“We are mutable and, because of that, there is hope”
A conversation between Charlotte Jarvis and Alejandra Labastida

Alejandra Labastida (AL):
While looking at your manifesto-video, I wished for a conversation between you and Ursula K. Le Guin. You use her short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” to address the ethical perspective of your project, but it reminded me of The Left Hand of Darkness as well. In it, Le Guin presents the thesis that the ambisexual extraterrestrial human society that her main character engages with—persons that do not have a defined gender and that have reproduction cycles in which they can temporarily, randomly and without any control or predisposition assume a male or female procreative role—are the result of a genetic experiment. Since their ambisexuality has no clear adaptive value, she proposes that the elimination of gender and the limitation of sexual drive to procreation might be an attempt to eliminate war and violence, to eliminate the masculinity that rapes and the femininity that is raped. Where do you imagine that conversation would lead you?

Charlotte Jarvis (CJ): I adore Ursula K. Le Guin’s stories. I think of them as thought experiments that reveal our preconceptions and assumptions. Her books demonstrate the limitations of our conceptual framework and give us a peek at something outside. I’m really interested in that—how we can access the other; the things that defy our definitions. It’s an extraordinary and radical thing to do: to reveal the box humanity has found itself in, to show its color, taste and texture, and in doing so, to challenge us to imagine something different.

Le Guin’s books don’t read like manifestos, they ask what seem to be quite simple, innocent questions, but which really successfully undermine some of the most pervasive and damaging narratives of humanity: patriarchy, capitalism, etc. Hers is world-building as a form of activism. Quiet and stealthy, but activism nonetheless.

In Technologies of Gender, Teresa de Lauretis describes another perspective existing in the “social spaces carved in the interstices of institutions and in the chinks and cracks of the power-knowledge apparati.” Lauretis talks about the need to find a “view from elsewhere,”  a different context for dialogue which exists in between. This is what Le Guin’s books do for me, they reveal the great hulking paradigms we carry around with us and—crucially—signal the spaces between, outside and around them. My practice is all about trying to inhabit those spaces.

If you have not read it already, I really recommend Always Coming Home, it’s a genre-defying opus which I often find myself referencing when teaching. It poses so many questions relevant to our current environmental crisis, while still—incredibly—being optimistic… a rare thing. 

AL: Although it may shed light on male infertility, your project is not driven to further the survival of the species but rather by the urgent need to reimagine it. I think the key moment of this complex endeavor is the decision to produce the seminal plasma not only with your blood but with the blood of several woman, trans and non-binary people in a collective ritual. It is not about self-pollination and enhancing an individual’s capacities. That is the real bombshell: not simply turning the tables and producing individual “female” semen, but deconstructing one of the strongholds of patriarchal masculinity—the figure of one powerful individual provider. But I was left wondering: why not also include females from other species in the coven? There is probably an obvious scientific reason for it, but, following your own strain of thought, I would think that, since patriarchy is also heavily dependent on humanism and the separation between man and animals has been the justification for a fair share of its violence, it would also be a great blow to open the collaboration to other species.

CJ: Because animals cannot consent. To extract blood from creatures that are incapable of understanding or participating would be an act of sacrifice rather than collaboration. There might well be a place within the wider Thesmophoria ritual for sacrifice, but not as part of making the seminal plasma. The giving of blood in the project is communal, joyous and meaningful for participants—it is where we enact our solidarity. Furthermore, I believe patriarchy to be a societal construct and, subsequently, it is our responsibility—humanity’s, not animals’—to get rid of it.

AL: Addressing and deconstructing both the materiality and the historical and violent symbolic power of semen is at the center of the artistic operation of In Posse. The scientific process by which you develop the female semen allows the elimination of both ejaculation and penetration—possibly the most violently-charged gestures related to male semen and a bastion of the imaginary of the phallic economy, yet a blurred image of ejaculation is recurrent in your video. Could you talk about the function of this image in your visual essay?

CJ: It is not so much about blurring (censoring) the image as it is about transforming it. In Posse is about approaching semen as a symbol, one that has historically been used to solidify binary, traditional notions of sex and gender and metamorphosing it so that it can be used to undermine patriarchal paradigms. I wanted to create imagery that could speak to this idea of transforming/distorting/subverting, but without dictating what the end result might be. My aim was to take this cross-cultural patriarchal signifier—the pornographic cumshot—and transform it into something aesthetically mutable, shifting and in between states. While I have avoided completely obscuring the image’s origins, the softened, slowly pulsating symmetrical form with a dark central axis takes on the aesthetics of more traditionally feminine symbology; it looks a bit like a vagina, or perhaps it is still very much a couple of jizzing penises, or both, or neither! The point is that it is a difficult image to digest. It is hard to categorize or define it, it is open ended: more of a question than a statement.

