The Maternal, Digital Subjectivity, and the Aesthetics of Interruption 9781501364822, 9781501364792, 9781501364808

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Strange Mothers
1 Digital Performance and the Maternal Subject
2 The Aesthetics of Interruption
3 Uncanny Encounters
4 Maternal Immanence and Embodied Transcendence
5 Networked Individuals and Maternal Ambivalence
6 Distributed Mother
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Maternal, Digital Subjectivity, and the Aesthetics of Interruption

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The Maternal, Digital Subjectivity, and the Aesthetics of Interruption EL PUTNAM

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2022 Copyright © EL Putnam, 2022 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on pp. x–xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image: EL Putnam, Quickening, 2018, documentation of digital performance All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Putnam, EL, author. Title: The maternal, digital subjectivity, and the aesthetics of interruption / EL Putnam. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Establishes a new mode of understanding digital subjectivity using maternal philosophy through a shared aesthetics of interruption”– Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021048721 (print) | LCCN 2021048722 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501364822 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501392139 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501364815 (epub) | ISBN 9781501364808 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Mass media–Philosophy. | Digital media. | Mass media–Technological innovations. | Mass media and technology. | Aesthetics. Classification: LCC P90 .P88 2022 (print) | LCC P90 (ebook) | DDC 302.2301–dcundefined LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021048721 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021048722 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-6482-2 ePDF: 978-1-5013-6480-8 eBook: 978-1-5013-6481-5 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For David L. Putnam

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Contents List of Illustrations  Acknowledgments 

viii x

Introduction: Strange Mothers 

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1 Digital Performance and the Maternal Subject  2 The Aesthetics of Interruption  3 Uncanny Encounters 

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49

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4 Maternal Immanence and Embodied Transcendence  5 Networked Individuals and Maternal Ambivalence  6 Distributed Mother  Bibliography  Index  205

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105 141

Illustrations Color plates 1 and 2

Stills from Marni Kotak’s, Raising Baby X: Five Years, video, 352 minutes. 2012–17. Images courtesy of the artist and Microscope Gallery 3 Megan Wynne, Mask of Motherhood, 2016. Courtesy of the artist 4 Megan Wynne, Motivation, 2016. Courtesy of the artist 5 and 6 Aideen Barry, Enshrined, 2016. Courtesy of the artist 7 and 8 Laura O’Connor, Uncomfortable State, 2018. Courtesy of the artist 9 and 10 EL Putnam, Quickening, 2018. Courtesy of the artist 11 Fatimah Tuggar, Lady & the Maid, 2000, Computer Montage (inkjet on vinyl), 274 × 115 cm (108 × 45 in). Courtesy of BintaZarah Studios 12 Fatimah Tuggar, Working Woman, 1997, Computer Montage (inkjet on vinyl), 128 × 121 cm (50 × 48 in). Courtesy of BintaZarah Studios 13 Amanda Coogan and Paddy Cahill, screenshots from Yellow The Film (2012). Courtesy of the artists 14 Promotional image for Jess Dobkin, Lactation Station, 2006. Photograph by David Hawe. Courtesy of the artist 15 Helen Knowles, Alleingeburt / Unassisted Childbirth, 2012, from YouTube series. Courtesy of the artist 16 Helen Knowles, Birth with Orgasm II, 2012, from YouTube series. Courtesy of the artist

Illustrations

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Figures 0.1 Coco Karol and Amanda Palmer performing in the music video for “Drowning in the Sound” (2019), scene cut from final video. Director: Michael Pope; choreographer: Coco Karol; conceived and written by Amanda Palmer, Coco Karol, and Michael Pope. “Drowning in the Sound” (the song) written by Amanda Palmer. Courtesy of the creators  3 0.2 Screenshot from “Drowning in the Sound” (2019). Director: Michael Pope; choreographer: Coco Karol; conceived and written by Amanda Palmer, Coco Karol, and Michael Pope. “Drowning in the Sound” (the song) written by Amanda Palmer. Courtesy of the creators  4 4.1 Patty Chang, Milk Debt, 2020. Installation view at 18th Street Arts Center Olympic Campus Main Gallery. Photograph by Brica Wilcox. Courtesy of the artist  106 4.2 Jess Dobkin, Lactation Station, 2006. Breast milk served at the public tasting. The Ontario College of Art & Design Professional Gallery. Photograph by David Hawe. Courtesy of the artist  116 4.3 Male Nipple Pasty Meme (2015), remastered 2021, Micol Hebron. Courtesy of the artist  126 5.1 Rena Butler as Medea in La Medea, 2017. Directed by Yara Travieso. Photograph by Maria Baranova. Courtesy of the creators  145 5.2 Shayla-Vie Jenkins as Medea in La Medea, 2017. Directed by Yara Travieso. Photograph by Darren Phillip Hoffman. Courtesy of the creators  145

Acknowledgments T

here are many people who have supported me in the realization of this book. First, I want to thank editor Katie Gallof for her generosity and support in bringing this project to print. I also thank James O’Sullivan for inviting me to write a chapter regarding the maternal and digital art in Ireland, which became the seed that grew into the current text. I have extreme gratitude for Noel Fitzpatrick and the Digital Studies Group at Gradcam/TU Dublin, which helped me develop the conceptual foundations of this work. I am grateful for members of the Beverly Salon in Beverly, Massachusetts—Jen Hall, Blyth Hazen, Patricia Tinajero, Mary Anne Davis, Linda Bourke, Kate Farrington, Caroline Bagenal, Lynn Cannon, Koren Christensen, Laura Reeder, Chelsea Sams, Lauren Barthold, and Joni Doherty—who supported the formulation of my ideas and writing throughout the process. Many thanks to the Salon, Conor McGarrigle, Kate Antosik-Parsons, George Smith, and Marilyn Arsem for reviewing early drafts and providing invaluable feedback. Thanks especially to Jennie Klein and the anonymous peer reviewers for taking the time to review this project in different stages of development, offering astute insights that introduced new directions for the work. Much of the writing and editing of this book took place during the Covid-19 pandemic. I would have not been able to complete this project without daily Shut Up and Write sessions with my National University Ireland Galway (NUIG) colleagues Frances McCormack, Emily Ridge, Siobhán Morrissey, and Conn Holohan. Your support was vital during challenging times. Many thanks also to Fergus Byrne, Jessica Rodríguez Colón, Digital Arts Studios Belfast, Anne Karhio, Miriam Haughton, Jason Hoelscher, Livestock (Francis Fay, Eleanor Lawler, and Katherine Nolan), Glenn Loughran, Charlotte McIvor, Martin McCann, Mike McCormack, Ciara McKeon, the Mobius Artists Group, Simonetta Moro, Mick O’Hara, Sean Ryder, Tim Stott, Dominic Thorpe, Connell Vaughan, Ian Walsh, and the many other groups and individuals who have influenced this work, both directly and indirectly. Early drafts of chapters were presented at the following conferences: the College Art Association Annual Conference; the Thinking Gender Justice, First Annual Conference of the Centre for Gender, Feminisms and Sexualities at University College Dublin, Ireland; the Bodies of Data: Intersecting Medical

Acknowledgments

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and Digital Humanities conference of the Irish Humanities Alliance; Transient Topographies: Space and Interface in Digital Literature and Art, Second Galway Digital Cultures Initiative Conference at National University Ireland Galway, Ireland; and the Annual Conference for the Society for Women in Philosophy Ireland. Parts of Chapters 1 and 2 have appeared in early form in the chapter “Strange Mothers: The Maternal and Contemporary Media Art in Ireland” in Digital Art in Ireland: New Media and Irish Artistic Practice, edited by James O’Sullivan and published by Anthem Press. I would like to thank the Moore Institute at NUIG for providing a Grant-in-Aid of Publication. Thank you to all the artists, Aideen Barry, Amanda Coogan and Paddy Cahill, Patty Chang, Jess Dobkin, Micol Hebron, Helen Knowles, Marni Kotak, Laura O’Connor, Amanda Palmer, Yara Travieso, Fatimah Tuggar, and Megan Wynne, who provided permissions to reproduce your imagery. Finally I want to thank the friends and family who have supported me throughout this process. I am especially grateful to David Stalling for being there with me along with Laurel and Sonja (my inspirations and creative foils). This book is rooted in this journey we are making together and would not exist without you. I have endless gratitude for my mother, Patricia Putnam, for your unconditional love and support over the years and coping with my interruptions. Thank you for helping me navigate this unmapped journey of motherhood. Finally, I am grateful for the love and support of my father, Dr. David Putnam. You instilled in me a love of learning and sparked my artistic journey so many years ago. I only wish you could have been here to see this project come to fruition.

