Still born

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Introduction 

Published in 2020, Guadalupe Nettel’s fourth novel Still Born explores the complexities of 21st-century motherhood under the co-constitutive forces of patriarchy and capitalism. Taking care throughout this review to situate the reader in the novel’s unfolding plot, I will begin by examining Nettel’s focus on reproduction and analysis of its structural relation to patriarchy and capitalism. I will then explore the text’s critique of motherhood’s burdens under these forces before examining how Nettel’s mothers survive these pressures by sharing the work of social reproduction and concomitantly expanding their biological families. Finally, I will elucidate the challenge these practices pose to the capitalist world-system and argue that this novel concludes optimistically by emphasising love’s revolutionary potential.

Reproduction 

Still Born’s protagonist and narrator, Laura, introduces the theme of reproduction at the novel’s outset. In the opening pages she damns procreation as a ‘sacrifice’ made ‘for the sake of the species’ and claims that children represent a limit on ‘freedom’, an ‘economic burden’, and cause of ‘physical and emotional cost’ (18). She elucidates these restrictions as gendered and structural when she asserts that ‘society is designed so that it’s us, and not men’ who are responsible for ‘caring for children’, thereby echoing arguments made by Social Reproduction Theorists (18). These theorists highlight how the labour done to produce and sustain populations is necessary for economic production under capitalism. They argue that this labour has been ascribed to women under the guise of love and thus assert: ‘they say it is love[,] we say it is unwaged labour’ (Federici 15). Laura’s assertions, then, begin this novel by criticising the exploitation of women and their reproductive capacities in the capitalist world-system. Expounding this critique, Laura admits to feeling ‘seduced’ by the ‘lure of pregnancy’ as she entered her 30s (23), thereby pointing to the societal forces that seek to deny women autonomy and pressure them towards reproduction and its attendant labour. Laura reports her immediate decision to ‘tie [her] tubes’ (24) in a ‘genuine inoculation’ against these pressures (26). She thus situates this personal act of reproductive agency within the political realm, characterising her own refusal to reproduce as an act of resistance to the co-constitutive forces of patriarchy and capitalism. Ending her relationship in doing so, Laura thereafter returns to Mexico from Paris to finish writing her PhD thesis. Here the novel’s plot unfolds, coloured from its inception by its willingness to give space to the tensions between gendered pressures and their refusal.

Situating herself rigidly within this tension, Laura’s return home prompts examination of reproduction within Mexico City’s capitalist society. She reconnects with her friend Alina and is devastated to learn of her choice to chain herself to ‘the human shackles’ of children (20). Laura’s staunch beliefs punctuate the narrative, communicating the totality of motherhood’s burdens while enticing the reader to judge Alina. She declares her refusal to ‘feign happiness’ for her friend and predicts the emergence of ‘an invisible rift’ between them. (27). Laura’s ensuing critical narration of Alina’s efforts to conceive unearths the significance of class in determining pregnancy outcomes. She recalls Alina’s claim that she would ‘go as far as it would take, including IVF and egg donation’, and cites her own intrigue at the compulsion to ‘squander fortunes’ in such endeavours (27-29). She thus emphasises the role wealth plays in enabling access to reproductive healthcare under capitalist inequality, returning to this idea throughout the novel with references to the impoverished mothers who birth and raise children ‘without access to any medical services’ (37). 

Laura’s unexpected and ‘genuine’ joy when Alina falls pregnant opens up space within the narrative for further nuanced exploration of reproductive politics when the tragic implications of the novel’s title are realised (35). Indeed, she reports the ‘arrogant certainty’ with which the male gynaecologist diagnoses Alina’s daughter with microlissencephaly and asserts that she will immediately die after birth (95). Gleaning Mexico’s strict abortion laws, she cites Alina’s claim that the doctor never proposes ‘she end the pregnancy’ (57), before detailing the ‘hollow feeling’ that subsequently characterises Alina’s birthing experience (87). Nettel thus illuminates the denial of women’s autonomy inherent in reproduction within the masculinised capitalist state. Laura’s narrative interpretation of Alina’s experiences fortify this notion. Her use of buffers such as ‘Alina maintains’ (39) and ‘Alina told me’ (63) concretise the realisation of the ‘invisible rift’ between the friends and serve to textually represent Alina’s alienation from her own reproductive experience and its co-optation in a greater act of creation. 

