Placenta To Go: Transcultural Birth Practices and Embodied Ecologies

• In Event: COMPOSTING Feminisms and Environmental Humanities 1: Decolonising Naturecultures

Abstract

The proposed piece utilizes radical new ecologies to explore cultural terrains of placentas and offer theories of dispossession from biopower. Based in ethnographic research with rural, indigenous midwives in Southern Uganda from 2010-2017, as well as anecdotal evidence from Los Angeles, CA, I consider where this life-generating organ is imbued with vast spiritual significance versus where it is bio-waste to be incinerated. The placenta is central to many indigenous systems of medicine and increasingly harnessed in spheres of mindful and alternative medicine. I re-conceptualize vitality in terms of self-formation, and move frameworks from productivity and labor to re-creation in an unfurling world capable of self-harmonizing. Placentas are buried in the earth and made into foods and medicines because of what they offer hormonally, nutritionally, ancestrally, and symbolically. With vast implications for theories of new materialisms and vibrant life as well as parallels to the human quest for self-sovereignty, I offer an exposé on generativity by way of the placenta.

I look at the placenta as a way to approach a reclaiming, re-naturalizing, and re-wilding of physiologies that decolonize the flesh with possibilities to re-inscribe our understandings of the body through feminist lens. The placenta is an agent of self-reliance, and this takes on particular meanings in precarious and violated regions of the world, which I address with regard to survivalist ethos from the anthropocene as well as environmental humanisms. I ask how the placenta and the edible, cyclical body can reimagine the medical body with enfleshed understanding and perceptive narratives.

Author

• Kara E Miller, California State University, Long Beach