Jenn Thảo Nguyễn

Reading about how an individual’s ability to undergo IVF treatment was shaped by successive stages of medical malpractice was deeply unsettling. Quilter’s writing deftly intertwines the history of IVF with her personal journey, illustrating the challenges she faced in articulating both her understanding of fertility and the medically opaque world of IVF. Much is omitted from Edwards and Steptoe’s (E&S) accounts of their experimentation; however, Quilter’s image schema gives voice to the subjects, amplifying their silenced experiences through her own narrative of disorientation and determination. Stoicism emerges as a reified trait in the women subjected to these tests — visible in their quiet endurance in clinic waiting rooms and in E&S’s depiction of Lesley Brown, whose success was seemingly prophesied by her ability to “suffer whatever was necessary with [said] stoicism” (99).

I wonder if stoicism is inherent to the maternal, or if it is a determination for the maternal — shaped by patriarchal and capitalist structures — that renders itself legible only as stoicism? Correa’s point on medical image-making encouraging women to “transpose herself from thinking subject to acted-upon object” (111) offers insight into how this severing of the woman from her affective and physiological connection to her body may be central to the process of becoming a mother. To be maternal, then, is to compartmentalize. Our readings reframe this compartmentalization from a passive phenomenon to an active one. Sarah Franklin reclaims stoicism and transmutes it into ambivalence, a state of mixed and contradictory feelings that allows for “indexing the paradoxical aspects of IVF as both ordinary and curious”.

The tension finds expression in Melissa Friedling’s Gestational Filmmaking trilogy, where ambivalence becomes a lens for exploring the intertwined histories of IVF and moving images, both mechanized forms of reproducing life. The experimental disjunctions accompanying each pairing of the ordinary and curious within each film were highly activating: from the split interview between a gynecological practitioner and a reproductive scholar in An Odd Pair, the asynchronous sound and visual commentary on Vitagraph and Vitaphone’s convergence in Midwood Movie (Friedling, 2024), to the parallel imagery of a garden vine and curling celluloid print on a trellis in Garden Roll Bounce Parking Lot (Friedling, 2009). These elements together create an uncanny coherence that uniquely characterizes IVF, made possible through this Chthulucene approach.

We see then how ‘ambivalence’ reclaims imposed distanciation, subverting its inscription as stoicism and instead welcoming the generative space that mixed and contradictory emotions allow. Labor, in the context of love, takes many forms, and the maternal creativity inspired by Friedling’s work is deeply generative. Embracing Baraitser’s ethics of interruption, Friedling’s creative parameters are shaped by her radius of childcare, making maternal ambivalence the necessary foundation for her renewed curiosity and artistic innovation. This reveals how compartmentalization can look to the inclusive, rather than the excluded. Following the footsteps of the many creatively curious mothers before her, Friedling offers an enabling representation of the mother who holds her baby while she writes, her writing made possible by the very creation in her hands.