Cut for sensitivity, profanity, and ranting about abortion issues.
Art major Aliza Shvarts ‘08 wants to make a statement.
Beginning next Tuesday, Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself “as often as possible” while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process.
No. Wait. Panic. Not because of the art, not because it might be real, not because of the idea of someone having multiple ‘forced miscarriages’. Panic because of comments from theoretically pro-choice feminists that amount to: it’s evil to KILL SOMETHING for fun/art, there’s a limit to how many abortions a woman should have, having that many abortions suggests mental illness, immoral, and HOAX. (Try here and here for a start.)
Who knew there was a threshold past which pro-choice feminists start to sound like fundamentalists? I didn’t think it would be that bad. I didn’t think the responses would make me THIS nauseous or furious or this close to tears. Because, dear feminist friends, fuck you for your vile responses.
‘It’s not art. It’s a HOAX.’ First, let’s look at this one, and I will put a FUCK YOU right by this one. It’s not a hoax. It’s art. CONGRATULATIONS, EVERYONE, FOR TAKING PART. Would you be so fast to call it a hoax if it were something else? What about liposuction? What if she said she ate only McDonalds and had liposuction every month. Would you be talking about it as performance art or deriding it as an immoral hoax? It’s not a hoax. It’s brilliant. Because many pro-choice feminists have just been outed for the fertility cultists and uterus polizia (thanks for the term, ~eyelid) that they really are under the surface. The hoax is every single ‘pro-choicer’ who responded to this with “I’m pro-choice, but…”
Let’s move on to this shit about “she’s stupid because she’s put herself in danger if it is real”. Step. The. Fuck. BACK. Let’s trade being a woman in an alley at night or a black man in a sundown town after dark with ‘artist simulating or having multiple abortions’.
What the fuck are you people fighting for if not the right of this woman and every woman to do EXACTLY what this woman pretends (apparently it was all artifice) to have done? Do you not trust your sisters? Are you only guaranteeing abortions to those who believe what you do? There really is a limit to the freedom you are willing to allow your sisters, isn’t there? It should not be dangerous beyond basic biological consequences for her to have as many abortions as she wants, for any reason. It is wrong for any of us to live in fear.
Doctors who PERFORM multiple abortions a DAY are heroes, doctors who have been shot, who have to be flown in by helicopter to clinics are not maligned as stupid, they are hailed as heroes. This woman therefore should be accorded the same status for placing herself in the public eye as a person who has (or has taken on the mantle of having) had multiple abortions and who is not sorry for it. She is a hero, to me.
To everyone mouthing words of concern about her health and future fertility, FUCK YOU as well. People have crucified themselves, immolated themselves, cut off their ears, their breasts, put out their own eyes, tattooed and disfigured themselves, and many of them call it art or heroism or martyrdom. ‘She shouldn’t have done it because she’s damaging herself,’ people are whining.
You know what’s damaging? Living under the sword of forced birth hanging over one’s head. That hurts every. damn. one. of us. Don’t dare lecture a woman for doing something that might interrupt her fertility. I’m sure that, immersed in the cult of fertility that we are, she’s thought of it. The same people who are outraged by a woman’s inability to get permanent sterilization at a young age are also… what? Mealy-mouthing over her choice to theoretically damage herself with multiple abortions for the sake of art.
What bullshit. Again, this is all about moralizing. It’s okay to have an abortion as long as you secretly are sorry for it? It’s okay if you only do it out of necessity? As soon as you say that, you throw us all into the furnace. I reject that utterly.
The argument that she is denigrating or using or making light of women’s real experiences with abortion is also pure crap. No, I’m not even starting to run out of steam on this subject. Fuck that as well. This from the same group that say an abortion should have the same social weight as a pap smear. Obviously if it doesn’t have that weight with YOU, why should the anti-choicers fall in line? You know this woman hasn’t really had an abortion? Why should she disclose her real status to you? She doesn’t have to earn a badge to talk about abortion, or to do art about abortion. She’s got a uterus, she did what she wanted with it. She hasn’t even looked sideways at yours. Step. Off. Get your eyes back where they belong, on your own hypocrisy.
To Yale, FUCK YOU, too. Fuck you for this: Had these acts been real, they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns. Basic ethical standards? What basic ethical standards are that? What mental and physical health concerns are we talking about? Are you rounding up the alcoholics, anorexics, cokeheads, insomniacs, plagiarists, overeaters, smokers, and nymphomaniacs in your program as well? These acts… you mean the ABORTIONS? The ‘forced miscarriages’? There are people doing worse things to themselves under your noses for the sake of art, people hurting other people as well, manipulating each other, driving each other mad, abusing each other, abusing themselves. Get your judgmental, authoritarian, hypocritical selves back in the ivory tower. Fuck you. This woman took legal actions, simulated or otherwise, on her own body and no other.
I wish this were true. I wish it were true because I wish it were that easy for women to control their fertility. I wish it weren’t all art. I’m glad it isn’t because I think that might keep Aliza safer, and I think she is brave to have done this. I don’t think it’s bad art. I’m sad that it worked so well and so many people danced the dance. I think the people who will be angriest about this are the ones who are going toe to toe with their own hypocrisy right now.
