3 ‘

Against Population,
Towards Alterlife
Michelle Murphy

A group ofindividuals and the sum of inhabitants.

Population is pervasively used as a neutral term that
abstractly describes a multitude. Yet figures of massified
life, in the forms of crowds and overpopulation, have
been persistently racializing. With intensifying climate
change, mass extinctions, and extraction regimes
poisoninglands, airs and waters, the problem of over-
population has been rechargedforleft andliberal poli-
tics as a way to think through environmental crisis. In
media venues like The Guardian, aerial photos of
global slums and crowded shopping malls excite privi-
leged viewers to reattach anxiety to overpopulation.
This essay takes a position against population as
a framework for a feminist politics while still elevating
the question of reproductive politics in feminist
decolonial environmental justice. Even if population as
a framework is abandoned,it is also the case that an
individualized approach to reproductive justice, in
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which the individual and their right to choice only Against Population
takes precedence, is also an inadequate frameworkfor
addressing the mesh of responsibilities and entangle- While we can trace population thinking back to
ments reproduction has with environmental violence. Malthus in the 18th century, the managerial sense of
Following in the footsteps of a multitude of radical population—as a quantity problem fixed by adjustable
reproductive justice visions, might we search for birth and death rates—is a 20th-century formulation.
concepts that reframe reproductive justice as funda- Population, in the 20th century, became a calculative
mentally a concern of environment—that is of land, concept used to govern the stock of peaple ina nation-
water, non-humanrelations, hostile conditions, and life state for the sake of economic productivity In 19¢h-
supports in worlds already damaged? This essay opens century Britain, the term designated the working class
a critical path against population and moves towards a as an undifferentiated mass, and in mid-20th-century
reparative path, envisioning a distributive reproductive United States, the word namedthe totality ofpeople in
politics that stretches beyond bodies, choice, and a prison. Population, as an artifact ofa particular way of
babies to extensively include all our relations and counting, bundles up bodies into single tally, creating
responsibilities within damaged worlds. at
distance and abstraction for a managerial gaze that is
Achieving distributi ve reproduct ive justice
then poised to ask, “What should be done about
requires creating infrastructures that disseminate viable them?” It is a formulation that allows the anonymiza-
worlds, queer and non-humankinships, harm reduc- tion of lives into deletable data points
fion practices, and also the taking apart of violent The histories of the uses of “population” are
systems. What concepts might be given up to make ignored at our peril. I have tried to show this in The
room for other ways of creating a politics of reproduc- Economization of Life, building on works by Alison
tive justice? Population is not the only way to think Bashford, Betsy Hartmann, Farida Akhter, and many
througha politics of more-than-individual reproduc- other chroniclers of eugenics and population control. In
tion that is responsible to environmental violence. the first half of the 20th century, the problem of popu-
Hence, I make my case beginning with a refusal of lation waspoliticized in nations aroundthe worldas the
population and then move towards positing the begin- eugenic project of racial futures, how to prevent the
ning of something else: the concept ofalterlife. breeding of somefor the sake ofthe evolutionary future
of the whole. The word “prevention” here hides the
vast range of violences undertaken in the nameofracial
evolution: sterilization, segregation, child-theft, resi-
dential schools, incarceration, starvation, murder, war.
The future of population was often posed as the prob-
lem ofdifferential fertility, creating national projects of
destructive sorting: the problem of poor people having
104 105
more children than therich, of blacks having more chil- rested on calculations of surplus life and white
dren than whites, of the colonized having more children supremacy, offoreignlife to be kept outside ofborders,
than the colonizer. From Malthus to American foreign of lives not worth saving, of killable brown and black
policy, the problem of population has been framed asa others, and ofelite lives to be protected. The concept
way to avert crises, as necessitating unsavory acts in of population has workedits way deep inside conven-
order to thwart a potential apocalypse of starvation, tional policy, economic, ecological, and life science
resource depletion, and war. thinking. Trained to inhabit a world composed of
In the cold war/postcolonial/ongoing-settler objects and forces rendered by these epistemologies,
colonial period of the second half of the 20th century, critics of environmental violence, especially biologists,
whenit becameless allowable for scientific and political might find it difficult to imagine a future organized
elites to explicitly invokeracial biological difference asa without “population”as a concept.
