The Stork

Taking my trip to a maternity ward to visit my newborn niece as a “clinical case,” I visit the phenomenon of digitally surveilling neonates with the self-same devices that were designed to enforce the house-arrest of would-be felons whose noisy place in the cultural imaginary has rendered the neonate’s ankle a transgenerational “risk object” in the unconscious collective. In conversation with the ever-emergent genre known as autotheory, I invite the reader to be an accomplice as I “dramatize my unsettlement” contrasting autotheory with Laplanchean “self-theorization” via interludes about temporality, expertise, birth, gender, race, and place that come to life in the tale of The Stork.