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The reception of Elaine Scarry's landmark text, The Body in Pain, focuses in part on exploring how pain might be understood as beneficial or therapeutic. Childbirth is often cited as the paradigmatic instance of this kind of beneficial pain. This essay examines conceptualizations of labour pain in biomedical, natural childbirth and reproductive justice movements that explore the limits of Scarry's description of pain as 'unshareable'. Political struggles over pain in childbirth centre on the legibility of pain in labour. Feminist and natural childbirth activists have developed an understanding of pain at birth as central to maternal subjectivity, where pain is a biopolitical force and its management a means of self-transformation. Alongside calls for reproductive justice, the essay considers how the visibility and expressivity of labour pain could contribute to what Imogen Tyler and Lisa Baraitser term a new 'natal politics' that addresses concerns for the disproportionate injury and death experienced by Black birth givers.

The reception of Elaine Scarry's landmark text, The Body in Pain, focuses in part on exploring how pain might be understood as beneficial or therapeutic. Childbirth is often cited as the paradigmatic instance of this kind of beneficial pain. This essay examines conceptualisations of labour pain in biomedical, natural childbirth and reproductive justice movements that explore the limits of Scarry's description of pain as 'unshareable.' Political struggles over pain in childbirth centre on the legibility of pain in labour. Feminist and natural childbirth activists have developed an understanding of pain at birth as central to maternal subjectivity, where pain is a biopolitical force and its management a means of self-transformation. The essay considers how the visibility and expressivity of labour pain could contribute to what Imogen Tyler and Lisa Baraitser (2013) term a new 'natal politics' that addresses concerns for reproductive justice and the disproportionate injury and death experienced by black birth givers.

This commentary on Sophie Lewis's essay, 'Cyborg uterine geography: complicating care and social reproduction' considers what a 'uterine geography' could offer for thinking about the body, sex, reproduction, pregnancy, birth, afterbirth, care, pain and love in new ways. While affirming the efforts in the text to generate a more complex, more-than-human and queer account of reproduction, it also raises several questions. How do narratives of maternal-fetal 'violence' or 'generosity' or 'hospitality' work in a broader social and political field, and more generally, how can scientific or evolutionary accounts of bodies be put to critical use in social theory? How does a 'cyborg uterine geography' differ from other feminist accounts of care? What are the possibilities of drawing on the 'uterine' as both a new material and symbolic figure, in light of recent works that emphasise the potential for thinking feminist politics through the brain, the heart, or the gut? And finally, what are the limits of a uterine geography?

The placenta's role as a mediating passage between bodies has been a conceptual resource for feminist theorists and philosophers interested in developing more nuanced explanations of the maternal–fetal relation, a relation that has tended to be identified with maternal and fetal bodies rather than with the placenta between them. I draw on efforts by philosopher Luce Irigaray and her readers to theorise placental relations as a model for the negotiation of differences. In her more recent work, Irigaray figures the placenta as an enveloping space of metaphorical enclosure. The placental relation in Irigaray's work thus offers insights into the temporal structure of her theory of becoming and can inform a more 'materialist' account of pregnancy. I then consider how placental relations are conceptual resources for re-imagining relations of self–other in pregnancy, and for addressing emergent ethical concerns over the transformation of the placenta into a scientific object.

The proliferation of for-profit enterprises offering stem cell storage services for personal use illustrates one of the ways health is increasingly governed through uncertainty and speculative notions of risk. Without any firm guarantee of therapeutic utility, commercial stem cell banks offer to store a range of bodily tissues, signalling the further transformation of the living body into an accumulation strategy within biotechnology capitalism's 'tissue economies'. This article makes two related claims: first, it suggests that specifically gendered forms of identification with the leading edge of the bioeconomy are embedded in the speculative practices of commercial stem cell banking and are particularly visible in the recent creation of a banking service for endometrial tissue marketed directly to women. Second, the article offers a novel analytic through which to explore the commercial banking of one's own bodily tissues (or 'autologous' banking) through Marx's discussion of money hoarding. The aim of the article is to thus further the conceptual claims linking emergent forms of economic and biomedical subjectivity to transformations in biotechnology capital.

Review of Spaces and Politics of Motherhood, by Kate Boyer, London; New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, £24.95. Paperback, 2018, ISBN: 978-1-78660-308-1This essay reviews Kate Boyer's book, Spaces and Politics of Motherhood.

This article takes at its starting point the idea that maternalism and entrepreneurialism are necessarily antithetical as Julie Stephens argues in Confronting Postmaternal Thinking: Feminism, Memory, and Care [2012. New York: Columbia University Press]. Building on scholarship which shows how motherhood has become commercialised and commodified in contemporary culture, we extend this field by investigating how mothers who are providers of services to other mothers and pregnant women are negotiating neoliberalism and entrepreneurialism. Through an empirical investigation of birth and parenting entrepreneurs–including hypnobirthing classes and placenta pill businesses–in Bristol, UK we argue that our self-employed participants were building community and care economies within neoliberal modes of self-production, thus suggesting a more complex and ambivalent relationship between entrepreneurialism and postmaternalism. We suggest that the experiences of women entrepreneurs or 'mumpreneurs' offer insights into how the spaces of work might be, counter to Stephens' characterisation, places of negotiation and struggle for the politics of feminism, rather than sites of 'anti-maternalism' or the 'forgetting' of maternalism. Moreover, our participants' accounts were strongly shaped by feminist ethics of care thus challenging the representation of such services as therapeutic postfeminist technologies of self-work.

This paper argues for moving away from a linear understanding of feminism which assumes that past feminism produces present and future feminism as a response to its previous waves. Instead, we argue for embracing the multiplicity and simultaneity of contemporary feminisms, taking inspiration from Elizabeth Grosz's writings on futurity and Cindi Katz's work on resistance, resilience and reworking. Drawing on Katz's framing, we review three analytically distinct ways to conceptualise feminist politics and consider how feminist geographers are asking new questions of familiar domains, as well as finding gender formations and political possibilities in unexpected empirical sites.