Ivy League Conservatives

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Abortogate. You heard it here first!

Here’s the latest from the Yale Daily News:

On Sunday, Yale College Dean Peter Salovey said Shvarts would not be allowed to open her exhibit unless she issued a written statement admitting that her project — which she claimed comprised nine months of self-inseminations and subsequent induced miscarriages — was nothing more than a creative fiction. Since no resolution was reached on Monday, Shvarts’s project will not be on display when the Undergraduate Art Senior Project Show opens for public viewing this morning. Whether it will eventually be installed remains uncertain.

“A determination has not yet been made,” Yale spokeswoman Helaine Klasky wrote in an e-mail Monday night.

She did not comment further.

Shvarts has not spoken publicly since Friday, when she defended her art project in an interview with the News and in an op-ed piece published in the newspaper. She did not return telephone messages over the weekend and remained silent Monday as time ticked away bef re today’s scheduled opening.

Since then, the University has disciplined two faculty members — the adviser, School of Art lecturer Pia Lindman, and one other — who knew of Shvarts’s project, which drew ire on campus and across the country last week when she first revealed its details. Yale officials have maintained that her project was an example of “performance art,” terming it a “creative fiction.”

In her public comments last week, Shvarts rebutted that assessment, calling it “ultimately inaccurate” and gave no indication that she planned to capitulate.

“I started out with the University on board with what I was doing, and because of the media frenzy they’ve been trying to dissociate with me,” she said Friday. “Ultimately, I want to get back to a point where they renew their support, because ultimately this was something they supported.”

[...] Whether or not Shvarts will comply with those terms is unclear, but a swarm of media is expected to gather outside Green Hall this morning for the exhibition’s scheduled opening.

The timing could not be worse: Today is the second day of the annual Bulldog Days, a three-day event for which admitted students are invited to visit campus and imbibe the Yale experience. Today also marks the beginning of the annual summit for the International Alliance of Research Universities, a consortium of ten leading research universities, including Yale, whose presidents are scheduled to converge on campus today for two days of meetings.

Here is Shvarts’ aforementioned defense of her project, as published in the op-ed section of the Yale Daily News:

For the past year, I performed repeated self-induced miscarriages. I created a group of fabricators from volunteers who submitted to periodic STD screenings and agreed to their complete and permanent anonymity. From the 9th to the 15th day of my menstrual cycle, the fabricators would provide me with sperm samples, which I used to privately self-inseminate. Using a needleless syringe, I would inject the sperm near my cervix within 30 minutes of its collection, so as to insure the possibility of fertilization. On the 28th day of my cycle, I would ingest an abortifacient, after which I would experience cramps and heavy bleeding.

To protect myself and others, only I know the number of fabricators who participated, the frequency and accuracy with which I inseminated and the specific abortifacient I used. Because of these measures of privacy, the piece exists only in its telling. This telling can take textual, visual, spatial, temporal and performative forms — copies of copies of which there is no original.

This piece — in its textual and sculptural forms — is meant to call into question the relationship between form and function as they converge on the body. The artwork exists as the verbal narrative you see above, as an installation that will take place in Green Hall, as a time-based performance, as a independent concept, as a myth and as a public discourse.

It creates an ambiguity that isolates the locus of ontology to an act of readership. An intentional ambiguity pervades both the act and the objects I produced in relation to it. The performance exists only as I chose to represent it. For me, the most poignant aspect of this representation — the part most meaningful in terms of its political agenda (and, incidentally, the aspect that has not been discussed thus far) — is the impossibility of accurately identifying the resulting blood. Because the miscarriages coincide with the expected date of menstruation (the 28th day of my cycle), it remains ambiguous whether the there was ever a fertilized ovum or not. The reality of the pregnancy, both for myself and for the audience, is a matter of reading.

This ambivalence makes obvious how the act of identification or naming — the act of ascribing a word to something physical — is at its heart an ideological act, an act that literally has the power to construct bodies. In a sense, the act of conception occurs when the viewer assigns the term “miscarriage” or “period” to that blood.

In some sense, neither term is exactly accurate or inaccurate; the ambiguity is not merely a matter of context, but is embodied in the physicality of the object. This central ambiguity defies a clear definition of the act. The reality of miscarriage is very much a linguistic and political reality, an act of reading constructed by an act of naming — an authorial act.

It is the intention of this piece to destabilize the locus of that authorial act, and in doing so, reclaim it from the heteronormative structures that seek to naturalize it.

As an intervention into our normative understanding of “the real” and its accompanying politics of convention, this performance piece has numerous conceptual goals. The first is to assert that often, normative understandings of biological function are a mythology imposed on form. It is this mythology that creates the sexist, racist, ableist, nationalist and homophobic perspective, distinguishing what body parts are “meant” to do from their physical capability. The myth that a certain set of functions are “natural” (while all the other potential functions are “unnatural”) undermines that sense of capability, confining lifestyle choices to the bounds of normatively defined narratives.

Just as it is a myth that women are “meant” to be feminine and men masculine, that penises and vaginas are “meant” for penetrative heterosexual sex (or that mouths, anuses, breasts, feet or leather, silicone, vinyl, rubber, or metal implements are not “meant” for sex at all), it is a myth that ovaries and a uterus are “meant” to birth a child.

When considering my own bodily form, I recognize its potential as extending beyond its ability to participate in a normative function. While my organs are capable of engaging with the narrative of reproduction — the time-based linkage of discrete events from conception to birth — the realm of capability extends beyond the bounds of that specific narrative chain. These organs can do other things, can have other purposes, and it is the prerogative of every individual to acknowledge and explore this wide realm of capability.

 

Aliza Shvarts is a senior in Davenport College.

For Shvarts, the art exhibit may not have debuted, but her vilification is not yet complete. She’s already been hammered–and rightfully so–by some major heavy hitters in the news and political blogosphere. Any future work she does on anything will only conjure up bitter memories of Abortogate. When you make a decision that will certainly spark controversy, sometimes you win. And sometimes, as Shvarts has shown us all, you lose.

Image from IvyGate.