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Introduction: Strange Mothers

Treading water in the matrix

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he music video “Drowning in the Sound” (2019), directed by Michael Pope, opens with the singer, Amanda Palmer, standing alone in a darkened, nonsituated place. She wears white ragged Victorian-style clothing, providing a stark contrast to the shadowed void. The camera cuts to a pregnant woman (Coco Karol), dressed in similar style clothing, looking intently at her upheld palm and gently caressing it like a touchscreen. Quick jump cuts match the jarring quality of the music, revealing four more dancers also dressed in white and standing in shallow water. The song, a dramatic melody of piano and classical instruments, drops to silence, matching the visual contrast of bodies in white against the emptiness of the blackened space. The tone both aurally and visually is loaded with emotion, playing with the affective tensions of seen and unseen, heard and unheard. Karol, who choreographed the video in addition to collaborating with Palmer and Pope in developing its concept, was seven-months pregnant at the time the shoot took place. Throughout the video, she reveals and hides her swollen belly, at times clutching it with her hands and caressing the bump with a tender gesture. At one point, she stands partially nude on a small island in the water, with her arm covering her breasts. The camera then cuts to a close up of her belly, as water drips down her revealed flesh. In some shots, she presents the image of an archetypal pregnant woman through her protective, waiting stance. This image is interrupted by her later movements, as Karol dances with the others, moving her body through a mix of aggressive and tender motions. Throughout the dance, she exudes strength. For centuries in Western art, images of pregnancy and motherhood have been dominated by the Christian

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iconography of the Virgin Mary and Jesus, constituting tropes that continue to be perpetuated and critiqued today. The pregnant woman, especially when framed as the expectant mother, is treated as a person in waiting for the act of birth, as opposed to being capable of creative production.1 As collaborator, choreographer, and performer, Karol is not just present in the video as an image of a pregnant woman—a symbol of a questionable future in the time of climate crisis and networked angst that the song “Drowning in the Sound” is about—but also performs and produces creative acts while pregnant, making this pregnancy visible as part of the video and its production process. Palmer highlights Karol’s pregnancy through accompanying social media posts, including dramatic production stills of a duet danced between her and Karol that had been cut from the final video. Through intense movements of Palmer and Karol grappling each other in a state of panic, Karol does not appear as a fragile being, but with her arms and legs spread wide becomes larger than life (see Figure 0.1). The music video and social media posts affiliated with “Drowning in the Sound” encapsulate a performance of pregnancy that is lived and embodied, but also where the pregnant woman is not reduced to simply an expectant mother or the container for the development of another being. Instead, she is a creative producer as a subject that does not reject the embodied state of gestation. Pregnancy and motherhood are not threats to selfhood, but the maternal changes subjectivity instead of undermining it. In her study of maternal subjectivity, Alison Stone emphasizes how in Western philosophical frameworks, the mother is placed in opposition to the autonomous subject, arguing that for one to become a subject means breaking from or rejecting the maternal body.2 In “Drowning in the Sound,” there is a glitching of pregnancy, as gestation is iterated with a difference and meaning is generated from bodily experience. Pregnancy constitutes only one strand of this video’s content. The dancers’ movements, which start as smooth and graceful, become increasingly jerky and frantic, appearing as bodies stuck in glitched loops. There are close-ups of eyes darting back and forth, hands manipulate the mouth and eyelids to create exaggerated facial expressions, fingers move frantically as more hands scroll through and then beat upon screens of devices that are not there. Bodies are

See Amy Mullin, “Pregnant Bodies, Pregnant Minds,” Feminist Theory 3, no. 1 (2002): 27–44; EL Putnam, “Performing Pregnant: An Aesthetic Investigation of Pregnancy,” in New Feminist Perspectives on Embodiment, ed. Clara Fischer and Luna Dolezal, 203–20, Breaking Feminist Waves (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2018).

1

Alison Stone, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity (New York: Routledge, 2012), 10.

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FIGURE 0.1 Coco Karol and Amanda Palmer performing in the music video for “Drowning in the Sound” (2019), scene cut from final video. Director: Michael Pope; choreographer: Coco Karol; conceived and written by Amanda Palmer, Coco Karol, and Michael Pope. “Drowning in the Sound” (the song) written by Amanda Palmer. Courtesy of the creators.

alternately wound up and then meld into each other, caught between extremes of anxiety and deep relaxation. In one scene, the performers are together in a row boat with Palmer at the stern, holding up a lantern. In the next shot, the camera is closer to her, but instead of a lantern, she holds up a smartphone to light the way (see Figure 0.2). The song lyrics shift from the personal to social issues, such as the prison industrial complex in the United States, politics, fake news, and climate change. The content transitions rapidly from topic to topic. The melody of the song compounds the emotions evoked through the movements and images of the video, shifting from angst to comfort to sorrow

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FIGURE 0.2  Screenshot from “Drowning in the Sound” (2019). Director: Michael Pope; choreographer: Coco Karol; conceived and written by Amanda Palmer, Coco Karol, and Michael Pope. “Drowning in the Sound” (the song) written by Amanda Palmer. Courtesy of the creators.

to strength to resignation, mimicking responses to a chain of events occurring through a social media feed, like doom-scrolling through Twitter or Facebook. Jodi Dean describes the digital subject as a “whatever being,” caught up in states of doubt and reflexivity, interconnected through networks of affect, and mediated through the power mechanisms of communicative capitalism. Increased and faster access to information have also meant that the capacities of knowledge have grown, though like the flexibility of identity, this is not always beneficial. As Dean states: The contemporary setting of electronically mediated subjectivity is one of infinite doubt, ultimate reflexivization. There’s always another option, link, opinion, nuance, or contingency that we haven’t taken into account, some particular experience of some other who could be potentially damaged or disenfranchised, a better deal, perhaps even a cure.3 The resulting subjects, according to Dean, are completely reflexive selves that exist in infinite loops, becoming the “very form of capture and absorption.”4 “Drowning in the Sound” is not just about the affective impacts of social media and digital technologies, but the song and video were created through these networks. Amanda Palmer’s artistic practice has long been developed

Jodi Dean, Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive, (Cambridge, UK, and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2010), 6.

3

Ibid., 13.

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and supported through online media. She currently uses Patreon, a crowdsourcing platform targeted toward artists, musicians, and creators. According to the service’s website, Jack Conte, a YouTube musician, developed the idea for Patreon as a way for his fans to financially support his artistic productions. He then teamed up with Sam Yam to develop the platform. Their business model is marketed as a means of cultivating direct support from fans.5 Palmer uses Patreon not only as a platform for supporting her art but also as a hub for her fans who become involved in her creative process. In a YouTube video she created to promote her account, Palmer recounts how she “gave birth” to her Patreon when she was pregnant as a means of supporting her practice directly without having to rely on the business model of album production and sales that characterizes the music industry. She appreciates the ability to produce art whenever she wants, with whomever she wants, and however she wants, as a means of “responding to the world around [her]” through the “miracle of artistic freedom” that Patreon enables.6 Starting with her blog in the 2000s, Palmer has regularly utilized internet platforms as a means of constituting herself as an artist in terms of her identity, development of her artistic work, and financial support. Her celebration of these platforms, which imbue her with a freedom and autonomy while working through collaborative networks, correlates with the utopian ideology that drove the computer technologies industry in Silicon Valley during the late twentieth century. Fred Turner describes how aspects of the Californian counterculture ethos of the 1960s can be found in the cultures of production that characterize Silicon Valley, particularly networked thinking that limits reliance on governing structures, the treatment of material reality as information, and models of entrepreneurship that utilize technology to encourage peer-to-peer engagements that enable self-sufficiency.7 Promoting a sort of communal yet autonomous state of being together, this ideological stance came to inform how technology is understood as a means of enabling social relations. As Silicon Valley was the major site of emergence for many digital technological innovations during the late twentieth century, including the development of the internet and personal computers, tools and machines are imbued with these ideas, which in turn are designing us through their technological affordances.8

Patreon, “About,” accessed August 16, 2019, https://www.patreon.com/about.

