Hacking Reproductive Justice: Solomon’s Judgment and the Captive Maternal

Abstract Sylvia Wynter’s sociogenic principle, Chiara Bottici’s feminist mythology, and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Black feminist praxis of hacking, all underscore the importance of working through the myths, codes, and origin stories that discursively form our world. We identify the biblical story of Solomon’s judgment as an origin story which constitutes an understanding of justice in matters of reproduction that is still hegemonic today, and that must be subverted to realize the Black feminist aim of reproductive justice. Through Solomon’s judgment, justice in reproduction got established as what Édouard Glissant terms, an “obsession with the chain of affiliation” inscribed with the “tragedy of miscegenation,” capturing the maternal in the arché-form of the future subject. We differentiate between the patriarchal configuration of “justice in reproduction” and the feminist concept “reproductive justice,” which is a popular, strong, and important activist concept. To arrive at reproductive justice, a “hack” of the patriarchal configuration of justice in Solomon’s judgment is orchestrated: through a radical affirmation of the events of both abortion and birth, we aim to “explode” the narrative code that constitutes the hegemonic patriarchal understanding of justice, in order to liberate the captive maternal and reimagine reproductive justice within a true feminist mythology.