie: I now see mothers around me who punish themselves so
much. They give themselves mini punishments all the time.
Sometimes, on the public transport, I realize that children are
always being either punished or rewarded. I don’t have children but
it seems so evident to me. For example, that whole thing about
letting kids cry through the night. Who thinks that’s ok? We are
brainwashed to fashion our kids from the moment they’re still in
diapers as workers and collaborators in the capitalist system.
Maria: That method of letting them cry the whole night is an
abomination, it comes from practices used in domesticating dogs
(not that they deserve it either, but anyway). There are other
alternatives that are being implemented these days: attachment
parenting, raising children without punishment or rewards…. Tell
me about any response to your video from a child that you found to
be special or beautiful.
Fannie: We’ve received lots of reactions of children roaring with
laughter, and of kids asking to see it again and again. Sadly we’ve
also had a lot of resistance from the children’s own family members
including those that we thought were more aligned with our ideas
about ‘adult’ sexualities. But the topic of sexuality and children is
like rubbing salt in a wound. I think that a lot of people that are still
scared by pedophilia and they equate positive sexual education
with it. That really hurts me a lot.
Maria: Yeah, it seems as if talking about sexuality and infancy is the
same as talking about pedophilia. It’s as if one said that talking
about adults and sexuality is the same as talking only about rape.
Fannie: Exactly. Or as if talking about consent would actually only be
about trauma. The hatred we got was truly intense!
Maria: Kids also have a sexuality that is all their own; they live it out
in their own way, from the moment they’re born. Their sexuality is
very different from that of adults, and sometimes it seems as if
adults see sexuality only in its relation to coitus.
Fannie: I remember climbing on things from a very early age. When I
was about three, I shimmied up the hammock poles; they were
about three or four meters high, because I had really great
orgasms. I had forgotten all about it until I was 22 and I was trying
out pole dancing. When I flexed my abs, it all came back to me. I
laughed a lot remembering my grandmother saying ‘this girl, she’s
so small and she’s already climbing so high,’ and there I was,
having meta orgasms. Meta is an expression used in Argentina, it’s
like saying having one orgasm after another.
Maria: I used to play a game with my friend where we would slap the
other’s ass. One would get on her knees in front of the sofa, and
 the other would hit her, really hard. We had a great time! Sadly her
grandpa took advantage of me and abused me, fucking up any
chance of enjoying masturbation from then onwards. He used to
finger me and I ended up hating it.
Fannie: I think its sexual frustration that creates these situations of
abuse, not sex positive attitudes.
Maria: In Aletha Solter’s book The Aware Baby, she says that any
adult who has the urge to sexually abuse a child is an adult that
was probably abused as a child. She treats the subject very
naturally. She just says that, simply, when you have the urge to do
it, don’t. And secondly, to ask for professional help in order to be
able to move past it. I also think we need to destigmatize our
shadows, as it were. I’ve felt this very strongly with my baby, as a
mother. It was when my son was very little that I began to first
understand how I had suffered various forms of abuse when I was
a baby. I had this gut feeling in me. We have to break these cycles
of abuse and pain, and face them head on. If we choose to
continue to negate or ignore these feelings within us, we let the
spirals of pain continue.
Fannie: I think that that’s an excellent way of summing up what’s
happening now. Specifically the persecution, rooted in fear, of the
positive mother energy. This motherly energy which tells herself,
her child, and the world: this negative energy stops with me. The
one that doesn’t hit her child, though she had once been hit. It’s a
creative energy, non-reactive. It’s hard not to fall into essentializing
discourse, but bit by bit I go on developing and expressing
complementary energies. Let me explain.
Reactive energy is the executive one. For example when we were
hunter gatherers, nomads or semi-nomads, the hunters were an
expression of this executive energy. It’s masculine, though it was
obviously rooted in a distinction of social functions, not gender. The
hunters went out into the world, they carried information out and
brought it into the village’s psyche or body. The gatherers were the
interpretive part, cognitive. Their role is best explained in the act
and image of weaver. You know, weaving knowledge, centring,
giving shape to, make objects. So this cognitive function, that of the
 gatherers, was worshiped in women, which back then was
considered to be a positive quality because sex and motherhood
had not yet been linked up. It was believed that it was only women
who gave life, I think that’s where the notion of the immaculate
conception comes from, though its defined from the patriarchal
viewpoint obviously… immaculate, as if having sex were a stain.
Actually the word ‘virgin’ comes from the same etymological root
as viril does, which means independent. So a woman who wasn’t
married; she was ‘one in herself,’ she didn’t belong to any
husband. A virgin wasn’t a chaste woman, but a sexually
independent and autonomous. I’ve thought a lot about the mothers
of the great prophets—Buddha, Mohammed, Jesus, etc…—and
realized they were all virgins. Or rather, they were all independent
women who showed their children the power of love. I don’t think
that’s a myth, it must have been true, that Parthenogenesis existed.
You’re very interested in that subject, right? Tell me a bit about your
story and where your interest comes from.
Maria: Yes. I am. I think it’s necessary for us to rethink maternity.
Parthenogenesis is the process by which a woman or a person with
an uterus is able to get pregnant, without any male contribution.
The ovule begins to divide itself through the use of an electric
pulse. Apparently other animal species can do it and it’s been done
in labs with human ovules. But anyway the scientific aspect isn’t
the focus of this book. What I think we need to rescue and study is
how this applies to human history, and how female achievements
at any level, be it mythological or religious or any other, are
silenced. The Californian Marguerite Rigoglioso is an expert on this
subject. She’s written various books including The Cult of Divine
Birth in Ancient Greece and Virgin Mother Goddesses of Antiquity.
In her doctoral thesis, Rigoglioso shows how the goddesses of
ancient Greece were capable of parthenogenesis. That’s how they
gave birth to the gods. Women would train from a very early age in
order to self-conceive and give birth through deep meditation.
Later, when the patriarchy rewrote history, these self-generated
and miraculous pregnancies were attributed to rape, doves, or rays
of light from a macho-God, or any kind of absurdity.
Fannie: I’m reading this really illuminating book: Saharasia, which
does a great job of clarifying the origins of the patriarchy, even if its
author is clearly pro-American and islamophobic. It talks about
how, contrary to what we have been taught to assume, human
beings lived in a peaceful society while in the Garden of Eden. That
famous garden is actually the region called Saharasia which today
is a desert but 15,000 years ago was a green and fertile land with
the best conditions for hunter-gatherer societies. These tribes
adored the goddess of nature, the sacred mother of energy, the
forces of unity, etc… What happened was that changes in climate
transformed Eden into a desert. In the transition that took place
over thousands of years, agriculture was invented because these
societies could no longer afford to be nomadic or to live in states of
complete dependence on the natural conditions that surrounded
them. They were forced to begin to dominate nature. At the same
time, these people felt punished seeing all things wither around
them, and that’s where the idea of ‘sin’ comes from. The now
famous notion of ‘original sin’ came to denote the human
relationship with pleasure and abundance that existed before with
the worshiping of nature. And just like that, the cults of worship
dedicated to the goddess of nature ended, and the Abrahamic
