Bear with the length (Background reading here and here if you haven’t heard about this Yale senior who tried to impregnate herself, induce abortions, and use the blood in an art project).
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
Just as it is a myth that women are “meant” to be feminine and men masculine, that penises and vaginas are “meant” for penetrative heterosexual sex (or that mouths, anuses, breasts, feet or leather, silicone, vinyl, rubber, or metal implements are not “meant” for sex at all), it is a myth that ovaries and a uterus are “meant” to birth a child.
When considering my own bodily form, I recognize its potential as extending beyond its ability to participate in a normative function. While my organs are capable of engaging with the narrative of reproduction — the time-based linkage of discrete events from conception to birth — the realm of capability extends beyond the bounds of that specific narrative chain. These organs can do other things, can have other purposes, and it is the prerogative of every individual to acknowledge and explore this wide realm of capability.
-Aliza Shvarts, in the Yale Daily News
To the average person this probably seems a bloviating morass of self-indulgent pap, but to the metastatic thinker the meaning is clear and inspiring. We do not, Shvarts declares, live in a cosmos (which is to say, an ordered existence) in which we must attune ourselves to the divine order of being. Rather, existence is corrupted. God must be murdered and the world remade–the order of being must be destroyed. This is what the railing against the normative means, that nothing outside the self is to be allowed any value or significance. External order must be swept away. All norms must be smashed and transgressed, all constraints must be broken so that humans may ascend to the role of creators, that our throne may be established on the grave of God (for it is intolerable that there should be a God other than myself).
