Birthing Potentialities: The Placenta's Shifting Ontologies

Megan Jean Harlow

Abstract: The placenta nurtures in darkness, pulsing with the rhythm of becoming. Yet under glaring hospital lights, this sustained lifeforce is bagged as biohazard waste—its vital materiality rendered invisible. In this presentation, I tread delicate lines between being and non-being to reconstitute the placenta’s significance. Drawing on Deleuzian perspectives of affect and assemblage, I explore the placenta's spiraling transformations: from sacred in ritual to abject matter in the medical gaze. But binary thinking falters here. The placenta defies categories, overflowing boundaries in its emergence. This vibrant, relational tissue pulses with cosmic creativity—and untapped potential.
My analysis interweaves feminist and indigenous insights about relationality and interdependence with crip/queer refusals of “normal.” Binary life/waste, purified/polluted collapse as the placenta trails amniotic threads across categories. I discuss artistic projects that re-stage the placenta as catalyst—unleashing its generative forces. In honoring what has been discarded, separation gives way to renewed connection. Out of absence, presence coheres in a feminist birthing of possibility. I seek not to constrain meanings, but invite imaginative openings that the placenta’s becoming births within us. This presentation explores the placenta’s potent material-discursiveness to transform what medicine excludes into radical new heuristics of value.