religions that came from arid and desert regions began. God
became a punitive father instead of an adoring mother. With
agriculture, everything relating to executive energy and force came
to the forefront, not only in order for the land to be domesticated,
but to protect what was now considered to be private property. In
becoming sedentary, these societies stopped seeing the earth as a
shared resource. In domesticating the land they began to treat it as
private property.
Maria: Restoring a matriarchal society then must begin by rebuilding
a society that is fundamentally connected to nature. An ecological
matriarchy, ecofeminist or eco-sex as Annie Sprinkle and Beth
Stephens call it. I like the fact that ecology inevitably comes up
when we talk about feminism.
Fannie: Patriarchy (and the loss of a matriarchal society) was the
result of climate change, not just an expression of the ‘nature’ of
human beings as Freud and Darwin would have us believe.
Everything is connected, and that’s why I find it difficult to write in a
decolonial language or a methodology. I’m doing my PhD in Paris
and they continuously ask us to write in an ‘objective’ or scientific
way. But that insistence on objectivity, the need to objectivize
knowledge, erases the identity of who is speaking in the first place.
For example, the whole idea of the academic ‘we’: ‘we have come
to this conclusion’, etc… in French theoretical writing one has to
write like that in any sort of dissertation or academic writing. I
consider it to be an act of cowardice because it erases the
observer’s identity and creates an asymmetrical relationship, as if
the knowledge transmitted in these dissertations were universal.
This ‘we’ is obviously white, male, and heterosexual (and stands in
stark contrast to the feminine ‘we’).
So, now going back to what I said at the beginning of the
interview: the current use of the word taboo is a clear example of
how the observer’s identity, in this case a white, European
ethnographer, comes to be seen as ‘neutral’ or ‘central.’ This in turn
begins an enormous chain of disinformation, that begins with
translating or ‘observing.’ What’s observed is the indigenous object;
if the observer is at the center, then the indigenous object is
othered, marginalized. In denying the particular identity that
belongs to the translator or observer, this center is bestowed a lot
of power because actually, the fact that this ethnographer defines
‘tapu’ as forbidden says a lot more about him than about the
indigenous culture he studies.
Another great example of this is something I recently read about,
a case that took place in Aotearoa (New Zealand). A Maori curator
put together an exhibit focusing on Maori weaponry and he
specifically asked pregnant women to sit it out and not participate.
When I first read it I was furious, and I fell into the trap of thinking of
indigenous people as ignorante and retrograde. Or a better
example of what I’m trying to say is the fact that women don’t
speak in certain types of Maori maraes (assemblies). It is worth
noting too that in some maraes, women do speak; it depends on
the region in which they take place. From an indigenous
perspective, as Ngahuia Murphy so aptly captures, this isn’t seen
 as repressive. Rather, this action follows their way of organizing the
world and protecting the mother energy and mother earth. The
mother energy is something to be worshiped, it is very powerful
and can even cause death if not approached with the appropriate
protocol…. Look, I’ve been so conditioned that I really find it hard
to defend what I’m saying just now. But when I read it in Ngahuia’s
words I really understood it: the pregnant women were asked to
stay away from the exhibit not to protect them, but to protect the
weapons’ powers. It’s the same as when pregnant women dont
speak in some maraes because they are the ones who take
important decisions, not the ones who explain them.
Maria: It’s so obvious I think it’s ridiculous how it’s not something we
think of from the very beginning.
Fannie: And you go and see that, and all of a sudden you turn into
this cocky sort of radical feminist! There’s a great deal of structural
colonialism in how knowledge is transmitted. We need to rewrite
how we see the indigenous village. In the best case, we see them
as worthy of pity, ‘we come to save you,’ when actually they’re the
ones who are going to have to save us.
But the crucial question here is: who is indigenous? I mean to
say, the notion that ‘I’m white and European, therefore I cannot be
indigenous’ is wrong in itself. We’re obviously walking through
tricky terrain here with this one, or at least complex for the Western
and linear mindset, but perhaps simple for the indigenous (and
circular) mind. Once again I feel as if whiteness is a way of erasing
the enunciator’s identity, just as it is a way of ruling out the
indigenous point of view.
There are so many people that say ‘oh, it’s cool that you’re a
woman of color, I’m white and so I don’t have any ethnicity.’ As if in
being white I didn’t have roots, an ethnicity, origins, mother earth;
as if I weren’t indigenous too. So whiteness again goes and erases
one’s identity. That’s why I talk so much about the need to re-
indiginize oneself.
In Saharasia there once were children democracies. The author
of the book I was telling you about talks about these spaces where
kids, after turning five or six (that is, after no longer depending on
 their mothers for survival) went to spend weeks or even months.
There they were only among other kids, without any adults, and
completely self-reliant. They ate, slept, and played whenever they
wanted. It’s also within these spaces, these child democracies,
where sexual games between kids began. There were no taboos
surrounding virginity, but there were also all kinds of birth control
available to them.
I want to talk to you a bit more about these different forms of birth
control. I give classes and workshops on twerking. Twerking is a
practice in peripheral or diasporic societies. It’s a word that, like
feminism, limits one’s movements sometimes. The word twerk
comes from New Orleans and bounce culture, it’s like the voguing
of the south. It’s super queer, super pride, it had nothing to do with
the heteronormative tall-tales they began to sell us later on. This
whole need to sanitize things really is insane. In the nineties, hip
hop and mainstream rhythm and blues appropriated this scene, this
culture. They transformed it by making it all for the male gaze,
when actually twerking was originally a way to resist and remember
(like in blues, jazz, capoeira, etc…) diasporic African culture that
had been sold and redistributed by triangular trade.
Anyway like I was saying, in these twerking workshops, I talk
about its origins in fertility rituals and dances, and there are always
women in my clases who get their period/lunar period (I like to call
them lunar periods whenever possible) and I had an epiphany. I
realized that these fertility dances weren’t only rituals for
conception—but also contraception! Dances that focus on the
womb or twerking are contraceptive and abortive techniques.
They’re techniques for controlling one’s own fertility, both to
increase one’s fertility or the opposite. That’s why they’re
associated with whores! Casilda Rodrigáñez talks about that too,
she calls those dances that were done by women in a circle, facing
each other, as ‘sexual dances.’ Later that circularity in practice was
lost and they became seductive dances. That is, they began to
face outward, towards the male gaze, and so the healing properties
of these dances was lost.
Maria: Thank you.
Fannie: No, thank you. You’ve really inspired me ever since I
discovered you in your book El postporno era eso, in Edu and Isa’s
house in Rio.
Maria: It was a book I wrote at a really difficult time in my life. I don’t
feel proud of it in the least.
Fannie: That’s why I say it. It’s been beautiful to see what I consider
to be your graceful transition to grasping your womanly powers.
I’ve noticed this transition; you’re more peaceful now. It’s because
I’ve gone through the same and it continues to happen to me. The
whole destruction-construction thing. We’re so alienated that
sometimes the only thing we can do is destroy. And the most
subversive, healing, peaceful and profound things are not these
that are explosive, but rather slow changes. Although both are
necessary. Explosions are necessary, but planting trees and
flowers after, in the craters formed by the blow up, is what allows
life to come back.
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A I
Today’s