sufficient rationalization for violent policies, the prob- Yet the problem of population is not just
lem of population was transformed within the social conceptual. Population as a problem carries with it
sciences into the dilemma of too many people: the thick transnational webs ofinfrastructures, laws, exper-
problem ofthe prevention of the birth of surplus others imental platforms, clinics, and technologies of popula-
for the sake of future economic prosperity ofthe nation. tion controlstill in operation today. Population infra-
In the UN, USAID, and national population depart- structures continue to weaponize birth control prac-
ments around the world, population became a concept tices, distributing coercive sterilization, inventing new
affectively charged with a fear of future apocalypses flexible forms of eugenics, propagating extractive
caused by the too-many. Population became a kind of experiments, putting up border walls, and fomenting
simple quantification of mass, containerized by Oe racist violence. Population is bound to the material
project of nation-statehood. It joined Gross Dente horror of genocide, apartheids, sexual violence and
Project as a simple kind of measure, one eeHy colonialisms. Each is animated by designations oflife as
adjustment: population and economy together nee e expendable.
to be counted, stimulated, managed. Economy’s After spending over a decade in the thick
perpetual growth required population’s curbing. In the archive ofdata producedby histories ofthe experimen-
second half of the 20th century, every nation was tal exuberance of globalized family planning in
required to offer up such numbersas the price of partic- American empire, after reading thousands ofstudies
ipation in transnational agreements and finance. about averting the births of poor, Indigenous, brown,
But so too was population summoned as a and black people, studies in which race is rarely
problem modeled as a planetary-scaled phenomenon mentioned even as it is the very grammar of designa-
open to ongoing management, legitimating pig tions of surplus life, after living with the ongoing
incorporating American interests to cover the glo % violence of settler colonialism in Canada, population
Population, as worked through the now Slopatiag has becomefor meanintolerable concept. I amagainst
practices of population control since the 1960s, has population. #AgainstPopulation
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Not only is population a way of managing The problem of massive, widely distributed,
human presence saturated with racism, concentrating environmental violence has today reinstalled popula-
fears on the problem of populationis also a distraction. tion as an affectively charged problem. Categories like
It deflects from the crucial fact that it is the structures climate change and the Anthropocene offer planetary-
of industrial accumulation, militarism, and consump- scaled_renderi i i -
tion—justified by the goal of improving macroeco- population Charts demonstrating the “Great
nomic measures—that have overwhelmingly produced Acceleration” put the dramatic upward slope of human
the material violence of climate change, extensive plan- population next to those ofextinction, carbon dioxide
etary pollution, and death-making terraforming. A and pollution emissions. This earth systems. optics of
2017 Major Carbons Database report identifies just 90 Anthropocene, as Joseph Masco has shown,is caught
companies that are responsible for two-thirds of the last up in cold war American military histories of planetary-
I50 years of green house gas emissions. In this scaled measurement, planning, and nuclear war model-
moment of intensifying environmental violence, ling. It is thus no accident that population thinking
human density is attractive as a managerial policy prob- (with its own entanglements with cold war military
Tem and container for worry becauseit points thefinger global planning, and not just ecological modelling) fits
at preventing future humanlife without requiring the well within the units of analysis of the Anthropocene
Teordering, of capitalism, colonialism, the nation-state, Anthropocene environ-
ortrereropatriarchy as world orders. If only there were — mental violence i
