The chapter draws on Roberto Esposito’s theorizing about immunity and Adriana Cavarero’s thinking about inclination to examine the tropological suturing of the political and the biomedical in the history of Irish motherhood as reimagined in Emma Donoghue’s novel The Pull of the Stars. Keyed to the material and affective legacies of the First World War and the 1918 influenza pandemic, the narrative dramatizes the compound effects of social, political, and biological precarity on the (pregnant) female body as a metaphor for errant flesh, on the one hand, and the Irish state, on the other. Commensurate with Esposito’s view of immunity as both constitutive and deprivative of community, the novel’s focus on the female body magnifies the violence of the immunitary procedures which were put into effect in Ireland’s Magdalene laundries and mother and baby homes as part of the state’s governance of life. Against this penitential regime of moral rectification, I suggest, Donoghue performs a figurative act of critical midwifery in tune with the idea of inclination, through which the novel reclaims mothering from heteropatriarchal moorings and broaches an ethical alternative to the immunitary politics of reproduction.