A I
Today’s Matriarchal Societies

T and diverse matriarchal (or matrilineal) societies

in our world today; each one of them come with their own
peculiarities. This interview isn’t a discussion on semantics or on the
difference between a matriarchal society and a matrilineal one—how
dull! The point is to learn a bit about non-patriarchal forms of social
organization and see how maternity is inscribed within them, so we
too can subvert the patriarchal vision of maternity we have inherited
and envision new possibilities.
The Minangkabau society, for example, is Islamic and practices
monogamous marriage. Nevertheless, they have managed to
maintain it’s matriarchal social organization. They have a
tremendous respect for women and the female figure—I haven’t ever
seen anything like it in my world, where women are routinely killed
by their husbands. I recall a story I heard when I was in Sumatra
about a man who, after having sexually harassed a woman, had to
flee from the village. Exactly: it was the man who had to run away in
order to escape the wrath of his family and neighbors. On the other
hand, there’s the example of the Mosuo people in China who engage
in free relationships and don’t have the institution of marriage.
Women have a special room in their houses where they can
entertain their lovers, and the children they have from their multiple
marriages are raised by the whole family. Sexuality never found a
household. They allow women the freedom of forming romantic
relationships without risking the loss of love and family if it goes
badly. Among the Mosuo, men are paternally responsabile, not
toward those children they may have with their lovers, but toward
their sisters’ children. Paternity is not strictly a question of biological
fatherhood. Other matriarchal societies are the Tuaregs in the North
of Africa, or the tribe Khasi, in North West India (in Mawlynnong). At
the end of the interview I have included a Guide for a Matriarchal
and Ecofeminist Society, a text I wrote when first started
investigating about matriarchies. It’s a series of pieces of advice for
how to establish a matriarchal society within our patriarchal one.
Anne Ionoff is a Parisian who has been living with the
Minangkabau people for many years. She speaks to us about the
possibilities of a matriarchy today from her own lived experience.
She’s married to a Minangkabau man, and they both live and work in
Sumatra. They are parents to three year old Alicia, who knows the
jungle and the rice fields of Indonesia as well as she does the Eiffel
Tower.
Annie is the director of communications at Authentic Sumatra—
Ricky’s Beach House, a fantastic tourist center in Sumatra that
perfectly integrates tourism into the lives of locals. We met when I
went to Sumatra in 2012, to learn more about matriarchal societies.
Shortly after our meeting I became pregnant. She answered my
questions on a beach in Sumatra in the winter of 2014.
María: Anne, could you tell me where you live, and how everything
began for you?
Anne: I am currently living in the small village of Nagari Sungai
Pinang, in West Sumatra. The village is about 2 hours from
Padang, the capital of Western Sumatra. I quit Paris in 2011 to
follow my husband here and live in Indonesia. I used to live in Paris
and work in a big health insurance company. I loved Paris and all
its ease. I was a working and city girl.
I met Ricky, my husband, in May of 2010 when I spent a
sabbatical year in Indonesia. I was studying Indonesian languages
at Pakuan university in Bogor, on the island of Java. I had lot of
time to travel, so I decided to go to west Sumatra to follow my
dream and meet the Mentawai tribe. There, I met Ricky. We fell in
love and got married six months later. I went back to France for few
months and in June 2011 decided to quit my Parisian life and move
to a small, remote Minangkabau village. I thought about it and
decided that life is short, so why not try out a new life and new
experiences.
María: I have always been very interested in the few matriarchal
societies that are still alive in this world. Some ethnographers
would say that matriarchal societies do not exist, and that there are
only matrilineal societies, but to me those are unimportant question
more related to semantics and translation. For example, I have
often read that the Minangkabau people are matrilineal to the
extent that property and land are passed down from mother to
daughter, while they are patriarchal because religious and political
affairs are delegated to men. I think this point of view is too
Western-centric. Religious and political affairs may be the concern
 of men for other reasons: maybe they’re considered to be too
unimportant for women to deal with. A matriarchal society is not the
opposite of a patriarchal one (it would be like saying that feminism
is the opposite of sexism, and thus aims for women to be superior
to men).
What do you think about the matriarchies that are alive today?
Could you explain in your words how the Minangkabau matriarchal
society works?
Anne: They’re really interesting questions and I hope I can make
myself understood. What word would I use to define the
Minangkabau people? I would say “ tolerance” because here men
and women are absolutely equals. Religion and tradition (traditional
Minangkabau culture is called Adat) coexist. Adat is often even
stronger than their religion. Women are really powerful and they
inherit land, houses, and the family’s name. They are the ones who
keep and spend the money. Men usually work and bring the money
to their wives. Men also have a degree of power: all traditional
meetings or ceremonies (like weddings, etc…) can’t be performed
without them.
On the other hand, they aren’t that different from any other small
village. Women tend to stay at home and raise the kids, cook, and
clean the house while the men work. At night, it is only men who go
out and play cards in the village cafe. It’s like that because it’s a
small village, I guess it would be very different in cities.
The big difference between Europe and here is that men don’t
inherit anything. If they marry a Minangkabau woman, they move in
to her house. If they divorce, men go back to their mothers. Nothing
belongs to them.
María: You´ve been a mother among the Minangkabau. How have
you lived out your experience of motherhood, giving birth, and
bringing up your child among the Minangkabau?
Anne: I have a profound interviewer. I’ll be very honest: it was very
difficult for me. First of all, Alicia´s birth was difficult. She was born
via c-section, and while everything was ok medically, after her birth,
the medical staff took her to another room for 7 hours. I didn’t see
my baby for 7 hours. She born at 12: 30 AM and I didn’t see her
 until 7 AM the next morning. It was traumatic for the two of us.
To this day I suffer because of that separation, and I know Alicia
does too.
In the clinic, they didn’t let my husband take care of her and help
the nurse change her diapers or bathe her, and so on. They also
gave her formula while she was away from me, when I had wanted
to breastfeed her. She was also vaccinated without me knowing
about it, and I am really opposed to vaccination.
I wasn’t able to hold my baby during her first few hours of life. I
wanted her on my breast and on my body, but it wasn’t possible.
Instead, she was left alone in a room, crying in a plastic bed. She
cried all she could, alone and abandoned.
Now she is 3 years old and still can’t sleep at night. She wakes
up at around 12:30 AM or 1 AM. It’s no coincidence. I still cry when
I think about this period of time.
María: I am really sorry about what happened, Anne. I hope that you
may be able to heal that wound, these terrible injustices together,
so that our daughters will not have to go through this pain
themselves. We must fight for a world where birth is respected and
honored, and mother and child are never purposefully separated.
Anne: So I hope. I also had to deal with another problem. Here, in
Minangkabau society, it is the women of the family who take care of
the newborns: grandmothers, aunts, etc. Some women of Ricky’s
family came to our house to help. For them it was just normal and
they were happy to do it. For me, it was a big intrusion into my life.
After having been separated for 7 hours from my baby, I needed to
prove to myself that I could take care of her and protect her. I felt
like the help was too much, and like they wanted take away my
motherly role. They often came into my room in the middle of the
night to rock Alicia to sleep, even though Ricky was there and
could help me (I couldn’t really move because of my c-section).
They would also come in and bathe her, somewhat rudely or
violently, when Ricky could have done it.
I tried to manage the situation and not complain, but it was too
much. I suffered a lot because of it. Ricky and I had lots of fights at
that time because he didn’t really understand me. A question of
 motherly instinct….
María: The first months were also difficult for me and my partner. We
are so emotionally fragile during postpartum. Each woman has
different feelings and sensations after giving birth. It’s hard to
accompany her without judgment.
Anne: After that, it was hard for me to let any woman approach
Alicia. They told me how to raise her according to their culture and
way of life, but I had my own ideas and didn’t want to follow their
advice. It was my own form of rebellion. It took me eighteen months
to feel better, and now I don’t have any problem with Ricky’s sisters
or any other woman.
The good thing: the breastfeeding. I breastfed Alicia and they
were very happy with that. It’s very common here, up until the baby
turns two years old, not so after this age. She’s now three, and still
breastfeeds at night. I must look so odd to people living here.
María: How are gender issues approached in Minangkabau society?
Is there a space for an alternative to the male/female binary? Is is
possible to have a queer gender space?
Anne: In my point of view, the gender issue is still taboo in
Minangkabau society. So is homosexuality and bisexuality. I’ve also
never met any transgender person here. I know some people who
are gay and they are well accepted, but it’s always seen as a joke.
When gay people came to our village, people just started laughing.
They joke around a lot with them, though I have never seen any
bad things happened or any insults thrown around.
I think the jokes are a bit too much. The gay people here play with
that too, of course. It’s kind of like a play, where everybody plays a
role. I’m bisexual, so your question really cuts to the quick. No one
here knows I’m bisexual, except for my partner.
María: The Minangkabau are Islamic but also follow their ethnic
traditions (Adat). The Minangkabau Adat was derived from animist
and Hindu-Buddhist beliefs that existed before the arrival of Islam.
So it’s a culture that has really been able to maintain matriarchal
structure while embracing new cultures and beliefs. For many
people it’s difficult to believe that a matriarchal society can be also
 Islamic... but why not? Islam is about love and respect, and so is
matriarchy. What’s your opinion on this?
Anne: I agree with you that Islam is about love and respect. They
combine Islam and Adat very well. Adat existed first, so that’s why
the Minangkabau people are so strongly attached to their tradition.
They’re closer to it than Islam, I think. All of them believe in Allah
but not all follow the “rules” of praying 5 times a day or fasting 1 full
month. They don’t follow any Islamic rules in their daily lives, but
they follow all the rules of Adat. Kids also learn Adat at school.
Even then, I can say that Adat is less strong than before. Times are
changing and the younger generations are less interested in things
like that.
 A Guide for a Queer Matriarchy
by M L
(published on Maríallopis.com, 2011)