fewer humans in sites of high-human density, then combined with an imminenta
future others might live more abundantly. Population 1 together, encourages res
policies of every flavour imaginable have been tried — urgent, hence assembli
over thelast half century, and they have resoundingly — scale of problematizing with the ethically fraught
failed to curb the violence of the world. timescape of the emergency as a justification for
Instead, nearly a century of governing industry — suspending ethics. For whom dothesescalings of the
for the sake of growing the national macroeconomyhas — problem make sense? Populationis not the only way of
produced a globalized capitalist infrastructure that, on — thinking through reproductive politics in relation to
the one hand,produces the molecular material “waste” | intensive environmental violence, even if the inheri-
of emissions as outside ofthe calculation of value and, — tance of cold war and colonial epistemologies keep
omthe other hand, designates poor people as forms of 4 offering population as a container. Given the existence
Human “waste,” better for the world to be without, j of elaborate national and transnational projects to
and hence correspondingly open to abuse, abandon- | reduce population in the 20th century, is there any
ment, and elimination. In other words, population as a } surprise that it remainseasier to imagine doing some-
concept is enmeshed in the very infrastructures and ~
logics that have produced ubiquitous environmental — not believe that a radical political imaginary for the
violence. concept of population can be mobilized without
108 109
and commodities. Reproductive justice frameworks
amplifying existing infrastructures already deployed
built by organization such as the Sister Song Women of
towards racist necropolitical ends. To take a stance
against population is to prompt the challenge of recog- Color Reproductive Health Collective, Asian
nizing and creating other ways of fguring humanity,
Communities for Reproductive Justice, or Native
ing Youth Sexual Health Network emphasize building
rélations, and density as part of collectivities resist
environmental violence and towards more livable strategies: of community, not just individual, survival
and flourishing. Radical reproductive justice takes asits
worlds.
So how to talk about intensive human-caused starting point the affirmative making of the conditions
that support collective life in the face ofpersistentracist
environmental violence andits relation to the questions
of humanpresence, distributions of reproductive possi- colonial, and heteropatriarchallife-negating structures,
bility, and differential exposures to death? How do Thus, reproductive justice bleeds into environmental
reproductive politics and massive environmental justice, which includes water, land, and non-human
relations, as well as policing, food, shelter, schools
Violence connect? How to create a politics of repro-
reserves, carceral systems, war, structural unemploy-
duction beyond the myopia of the individual body and
in recognition of macrological political dimensions of ment, and pollution. If you cannot drink the water
there is no reproductive justice. Or, as the Third World
human life, and evenall being? This essay is an attempt
Women’spolitical banner at a 1979 Boston protest
to think through these questionsin, alongside, and in
about murdered Black women declared,cannot
struggle with colleagues and mentors whose work, it is
live without ourlives.”
no exaggeration to say, have made my own possible. It
is an attempt to think futures and concepts in the ‘nS if conditions of environmental hostility
spaces between conflicting and yet deeply entangled — require versionsof collective reproductive justice, might
feminisms. And it is an insistence of opposition to the same be said of elite and enabledlife? What repro-
ductive justice politics can grapple with rich, white
population and human numbering as a feminist fram-
ing for land defense whilestill puzzling through how settler colonial, heteronormative reproduction, of baby-
reproductive politics is integral to environmental making with expensive strollers assembled in supply
chain capitalist webs, of fossil-fuel guzzling SUVs fed
justice.
