# subRosa

**URL:** https://ps.zoethical.org/t/subrosa/2265
**Category:** 3TS Reader
**Tags:** author
**Created:** [March 6, 2019, 1:36pm UTC](https://ps.zoethical.org/t/subrosa/2265 "2019-03-06T13:36:19Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![system](https://ps.zoethical.org/uploads/default/original/2X/9/9eb088232ae3ace61d2d35e92896da8d59b6f2b3.png) [@system](https://ps.zoethical.org/u/system)
#### Post date: [March 6, 2019, 1:36pm UTC](https://ps.zoethical.org/t/subrosa/2265/1 "2019-03-06T13:36:19Z")

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## title: subRosa subtitle: Cyberfeminism

## About the Author

{: #author .intro }

Subrosa is a collective of cyberfeminists artists and researchers, critically  
dealing with issues about technology and the body. [https://cyberfeminism.net](https://cyberfeminism.net)

## Sources

{: #sources .intro }

- [subRosa Tactical Politics][1], chapter 14, pp.221-242 (subRosa, 1999)

[1]: /library/subRosa - Common Knowledge and Political Love (in Tactical Politics).pdf

## Common Knowledge and Political Love

{: #common-knowledge }

> Under capitalism, femininity and gender roles became a “labor” function, and  
> women became a “labor class.” On one hand, women’s bodies and labor are  
> revered and exploited as a “natural” resource, a biocommons or commonwealth  
> that is fundamental to maintaining and continuing life: women are equated with  
> “the lands,” “mother-earth,” or “the homelands.” On the other hand, women’s  
> sexual and reproductive labor—motherhood, pregnancy, childbirth—is  
> economically devalued and socially degraded. In the Biotech Century, women’s  
> bodies have become flesh labs and Pharma-commons: They are minedfor eggs,  
> embryonic tissues, and stem cells for use in medical, and therapeutic  
> experiments, and are employed as gestational wombs in assisted reproductive  
> technologies (ART). Under such conditions, resistant feminist discourses of  
> the “body” emerge as an explicitly biopolitical practice.

## Primitive Accumulation

{: #primitive accumulation }

> Human and animal bodies have been the most valuable commodity in human culture  
> since primitive accumulation began. It follows, then, that bodies are also  
> primary sites of sovereignty, resistance, and contestation. In this chapter,  
> subRosa begins by tracing a brief history of lay or “common” medical, and  
> healing practices that posed an embodied resistance to religious, medical, and  
> capitalist control of gendered bodies, reproduction, and medical practices—and  
> connects them to current social struggles to create accessible and just public  
> health-care systems, biopolitical autonomy, and knowledge in common.  
> Researching and learning from these histories is fundamental to subRosa’s  
> cultural practice.

## Resistance

{: #resistance }

> Historically, women’s bodies have been notoriously resistant to machine  
> adaptation or medical regulation. The unpredictable ebb and flow of menstrual  
> cycles, hormones, moods, libido, weight loss or gain, metabolism, ovulation,  
> pregnancy, gestation period, fertility, and natural birth rhythms, have  
> severely tested scientific control and management methods.

## Detournement

{: #detournement }

> SmartMom is a detournement (a tactic used by the situationists to change  
> original meanings of texts or images) of the concept of the Defense Advanced  
> Research Project Agency’s (DARPA) Smart T-Shirt technology, and the cyborg  
> engineering of the body for space travel, as described in Manfred Clynes and  
> Nathan Cline’s article “Cyborgs and Space.” SmartMom satirically proposes a  
> civilian adaptation of the technology of the Smart T-Shirt as a new means of  
> surveilling the behavior of pregnant women. Although the shirt was originally  
> engineered for remote battlefield wound sensing and to facilitate telepresent  
> surgery for soldiers or space travelers, it was not hard for subRosa to  
> imagine “repurposing” DARPA’s Smart T-Shirt to control women’s productive and  
> reproductive labor.