It is also significant that the image is mirrored. Throughout the essay, there is the theme of water, reflections and mirrors. These are transitional membranes, places where the world is duplicated, inverted and shifted—where we glimpse alternate versions of our reality—recognizable but also alien, uncanny and familiar. This is what Susana and I aspire to with the project, to provide a view of an-other way.

AL: I love the reference you make to Maggie Nelson’s insistence on the queerness of pregnancy and, again, the way you present your collaboration with Dr. Lopes as "performative research"—which has the power to call into being that which it longs for merely by the process of looking for it—reminded me of another quote from The Argonauts that I have not quite grasped yet and I want to ask what it means to you: “Don’t produce and don’t reproduce, my friend said. But really there is no such thing as reproduction, only acts of production.”[1]

CJ: Reproduction implies something copied, production is something created. Although we use the term reproduction to refer to the act of having children, children themselves are never faithful copies of the originals (thank god!). Children are always something new; something produced, you might say.

There is also the idea of reproduction being something that is domestic, as opposed to production being something economic, with value. As feminists, we recognize that the work of reproduction also has a very real economic value: the billions of hours of unpaid labor women have traditionally provided as mothers/wives/caretakers has been as essential to economic growth as the “productive” work traditionally taken on by men. So, in this sense, there can be no distinction between reproductive and productive work.

AL: In regards to the decision on what to share from the Thesmophoria festivals you experienced in this project, you talk about turning the tables as well as the use of knowledge as a weapon of subjugation. We know it is not only what patriarchy withheld from women, but what it forced them to keep secret amongst themselves, as Alicia Ostriker puts it: “Pregnancy and birth were, I suddenly realized, subjects far more severely taboo than, for example, sex […] Taboo, because men were jealous of us, did not know they were, and we had to protect them from the knowledge.”[2] If you had to transform this manifesto—in which you combine all the radical experience and knowledge that being pregnant and giving birth while doing this project has brought you—into a short story for your baby, what would it center on? In the context of the political mutation you are fighting for, what should we never forget to share with our kids?

CJ: That we can change. Transformation is fundamental to our biology. Our bodies, minds, cultures, political systems, societies and species are not static and never have been. We are mutable and, because of that, there is hope.

AL: This visual essay is also, as you say, a theoretical autobiography that brings you back to an art school project in which you confronted male-dominated Art History with an ironic representation of Pollock’s “ejaculation style.” If, instead of a full circle, you would think of it as a spiral in your work, what would be the next step?

CJ: Before this year, I might have said that I wanted to remake that project, to film myself many years older making a Pollock painting using female semen. But now, writing this, I wonder if the Art-Historical self reflection might be a little too conceited—and perhaps boring, in comparison to some of the more truly radical things I have experienced recently. So, the continuation of the spiral might perhaps be making work with my daughter, or my own mother. I am thinking about matryoshka dolls, umbilical cords, placentas, etc… I met a placenta scientist last year who I would like to reconnect with. It is a really fascinating area of research. The placenta is perhaps the ultimate liminal space, a membrane between two beings: a site for genetic hybridization. It is also an alien organ, grown by the fetus, not the mother, as I think most of us presume. So the placenta I have in my freezer is in fact my daughter’s, not mine. Equally, if I were to use my own stem cells to grow a placenta, it would be the same as the one my mother carried when she bore me. It would be fertile ground for a project.

Within In Posse, I am also interested in looking further at the ritualization of science and the reclaiming of biology. I recently chatted with Susana about the potential of making sex cells by halving the genetic material of my stem cells. It is effectively mimicking the process of meiosis (in which your body makes sperm/eggs by splitting cells in half, so they contain half the DNA of the original) in the lab. What appeals to me about this is that this is the moment “God plays dice”—this is where the infinite genetic possibilities of an individual human collapse. I would like to explore this, perhaps we could create a poetic method for randomizing the genetic distribution? Perhaps this could be part of the Thesmophoria ritual?

Outside of this project, I recently started a collaboration through the British Council which has been put on hold due to the pandemic, but which I would very much like to pursue. I was working with a wonderful Argentinian scientist/poet, thinking about the liminality of our bodies on a molecular and quantum level. Dipole charges attract or repel energy. The sensory system detects subtle differences in these dipoles and responds by literally moving the boundaries of objects within the body: we are in flux, our bodies are constantly changing, adapting, responding, morphing, all without stable borders. We are made of quantum particles. Scientists posit quantum entanglement—a state in which particles mirror each other across time and space—as an explanation for human consciousness. I think quantum biology asks us some really exciting questions I would like to pursue, like: Where does the body begin and end? Is there such a thing as a definable body? And Are any organisms finite within a network of life?

 


[1] Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts, Minneapolis, Graywolf Press, 2015, p. 143.

[2] Alicia Ostriker, “A Wild Surmise: Motherhood and Poetry,” Moyra Davey (ed.), Mother Reader: Essential Writings on Motherhood, New York, Seven Stories Press, 2001, pp. 156-157.