Phenomenology of Menstruation
(Bio)artworks Within a Feminist Occult
Nøgleord:
menstruation, phenomenology, biotechnology, bioart, tabooResumé
This paper threads together an individual history of transdisciplinary artistic practice that pivots around material, biotechnological, and conceptual applications of blood, particularly menstrual fluid. My practice has utilized textiles, video performance, ritual/symbolism, microbiology and cellular biology in overlapping strategies to produce a series of feminist artworks. When analysed together, these works form a cohesive repertoire of embodied knowledge where craft and science engagements with menstrual (and other) blood inform a phenomenological approach to bioartistic production. In my artistic practice, working somatically within so-called objective sci-tech fields is intentionally transgressive: (re)personalizing research of taboo, innate body materiality can disrupt both art and biomedicine. These fields have traditionally viewed female bodies and their processes as objects to be studied, (mis)represented and/or controlled, and then repackaged and handed back as dictum – often by those who bear little to no lived physical experience. Steering my research outputs towards critique in the form of aesthetic objects serves to generate physical, crafted ‘evidence’ of embodied knowledge, which can challenge externally authoritative modes of knowledge and culture production. When applied to and utilizing personal blood as creative material, the phenomenology of menstruation becomes a feminist tool for empowerment versus commonly used restrictive taboos. In this paper, I highlight several projects, created between 2003-2023, where the artistic and scientific use of the materiality of blood links back to cultural/technocultural mediations of women’s and other nonhegemonic bodies. This is done as both a self-reflexive and wider critical analysis of blood as feminist materia magica.
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