Motherhood 

The birth of Inés focuses the text on the lived experience of motherhood. Following her caesarean, Laura reports that Alina’s body was a ‘stitched-up mass’ that ‘mattered as little as the dirty strips of fabric and bloody gauzes’ now that it was ‘empty’ of its ‘precious’ cargo (91). Thus, Alina’s initiation into maternity is characterised by destruction and dehumanisation, reflecting her transformation into a breeding-machine in service of reproducing the species. The notion that she must be ‘tidied away’ like the materials used in this birth enact the erasure of women’s reproductive labour by the capitalist state, enabling the depiction of Alina’s bodily sacrifice in terms of love. Nettel reminds readers of this process’ explicitly gendered nature with comparison to Alina’s partner Aurelio’s enduringly ‘perfect’ body (172). 

The materialisation of Alina’s sacrifice into the home-space is realised by Inés’ survival of her birthday (as the title also suggests, she is still born). Laura narrates Alina’s transformation into a ‘domestic slave’ in the ‘typical patriarchal arrangement’ (122): while Aurelio works for a wage outside their home, Alina is burdened with domestic care work. This work and the isolation it provokes is intensified by Inés’ disability, which in turn prompts Alina’s fears that she will spend her life ‘caring for a terminally ill person’ (115) and changing her daughters future ‘sanitary towels’ (100). Liberated by Laura’s own aversion to procreation, here the lucid narrative voice renders visible the care work inherent in motherhood and seizes the opportunity to remind readers of the centrality of reproduction in this labour. Challenging the naturalisation of this labour as love while also inspiring consideration of abortion denial’s consequences, Alina begs her daughter to die and tells her that ‘neither of [them] will have any sort of life’ if she lives (102). This challenge is crystallised in the novel’s parallel plot in which Laura develops a relationship with her depressed neighbour Doris. ‘Worn out’ by her son Nicolás’ rages, Doris admits to Laura that she cannot remember what ‘love feels like’ and asks: ‘normal mothers don’t think those kinds of things, do they?’ (134). Nettel thereby takes her novel’s mothers and their labour out of obscurity and provides them with a platform from which they can reject motherhood and concomitantly rebel against the capitalist world-system. Thus, the text itself draws into question the very concept of a ‘normal mother’.

Expanding the family 

Still Born’s mothers’ inability to cope with the work of social reproduction under the co-constitutive forces of patriarchy and capitalism leads to the transformation of familial structures as the narrative unfolds. This process of transformation is introduced early in the text with the allegorical subplot about the pigeon family nesting on Laura’s balcony. She details their practice of what is later identified as ‘brood parasitism’ (180): she describes the process by which a cuckoo bird lays an egg in the pigeons’ nest, tips out the native eggs, and leaves their offspring to be raised by the pigeons. Enthralled by their presence, Laura realises that the female cuckoos felt a ‘powerful urge to get out of the labour of raising their young’ (189) and cites the pigeons’ joyful willingness to care for a bird who ‘looked nothing like its parents’ (113). 