For some, particularly people in privileged — through pipelines,of oil turned into piles of plastic toys
vantage points, the abuses of population control are — destined for landfills and then microplastic gyres, of
white property relations with empty rooms, of grocery
parried with a politics of individual choice and the indi- —
vidual right to choose to have or not have children. — stores stocked with the bright goods of multi-national
However, women of color, Indigenous, queer, and corporations, and all the many forms of white posses-
decolonial feminist reproductive justice has long been 4 ae and enablement? Reproduction here is not just the
aye a a ae
critical of this privileged version of reproductive poli- —
smooth This
tics, which pivots on the well-resourced individualized
user and consumerof reproductive health care services — kind of reproductive accumulation is another kind of
110

density—a density ofrelations that enable capitalist life is about how life supports are replenished,
cared for,
at the expenseofall else. Here we can think of density and created. It 1s mseparabie-trom—a becoming
=with—
in a different way: not in terms of human numbers, but the-many that includes shelter, technologies,
protocols
as densities of relations that create the enablement and of governance, structures of violence, animals,
entitlement that in turn depend on and propagate often plants,
ancestors, and histories. A distributed sense
of repro-
quite di istributions of violence. ad duction attends to what infrastructures, —asse
mbties;
What responsibilities to webs of injury, land systems, and collectivities—are—supported:
through
theft, and other worlds does an anti-colonial, anti-racist violence—capitalism, —cotomiatism,—white supr
emacy;
environmental reproductive justice politics attuned to heteropatriarchy—and what retationsmaststt aget
efor
the environmental violence of capitalism, white their continuity or resurgence, ancso domp
-fghtfor
supremacy, and settler colonialism demand? What the destruction of those violent systems, a disma
ntting-
responsibilities to our entanglements in webs of accu- that makes room for other forms-of-tite As-W
inrome
mulation, entitlement, and hoarding? An extended, LaDukeasserts, not pipelines for oil, but for
water.
anti-racist and decolonial reproductive justice politics Which structures have to end to make room for
livable
stretches beyond babies, birth and bodies and out into ways of being together? Thelist is long. Repr
oduction
struggles of survival that are not just personal survival, (as perpetuation)is notin itself an inherentgood
;——
strugglesover what more-than-life relations might Aspiring towards decotonizing-amd-quecr alter-
persist into the future for collectivities. It also asks what worlds, reproduction might be better rethough
t as a
relations should be dismantled, refused, shunned? This politics of redistributing relations, possibilit
ies and
extensive sense of reproductive relations thus includes futures. #RedistributionsNotReproductions,
Making
policing and military violence, reserves and borders, redistributed relations is an extensive,
ongoing
heterosexuality and family, property and labor, land and endeavor, looped with imperfections, messiness,
returns
water, and questions ofredistribution of resources and and futurities. I am against population andfora polit
ics
life chances. It includes Black Lives Matter, Missing and ofdifferently distributed futures. #DifferentFu
tures
Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and TwoSpirit So to be-against-population is to reject the
People, No One is Illegal, and countless struggles zeroing in on human density and wealth as prob
lems of
against extractive regimes around the globe. disconnected counting and to instead conc
entrate
A distributed reproductive politics is not about | political attention on decomposing the densi
ty of
birth rates or human numbers. It is about which consumption, property, waste and state sanc
tioned
kinships, supports, structures, and beings get to have a violence that prop up capitalism, colonialis
m, and
future and which are destroyed. A distributed repro- white supremacy, while at the same time creat
ing less
duction is not about babies in particular (neither is it violent ways of being with land. It is to strug
gle over
against them); instead its ambit extendsintoair, water, | different futurities, not differentialfertitity—fo—b
e
land, and a meshoflife forms into the multigenerational against the problem of population, then,
calls for
future. It is not merely about how bodies reproduce,it | concepts and practices of becoming-with-th
e-many-
114 115
Alterlife has becomea political concern for me disruption and metabolism that overflow the old singu-
astil: live asta guest: in’ “Tkaronto/Toronto,: on lar toxicological focus on acute poisonings that have
Anishinaabeterritories, on the Great Lakes governed by previously been used to map(and limit) the terrains of
the Dish and One Spoon Wampum Treaty, and in environmental violence. Somescientists are now track-
Canada, a settler colonial and petro-extraction state. ing low dose epigenetic, neurobehavioral, developmen-
The questionofalterlife is shaped by a sense of respon- tal, and metabolic effects of industrial chemicals, some
sibilities as a guest ofthis place, to its water and land, to of which may be transgenerational. means
its Knowledge-making, and to my own position as an be_a_ human is to i al
urban Métis person from Winnipeg with responsibilities distri
to both my complicities in settler colonialism and white- industrial capit: yi i 2 4h
(
ness as well as activations of decolonial Indigenousrela- discrete body is unravelling. Microbiome research, for
tions. To be a white-coded Métis in settler colonial example, shows how bodies are not singular organisms,
spacesis to be messily pulled between systems intent on but instead always collectivities. These are emerging
Indigenous erasure interconnected with structures of research trajectories that might be collaborated with
white entitlement. towards thickening a sense ofalterlife.