I about Matriarchal societies as some utopia

belonging to a remote past, which was, of course, oh-so-much-
better. It was all about feminist nostalgia. So I was gladly surprised
when I discovered that I was wrong, as there are many matriarchal
societies living in the world right now. They are endangered, of
course they are, but they are there. And it is not about power shifting
from men to women. It is about different priorities.
It is about escaping the heteronormative model and building
another type of society around other values, which we are going to
explore in this lecture. It is about denying patriarchal
heteronormative capitalism in a time when the financial and social
crisis that we are living makes it more necessary than ever.
The Mosuo are a community living around lake Lugu, between the
provinces of Yunnan and Sichuan, in south-east China, who are
about 50.000 people. The Minangkabau are a community in west
Sumatra (Indonesia) of four million people.
Modern anthropology denies the existence of matriarchal societies,
as they are looking for a society is which power control is reversed
and therefore men are oppressed by women. But this is not
Matriarchy. Queer theory and postporn feminism is definitely going to
help us understand.
1.- The family unit is built around mothers.
“People should never marry, as love is like the seasons of the year,
they come and go.” Yang Erche Namu, Mosuo woman.
The matriarch is the boss, and she is chosen among the family
members. Children, cousins, aunts and grandparents live together in
the same household. Children that are born live in the maternal
house are brought up collectively within the family. As a result you
will find that the family is always present and available, regardless of
the romantic relationships you may have in your life.
 Nowadays our families are built upon the concept of romantic love
and this is quite a new form arrangement in history. Pre arranged
marriage was the norm till few years ago and in a way it seems to
me like a more truthful and sincere option if you choose marriage as
the main family unit in a society. Mosuo people do not have
marriage. Sexuality is outside the family unit.
Therefore, they have the freedom to fall in love without fearing that,
if things go wrong, they will lose their house or child custody. They
do not have to fight for the right of gay and lesbian couples to marry.
If we look closely to the institution of marriage we will see that it is
the origin of all evils.
2. A room of one’s own.
When Mosuo girls are around 13 or 14 years old, they get access to
a room of their own. This room has two doors, one has access to the
interior of the common home and the second door to the outside.
The girls have total autonomy in deciding who enters the room. The
only rule is that their guests have to leave before dawn. And they
also have to be discreet about the visitors. They can bring different
partners every night or, on the contrary, they can share their bed with
the same person every night. They are not expected to commit to a
relationship and the children that they may conceive will be brought
up in the communal house, with the help of their mothers, brothers,
sisters and all the community.
This room is called “Babahuago” in Mosuo language and it means
flower room.
Would it be possible to create a queer flower room? The flower
room is the hostess, so let’s imagine that any child in the family who
feels like receiving and hosting, no matter which gender or which
anatomy, could have a flower room. And privacy is a rule, so you can
receive whoever you want in your flower room, men, women and
everything in between.
3.- Women do it better.
In matriarchal societies, work is the responsibility of women. There is
a phrase that is repeated in all the books I read about the Mosuo,
and it says: “Women do it better”. They do it better because their
interest is more focused in caring for the well-being of their children
and the community, and not so much in capital accumulation. They
do it better because they are mothers and they care for the well-
being of the children. And we are going to go deeper in the
motherhood concept. Because Matriarchal societies are societies
that put motherhood in a central position inside the society.
4.- Multiple paternity.
Among the Mosuo, men are considered to have no parental
responsibilities towards children that they might conceive during the
visits to the flower rooms. Mosuo men are responsible of the children
of their sisters and their household and family. So the paternal
contribution is detached from biological parenthood. In Mosuo the
word “Awu” means both: father and uncle. It makes sense, as in fact,
the children of your sisters are children of your own blood.
“When Paul Le Jeune, French Jesuit missionary in French Canada
in XVII , talked about the dangers of depraved infidelity to an indian,
he got a good lesson on parenting. The missionary told the indian
that it was not all right that their women loved other men, as it often
happens amongst them. He explained him that in that way, he could
not be sure of being the father of his son, who was present. The
Indian replied: “You say silly things. You french people only love your
own children, but we love all the children of our tribe.”
Sex at Dawn. Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá.
This type of social organization we live in began 8.000 years before
Christ, and given that anatomically modern humans have existed for
at least 200,000 years, it becomes only a 5% of our collective
experience. It is not that much. So, let’s not accept it as the only
possible reality. This is a recent invention, we settled down in a piece
of land, we invented agriculture and we domesticated animals, and
therefore we started to accumulate possessions which we were not
able to carry when we were nomads. We invented inheritance and
men wanted to know who were their biological children in order to
leave their properties to them. And the only way of knowing if this
child is yours, guys, is to control women’s sexuality through marriage
and monogamy. Patriarchal society is based upon the control of
women’s sexuality through marriage, placing women at the disposal
of men sexually and reproductively.
5.- Rejection of aggression and non consensual government.
The head of each Mosuo village is a man chosen by the community.
As Ricardo Coler explains in his book El reino de las mujeres: “One
of his main functions is to mediate between neighbors. To be
aggressive, inside or outside the community is considered shameful.
Violence leads to rejection. Any overreaction, especially the use of
strength, is not permitted. What in our world can be seen as courage
or even worse, virility, they find it intolerable. So before disputes get
complicated, they turn to the village chief to impose his authority, in
order to peacefully mediate.”
The Minangkabau people in west Sumatra believe that no sort of
government is possible, as any decision to be taken must be
consensual.
On the other hand, Mosuo people think that men have the ability to
make big decisions. Coler: “Women handle the everyday life and
manage the money. But the big decisions, such as a trip, selling an
animal, the construction of a house or something of the sort, is not a
women’s business. It is difficult to understand for our western minds
but they do not consider the so-called “big decisions” to be
important.”
6.- Men need to wear a cap, or whoever wants to have a sexual
encounter in the neighborhood.
On the outside door of the flower room there is a hook where night
visitors can put their caps. This is a way of knowing when a room is
already busy. I guess that if you want some extra visitors, you can
always hide the caps. Or if you don’t want to have a visitor, you can
always use an old cap and hang it there for the night. Night
encounters are arranged during the day anyway. In a queer
matriarchy transgendering would as easy as taking a simple cap in
order to relocate yourself socially and sexually.
7.- Respect for individual freedom and social rejection to jealousy.
It is forbidden to talk at home about love or romantic relationships in
order to avoid conflicts and jealousy. Everybody is expected to be
discreet. Due to the fact that everybody can have as many
relationships as desired, it is requested to respect the intimacy of the
other members of the community. To show jealousy openly is
considered aggressive as you are intruding in the sacred autonomy
of other person.
In my many years of pro sex feminist and queer struggle, I have
always spoken up. In our patriarchal world, we are in need of
bringing to light our non normative desires. It has been challenging
for me to think of a society where you fuck freely throughout your life
thanks to being discreet. In a queer matriarchy we wouldn’t need to
speak up, we would only need to fuck.
8.- Walking marriages or even better, no marriage at all.
The Mosuo people do have long life relationships. Western
anthropologists call them “walking marriages”, though there is no
marriage at all. The partners may see each other every night, but
they will never live together and the offspring will be brought up in
the mother´s home. The relationship can last as long as they want
and when it ends, that’s it. No house to split, no economical
arrangements, no child custody nightmares, no children undergoing
traumatic divorce processes.
Relationships between people who have a great age difference are
not approved because they could be father and child.
9.- The well being of the offspring as the base of the society.
Mosuo women take care of their babies for about one year after
giving birth. Afterwards they return to work and grandparents and
aunts take care of the child. The well being of the offspring is the
base of the matriarchal society. Matriarchy is not the inverse of
patriarchy, but a society that aims for the well being of all the children
in the community.
This is the main aspect of Matriarchy and the only one that truly
defines it. So in Queer Matriarchy this would also be the main goal of
the whole community: the well being of children.
The way children are brought into the world and raised is
fundamental for the sustenance of patriarchy. We give birth and raise
our children in patriarchy, we are raised also following patriarchal
rules. We are disconnected from our true emotions. It is the
devastation, not only of our true loving nature, but also of our
environment. We are destroying the planet as we are destroying our
emotional tissue.
Look at the way women give birth: in extreme pain (whereas a few
minority of women are able to have an orgasm in labor), children are
systematically separated form the mother when being born (when it
is know that the baby needs to be close to the mother in order to
start breastfeeding), bottles substituting mother’s milk, children being
forced to spend long hours sitting quietly in schools. We deny
children’s sexuality and suppress its expression, teaching kids that it
something to be ashamed of. Women sexuality is devastated,
because it is denied since infancy, girls are not allowed to explore it
with games.
10.- Ecology.
The Lugu Lake symbolizes the Mother Goddess for Mosuo people.
The mountain that goes high upon it, Ganmo, is the Love Goddess.
All matriarchal societies have a deep respect for nature and the
desire to live harmoniously in it without any violence, either against
people or nature. Sexual repression, patriarchal capitalism and
destruction of Earth comes all together. Queer matriarchy is
ecofeminist.
* When I talk about men and women in this guide, I mean both bio men/women and non bio
men/women, as well as people whose gender identity is flexible, trans and intersex.
 salto de página