5

Amanda Palmer, “How Patreon Is Changing Everything. Love, Amanda Palmer,” YouTube, March 23, 2018, accessed November 27, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7oUKUK8Xus.

6

Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 5.

7

See Jenny L. Davis, How Artifacts Afford: The Power and Politics of Everyday Things, Design Thinking, Design Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020).

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The developers of these technologies and platforms emphasize peer-to-peer networking, self-sufficiency, playfulness, and freedom from organizational structures. Within these relations of affective flux, Palmer functions as a digital performer whose subjectivity is formed through the networks she utilizes. The implications of these processes can be detected through her artistic work, including the frantic aesthetics and content of “Drowning in the Sound.” The song and video draw from a number of inspiring factors, while being informed and enabled by social networks. For instance, Palmer posted the demo for the song “Drowning in the Sound” the day after she wrote it, which would not be possible in traditional models of song production through record labels. She eventually produced a higher-quality version of the song that was released on her 2019 album, There Will be No Intermission, also produced through Patreon support. The title of the album encompasses an ethos of production where there is no break to the flow of life nor the making of art. This flow encapsulates the temporal being of digital subjectivity, where instead of being constant or insistent, it is actually composed of persistent interruptions. Palmer is producing artworks that bring together music, video, live and recorded performance, but she is also participating in an ongoing digital performance through the production, development, and maintenance of an online presence.

Connecting the dots This circuitous prelude that considers Amanda Palmer’s music video engages with an intersection of digital subjectivity and the maternal. In addition to the alternative construction of pregnancy presented in the video, Palmer is a mother who draws from her experiences, including other reproductive events in her life such as abortions and miscarriage, as fuel for her song lyrics. The range and shifting tone of references to reproduction and care encompass the complexity of the maternal, which is defined in the context of this book as a performative parenting role that includes, but is not limited by, biological reproduction and the capacity to care for children. Even though the capacity to mother is not gendered,9 mothers tend to be presumed to be women or

See Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace, 1st British publication (London: The Women’s Press, 1990); Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2015); Andrea O’Reilly, Matricentric Feminism: Theory, Activism, Practice (Bradford, ON: Demeter Press, 2021).

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femme-presenting. I propose that Palmer is a strange mother, or someone who redefines motherhood and the maternal subject through creative practice. These artists use technology to glitch the maternal. This leads to the problem at hand addressed in this book. The advent and proliferation of digital technologies, which has come to be present in almost every aspect of our lives, have incited major changes in how human beings function individually and collectively. In recent years, various scholars have expressed concern at the psychosocial implications of digitization. Bernard Stiegler describes the invasive impact of these processes on human beings, where individuals and groups are “transformed into data-providers, de-formed and re-formed by ‘social’ networks operating according to new protocols of associations.”10 There are various descriptors of this current phase of extreme rationalization. Some base it in an economic framework, or what Shoshana Zuboff refers to as surveillance capitalism, Jonathan Crary terms 24/7 capitalism, Jodi Dean calls communicative capitalism, and McKenzie Wark proposes as the death of capitalism and something worse.11 Certain scholars take a political perspective, including Antoinette Rouvroy and Thomas Bern, who call it algorithmic governmentality.12 Others take a broader cultural and social approach with reference to human subjects, including what Wendy Hui Kyong Chui describes as programmed visions, John Cheney-Lippold treats as the datafied self, artist James Bridle calls a new technological dark age, and Ruha Benjamin, highlighting epistemic racial inequalities, refers to as the “new Jim Code.”13 All of these attempts at naming engage with the various ways that the ubiquitous collection of data and the influence of algorithms have on our behaviors, informing nearly every aspect of our lives as power is transformed. While each of these authors take a slightly different approach to these issues—specifically the impact of digital technology on human subjectivity, behaviors, and societies with implications that exceed the

Bernard Stiegler, The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism, trans. Daniel Ross, (Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2019), 7. 10

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, 1st edition (New York: Public Affairs, 2019); Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2014); Dean, Blog Theory; McKenzie Wark, Capital Is Dead (London and New York: Verso, 2019). 11

Antoinette Rouvroy and Thomas Berns, “Gouvernementalité Algorithmique et Perspectives d’émancipation,” trans. Elizabeth Libbrecht, Réseaux 177, no. 1 (October 14, 2013): 163–96.

12

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (Cambridge, MA, and London, England: MIT Press, 2011); John Cheney-Lippold, We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves (New York: New York University Press, 2017); James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future (London and New York: Verso, 2018); Ruha Benjamin, Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Newark, UK: Polity Press, 2019).

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knowledge and understanding of users—there are common concerns. This does not entail a wholesale rejection of technology, but a means of rethinking the capacities of what digital technologies can enable that exceed current neoliberal market logic. As Benjamin Bratton states: “we could be using these technologies for much more important things than, for example, racial profiling and modeling individual consumers so as to predict which video they’re likely to click on next.”14 Despite the increased reliance on digital technology globally, there is an extreme asymmetry of knowledge, understanding, and power in how these devices work, how data is collected and collated, how this increasing well of information is used, and the networked impact it has on different individuals and groups. Ruha Benjamin describes how tools capture “more than just people’s bodies. They also capture the imagination, offering technological fixes for a wide range of social problems.”15 It increasingly is becoming apparent that the rush for techno-solutionism tends to exacerbate and not resolve social problems, as responsibility is deferred through algorithmic mediation.16 What appears to be free and voluntary is increasingly a state of algorithmic determination as behaviors are modified to become more trackable and predictable, or what Zuboff refers to as instrumentarianism.17 Actions and behaviors are not only manipulated through the use of digital platforms and devices, such as the addictive properties of social media that modify social relations as well as GPS devices or fitness trackers that impact where and how we move, but instrumentarianism has enabled a state of economic precarity, the “gig” economy, where hyperproductivity is possible, and expected, around the clock. The impacts of hyperproductivity on the human body, such as sleep deprivation, the ability to perform labor on demand, the need to adapt to constant change, and the challenges of split attention from regular interruptions, is a familiar state of being for new parents caring for a young child. This correlation offers a glimpse of how bringing together the maternal with digital philosophy is not merely a means of finding a new way of creating insight into motherhood. Instead, what is commonly considered outside the realm of philosophy and art making—biological pregnancy, motherhood, and

Benjamin H. Bratton, The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World (London and New York: Verso, 2021), 56. 14

Ruha Benjamin, ed., Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 1.

15

16 See Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism, 1st edition (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013); Meredith Broussard, Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018). 17

Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 352.

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care work—inspires a different way of thinking digitally. It emerges from the increasing recognition that is drawing attention to the vitality of the maternal for artists. Some points of intersection developed throughout this book include fragmentation of the subject; visibility and obfuscation; the slippery nature of affective labor; immanence and transcendence of corporeal experience; uncanny angst and cultivating steadfastness; human–technological interaction as co-productive; and ambivalence and cultivating networks of care as reproductive justice. I am not making the argument that digital technology in the neoliberal economy has perpetuated the feminization of labor, meaning that mothers have an advantageous capacity to work and succeed in such a context. Sadie Plant makes such a point in her cyberfeminist classic Zeros + Ones, though she focuses on the broader category of women as opposed to mothers.18 Instead, I consider how the interplay of the maternal with the digital can foster novel strategies of subject development and mutual coexistence in the complex mediation of computational society and algorithmic determination. Pregnancy and motherhood are highly regulated biopolitical and biosocial roles that resonate with the algorithmic determination of life that is increasingly informing human behaviors without our input. Exploring the work of artists and other creative digital makers who have challenged and destabilized these expectations of gendered, reproductive labor provides insight into how computation technologies are transforming us into codependent nurturers of a sentient, artificially intelligent future. The milk suckled through this digital infrastructure is data, and technology innovators are discovering more and more ways to codify our behaviors into financially exploitable nourishment. How then to shift this seemingly inevitable course? One possibility, I suggest, is to reconsider our notions of becoming, coexistence, and care through a reconceptualization of the maternal in conjunction with an analysis of human relations as informing and mediated by digital technologies, focusing on the moments of interruption. Such a process enables a means of rethinking subjectivity in the digital age. To do this, I engage an interdisciplinary approach that includes maternal philosophy, digital studies and philosophy of technology, science and technology studies, performance studies and art history, gender theory and critical race theory with a focus on how the embodied subject is formed through relations.