Alterlife is a concern here in Canada, where Moreover, Hannah Landecker has identified a
entangled relations of life and death take the form of turn to a “post-industrial metabolism”in which many
neoliberal managerial governance combined with a life scientists now explicitly acknowledge that their
capitalist settler colonial extraction regime that Oo a toaitaAy “ are Ate.

together create a potent environmentally violent mix riall ic: ist ran
dependent on Indigenous dispossession. Alterlife is a glements with a capitalist-made built environment
concern for me as someone wholives with bodies of an insde outside
d tabs. The nascent field of
water that hold 21% of the world’s fresh surface water, exposomics” likewise extends the sense ofthe beings
and 84% of North America’s. Alterlife is a concern for and doings that make up bodies by attending to the
me asI live as a guest of both ancestors and those yet metabolic effects of synthetic chemical exposures as>
to come, who also already have relations with this
land. Thus, my thinking ofalterlife is also about bodies from While this field is
upholding Indigenous sovereignties and continuing aimed at creating a personalized medicine that can
Land/Body relations in the ongoing aftermaths of address the problematics of individual exposure, it
settler colonialism, even while surrounded by nonetheless sparks a potential for new ways ofstudy-
skyscrapers and enmeshed in the enjoyments and ing exposures as the extensive molecular alteration of
densities of city life. life in capitalist fields ofrelation.
Mysense ofa politics of distributed reproduc- To these emerging fields ofresearch, environ-
tion for the condition ofalterlife is also animated by mental epigenetic studies are now suggesting that the
emergent technoscientific renderings of endocrine environments of our ancestors may bepresentinside us
116 117
as inherited metabolic patterns. This bundle of research crisis and the Anthropocene both put apocalypse on
contributes towards a sense of relational living-being the horizon. It is yet to come. Thisis telling. For whom
that extends not only outward into multi-species an has massive violence not already been a daily struggle,
land relations, but out into the very physical infrastruc- and thus whohasthe luxury to think endangermentsto
tures of capitalism, colonialism, and racism. Or put life are in the future? Alterlife, in contrast, insists on a
another way, it offers a sense of how such infrastruc- different temporality, recognizing the many toOrg=
tures are physically present inside of us, unevenly standing world-destructions, from settler colonialism
distributing harms and supports. These are not thelife to plantation slavery. As Kyle Whyte argues,
forms of cold war population models. They point to Indigenous people of Turtle Island already know well
different kinds of densities and relations of becoming. loss of land—through land theft, displacement, and
While evocative, these various technoscience material- industrialism—and do not have to wait for climate
izations of the already-altered body need to be trou- change to intimately know forms ofloss tied to land
bled, challenged, collaborated with, and recomposed change. Slavery too brutally robbed people oftheir
with critical research from Black studies, Indigenous worlds, their lands, their knowledges, languages, and
studies, postcolonial studies, queer studies, and trans relations, creating legacies of dehumanization and
studies, fields that have many lessons for how to craft death, as well as accumulations of wealth out ofunfree
concepts, existences, kinships, and political actions that labor, the structures of whichare still at work today.
