The aff’s drive to prevent large scale threats is a form of masculine survivalism where gendered bodies become the unwilling tools to sustain humanity. You should refuse their obsession with patriarchal reproduction.

The reproduction of survival/ the survival of reproduction Extinction is almost always understood against the horizon of survival and the imperative to sustain it – at least for life forms deemed to be of value to humans. In many cases, this imperative takes the form of deliberate strategies for enforcing existence. Donna Haraway’s influential book When Species Meet devotes considerable attention to the logics, practices and politics of Species Survival Plans. These plans monitor and enforce reproduction amongst ‘endangered’ species, not least by collecting data on populations, genetic profiles and genetic materials to enable selective breeding. This strategy assumes that all organisms can, should, and can be made to exercise their reproductive capacities in order to resist extinction, and it actively mobilizes members of ‘endangered species’ into this project. In so doing, it helps to entrench norms regarding gender, sexuality and reproductive labour that are deeply entrenched in modern, Western human cultures. Attention to these programmes highlights an important way in which extinction is gendered in dominant scientific and policy frameworks. Specifically, strategic breeding programmes share in the belief that reproduction is an imperative for those capable of reproducing if ‘the species’ is at risk’. This belief is directly related to Western norms of the reproductive imperative for women. Indeed, Haraway points out that it is precisely “‘woman’s’ putative self-defining responsibility to ‘the species’ as this singular and typological female is reduced to her reproductive function”. In a similar sense, within SSPs and other strategies of enforced survival, entire life forms are reduced to their reproductive capacities. Moreover, programmes of enforced survival can, in the context of sexual reproduction, disproportionately burden female organisms with the task of avoiding extinction. This logic is particularly fraught in discussions of the possibility of human extinction, in which female fertility (captured in the standard policy language of ‘births per woman’) is framed simultaneously as a threat to survival, and the only hope for escaping extinction (see, for instance, Alan Weisman’s comments on this). In these ways, the securitization of survival entrenches the intersectional categories of gender, species and race discussed above. Dominant discourses of extinction and conservation also entrench and privilege sexual reproduction, in ways that entrench heteronormative assumptions and norms. This is reflected in the way that the subjects of extinction and conservation are framed. The standard object of conservation is the biological ‘species’, a term which is defined by the ability of organisms to reproduce sexually. As Myra Hird has pointed out, this conception of ‘species’ makes it appear as if sexual reproduction is the ‘best’ means of sustaining the existence of a life form. However, Hird’s work demonstrates that Earthly life forms actually engage in myriad forms of reproduction, from the free exchange of DNA between bacteria to the hermaphroditic practices of some fish. The upshot of these arguments is that Earthly life is sustained through a huge variety of reproductive activities that do not conform to biological understandings of life processes or species. Crucially, Hird argues that there is no necessary hierarchy between forms of reproduction. In Darwinian terms, all species that manage to survive are equally successful. However, by conflating survival with sexual reproduction, existing discourses of extinction embed hetero-normative frameworks that devalue other forms of reproduction. They also reduce reproduction to the imperative to survive, ignoring the myriad cultural, political, aesthetic, sensual and other dimensions of reproduction.