18 See Sadie Plant, Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + the New Technoculture (London: 4th Estate, 1998).

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A working definition of subjectivity Within this context, digital subjectivity is defined as decentered subjectivity that informs and is informed through digital technologies, experienced as a networked self. This networked self involves asymmetrical relations of power and knowledge, meaning that it is not the unified, autonomous subject, but a hyper-rationalized, algorithmically informed subject with illusions of agency. As Judith Butler, building upon the work of Michel Foucault, and other feminist scholars emphasize: the subject is individual yet collectively formed, as it acts and is acted upon.19 Increased reliance on digital technologies and computation have introduced algorithms that fashion subjects and influence how subjects act. Moreover, the digital subject in the context of this book is treated as performative, or constitutive, in process, and incomplete. W.E.B. Du Bois proposed the idea of “double consciousness” as a means of describing how African diasporic individuals negotiate subjectivity and racism: “it is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”20 As Aria Dean notes: Something like the Du Boisian double consciousness that has characterized Black life for centuries has wriggled its way into the minds of all subjects and now every single networked human being now exists under this condition of “looking at oneself through the eyes of others” or living, watching, being watched, watching yourself watch others.21 This splintering of the subject anticipates the decentered subjectivity that digital technologies create. Subjectivity in such a dynamic state is malleable and unfixed, holding an appeal for its capacity for change through iteration. During the early years of the World Wide Web, certain feminist thinkers, including Sadie Plant and Sherry Turkle,22 celebrated the potential of digital technologies to enable marginalized groups to use the flexibility of identity play on the internet to escape enshrined biases and institutional restrictions.

19

Judith Butler, Senses of the Subject (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 6.

W.E.B DuBois, “Double-Consciousness and the Veil,” in Social Class and Stratification: Classic Statements and Theoretical Debates, ed. Rhonda Levine (London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 204.

20

Aria Dean, “Closing the Loop,” The New Inquiry, March 1, 2016, accessed November 27, 2021, https://thenewinquiry.com/closing-the-loop/.

21

See Plant, Zeros + Ones; Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (London: SAGE, 1996).

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Shifting into the twenty-first century, such utopian hopes have been tempered. Lisa Nakamura describes how identity tourism, or the capacity to perform or “pass” as a different race and gender online, can function as a digital Orientalism that reinforces hierarchies of power through the exotification of the “Other.”23 In addition, the capacity of algorithms to influence behaviors and in turn to form subjects have come to be utilized by burgeoning technology companies, particularly Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. While previously the unstable qualities of subjectivity were treated as beneficial, these aspects came to be valued as mechanisms of further entrenching order and rationalization through algorithmic determination. I draw attention to how these decentered and unstable beings of digital subjectivity are like mothers, who are exploited through vulnerabilities by the systems that have rendered them dependent, without providing adequate capacity to exercise agency. That is, the sense of freedom exercised within these networks is an illusion, as subjects provide the necessary data to serve corporate interests, much like the mother who serves the next generation through reproductive labor. In both instances, these subjects are what Jacques Derrida calls sous rature, or under erasure.24 Individuals appear to be self-reliant, but are in fact disenfranchised. Kylie Jarrett crafts the figure of the Digital Housewife as a means of intersecting the feminist histories of reproductive labor with Marxist discourses of immaterial labor as it relates to unpaid work in the digital media industries.25 She states: The figure of the Digital Housewife, whose cognitive and affective efforts in building and sustaining interpersonal relationships online, in communicating and coordinating activity with others, in producing and sharing content, is at the heart of the collective intelligence of digital media’s commercial properties.26 Her method of bringing together feminist theory with Marxist, Autonomist readings of digital technology and culture anticipate the approach of this book. In particular, Jarrett’s attention to the history of unpaid domestic and reproductive labor “corrects a tendency to view the incorporation of subjectivity into capital

See Lisa Nakamura, Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (New York: Routledge, 2002). 23

Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak, “Translator’s Preface,” in Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), xix.

24

Kylie Jarrett, Feminism, Labour, and Digital Media: The Digital Housewife (New York and London: Routledge, 2016), 2.

25

Ibid., 9.

26

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as a novel set of circumstances, a common feature of many Autonomist Marxist conceptualizations.”27 Like Jarrett, I am drawing from feminist histories of reproductive care to challenge constructions of the digital subject as a novel being emerging from recent technological developments. Where my project diverges is that instead of considering the affective and immaterial aspects of digital labor through a Marxist-Feminist critique of capitalism, I instead focus on the development of a shared aesthetics of interruption through digital performance to establish a means of understanding digital subjectivity using maternal philosophy and art. The aesthetics of interruption is an aesthetic experience characterized by interruption, such as the gap, the glitch, or the lag. It encompasses an aesthetics where breaks, jagged edges, absences, silences, and noise are not glossed over through illusions of perfection, but these qualities point to the glut of experience and how it exceeds the limits of representation. Just as Jarrett corrects the marginalization of feminist thinking in contemporary Marxism, my bringing together of the maternal with the digital is meant to counter the positing of mothers as “inappropriate bodies” in art, philosophy, and theoretical discourse.28

Maternal entanglements Experiences that constitute the maternal through the philosophies and artworks explored in this book touch upon various configurations of the following: reproductive health, pregnancy, birth, child-rearing, othermothering, conception, abortion, the unrequited desire to have children, surrogacy and adoption, and the extending of family dynamics to include atypical or nonheteronormative configurations, including queer, extended, and communal families. The point is not to reject the maternal in favor of more generalized terminology, but to nuance it to the point where explorations of difference make it unrecognizable but more habitable. The intention is not to perpetuate a more concrete definition of the maternal, but to extract the maternal from these experiences to cultivate different ways of thinking about collective subjectivity that are not bound to specific constraints. The maternal will not survive this process unscathed, but it refuses to disappear either. The maternal becomes more complex through attempts to understand how it manifests. Ibid., 18.

27

Rachel Epp Buller and Charles Reeve use the phrase “inappropriate bodies” to describe the contradictory state of maternity as cultural ideal and taboo, drawing attention to the instances of the maternal that challenge social and cultural norms while highlighting conflicting assumptions. See Rachel Epp Buller and Charles Reeve, eds., Inappropriate Bodies: Art, Design, and Maternity (Bradford, ON: Demeter Press, 2019).

28

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13

Thus, this is not an attempt to find a logos of the maternal. Instead, concepts exist contingently in relation to the manifestations that are explored— artistic creations and digital performances that invite multisensory aesthetic experiences, emerging from creators’ situated knowledge and understandings of being in the world. As a result, the maternal is made strange, which in itself is a multifaceted concept. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term “strange” generally refers to what is unknown or unfamiliar, historically referencing what is foreign and different.29 Strange is a notable term, since what is considered strange is not so much dependent on what is being judged, but on the norms and standards of the one performing the judgment. Something is considered strange when it is “unfamiliar, abnormal, or exceptional to a degree that excites wonder or astonishment; difficult to take in or account for; queer, surprising, unaccountable.”30 Strangeness does not just refer to difference, but difference that generates interest and draws attention. Thus, to describe something as strange becomes a means of coping with difference, as when it is imposed through judgment, but can also become a means of introducing or drawing attention to difference for the purposes of challenging restrictive and harmful norms. Moreover, the strange mother critiques and reconstructs the maternal through processes of revelation through defamiliarization, with implications that extend beyond thinking about kinship and care to human social engagement more generally speaking. In the context of this book, I focus on how these processes are manifest through digital technologies as instigators and mediators of networked being. The strange mother is an instance of what Antonia Majaca and Luciana Parisi refer to as the “incomputable subject,” or “an invocation of the subject that comes to being by way of reclaiming the contingent as a mode of reasoning and as the field of the political. It is a subject that considers its means and its ends in the same plane of becoming.”31 Referencing Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood science fiction trilogy, originally referred to as Xenogenesis, Majaca and Parisi discuss how the figure of Lilith as a “Promethean woman” that “comes into being by fully acknowledging instrumentality, politicizing it, and ultimately transcending.”32 In the series, which is composed of the three books Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989), Lilith, a Black woman, has OED Online, s.v. “Strange, Adj. and n.” (Oxford: Oxford University Press), accessed June 10, 2021, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/191244.

