As an intervention into our normative understanding of .the real. and its accompanying politics of convention, this performance piece has numerous conceptual goals. The first is to assert that often, normative understandings of biological function are a mythology imposed on form. It is this mythology that creates the sexist, racist, ableist, nationalist and homophobic perspective, distinguishing what body parts are .meant. to do from their physical capability. The myth that a certain set of functions are .natural. (while all the other potential functions are .unnatural.) undermines that sense of capability, confining lifestyle choices to the bounds of normatively defined narratives.
When words are no longer used as a means to convey ideas but, instead, as a means to confuse and camouflage ideas, the speaker has ceased to be an honest broker and has become a huckster. In case you have somehow been lucky enough to miss it, the quote above comes from the "artist" Aliza Shvarts.
For the past year, I performed repeated self-induced miscarriages. I created a group of fabricators from volunteers who submitted to periodic STD screenings and agreed to their complete and permanent anonymity. From the 9th to the 15th day of my menstrual cycle, the fabricators would provide me with sperm samples, which I used to privately self-inseminate.
Emphasis mine.I'm not going to address what Ms. Shvarts chooses to call "art" but rather the words she uses to describe and justify this waste of her parent's money. In the bolded passage above "I created a group of fabricators" is camouflage for a much more straightforward construction: "I asked some guys to be sperm donors" But Ms. Shvarts cannot speak in such banal language because she must hide the banality of her point.
...it is a myth that ovaries and a uterus are .meant.[sic] to birth a child.
I beg to differ, Ms Shvarts. Birthing a child is precisely and exactly what ovaries and a uterus are "meant" to do. More specifically, that is what they are designed to do. If I may lapse into "artist" speak for a moment, "They have a function and their form flows from that function." Yes, they may be used for some other purpose (I once used a ratchet to drive nail) but that doesn't change what they were "meant" to do.
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Perhaps this is why leftists are so violently opposed to Intelligent Design. If our bodies are designed, then their parts must have purposes.
ReplyDeleteAnd since that would mean that using those parts for other purposes would be misuse or abuse, or (gasp!) wrong, it simply can't be true. Listen to the Evan Sayet Heritage Foundation lecture and it all makes sense.
I think that I would like to deconstruct the "author" with a large hammer.
ReplyDeleteWhy is it that so many who inhabit our universities should be more properly housed in asylums?
Fortunately, the description turned out to be a lie. That doesn't change the fact that the "artist" has produced a completely horrific message.
ReplyDeleteRegarding Intelligent Design - Even without ID, the fact that the whole point of being able to reproduce is to further the species through procreation is enough to make it worthwhile to discourage such acts as this, as well as others I'm not going to bother to list here, for the mere fact that they are counter-survival.
Oh - her.
ReplyDeleteFrom the excerpt you provided, I thought it was going to be some intelligensia-flavored review of Chelsea Clinton's visit to the GayBar circuit.
- MuscleDaddy
Hah!
ReplyDeleteThat would fit, too.