A S
and B

A S B S
Ecosexuality, motherhood and ecofeminism

R of subverting
motherhood takes me, time and time again, to the same place. Each
time I get there, I’m pleasantly surprised again. At the start of this
journey, I didn’t expect to end up talking about ecofeminism and
ecosexuality so much. But there is no doubt about it: living
motherhood out as a blissful experience takes one, time and time
again, to reconnect with our corporality, with the sensuality inherent
in our bodies, with our wild and free nature. And that’s where the
deep connection with nature lies.
Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens have a project titled Sexecology
(www.sexecology.org) in which they put on workshops,
performances, and marriages with natural elements. The goal is to
recover the lost connection between sexuality and ecology. This
buried connection is something I consider fundamental to
motherhood as a subversive act, given that it offers up a much more
complex and encompassing vision of sexuality. There are lots of
stages within the world of sexuality, and in order to live out maternity
and parenting in the most complete way, one must work to
understand and enjoy them.
This is why I want to end the book with this interview. Because I
think Annie and Beth have been able to come to his same
conclusion after having spent many years studying sexuality at its
deepest levels through the field of art. I think they have a lot to say
about motherhood and sexuality, despite—or perhaps because of—
not being biological mothers. As we know, one can be a mother
millions of different ways. I think they are mothers, one can sense
their maternal love, in the same way that I’m sure you will feel too
throughout this interview. One can feel the universal mother in them,
one which is ecosexual and full of joy.
Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens are artists and subversive,
ecosexual mothers. Beth is also a professor of art at the University of
California, and Annie is a key figure in the postporn movement. She
was actually the pioneer of this field when in the nineties she began
to put on artistic performances focused on her experience as a sex
worker and porn actress.
We met for the first time in Berlin in 2006, at the Tim Stüttgen’s
mythic event—the Post Porn Politics Symposium. We had run into
each other at various other events before including weddings,
performances, and other postpornographic events, and we had
many friends in common. Our mutual friend Tim Stüttgen left this
world in 2013, leaving us with a legacy of love and post-porn we
carry with us in our hearts and pussy. We talked over Skype,
between their house in California and my house in Vancouver, in
January 2015.
María: I like to think of the earth as , a mother I’d like to fuck,
and I love that part of your work on ecosexuality that talks about
how earth should be as a lover, not a mother.
Annie: We love being ecosexuals! We’ve found our vocation. Most
people imagine that earth as a mother because it feeds us, it takes
care of us, but we feel like the mother is in menopause. And now
she is tired and she has taken care of us for so long, and we are
shitting on it, literally, in a bad way not in a good way, so the Earth
needs more love. So our activist strategy is to imagine the earth as
a lover, so maybe people will treat it better. Just like how with some
lovers there are relationships that are truly reciprocal and
egalitarian, we think the earth needs to feel what it gives
reciprocated, to be told nice things and made love to. We are trying
to create a more equal relationship with the earth as lovers.
However, the earth is still also mother for us, and also father, it’s
queer.
Beth: And our tranny lover!
Annie: It’s a transgender, multi-gender relationship.
Beth: Multispecies too!
Annie: Ecosex is based on a lot of fantasy and imagination. Why do
sexual fantasies only have to exist between humans? That’s a very
limited way of looking at things. When I see a cherry tree covered
in the most electric pink flowers, I see it as a tree wearing the
prettiest lingerie. When I see the ocean, I see a lover with whom I
want to get naked, go under, and taste it all over with my tongue.
Beth: It’s about intergenerational love. It has to do with how old the
earth is and how young human beings are. The older body is the
tired body, the diseased and destroyed body needs as much love
as the young beautiful body, right? The earth is also a (a
grandmother I’d like to fuck)!
María: In which way do you think of yourselves as mothers?
Annie: Sometimes we’re mothers to earth, like when we protest
about the destruction of our planet. We hate to see our baby
abused. We are also mothers to a lot of young artists who are
mothers themselves, like Madison Young and Sadie Lune. We are
like their porn art moms. So we like to nurture them however we
can—they are our chosen, extended family! Well and you are too!
We also like to see ourselves as your grandmothers, as !
María: It’s my pleasure and the biggest honor to feel your motherly
love, Annie and Beth. Thank you. You give so much love to the
world, and its really so generous.
Many people I have interviewed for this book talk about
reconnecting with nature love, and ecology because of the
experience of motherhood. You have made this connection through
art perhaps because of your mothering of other artist mothers. You
also have a deep understanding of sexuality, and I think that that’s
really where one can begin to understand nature.
You have performed a lot of beautiful weddings (eco weddings)
as a way of honoring the earth, the sky, the sea, snow, the rocks,
carbon, and the love that exists between people and in connection
to the earth. Tell me a bit about the importance of ritual in your
performances.
Beth: I think the significance of our weddings is that in some way
they try to create a space for people to connect as communities,
and for these communities to connect with the planet earth.
Ecology is a huge community. We really have to take care and love
and honor our community, and we have to make space for diversity
within these communities.
Everything counts, it’s not just our legal partner. I mean my
partner does count for a lot but... it’s not just that. Communities are
people we don’t even know! It’s people we have just met, everyone
is a potential community. Our eco-weddings also introduce people
to ecosexuality, because we invite them to vow on a specific aspect
of nature to love, honor, and respect. So that whole vow aspect
romantically connects these people with nature and our
ecosystems.
 Getting back to the wedding aspect, it’s important to remember
that it’s not just one big important wedding day. I think we need to
renew those vows of love as often as possible. I think that because
our culture fixates on the idea of one wedding day as the most
important day in someone’s life, we separate ourselves from our
community in the act of marriage. So we have to redo and
celebrate these weddings over and over again, in order to reaffirm
and honor this connection with earth and our community.
Annie: So far we’ve celebrated nineteen large-scare eco-weddings in
nine different countries, and dozens of smaller-scale ones. We
don’t ask for presents, though we ask different artists and non-
artists to collaborate. Every time we do a wedding we have a
person object to the marriage in the ‘speak now or forever hold
your peace’ part. There’s a lot to object to in normal weddings, and
in this one too we give these voices room to speak.
A big part of our work over the last nine years has been trying to
make an environmental movement that subversive mothers,
queers, drag queens, sex workers... can relate to and be
comfortable in. So our weddings are for that community of people
that live on the margins of society to come together and care for
the environment. We want to make our environment more sexy, fun
and diverse. We are in a way mothering the earth as well. We are
very protective of the earth, the earth is our baby. We play different
roles and use different archetypes at different moments. We
anthropomorphize earth, we give it human qualities in the same
way we give people qualities attributed to earth. We’re always are
of the fact that we’re made of water, dust, minerals, bacteria….
Annie: Do you know that once when we were doing a performance
about motherhood Beth got pregnant? When we first got together
we were so in love we thought we would be good parents. So we
went to the sperm bank, but we couldn’t decide which sperm to
pick. So we did a performance art piece where we did a sperm
dancing contest.
Beth: We picked ten people from the audience, each one
representing a different sperm donor. We gave them each a hat
shaped like a sperm, and let them dance until we picked a winner
to give us his sperm. But it didn’t work.
Annie: So then we tried it with fresh sperm from a couple of guys,