29

Ibid.

30

Luciana Parisi and Antonia Majaca, “The Incomputable and Instrumental Possibility,” E-Flux 77 (November 2016), accessed November 27, 2021, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/77/76322/theincomputable-and-instrumental-possibility/. 32 Ibid. 31

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been abducted by an alien race, waking up years in the future after the earth has become uninhabitable. Instead of becoming an instrument of the aliens or striving for autonomy, Lilith “embraces her abduction and starts to reason with the instrument.”33 Part of this shift involves new modes of interspecies breeding with the aliens (Oankali), which is not between a male and female alone, but requires a third sexed being (Ooloi) for successful procreation. Lilith “learns from the logic of the machine” instead of succumbing to the biopolitical order of the Oankali, she is an incomputable subject in a manner that parallels algorithmically formed data bodies: The new subject can only be constructed from the hard labor of alienation, which includes understanding the logic of instrumentality, politicizing it, and transcending it through usage itself. This requires building a nonparanoid imagination, and a readiness for a radical denaturalization of both humanness and subjectivity as we know it, just as it happens with Lilith in Octavia Butler’s story.34 The strange mother functions along similar lines, as the inability to conform to normalized expectations, experienced as an aesthetics of interruption, presenting iterations of motherhood that are in excess while pointing to the inefficiencies and incompleteness of such narrow understandings of subjectivity that have been universalized. Parisi and Majaca describe how the “algorithmic regime is built on the auto-exploitation of so many entrepreneurs of the self, furiously and automatically reiterating their small serving of subjectivity until it is entirely flattened into data and hopelessly depleted of any other possible becoming.”35 Throughout this book, I analyze how this is also the case for maternal subjects. At a time when gender and sexuality are increasingly understood and accepted as fluid, there may be some reservations with using such a genderspecific and loaded concept such as motherhood. In fact, drawing from the maternal may seem anachronistic. However, my persistence in evoking the maternal is not to posit that there are universal qualities to motherhood or an invitation for gendered essentialism. In fact, the representations of the maternal explored in this book challenge accepted cultural norms of motherhood that have dominated Western and settler-colonial art history for centuries while at the same time attempting to capture how motherhood as a gendered parental role cannot be adequately represented or even understood. Ibid.

33

Ibid.

34

Ibid.

35

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15

Gendered specificity in parenting is used as a starting point since expectations of domestic care and care work tend to be performed predominately by women. As Kathi Weeks states in her analysis of “caring labor” as women’s work: “Regardless of whether particular women actually do this kind of work (and of course, many do not), women are generally (though differently) constructed to be the kinds of people who can perform these duties, and are usually (though variously) expected to be the ones who should.”36 Different institutional power structures, including medical discourses, religion, politics, and legislation, perpetuate the role of women as the predominant providers of paid and unpaid care work. As long as parenting does not transcend gendered difference, ignoring these presumptions risks perpetuating the invisibility of struggles mothers can face when attempting to care for children in social circumstances that are not conducive to supporting these activities based on gender difference. Even though, as Sophie Lewis points out, gestation “has no inherent or immoveable gender,”37 images and attitudes regarding pregnancy are centered on cisgendered women as mothers. At the same time, Laura Briggs argues that while the transgender rights movement has urged the use of gender-neutral language in relation to reproduction and parenting, such as “pregnant person,” these terms have certain implications. For instance, Briggs states: “‘Pregnant people’ and ‘non-pregnant people’ was also a conservative language for denying protections against pregnancy discrimination in the workplace by insisting that it is not a form of sex discrimination that would be illegal under the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”38 That is, the erasure of gender has been utilized by conservatives as a means of bypassing discrimination litigation. Consistent with Lisa Baraitser and Alison Stone,39 I do not treat the maternal as inherently feminine or reduce the feminine to the maternal. Instead, the maternal is treated as being entangled with sex and gender, not determined by it or reduced to it. Entangled in this context emerges from new materialist perspectives, including the work of Donna Haraway and Karen Barad,40 to

Kathi Weeks, Constituting Feminist Subjects (London and New York: Verso, 2018), 6.

36

Sophie Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism against Family (London and New York: Verso, 2019), 24.

37

Laura Briggs, How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump, 4–5, Reproductive Justice: A New Vision for the Twenty-First Century 2 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017). 39 Lisa Baraitser, Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (London and New York: Routledge, 2009); Stone, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity. 40 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2007); Donna Jeanne Haraway, When Species Meet, Posthumanities 3 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2016). 38

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account for the material properties of the human body without using biology to foreclose or determine gendered expectations. In their application of new materialism to gender theory, Kathleen Lennon and Rachel Alsop point to the challenges faced when reducing sex to reproductive functions, since not all females can gestate, give birth, or breastfeed.41 Instead, reproduction and mothering are informed by entanglements of material bodies, social forces, and technical objects. These interconnected, agential relations in turn impact family structures, kinship, and systems of care: The complexity of the entanglements between biology, cultural practices, and technological developments […] has allowed for changes in the way in which reproduction is possible—via IVF, for example, and sperm donation— and, thereby, to diversity in the familial and kinship structures within which children are raised.42 Natalie Loveless coined the neologism “new maternalisms” as a way of merging the maternal with feminist new materialism, with reference to artists whose work emerges from the “intra-actions” of maternal labor and political systems of support.43 The artists and other creatives discussed in this book are among those whose work qualifies as “new maternalisms,” where the maternal is expanded from relations of mother to child within an isolated, genealogical family unit to the complex ecologies of human societies with technologies and reproductive politics. In other words, what has come to be defined as “motherhood” and the “maternal” arises from an entangled mess of sexuality, biology, cultural constructions, political and technological mediation, and social expectations. At this stage of medical and technological development, the notion of natural childbirth is obsolete. The intentional and inadvertent consumption of medicine, chemicals, and hormone treatments mean that human bodies are replete with different substances that modify it biologically, having some impact on the bodies of gestators and the growing beings that they carry and develop. In addition, Sophie Lewis undermines the presumption of maternal bonding through pregnancy in her analysis of commercial surrogacy, where the woman who gestates and gives birth to the child is not considered the mother, but merely a carrier and is legally treated as such.44 I am also challenging Kathleen Lennon and Rachel Alsop, Gender Theory in Troubled Times (Cambridge, UK, and Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2020), 23.

41

Ibid., 43.

42

Natalie Loveless, ed., New Maternalisms: Redux (Edmonton: University of Alberta, 2018), 8.

43

Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now, 8.

44

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what it means to define a trait or characteristic as maternal when it simply means displaying nurturing care for a child, as actual maternal activities are rife with ambivalence. The unquestioning expectation of women to have an innate sense of what it means to take care of a child, where “mother knows best,” has no solid grounding in lived experiences of mothering.45 The political activism of mothers is also not inherently progressive, as mothers’ claims of doing what is best for her family are used to perpetuate white supremacy and other forms of structural violence.46 Moreover, within the context of this book, the maternal is not being equated as an innate goodness used to protect the institution of the nuclear family. Conceptual artist Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro treats the maternal as a force for resistance. In their practice, Mba Bikoro analyzes migrational struggles and colonial memory, focusing on queer, maternal, indigenous, Black, and feminist biopolitics.47 For Mba Bikoro, the maternal, particularly in how it relates to their experiences of migrant motherhood, enables an imagining of new rituals for social justice through reconsiderations of the past: “the maternal can be radical in the mutation of these systems of knowledge through a re-invention of the incompleteness and fictions of archives.”48 It is reinvented “radically with tenderness, the kind that doesn’t need to make you feel comfortable.”49 Moreover, I start at a position of the mother as a gendered parenting role as a means of deconstructing expectations through artistic production, interpretation, and theoretical analysis, while expanding the notion of the maternal to include less gender-specific enunciations. That is not to say that gender is inconsequential, but it is more complex than current binary understandings enable. The continued use of a gendered term for parenting is meant to enter a discourse of parenting and care work that is gendered and has been used as a means of oppressing women, to fragment it—glitch it— and work toward an understanding of what it means to create and raise human

See Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species, 1st Ballantine Books edition (New York: Ballantine Books, 2000).

