Guest Speaker Dr. Eben Kirksey - The Xenopus Pregnancy Test: A Performative Experiment
Duration: 1 hour 22 mins
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About this item
| Description: | An open seminar sponsored by the Reproductive Sociology Research Group (ReproSoc). Filmed on 22nd May 2015. |
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| Created: | 2015-05-27 11:56 |
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| Collection: |
ReproSoc
Crisis and Social Change: towards alternative horizons |
| Publisher: | University of Cambridge |
| Copyright: | R.C. Williams |
| Language: | eng (English) |
| Distribution: |
World
(not downloadable)
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| Keywords: | Xenopus; pregnancy; test; reproduction; Franklin; bioart; multispecies; ethnography; Anthropology; Kirksey; |
| Categories: |
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| Explicit content: | No |
| Aspect Ratio: | 4:3 |
| Screencast: | No |
| Bumper: | UCS Default |
| Trailer: | UCS Default |
| Abstract: | Dr. Eben Kirksey, Ph.D. is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow, 2014-2017, a permanent faculty member in Environmental Humanities at UNSW Australia and visiting research scholar at Science Studies, The Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the editor of The Multispecies Salon (Duke 2014).
Performative experiments exhibit standard scientific protocols and modes of knowledge production for critical inspection. Drawing on “the performative turn” in science and technology studies, as well as queer theories of gender performance, these experiments often exaggerate, parody, and critique the norms of conventional science. We conducted a performative experiment, a pregnancy test, using a live Xenopus lavevis frog and urine from one of our own bodies. Human Chorionic Gonadotropin, if present in urine, causes Xenopus frogs to lay eggs, signaling pregnancy. By staging this anachronistic pregnancy test, which we retrieved from the annals of medical science, we investigated modes of choreographing human ontologies and expanded the tool kit of ethnography with novel methods and tactics. There is an appreciable gap between the biochemical condition of “being pregnant” and the social condition of experiencing oneself and being recognized by others as pregnant—a gap that technology can serve to narrow or widen depending on how one chooses to stage an ontological state. A positive pregnancy test at a very early stage with a pee-stick or blood test often presages an early miscarriage. Performing the Xenopus Pregnancy Test requires waiting for human bodies to enter a more stable ontology. |
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