and Beth finally got pregnant. It was the donation from the artist
Keith Hennessy that did it. But her eggs were too old and she lost
it. But that’s ok, it wasn’t our destiny. We had a great time
throughout that year trying to fertilize
Beth: Our art projects are our babies. Our new dog Butch is, in a
way, our son. He’s a one year old black lab, and we’re both its
mothers and lovers. We also mother our white peacock Albert, our
sequoia trees, the stray cats in the neighbourhood, our zucchinis.
We think about mothers only as those who take care of us, but
really they’re the source of life too. I think that’s where the ecology
connection is strongest. We need to stop seeing the earth as a
resource, we need to see it as source of life. And that is a subtle
shift but also a huge change. I mean, a lot of people don’t respect
their mother. I think it’s really important to know what gives you life
and to love that source.
María: The bonds between a mother and baby are very important.
That special relationship is somewhat sexual, but not in the way we
adults understand sexuality.
Beth: Yeah, one could say that the links between a mother and child
are ecosexual. Eco-sex goes beyond genital sex; it even goes past
romance.
Annie: Ecosex can just simply be an exchange of sensual energy
like smelling, touching, tasting, seeing… it’s really just seeing
sexuality and sensuality in everything that surrounds you, all the
time. That’s what we feel and define as ecosex.
María: Your work is based on a very deep understanding of sexuality.
Annie: Yes, sex has been my job for 42 years now, and the best is
yet to come. It’s a scientific fact, for example, that babies
masturbate in utero. So choosing to not see your baby as a sexual
being is to negate reality. If you’re really a good mother you smell
your baby, you smell different their poop, you feel their skin, their
little head.... It’s really very sensual relationship
Beth: And they feel you up too! It’s an exchange, we don’t just take
from them.
Annie: Of course, we are all connected, we all form an inseparable
 part of earth. We’re all water, minerals, stardust, and so we are all
babies, mothers, lovers to each other.
Beth: We’re all each other. There aren’t that many sources of .
Like it all came from a few beings.
Annie: Life-force energy is sexual energy. When a rosebush
explodes into roses, those are its genitals we see. When we smell
the roses, we’re smelling its reproductive parts, its pussy and
sperm. If you have an ecosexual gaze, you see sex everywhere!
It’s not necessarily genital, but a sensual energy too.
María: How does your work continue to evolve?
Beth: We flow towards water! We’re gonna be the wet and wild
ecosexuals. We just came out with a new website,
www.theecosexuals.org where we have published our new movie
and the series of performances we’ve done that focus on pleasure,
politics, and water pollution. Water makes us wet!
Beth: I think it’s really great that you’re a mom, and that you’re now
feeling the connection with ecology thanks to maternity. That’s so
great!
Beth: We float in our mother’s womb as babies, and as adults we
float in our own bodies. Our bodies are about 60-70% water. We’re
floating in our own skin!
Annie: Or one could say that our bodies float over water. Ecosex
poses some interesting questions. Like does water consent to
being used when people masturbate with shower heads? Can we
ask trees if they want to be hugged or not? How can they respond?
Is everything really ecosex? When we make love to someone, is
that just us making waves and splashing?
María: What are you working on now?
Annie: We’re currently organizing a seven week road trip involving a
bunch of performances where we will shoot the documentary Here
Come the Ecosexuals! We’re also organizing a big ecosex group
for San Francisco’s Gay Pride Parade as a protest—we want them
to add an E for ecosexual in the 1 acronym. We also
have a contract with the University of Minnesota Press to publish a
book about our work together over the last twelve years titled
Assuming the Ecosexual Position. It’s going to be the best publicity
 we could have dreamed of.
We’re also writing a book about female orgasms with an editorial
called Greenery, in which we use a lot of nature metaphors to
explain how to have a lots of different types of orgasms. Beth is
also finishing her PhD dissertation on environmental arts, focusing
on the work of Joseph Beuys, Helen Mayer, and Newton Harrison.
So there’s definitely a lot of interest in the ecosexual work we’re
doing. We’re also creating a Pollination Pod in a 1976 Perris Pacer
R.V. that’s being painted bright blue right now as we speak. It’ll be
our ‘mobile investigative ecosex vehicle’ and an art installation.
Beth: We just got some money in order to create an investigative
center at the University of California Santa Cruz, where I teach.
We’re calling it the E.A.R.T.H. (Environmental Art, Research,
Theory and Happenings) laboratory. This will be our academic
contribution, our ecosex program that bring together art, theory,
and activism. We’re also buying some land to create an ecosexual
artists retreat. We would actually love it if you could come down to
do some workshops! We’re tired of traveling and want the world to
come to us now.
Annie: Let’s do an ecosexual motherhood workshop! Do you identify
as ecosexual now?
María: Yes, of course! I love the idea of a subversive and ecosexual
maternity!
Annie: It’s good that cool people like you come out as ecosexual!
There are different definitions of ecosexual, and lots of people do it
very differently. For some people it’s about polyamory, or
something like that, with a bit of a new age vibe. Or for some it just
means being involved in anything that involves defending the
environment. The term ecosex is still being defined and created.
We try to make our definition of it a bit queer—whore—punk.
That month we spent with you and Diana Pornoterrorista in
Barcelona and Gijon in 2011 was very important for us. It was great
to all work together inthe Centro de Arte Laboral with all the artists
Pedro Soler brought together for the ecosex workshop and our
wedding to carbon. Spain was incredible and we really felt
influenced by the queer-punk-anarchist aesthetics and attitudes.
We didn’t know if you guys would take to the idea of ecosex at first!
María: It was a great energy exchange!
Beth: It seems like a lot of those people have now left Barcelona.
María: Because there is nothing to do in Spain right now, the
economic crisis created a really difficult situation.
Annie: I hear you. San Francisco has gotten so expensive that a lot
of our friends have moved out. Even luxury escorts can’t afford to
live there, not to mention artists and activists…
Beth: If it weren’t for my job as a professor we’d be down in the toilet
and I would be doing sex work!
Annie: Beth would be a great sex worker. Or a great pimp! I think
pimping is probably illegal in the U.S. now, and if not, it will be soon
if things continue like they do.
María: Any last thoughts on maternity and ecosexual love?
Annie: I would say motherhood is extremely ecosexual, and being a
baby is ecosexual. You know we are born orgasmically, we have
these sorts of energy releases as babies—it’s all in the Kinsey
report. But diapers are put on babies immediately, and they can’t
touch themselves for years. That’s pretty sad. I think that is
important to take the diaper off the baby every once in awhile so
they can discover their genitals. Because babies do have orgasms,
and they do masturbate!
María: Of course they do! And women do experience orgasms while
giving birth!
Beth: Some do, others don’t.
Annie: It’s a shame Beth and I couldn’t have tried it. But we also
enjoy lots of other fun and eco-sexy things. We continue to give
birth to a movement, or at least accompany it. We gave birth to a
new field of study —sexecology— that explores the spaces where
sexology ad ecology meet. We enlighten eachother with multiple
orgasms.
Beth: We all have a lot of nature fetishes, from the most tame to the
most extreme. We massage earth without feet, we give pleasure to
the ground, and we admire the shape and sight of earth….
Annie: Beth and our mutual friend Helena Wilson ran naked through
a field of nettles and got covered in red welts. Ecosex can be super
 kinky!
Beth: When we’re performing one of our weddings to the earth, we
always pronounce: ‘I promise to love you until death joins us
forever.’
Annie: When we die and they bury our bodies, they’ll decompose
and give life to other trees, magic mushrooms, and microscopic
creatures. I used to want to be cremated because I didn’t like the
idea of being eaten by insects, but now I’m rethinking it.
Beth: Our dog Butch needs our maternal care now. He wants us to
throw the ball to him.
María: Great! You wonderful s, go take care of Butch and play
fetch!
1. lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual, ally, pansexual.
 Conclusion