45

See Kathleen Blee, “Mothers in Race-Hate Movements,” in The Politics of Motherhood: Activist Voices from Left to Right, ed. Alexis Jetter, Annelise Orleck, and Diana Taylor (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997), 247–56; Ruby Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color (New York: Catapult, 2020).

46

Anguezomo Nathalie Mba Bikoro, “About,” Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, accessed July 1, 2021, http:// www.anguezomo-bikoro.com/about.html.

47

Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, Lena Šimić, and Emily Underwood-Lee, “Interview with Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro,” Performance and the Maternal, October 12, 2020, accessed November 27, 2021, https://performanceandthematernal.files.wordpress.com/2020/12/nathalieanguezomo-mba-bikoro.pdf.

48

Ibid.

49

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beings that is not absent of gender, but enables many genders to flourish. Like Briggs, I am interested in the differentials of “women” and “mothers,” as when these terms are not just used to refer to cisgender women but how “woman is being enacted or broken apart into unstable pieces.”50 These entanglements are also connected to the performances of the maternal expressed through artworks and experienced as an aesthetics of interruption. Such an approach is indelibly tied to the challenging of binary gender norms. Therefore, the term mother will be used as gender specific referring to women, while gender-neutral terms such as pregnant person and parent, will be utilized when discussing non-gender specific reproduction and care. Even though the maternal subject retains its connections as a gendered parenting role, it is broadened to account for the different intersections of oppression and privilege, as made evident through reproductive justice activism. Reproductive justice emerged from the work of women activists of color, including SisterSong, taking an intersectional feminist approach to reproductive rights. It breaks from the pro-choice and anti-abortion binary that has dominated debates around reproduction in the United States, Ireland,51 and other societies and cultures. Reproductive justice activists and scholars draw attention to the often marginalized experiences of women of color, which includes considering how white supremacy and colonialism has influenced reproductive policies and practices, resulting in reproductive oppression. Such measures include population control and forced sterilization through explicit and implicit eugenics, reproduction for profit (as with slavery), limitations to appropriate medical care and support systems due to poverty or imprisonment. Reproductive justice has three principles: “(1) the right not to have a child; (2) the right to have a child; and (3) the right to parent children in safe and healthy environments.”52 These principles raise significant questions about what constitutes a mother. As historian Rickie Solinger asks: Who gets to be a “legitimate” mother […]? (And who do authorities consider “legitimately” sexual?) Who is denied maternal legitimacy? What do race and class have to do with “legitimate” and “illegitimate”

Briggs, How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics, 5.

50

Reproductive Justice in Ireland is represented by Migrants and Ethnic Minorities for Reproductive Justice (MERJ), which has been critical of the predominantly white feminist discourse surrounding the 2018 vote to Repeal the Eighth Amendment, For more details, see Cristina Florescu, Elena Balboa, Juliana Sassi, and Paola Rivetti, eds., We’ve Come a Long Way: Reproductive Rights of Migrants and Ethnic Minorities in Ireland, 2nd edition (Braganca Paulista-SP, Brazil: Editora Urutau, 2018).

51

52 Loretta Ross and Rickie Solinger, Reproductive Justice: An Introduction, (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 9.

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maternity? What do the government, the church, the community, and the family have to do with deciding and enforcing answers to these questions? How have answers changed over time? And perhaps most important, how does the maternal “legitimacy” of some persons depend on and guarantee the illegitimacy of others?53 This description of race and class can be expanded to include sexual orientation, gender identification, mental and physical abilities, and national status, as these intersectional aspects of identity all inform the “legitimacy” of a particular individual as a mother. For instance, in Ireland, with the legalization of gay marriage in 2016 by popular vote, same-sex couples are increasingly having children together. However, in families where both parents are female and where a child is donor-conceived, only the woman who gave birth has parental rights and only her name can be placed on the birth certificate. Her same-sex spouse has to adopt the child to be considered a legal parent.54 The complex bureaucratic process surrounding adoption may inhibit some couples from going through it, including a two-year waiting prior to claim guardianship, which has serious implications when couples separate or divorce, meaning that one mother lacks parental rights—an act of delegitimization. Questions of legitimacy are tied to privilege, which must be taken into account when considering maternal subjectivity, including the work of artists and other creatives whose practices challenge and destabilize expectations and understandings of the maternal as explored in this book. White, heterosexual, cisgender, middle-class artists without disabilities in stable, legally recognized relationships are less likely to have their maternal legitimacy challenged than those in more vulnerable circumstances, which can impact the type of work produced and how it is received. These artists (myself included) face a lower risk of being delegitimized as mothers when challenging expectations and social standards through their work and practice, which may enable them to be more publicly vocal or seemingly active in challenging patriarchal prescriptions of maternal subjectivity. However, as the reproductive justice movement has made evident, maintaining a single-issue feminist stance risks perpetuating white supremacy, contributing to the reproductive oppression of poor women and women of color.55 Therefore, the maternal subject cannot be flattened into

Ibid., 3.

53

Dr. Brian Tobin, “Opinion: ‘We Still Don’t Have Crucial Parental Rights for Same-Sex Married Couples,’” TheJournal.Ie, May 29, 2017, accessed December 18, 2019, https://www.thejournal.ie/ readme/opinion-we-still-dont-have-crucial-parental-rights-for-same-sex-married-couples-3410543May2017/.

54

Ross and Solinger, Reproductive Justice, 112.

55

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a universal archetype—even a radical one. Rather, any analysis of maternal subjectivity must take into account the range of individual experiences.

Chapter summaries Reproductive justice engages with storytelling as a means of diversifying narratives. Within this book, I explore the work of artists and creators that encapsulate different intersections of nationality, race, gender, sexuality, class, and family structure in relation to the maternal, though such a collection is by no means complete. Like the digital subjectivities that are formed through our uses of technology, maternal subjectivity is a conglomerate of identifiers that is ever shifting and changing depending on our relations to others, bringing to an extreme the interconnectivity of human existence and breaking modernist notions of autonomous isolation. In Chapter 1, definitions of digital performance and the maternal subject are formulated through the gestural interplay of humans with technology through the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon and artworks by Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Marni Kotak, Wendy Red Star, and Megan Wynne. In Chapter 2, I define the aesthetics of interruption through a close reading of various artists living and working in Ireland, including Aideen Barry, Pauline Cummins, Laura O’Connor, me (EL Putnam), and Rosaleen McDonagh. I consider who is excluded from idealizations of the maternal in Ireland, which perpetuates an unacknowledged norm of whiteness, including asylum seekers living in Direct Provision (Ireland’s institutional holding system for those seeking asylum) and Travellers (Ireland’s peripatetic ethnic minority). In Chapter 3, I describe the impacts of the aesthetics of interruption as uncanny. I draw from a number of interpretations of the uncanny rooted in the work of Sigmund Freud and Martin Heidegger. I start with a consideration of Fatimah Tuggar’s digital collage work before turning to the return of Ireland’s repressed institutional mistreatment of mothers through an analysis of Amanda Coogan’s Yellow. Through Yellow, I also investigate the relationship between performance and digital documentation as uncanny in Coogan’s collaboration with filmmaker Paddy Cahill. In Chapter 4, I question the dichotomies of the body and machine, immanence and transcendence, which accompany framings of the subject in relation to digital technologies through the work of Patty Chang, Jess Dobkin, and Micol Hebron. I follow this with an analysis of transgender pregnancy in Trystan Reese’s digital storytelling, which undoes gender in what is upheld as quintessentially feminine—biological pregnancy— through glitch feminism.