This aversion to motherhood’s labour and employment of non-biological carers to assist in social reproduction is reflected in the text’s human relationships. Indeed, progressing from the anti-natalist protestations with which she began the novel, Laura assists Doris and assumes a caring role for Nicolás. She plays Alina’s pregnancy playlist in effort to entertain him and recalls her own claim that the music was part of Alina’s ‘genetic heritage; for there is some music that fuses with our cells’ (79). Thus, she links hers and Nicolás’ relationship with that between Alina and her daughter, thereby destabilising the biological boundaries of motherhood. Mirroring this transformation, Alina and Aurelio are compelled by the combined pressures of financial capitalism and caring for a disabled child to hire a nanny named Marlene. Alina soon comes to resent Marlene and the threat she poses to Alina’s ‘maternal responsibility’ (158). She is disgusted by the image of Marlene ‘sleeping naked’ (177) with Inés and dismisses such behaviour as ‘disinterested love’ (178). Employing hooks’ argument that ‘love is as love does’ negates this claim (14). Indeed, it prompts recognition that Marlene’s skin-on-skin embrace with Inés in which she replicates an act of care between a biological mother and child realises this act of love in its performance and permeates the bounds of motherhood. Reflecting on Marlene’s role in her family, Alina’s friend Mónica states: ‘we’ve always looked after other women’s children, and there are always other women who help us take care of our own’ (180). Here, Nettel reveals the commonality of the novel’s women’s experiences, thereby denaturalising the love and attendant labour prescribed to biological mothers under patriarchy and capitalism.

Revolutionary love 

The liberatory potential of the expanded family is realised at Still Born’s close. Discussing gestational surrogacy, Lewis asserts that it is societally evident that ‘infants don’t belong to anyone . . . they aren’t property’ (12-13). This novel’s sharing of motherhood’s labour, then, challenges notions of property foundational to the capitalist world-system. This symbolic challenge is enacted architecturally. Alina accepts Marlene by the novel’s end and tells Laura that she is now living with them and expresses her gratitude for the ‘family we’ve become’ (211). Similarly, the novel charts the dissolution of the division between Laura and her neighbours, who ultimately travel between the two apartments freely and thus permeate the walls Nicolás had previously sought to literally demolish. Nettel thus blurs the boundaries of the biological family and the property borders that seek to contain it, revealing the liberatory potential of capitalism’s dissolution. Emblematising this potential, Laura retells a story in which the Buddha sent a bereaved women ‘knocking at all the doors of every house she came across’ and thus enabling her ‘to experience the healing balm’ of community (76). Nettel allows her characters to experience this healing balm by her text’s end: Inés and Nicolás receive the care they need, Alina and Doris are freed from the isolating confines of motherhood, and all the women form friendship bonds that provide them with support and love. In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Hartman envisions ‘intimate acts’ that transform ‘social life’ and inaugurate the ‘modern’ by bringing about ‘revolution in a minor key’ (59). Nettel’s expanded families, then, enact revolution in the intimate realm of love and care. Thus, as emblems of how we all live, these families represent daily practices that potentiate the transformation of societies governed by capitalist patriarchy and the inauguration of a new world.

Conclusion 

Nettel’s text offers a critique of the capitalist exploitation of women’s reproductive capacities and devaluation of the work of social reproduction. Deploying Laura’s staunch political beliefs while tracing the softening of her attitudes towards the mothers around her creates space in the narrative for Nettel to explore motherhood’s complexities. Indeed, she challenges notions of a ‘normal’ mother and exposes the revolutionary realities embodied by the expanded biological family. Invoking Lewis’ assertion that the family is ‘a microcosm of the nation-state’ (6), it would be interesting to consider how the intimate acts of minor revolution Nettel exposes reverberate in the public political realm. Implicitly, this novel’s challenge to the boundaries of family and property upon which capitalism is reliant can be scaled up, destabilising national cultures and borders that divide and police our world. 

Works Cited

Federici, Silvia. Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, PM Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/londonschoolecons/detail.action?docID=1011442.  

Hartman, Saidiya V. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals. Serpent’s Tail, 2021. 

hooks, bell. All about Love: New Visions. William Morrow, an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2022. 

Lewis, Sophie. Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, Verso, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/londonschoolecons/detail.action?docID=5734525.   

Nettel, Guadalupe. Still Born. Translated by Rosalind Harvey, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2023.