Which Half Is Mommy? Tetragametic Chimerism and Trans-Subjectivity

Aryn Martin (2007a) suggests that there is something of the self that has "become bound up in cells, in response to a cultural rhetoric of genetic reductionism... facilitated by a broader political shift toward privatization and individual responsibility in the late twentieth century in America and in other advanced liberal states" (222). By officially decreeing Lydia as the mother of her children with the emerging possibility that she could be a chimera, the state reinforces its power to determine lineage, reaffirms scientific practice as an integral part of juridical discourse (the introduction of the concept of chimerism into the discourse having affected the outcome), and exposes itself to contestation by revealing the instability of biogenetic definitions of motherhood.