Introduction: Strange Mothers

21

The networked characteristics of subjectivity are considered in Chapter 5, where I discuss Yara Travieso’s livestreamed dance film, La Medea, in terms of maternal ambivalence, or when a mother has contradictory emotions for her children. I follow with an analysis of Helen Knowles screen print series based on birthing videos posted on YouTube as a critical examination of sharing graphic representations of birth through social media networks and the limits that these networks impose. Then, in Chapter 6, I consider Our Data Bodies as a different kind of digital performance that has emerged in response to the surveillance and control of marginalized groups in the United States. I contrast their actions with the Wall of Moms activist group that arose in the summer of 2020. The chapter closes with a discussion of how Our Data Bodies cultivates a distributed matrix that promotes social change through reproductive justice while redefining what it means to be a digital subject.

Some notes on context (collapse) I worked on this book in Ireland during the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020–2021. At that time, nations around the world implemented strict public health restrictions to curb the spread of this novel, highly contagious disease. For me, as a university lecturer, this involved working from home as classes transitioned to online learning to minimize physical contact. In addition, primary schools and day care centers closed for prolonged periods, requiring that I homeschool my eldest child (who turned six during the pandemic) while caring for a toddler. Elsewhere, I have referred to this merging of these various spheres as context collapse.56 I reference the neologism coined by danah boyd, where different communication contexts collapse through social media as audiences that may be distinct in different spheres of experience collapse due to the changes to framings of time and space that occur online.57 During Covid-19, this context collapse is not just virtual but also involves the actual merger of realms spatially and temporally as the personal, professional, and the domestic coalesce. Prior to these events, the topics considered throughout this book—maternal subjectivity and digital performance—were treated as peripheral or even inferior. However, the changes instigated through Covid-19 brought these

EL Putnam, “Context Collapse,” in Mothers, Mothering, and COVID-19: Dispatches from the Pandemic, ed. Andrea O’Reilly and Fiona Joy Green (Bradford, ON: Demeter Press, 2021), 423–9.

56

Alice E. Marwick and danah boyd, “I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience,” New Media & Society 13, no. 1 (February 2011): 2, doi:10.1177/1461444810365313.

57

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concerns to the fore. Isolation for the sake of public health safety has meant that structures of care are restricted to immediate living spaces, whether this be a home or institutional residence. Most public events and social activities have moved online, where the primary form of contact with others outside an immediate living space is through video conferencing. What had been a marginalized means of artistic production—the digital performance—became the only means of engaging with others in real time. Increased pressure has also been placed on mothers to fulfill roles of care that previously have been supplemented through networked support. Covid-19 has revealed and exacerbated systemic inequalities in already fraught and precarious social systems. For the past few decades, kinship networks and care responsibilities have been increasingly siloed and privatized, fueled by a neoliberal economic ideology that emphasizes the individual and “profit-making as the organizing principle of life.”58 Such an approach is rooted in the denial of interdependence, though as the Covid-19 pandemic has brought violently to the foreground, such illusions of self-sufficiency are not only inadequate but also delusional since instead of promoting freedom, neoliberalism actually undermines agency and capacities to care by limiting options through privatization.59 That is, agency is connected to the capacity to pay. This book has changed in tandem with these global events. The aesthetics of interruption emerged from my personal experiences as a mother and an artist, though during Covid-19, it took on a richer, more potent meaning as disruption on a global scale took place. The implications of these changes have yet to be made manifest, though the arguments presented throughout this book are informed by the crises that Covid-19 has revealed. As such, this book functions as a necessary call to acknowledge our interdependence and interconnectedness, to recognize the dangers of current attitudes regarding digital technologies, and to acknowledge the material and embodied qualities of our shared existence, where vulnerabilities and difference need not be treated as weaknesses to be exploited, but as calls for collective organizing.

The Care Collective, Andreas Chatzidakis, Jamie Hakim, Jo Littler, Catherine Rottenberg, and Lynne Segal, The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence (London and New York: Verso, 2020), 3.

58

Ibid., 10.

59

1 Digital Performance and the Maternal Subject

Creation Story

C

reation Story by artist and technologist Amelia Winger-Bearskin, opens with a colorful layering of digital animations and special effects over a video of performed actions. A femme-figure wearing a sequined dress, what appear to be porcupine quills, and feathers covering her head is to the right of the screen, seeming to manipulate a computer generated lightning bolt with her hands. The images slip into each other, as videos swirl with cyclical geometric forms that meld with elaborate costumes. Patterns pulsate between animated sequences and bold colors through loops in this sculptural landscape. The merging of digital images is not seamless, but there are imperfections at the edges that draw attention to the means of production as pixels take on a notable presence. Such qualities do not detract from the work, as the repetitive cycling of images and melding of forms enrapture the viewer as these imperfections enable unique transitions. Animations are integrated into the performance videos through chroma keying, with flickering artifacts creating digital sediments. The overall work has a lively quality, accentuated through the presence of two children, who do not act as much as engage in the imaginative play of youth. Imagination functions as a transformative force through the incorporation of digital effects and physical objects, including colorful sculptures and everyday items such as Styrofoam packing materials. Play in this instance becomes an artistic medium, framed and edited through moving image. Such an approach is appropriate for the video’s content: a retelling of an Iroquois creation myth about the story of Sky Woman and how Turtle Island emerged from an imaginative transformation and co-creation.

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Winger-Bearskin is Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma, Deer Clan. Creation Myth was developed with Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke/Crow) and Winger-Bearskin’s two children Tristan and Charlene. Winger-Bearskin’s practice engages with the experimental use of digital technologies and is informed through “indigenous values of co-creation.”1 She states: I approach decentralized storytelling in a Haudenosaunee way: Our current world is the result of seven generations before me. I am interacting with the world designed by my ancestors and yours. My life is a way to communicate with the people born in the future seven generations from now. Today the stories we tell are embedded in networks and pixels instead of wampum and rivers, but they may still have the power to last through seven generations, to influence the lives of my great-great-great-greatgreat-great grandchildren, for the people I do not yet know, and those I have only met in dreams.2 Attention is paid not just to the generations past but also to future developments. As such, Winger-Bearskin’s approach to digital technologies engages with Haudenosaunee cosmologies, in contrast to Eurocentric philosophies of technology rooted in the Greek myth of Prometheus that currently dominate the tech industries.3 At the same time, her work conscientiously engages with the maternal through creative development with her children as well as the content of the story—the myth of the Sky Woman—as the roles of mother and artist merge in the production of the piece. Through this approach, Winger-Bearskin presents the maternal utilizing processes of co-creation and storytelling with technology that enables a rethinking of digital subjectivity through the mother-artist: an artist who is a mother and whose work does not distinguish between these roles.

Amelia Winger-Bearskin, “About,” Amelia Winger-Bearskin, accessed June 4, 2021, https://www. studioamelia.com/about. 2 Amelia Winger-Bearskin, “Decentralized Storytelling,” Amelia Winger-Bearskin, accessed June 4, 2021, https://www.studioamelia.com/work/storytelling. 3 Yuk Hui describes the significance of cosmology on the development of philosophies of technology in different contexts of cultural development. This approach is not simply cultural relativism, but highlights the significance of cosmological difference, including origin myths, as forming the groundwork for different paradigms of understanding technological use. See Yuk Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic Media, 2016); Yuk Hui, Recursivity and Contingency, (London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019); Yuk Hui and Pieter Lemmens, eds., Cosmotechnics: For a Renewed Concept of Technology in the Anthropocene (London and New York: Routledge, 2021); Yuk Hui, Art and Cosmotechnics (Minneapolis, MN: e-flux books, 2020). 1

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Creation Story functions as an instance of digital performance, which in the context of this book is understood as actions created with or mediated through digital technologies, with an emphasis on the embodied relationships of gesture with technology. To grasp these entanglements, I analyze the work of Winger-Bearskin, followed by a discussion of performance artist Marni Kotak’s practice using Gilbert Simondon’s definition of the technical object. I then consider Wendy Red Star’s photographic series Apsáalooke Feminist (2016) as a means of illustrating how technological relations are intergenerational. Simondon developed his theories during the early decades of computational technology, and while his philosophies remain relevant today, there are limits to their material applications. Yuk Hui’s definition of digital objects, which brings together Simondon and Martin Heidegger, provides valuable insights into how our embodied relations with digital technologies function as performances. I turn finally to the work of Megan Wynne, to discuss her practice as a means of “standing apart,” or to take the stance of critical observer within social media in the attention economy. Moreover, the maternal subject as presented through these artists’ practices engages in and is defined through digital performance as processes of becoming. These function as manifestations of strange mothers—maternal figures that exceed and critique idealized expectations of motherhood and kinship based on dominant colonizer, heteronormative family structures. The maternal in this instance is not limited to the guardianship of immediate family, but becomes an impetus for creative action that constitutes the subject through gestures that merge taking care with artistic production using digital technologies.