rise from and resist the aftermaths of structural Theorizing the plantation as an ongoing violence,
violence. Alterlife is forged in recognition ofthe long Kathrine McKittrick asks, “What kind offuture can the
duration of densified everyday environmental violence. plantation give us?” In this spirit, the temporality of
Alterlife does not happenat the scale of molecules,it is alterlife is one of the aftermaths, even as they arestill
extensive, now planet wide, even as it is unevenly happening, and for which there has been continual
concentrated in someplaces and bodies. heterogenous projects of making life otherwise in the
Learning from and making kin with the decolo- ongoing fallout.
nial projects of Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, and Of vital significance hereis thatlife has not just
Indigenous Land/body prophecies, understanding the been altered, it is more generally open to ongoing
densities that make up “alterlife” is a project aimed at alteration, both desired and imposed, making and
summoning new forms of humanity, not preserving the destroying, choreographed and unexpected. Alterlife
human that histories of deep violence have created. resides in ongoing uncertain aftermaths, continuingly
Alterlife is not waiting for the apocalypse—apocalypses challenged byviolentinfrastructures, but also holding
of many kinds have already happened, evenaslivable capacities to alter and be altered—to recompose rela-
worlds keep being snatched away. First the buffalo, tions to land and sociality, to Tove and sex, to survival
then the land, now the water. Alterlife resides in what and persistence, to undo some forms of life andbe
Frantz Fanon called “an atmosphere of certain uncer- supported by others, to becomealter-wise in the after-
tainty.” This is a crucial point. The frame of population mathof hostile conditions, to surprise.

cl”
118 119
Alterlife is the condition of being already co- airs, and the many beings that are co-dependent on
constituted by material entanglements with water, one anotheris also violence on bodies. “What happens
chemicals, soil, atmospheres, microbes, and built envi- to the land, happens to the people.” Their recent
ronments, and also the condition of being open to campaign with Women’s Earth Alliance on
ongoing becoming. Hence,alterlife is already recom- — Land/Body Defense centers the experiences, resis-
posed, pained, and damaged, but has potentiality — tances, and resurgences of Indigenous women, two-
nonetheless. olds together tensions between spirit, and young people whoselives are already also
violenceand possibility, braiding the organic and inor- — altered by racist colonial processes including the mate-
ganic, body and land, and resides in the indistinctions rial environmental violence of extractive industries.
between infrastructures and ecologies, recognizing © There are generations of hard-earned learning to
Alterlife attends also to openness, to a potential for — acknowledge andstart from.
recomposition that exceeds the ongoing aftermaths. —
efusing narratives of purity, or a sense oflife as sepa- | Our current work cannot afford to forget that a
rate from its conditions, or a politics of reproduction movementfor land/body defense has been growing
consistently for many years; there are tools and
separate from environment, alterlife strives for a politics
strategies already tried and true or discarded. The
of survival-as-resistance—what indigenous scholar — first step, then, hadto betalking to and honoring the
Gerald Vizenorcalls survivance. Alterlife is life damaged, © knowledge of those grandmothers, mothers,aunties,
life persistent, and life otherwise; life materialized_in — and elders who most intimately know therelation-
other ways andlife exceeding our materializations. j ship between body,place, people, and movement.
The concept of alterlife is offered as a way of —
approaching the politics of relations in solidarity with | #LandBodyDefense.It is already here.
the vast labors of anti-racist and decolonial reproductive © Those who benefit from oppressive systems
and environmental justice activism, as well as have much work to doin calling forth alterlife, disman-
Indigenous survivance and resurgence. This vision of — tling the work of whiteness in the ways environmental
decolonializing more-than-life collectivities draws inspi- violence is structured with beneficiaries: the people and
ration from the work of many scholars, land defenders, — institution who are often densely supported and
activists, and artists, as well as students and friends, who enriched by capitalist, colonial, and racist systems of
are working hard to activate decolonial potentials now, — consumption and waste. This teaching points to
without waiting for a better momenttoarrive. 4 another way of conceiving of a politics of density.