Y me to write a conclusion to this book, to give it

a final voice, and to define what it is to be a subversive mother. And
it drives me up the wall, because I’m not good with words and I am
even worse at defining things. I brought together all the people who
make up this book because I find their way of approaching
motherhood to be inspiring; because they challenge the system from
a place of joy and bliss; because they practice radical politics in their
everyday lives. Ecstatic births, shared parenting and artistic creation,
parenting and sexuality, parthenogenesis, trans* parenting, lactivism,
matriarchal activism, shared breastfeeding, traditional midwifery,
trans-hack-feminist motherhoods, matriarchal societies, maternity
and capitalism, maternity and ecofeminism….
Yes, María, but: “what are subversive motherhoods?”
Well, they all are. They all are, every form of motherhood that
exists in our world is subversive. Tell me if you can find one that slots
in, perfectly, with the hegemonic definition we’ve been given. It’s
impossible to fit with what they—the medical, political, and social
institutions—have tried to sell to us. Each experience of motherhood
challenges the established order in its own way. It blows the world up
and births it again. And it’s there, in same rupture, that new types of
societies are bred. The patriarchal and capitalist society in which we
live has its days numbered; it’s all cycles, the world is made up of
cycles, and this one is coming to an end. The paradigm shift we’re
living through now with our motherhoods shows us that we are ready
for another form of social organization.
I’ve left out a lot of people I wanted to interview. I think I could
continue forever until I interviewed all the people in the world who
are mothers; who take care, give birth to, parent, become pregnant,
have abortions, grow, die, and feed life. Life and death, everything is
part of the same cycle. And whoever wants to get out of it, write me
a book and explain it to me, because I haven’t met yet other cycle
than that of continuous birth and death.
 To My Mother

S I was doing one of those mad, Valencia all-

nighters. I ended up fucking with an ex-boyfriend with whom I had
lived a year in a flat in Ruzafa and with whom I had shared many
beautiful things. He came deliberately inside of me and when I
rebuked him, he told me that he had done on purpose and that I
deserved it. He was hurt about me ending our relationship some
years ago, and this was his way of having his revenge.
Thanks to feminism I could take the morning-after pill and that was
the end of it. But even if it hadn’t worked, even I had ended up
pregnant, I could have had an abortion. I was lucky. But many
women aren’t so lucky. All around the world we have to face rape,
forced marriages, and the lack of contraceptive options… and that’s
when motherhood becomes an unavoidable destiny.
My own mother got pregnant very young and against her will. Her
teacher, a priest in the religious school she attended, fucked her
regularly using private tutoring as an excuse, until she got pregnant
with me. Those motherhoods carry with them the burden of the
punishment that our society inflicts on these women and their
bastard babies.
I want to dedicate this book to my mother and to every woman who
couldn’t choose her own motherhood, who had a painful experiences
forced on them, and who don’t make up this book. This goes to them
and their babies. I hope life may give us tools to heal our wounds so
as to be able to create a new world together, where motherhood and
life will always be pure pleasure.
 Glossary

H the definitions of some words used throughout

the various interviews. In a lot of the definitions, it’s the interviewees
themselves who define the words, as they are experts on the
subjects.
Doula:
Ana Claramonte defines a doula as a woman who has some
experience with motherhood, and who accompanies (without
passing judgment) a woman’s pregnancy, birth, and postpartum
period. She also closely watches over miscarriages and abortions.
She relies on information gathered from personal experience and on
her professional formation in order to best do her job. She never
imposes on or judges the decisions made by the woman or family;
she solely accompanies them. As her work comes from a place of
humility, she constantly listens and checks her own position in order
to best respect and honor natural processes and female sexuality.
Ecofeminism:
This is the shared ground of feminism and ecology. It points to the
fact that the exploitation of earth and of women come hand in hand,
as both are the base for a patriarchal and capitalist society. Radical
ecofeminism entails a rediscovery of matriarchal values and the
collapse of capitalist society.
Extinctionist:
A person who considers humanity to be a scourge on the planet, and
so chooses to not have children in order to prevent the reproduction
of the human species.
Gender identity/gender expression/sexual orientation/biological sex:
Gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation and biological
sexuality are concepts that exist independently of one another. On
one side is gender identity (woman, queer, or man) which refers to
how one feels and thinks about oneself. On another side is gender
expression (feminine, androgynous, or masculine) which is how you
choose to portray yourself to the world around you, based on
traditional gender norms. Biological sex—or animal sex as I call it—
(female, intersexual, or male) is defined by our sexual and
reproductive organs and our hormonal levels. Finally, sexual
orientation (heterosexual, bisexual, homosexual, and queer if we
want to step outside the rigidness of these labels) has to do with who
or what kind of a person you are attracted to physically, spiritually
and emotionally.
Intersexuality:
On the blog mibebeintersexual.wordpress.com, intersexuality is
explained in a really beautiful way:
‘As the parents of an intersexual baby, we’re going to try to explain what, from our point of
view, this characteristic of our baby has means. In our view, it’s just one more
characteristic that defines our baby, like its eye color, hair color, skin tone, etc…
Why do we want to give our own definition?
Because we think that, like the majority of intersexual people, medical definitions do not fit
their experience. Doctors only talk about pathologies, disorders, problems, etc. And that’s
without even mentioning those worse words we have come to hear about our child. We
like to think this misinformation comes from a place of ignorance about the subject.
Physically, there’s a lot of diversity within intersexuality, but all of them center on the fact
that the individual’s genitals and reproductive organs aren’t either totally masculine nor
totally feminine; they can be a bit of both, neither one nor the other. They don’t fully fit into
what is recognized as male or female; rather they are in the middle of both. We think this
is itself important given that it shows how genders are not that far from each other, and no
one is either completely male or female.
In terms of gender identity, intersex peoples are also very diverse. They can identify as
women or men or neither one nor the other, but something in between.’

