Every feminist scholar interested in the spaces, practices, limits, and social meanings of motherhood will want to read this book. Irina Aristarkhova's erudite, intrepid exploration of the meaning of the matrix in philosophy, embryology, biomedicine, nursing, and performance art is a tour de force of feminist scholarship. Bringing together matter, mind, and new media, her book demonstrates how a full understanding of the matrix dramatically expands the meaning of hospitality itself.
Susan Squier, author of Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine Aristarkhova makes an original and fascinating contribution by spelling out the matrixial/maternal relation as a matter of hosting the other. She opens an alternative vision of self-other relations that redefines philosophical, technological, biomedical, and cultural/aesthetic vocabularies by challenging them to welcome the mother. Artists, thinkers, and scientists interested in the studies of generation, its matter and form, human-machine relation, and biomedical technologies will find this book indispensible and full of new ideas.
Faith Wilding, artist, Guggenheim Fellow, cofounder of subRosa, a cyberfeminist art collective, and professor emerita, School of the Art Institute of Chicago original and thought-provoking...
Luna Dolezal Hospitality and Society