I support Aliza’s right to do this for real, because I will not throw my sisters into the furnace by applying my morality to OUR RIGHT to do what we will to our bodies. I support her right to do this as performance art, simulating the abortions/miscarriages she claims to have had, because it is her right (OUR RIGHT) to express herself in a way that harms no one. And I utterly reject any criticism of her beyond the unbiased, technical evaluation of her work as a whole. I hope she gets a fucking A.
5 responses so far ↓
1 Starshadow // Apr 18, 2008 at 3:14 am
I had to think about this one for a while.
Do I think it’s art? No. But then, we all have our own definitions of “art.” I didn’t think the fellow who urinated on canvas was creating art, either.
Do I think it’s a statement? Yes, most definitely.
We all say there should be no line - and yet there is always a line, inside each one of us. For every ethical dilemma, for every hot issue, inside each one of us is a line: “That far, but no further.”
Did she cross my line? Yeah, I think she did. I will always support a woman’s right to do with her body as she chooses, but I can also acknowledge that there’s something awry with the system if a woman is using abortions as her primary means of birth control. A huge part of the problem, of course, is easy, affordable birth control.
I would like to see a world where R&D developed effective birth control that was also safe, and a world where said birth control was made readily available to all women. Many of the options currently available aren’t nearly as effective as we’d like, and/or they have potentially nasty side effects (mucking about with one’s hormones is not a good thing). If it were the men who were the ones getting pregnant, you can bet that there’d be a lot of $$ spent on developing birth control methods, and you can bet it would be easily available (and affordable).
She may not have crossed the line for everyone, but she did for some. Was it a line that needed to be crossed? Maybe yes, maybe no. If one of the results of her performance art/statement is more restrictions on access to abortion, how will we feel then about what she’s done?
2 ande // Apr 18, 2008 at 3:51 am
If one of the results of her art is more restriction, then we aren’t trying hard enough. We’re to blame, as a society and as a movement. Not her. I am sick of women being afraid to get in trouble. I am sick of the ‘you’ll make them angry at us!’ banner being waved in the faces of the defiant. I am tired of feeling like a child in a dysfunctional family when I am a full grown human being.
I absolutely feel that women should not use abortion as their primary form of birth control, because, yes, they should have access to better fertility control. Women shouldn’t have to be unduly inconvenienced or stressed by the preservation of their reproductive freedom.
I don’t think she crossed any line that didn’t need to be crossed. I think any censure of her art should be in a lack of attention, if one feels it necessary. The reaction to it has been horrible and cleansing at once, like an abscess being lanced.
I don’t think there is a line here, ethically. Because once you say “it’s wrong to do something legal to your body for frivolous purposes”, you are in dangerous territory. Define frivolous or unnecessary. I refuse to put an ethical line there — regardless of my personal feelings on the matter — because I want abortion to be safe, legal, and free of shame for every woman in the world. If we back down on abortion, we back down on birth control. We back down on everything. If someone wants a clump of cells suctioned out of their body, that’s their choice. I think it is too dangerous to put ethical boundaries around the process.
3 Alex // Apr 18, 2008 at 10:35 am
It should not be dangerous beyond basic biological consequences for her to have as many abortions as she wants, for any reason. - that really brought home to me what a different culture I’m living in, because it did not occur to me until I read those words that there could be any *other* type of danger being referred to above.
I know a couple of performance artists who routinely put their bodies through a lot of punishment, with risks and potentially permanent side effects, and - well - if they want to do that, feel compelled to do that, make an informed choice to do that - they should do that. (and given the society I live in, it may be worth adding ‘and, yes, my taxes should pay for their health care if one of those risks goes sour’. )
4 Voyou Desoeuvre » Blog Archive » Pro-choice means never having to say you’re sorry // Apr 21, 2008 at 10:55 pm
[…] I’m in favor of abortion or, in the rather impoverished language of contemporary debate, I’m pro-choice. That would include the choice of art students to artificially inseminate themselves and then induce miscarriages as part of their work. But a lot of the response on the internet to Aliza Shvartzs’s artwork has been of the “I’m as pro-choice as anyone, as long as women don’t make choices I disagree with” variety. I think it’s a real weakness of the pro-choice position that abortion is so often spoken of in hushed terms, treated as unpleasant, tragic, something awful that must, perhaps, be allowed in some circumstances when entered into with the proper degree of gravity. But this isn’t really a pro-choice position at all; treating abortion as somehow an especially grave matter buys completely into the pro-life position that there’s something wrong about abortion (indeed, the idea that you can have an abortion, but only if you treat it with the requisite degree of moral seriousness, is not conceptually different from the idea that you can have an abortion, but only if you are the victim of rape: it depends on a misogynist distinction between “responsible” and “irresponsible” women). For more on this see an old LBO post by shag, and this excellent post on the current controversy. […]
5 binsk // Apr 25, 2008 at 6:25 am
yet, after we all agree with her right to do what she wants with her body, can’t we make a value judgement to say, “this is pretty dumb”?
Leave a Comment