Disarticulated Membranes: Pregnancy, Excess, and Radical Resistance

Abstract:My color photography is a theater of psychological and physical transformations that reveal a luminescent excess. This excess combines both the civilized and the animal-istic. For my photography series the Gestation Project I choreographed groups of ten to thirty naked pregnant women in San Francisco public spaces such as the zoo, hair salons, bookstores, nightclubs, boxing rings, and empty auditoriums. The women’s pregnant bodies in community render the private explicitly public. While exploring the erasure of public spaces and our potential for reimagining our collective future, my article conjures the fertility of environmental justice within the commons. Juxtaposing bodies / body fragments with organic and synthetic materials and environments, I play with the illusory distinctions between “them” and “us.” By recognizing how vulnerability can engender a humane global culture, ecofeminist strategies for living our principles without self-censorship, we can hold ourselves accountable as the fear of perceived difference becomes more urgent in our technoeuphoric media-saturated age. A cross-cultural, interspecies approach to climate-crisis mitigation integrates individual, community, and infrastructural change. From this visceral commitment, we can cultivate regenerative economic tools for biocultural transformation, integrating rather than competing with our natural environment or isolating ourselves from it.