Core to the sense ofalterlife is the acknowl- Whereare the benefits ofviolence concentrated? Which
edgment that bodies are not separable from lands,- density of enablement catches life in structures that
waters, airs, and other non-human beings. Body | demand environmental violence as the price of living?
defense is land defense, as the Native Youth Sexual Most people are caught in quotidian and humble
Health Project’s reproductive/environmental justice — complicities that are entangled with the very acts of
work teaches. The violences against the land, water, | sheltering, eating, cleaning, and surviving that are in
120 121
turn knotted to a cacophony of consumption and Oneperversity of population control rhetoric
harms within supply chain capitalist webs, and tied to today is that it focuses on places like Africa and
discard systems built into objects, tethering ordinary Bangladesh, where everyday contributionsto planetary
survival to the continual spewing of injury and persis- environmental violence by humans is minimal. It
tent chemical violence. worries about teenage Indigenous pregnancy in a
Ourrelations are not just supportive, they can world of settler colonial exterminations. It targets
also be injurious and toxic. Vanessa Agard-Jonescalls desperate displaced people passing over border fences
this “chemical kinship.” Honoring “water is life” | looking for slightly better life chances. Population
demands fraught practices of caring for bodies of — rhetoric points responsibility away from low-fertility,
water, geological processes, weather, and organisms, — heteronormative, elite, massively consumptivelives that
as well as relationships with the chemical and radioac- are profoundly supported by the exposure to structural
tive offspring born of extraction processes, nuclear violenceofothers. It deflects from the infrastructure of
power, and careful as well as careless discard. These — our currentelite and human-centered support systems.
non-innocent websofrelations are densified as white — It is this infrastructure that I wantto attendto, built by
supremacy, multi-national corporations, and settler a cosmology that frames the body as disti i -
colonial nations. They constitute the political problem of ] able from conditions of becoming with the many, It is
density; not human number counts ofsurplus life. Métis © the result of seeing land as a resource, with bodies on
artist and land defender Erin Marie Konsmo who © it, rather than bodies as manifestati
works with Native Youth Sexual Health persistently — as_extensions
reminds that an understanding of wateraslife includes _ Alterlife gathers at least three affirming gestures
queer, addicted, homeless, hungry, urban, and sick — for a reconceptualized sense of more-than-life becom-
ways of being, and thus demandsa politics of harm-_ ing within and against conditions of massive violence.
reduction aimed at leaving none of our relations — First, alterlife considers living-being within
uncared for. No oneis discarded because the land and ~ entanglements of becoming, and unbecoming, with
water needs everyone. Attention to alterlife asks, not | others and infrastructures, as a project of future-
for a politics of fixing the other but, in the words of | making. What might a radically inclusive becoming-in-
Fred Moten, “your recognition that it’s fucked up for — time together look like? No single being onthis planet
you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized - escapes entanglements with capitalism, colonialism and
thatit’s fucked up for us. I don’t need yourhelp. I just racism, even as their violent effects are profoundly
need you to recognize that igithis shit is killing you too — concentrated in hotspots of hostility. Alterlife makes
futures in explicit recognition and resistance to
alterlife the potential for political kinship and alter- profoundly uneven distributions of life chances.
relations comes out of the recognition of connected, - Alterlife seeks to find other ways ofpersisting in ongo-
though profoundly uneven and often complicit, imbri- | ing aftermaths that materially redistribute densities of
cations in the systems that distribute violence. enablement and misery.
122 123
Second,alterlife thinks with and against ways — Alterlife is a challenge to invent, revive and sustain
of framing environmental violence in discourses about — decolonializing possibilities and persistances right now
the Anthropocene (which tend to erase the complex as we are, forged in non-innocence, learning from and
histories that have generated and unevenly distributed in collaboration with past and present projects ofresis-
environmental violence and benefits), as well as within tance and resurgence. Thus, “Alterlife in the Ongoing
scientific fields such as ecology, climatology, geology, | Aftermath” is offered as an unfinished and ongoingcall
demography, toxicology, epigenetics, and endocrine to collaborative action, land defense and reoriented
disruption that are riven by biopolitical grammars, — responsibility. It is a calling forth of something else,
challenging the ways damaged-based research rede- even if that something is not known,even if small, and
ploys portraits of racial and_ sexual difference and recognizing that this work has already been happening.