MaPa, Ma-Paternity:
MaPa is a term many people choose as an alternative to the
mother/father binary. If a person doesn’t identify as a man or as a
woman, they’re also not comfortable with the binaryness of
mother/father. Sometimes, when people refer to their
fatherhood/motherhood in English they use the neutral term
parenting. But paternity in Spanish—and in English—refers to the
latin word pater and so loses its generic nature. For this reason, in
this book I’ve decided to translate the most neutral form of the word
as Ma-Paternity, because it seems more in line with how the people
in this book use it and approaches the message they want us to get.
Ecstatic birth/orgasmic birth:
Childbirth in which the woman experiences pleasure throughout her
contractions that may or may not lead to orgasm.
Birth in which the mother experiences pleasure in the contractions,
pushing, and any other phase of the birthing process, that can lead
to orgasm and may or may not be combined with pain sensations.
Postporn
Annie Sprinkle, the mother and grandmother of the postporn
movement, defines it as such:
“A Post Porn Modernist person creates sexually explicit material which is more artistic,
conceptual, experimental, political, or humorous than conventional porn. It tends to have a
critical sensibility and while it generally contains hardcore porn, it doesn’t center on
‘eroticism.’” Post porn modernism is the field in which a post porn modernist (post porn for
short) works.

Annie Sprinkle first coined the term post porn modernist in 1988 as
the title for her first solo play. She left her work as a conventional
porn actress in order to become a performance artist. Her play
coincided with the Dutch artist’s Wink Van Kempen’s exhibit in
Rotterdam Porn Modernism (1986). Both works involved
pornographic as well as artistic elements. Sprinkle traveled with Post
Porn Modernist for five years and went to over sixteen countries.
She also titled her autobiographical book Post Porn Modernist. The
increased popularization of her play/performance, the book, and her
as an artist became very popular, leading to the mainstream use of
the term.
Veronica Vera, Sprinkle’s longtime friend, frequent collaborator, and
the creator of the Finishing School for Boys who Want to Be Girls,
wrote the Post Porn Modernist Manifesto in 1989. This manifesto
was included by Sprinkle in all the programs for her performance:
“… we embrace our genitals as part of, not separate from, our spirit. We use sexually
explicit words, pictures, and artistic performances in order to relate our ideas and
emotions. We condemn the censoring of sexuality as anti-art and inhuman. We empower
ourselves through sex-positive attitudes. And with our love for our own sexual self we
 have fun, heal the world, and go on.”

Other artists and academics have adopted and have been adopted
by this term. A key example is Paul B. Preciado who defined post-
pornography in 2002 as ‘a series of performances, representations,
audiovisual practices, and other actions or activist texts that, inspired
by Annie Sprinkle’s text, decenter the dominant pornographic gaze,
question the normative codes of representation in porn, and create
new spaces for the production of feminist and queer bodies and
pleasures.’ In 2003, Preciado organized a ‘Post Porn Marathon’ in
the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Barcelona ( ) which
was “the first international meeting of artists, queer activists,
filmmakers, and theorists who follow Annie Sprinkle’s initiative and
work in post-pornography. “
The artist/theorist Tim Stüttgen organized the 2007
PostPornPolitics Conference in Berlin, and wrote a book with that
same name. He wrote: ‘Aligning herself with joy, independence, and
a willingness to take part in sexual exchange, Sprinkle made us think
about sex as a queer/feminist counter-pleasure, beyond the
discourses of victimhood, censoring, and taboo. Today, many
American and European artists, pornographers, and performance
groups define their work as post porn. This includes individuals and
groups as diverse as: Charles Gatewood, Post Op, Dr. Carol Queen,
Orgia, Girls Who Like Porno, Tina Butcher aka Madison Young,
Tristan Taormino, Sadie Lune, María Llopis, Diana Pornoterrorista
and Del LaGrace Volcano.
Other artists whose work could be described as post pornographic
are Marina Abramovic (Balkan Erotic Epoc), Ron Athey, Matthew
Barney, Fuck for Forest, Jeff Koons, and Cicciolina.”
Postpartum:
The period of time that immediately follows childbirth. In many
cultures it can be up to 40 days, and it can extend to be even more,
depending on the woman, the child, and their circumstances. It’s
very important to respect this as an vital period of time and to allow
the mother and child to enjoy the intimacy they need. It’s also very
important to take care of the woman in this period as birth and c-
sections leave one physically and emotionally tired, and it takes
some time for bodies (and selves) to recover.
Queer, the queer movement
For Paul B. Preciado, this term tries to delineate a:
“post-identitarian movement,” that is, a critical position that is aware of the processes of
exclusion and marginalization that all identitarian fictions create, within both heterosexual
societies and gay culture.’
Trans*
Raquel (Lucas) Platero Méndez defines trans* in her book
Trans*exualidades. Acompañamiento, factores de salud y recursos
educativos (Bellaterra 2014) (Transexualities: Acompaniment, Health
Factors, and Educational Resources).
“The use of the term trans* (with an asterix) is preferable as an umbrella term that can
include different gender identities and expressions such as trans, transexual, transgender,
etc… the asterix points to the heterogeneity of bodies, identities, and lifestyles that go
beyond imposed social binaries. Trans*, trans and transgender are self-labels defined by
their protagonists, in opposition to those that come from the medical sphere and define it
as a pathology. The asterix aims to show that there can be shared struggles as well as
diverging visions on what it means to be trans, trans*, transexual, or transgender.”

Transfeminism:
The feminist Laura Bugalho defines transfeminism as the sum of all
the struggles that originate in society’s margins and intelligently work
together in order to create links between trans, gay, lesbian, whore
and migrant networks, and operating from a feminist grounding.
 Índice
Prologue by R H C
Introduction
Interviews
Sarri Wilde: Ecstatic birth Maternity as a sphere of sexuality
A Á -E Creation and parenting in artistic practice
Motherhood’s self-portraits
A M Motherhood in a capitalist society
D L V Intersexuality and Gender Queer Parenting
M Y Feminism, pro-sexuality, pornography, and
maternity
E H Trans* fatherhood
M K Gender Queer Co-Parenting
P D Children’s sexualities Spontaneous abortion
An Easy (and Wild) Guide to Miscarriage by M L
(published on Mariallopis.com, 2011)
P P Traditional birth, natural gynecology
K K Transhackfeminist Motherhood: on the origins of
gynecology
E M Guijarro Lactivism
J R O Matriactivism
B I Co-breastfeeding Ecstatic birth, sexuality and
parenting
H T Parenting, maternity and sexuality
R A
Love, motherhood and feminist activism
F S Motherhood and decolonization Parthenogenesis
A I Today’s Matriarchal Societies
A Guide for a Queer Matriarchy by M L
(published on Maríallopis.com, 2011)
A S and B S Ecosexuality, motherhood and
ecofeminism
Conclusion
To My Mother
Glossary