Artful trans-itions and the queering of pregnancy, birth and (m)othering

The material and cultural conditions of being pregnant and/or becoming-(m)other (at once self and other) swell our bodies and subjectivities beyond the persistent myth of a bounded individual identity, exceeding modernist definitions of what it means to be human. Biomedical power is materialised in equally complex and problematic ways in the discourses and practices of gender transition, where chemical and surgical intervention enables certain forms of agency but ‘at a price’. Social norms require trans and gender-independent people to perform their narrative on-demand–to justify their existence through a lens of linear transition ‘in order to explain away their difference from traditional conceptions of the stable, unalterable relationship between sex and gender’. Labour–perhaps a pregnant body experiences it, safe to say that most do, although not all.