blame.Alterlife seeks to refuse the eugenic residual that — This version of hopefulness is not a deflection.
calculates lives worth living, lives that are better not to Our bodies/lands are materialized through synthetic
have been born,lives not worth supporting, unproduc- — chemicals that bind to multinational corporations,
tive lives, and lives ignorable and killable. Such calcula- ( through settler colonial extraction, through juridical
tions vividly persist in policing, ecology, toxicology, 7 systems that diminish the value oflife and turn it into
demography,public health, economics and many other i a cost benefit calculus for finance. I want to learn with
science, technical, and policy practices. Alterlife rejects — others how to activate non-innocent, harm-reducing
damage-based research and biopolitical | frameworks support systemsthat, here in Tkaronto, enact the radi-
that focus the burden of representing violence (and cally generous potentials of Indigenous sovereignties
hence the managerial aim and blame) on people, j and are mindfully responsible to our planetary rela-
beings, and communities already confined in hostile { tions. At the same time, I want to propagate responsi-
worlds. Alterlife insists on a politics of valuing, loving j bility to ongoing violences, the responsibility to not
and supporting violated, endangered, and queer life, | only build alter-relations, but also the responsibility to
while fashioning problemizations and projects that | dismantle and shutdown. #AlterRelations and
attach responsibility to perpetrators and their infra #ShutItDown.
structures. i i Even as it dreams expansively, what this essay
And third, alterlife compels speculation about offers are some humble concepts derived from feminist
futurity and potentials of being otherwise. Alterlife q decolonial STSas practiced on the Great Lakes, build-
shares with responses to the Anthropocenea politics of ing on longerresistive legacies of Indigenous, Black,
non-deferral that is a commitmentto act now. But this” queer, and other projects of radical justice. Concepts
politics of non-deferral is not driven by the logic ofth@ that manifest environmental and reproductive justice
emergency, the scale of the planetary, or the container together, that express Land/Body persistence in the
of the nationstate. It is a politics of non-deferral inter ongoing aftermath. I can almost imagine a politics of
ested in the humbleness of right here, in the scale of alter-collectivities both more than pessimistic and less
communities, and in the intimacies of relations. than optimistic, that draws from what was and what has
A

4
124
antles, regener-
persisted, that affirms, disrupts, dism s
nted to relation
ates, and resists; a way of being orie
needs new and
andthat cares aboutdistributions, that
ities, and peda-
old kinds ofsolidarities, interdisciplinar
e the same, that has
gogies, and does not reproduc
with encompassing 4
concepts that grapple squarely
rwis e. Almost.
violences and yet propagate the alte
#AlterlifeintheAftermath 4
New Feminist Biopolitics
in Ultra-low-fertility East Asia
Yu-Ling Huang and Chia-Ling Wu —

In 2013, 37-year-old actress Jessie Chang made her

first documentary, Freeze My Eggs, chronicling her
reproductive adventures in Taiwan. To enhance her
healthy body before the clinical procedures, this single
woman went to see a doctor of Chinese medicine and
a naturalist healer, quit smoking, and did yoga regu-
larly. She then visited an assisted reproductive tech-
nologies (ART) center in Taipei and started her
biomedical journey: testing her hormonelevels, having
ultrasounds to assess the quality of her ovaries, self-
injecting an egg-stimulating drug for ten days, and
undergoing egg-retrieval surgery under anesthesia. She
then hadfifteen eggs stored at a cost of NT $150,000
(roughly US $5,000) for the whole procedure.
Taiwan’s Artificial Reproduction Act allows only
married couples to access ART. Thus, Jessie’s plan,like
other single women, was to freeze her healthy eggs
while younger and use them when “Mr. Right”