Defining digital performance The rise of performance art as a recognized visual art form in the mid-twentieth century, distinctive from theater, dance, and music, did not mark the beginning of such experimentation, but conveys increased acceptance of this practice in institutional contexts, including art schools, galleries, art-related publications, and eventually museums. There have been various genealogies and histories tracing performance art’s rise of significance in the twentieth century, including RoseLee Goldberg’s key text that traces performance art’s current manifestations to futurism and Dadaism during the early twentieth century.4 Shannon Jackson extends the scope of analysis to consider how performance

RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (London: Thames & Hudson, 2011).

4

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studies arose from linguistic studies, differentiated yet intertwined with the history of theater.5 Diana Taylor finds historical precedence beyond the standard Western art history canon through her analysis of pre-Columbian performances that functioned as a repertoire, collectively sharing and embodying memory through actions including rituals.6 How performance art is defined within the visual arts varies, even between particular practitioners. Instead of coming to a concrete definition of what constitutes performance, Taylor emphasizes how performance functions as a mode of understanding and valuing how the body operates as a means of knowledge production and transfer. Her definition of performance as an art form is as ephemeral as the medium itself: “performance is radically unstable, dependent totally on its framing, on the by whom and for whom, on the why where when it comes into being.”7 Due to the range of practices and works discussed throughout this book, I engage with Taylor’s multifaceted definition of performance, focusing on the living body of the artist, which transfers personal and societal knowledge through a repertoire of gestures that can both loosen and stabilize meaning through action, iteration, and reiteration, moving “between the AS IF and the IS, between pretend and new constructions of the ‘real.’”8 While her approach appears at a glance to introduce contradiction into what constitutes performance art, Taylor’s emphasis on associating how performance is defined to how an artist makes a performance manifest captures the flexible nature of the art form as a means of production that comes to be defined through the work itself. Placing an emphasis on gestures and actions in the relationship between human bodies and technology in works of art shifts attention from problem-solving, as is the emphasis in design that focuses upon user experience and human–computer interaction (HCI), to treating these interactions as performed processes of becoming. The phrase digital performance, therefore, is used to describe artistic and other creative works where the performing body and digital technology coalesce, which includes live action, as in performance art, but also algorithmically informed performance, performance to and with the camera, and the responses of audience members as performance.

Shannon Jackson, Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 6 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2003). 7 Diana Taylor, Performance (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 41, italics in original. 8 Ibid., 6. 5

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Such an approach differs from other investigations regarding digital performance. For instance, Steve Dixon defines digital performance as “all performance works where computer technologies play a key role rather than a subsidiary one in content, techniques, aesthetics, or delivery forms.”9 Dixon limits his approach to interactive works that require active engagement with media. Building upon Dixon’s definition, I argue for the inclusion of “non-interactive” works, such as performance-to-camera and forms of documentation, focusing on instances where the use of the camera and display of digital media, including video and sound, present a conscientious engagement where the body as impetus of action and gesture merges with the tools of production. Here I draw from Katja Kwastek’s definition of digital art as: works that primarily use digital technology as part of their method of production (as in certain forms of digital photography) and to projects in which the processual qualities of digital technology are an elementary feature of the work; examples are generative software and works based on an interaction between the recipient and the digital systems. Such works are produced, stored, and presented in the digital medium.10 Reading Kwastek’s definition of digital art in conjunction with Dixon enables a rethinking of digital performance as more than live art while also not being limited to works that are explicitly interactive. Working with such a definition of digital performance shifts understandings of what constitutes performance art while considering how digital technologies invite certain embodied actions. Steven Dixon points out that “Internet communication has been theorized as a type of virtual performance of the self.”11 Since he wrote those words, the advent of social media and the rise of big data, or data-mining on a mass scale, along with more extensive forms of algorithmic intervention and control, have made the relation between performance and digital technologies even more omnipresent though less noticeable. These developments point to how performance is already entwined with technology. In his overview of performance and digital technology, Chris Salter emphasizes how digital technology and new media may appear to open up new horizons for performance practice, but in fact “even a cursory glance at the technological history of performance on and off the stage, however,

Steve Dixon, Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 3. 10 Katja Kwastek, Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 4. 11 Dixon, Digital Performance, 3. 9

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reveals a story strangely similar to our present one.”12 His history extends to the use of mechanics in the theater, going back to ancient Greece.13 As Salter points out, performance studies scholar Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett states that “Technology is integral to the history of performance” and “performance is integral to the history of technology.”14 Thus, throughout this book, I point to examples of digital performance that may seem atypical to convey how technological engagement with human, corporeal gestures proceed our current state of computational ubiquity, but are also more invasive than we may realize. Winger-Bearskin’s use of digital technologies functions as a sort of performance that fosters collaboration not just between humans but also nonhumans and technological systems. Here, she draws from Haudenosaunee traditions of storytelling that integrated technological advancement with spiritual lessons: The stories were very longform. They would use a multiplicity of different types of tools: pottery, baskets, rock formations, natural land monuments […] It was entertaining, it was community building, it shared values, but it also shared technological advances from one community to the other, by connecting to a story that people were familiar with.15 Winger-Bearskin describes how the Haudenosaunee, a traditionally matrilineal and matriarchal society, used storytelling through tools as a means not just to communicate moral lessons and values but also to share technological knowledge. For instance, cornhusk dolls connected to the story of the Corn Husk Woman, which not only conveyed social values but also communicated the advanced farming infrastructure of the Haudenosaunee, “was a way to teach technology.”16 She also compares wampum to present-day blockchain, which functioned as a means of exchange but also as a “complex negotiated treaty or contract in a public ledger recording agreements governed by individuals, nation states, and nations.”17 That is, technologies are integrated into the acts of storytelling, extending the capacities of such performances

Chris Salter, Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2010), xxi. 13 Ibid., xxii. 14 As quoted in ibid., xxii–xxiii. 15 Katerina Cizek et al., Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media within Communities, across Disciplines and with Algorithms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019), accessed November 27, 2021, https://wip.mitpress.mit.edu/collectivewisdom. 16 Winger-Bearskin, “Decentralized Storytelling.” 17 Ibid. 12

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much like the capabilities of digital technologies today. Knowledge is “woven” into the technology facilitating processes of decentralized storytelling, enabling these stories to capture the memories of generations past as the stories span into generations in the future. Subjectivity through such an approach is entangled with technologies that are involved in the co-creation of these digital performances. While some of Winger-Bearskin’s work, such as Creation Story, explicitly engages with the maternal through its content, notions of care and kinship are omnipresent through her practice and are made manifest in initiatives like Wampum.Codes. Winger-Bearskin describes how designing software involves not just technological dependencies, such as requiring certain software packages, but also more abstract dependencies ranging from the material infrastructures needed to run it (including appropriate hardware and electricity) to ethical dependencies. Wampum.Codes is the first iteration of a project “to develop a model of ethical software dependencies – an attempt to inscribe community values and developer accountability into code.”18 Utilizing free libre open-source software (FLOSS) methods, Winger-Bearskin explicitly engages with indigenous wisdom to “offer up a new framework for designing software ethically.”19 As such, features of co-creation—namely, the processes of community engagement—while treated as novel in the current phase of technological hype and innovation, have extensive histories, including in Haudenosaunee societies.20 Moreover, Winger-Bearskin’s work demonstrates how the maternal extends beyond a femme-parent who cares for her immediate family to networks of care and kinship that engage whole communities and reach generations into the future. Winger-Bearskin invites considerations of the body and technology as relational, mutually constituted through presentations of the maternal subject.

Maternal subject Studies of the maternal subject have become a complex endeavor in recent decades, as it is the site of questioning and challenging not only presumptions of subjectivity but also models of gendered care as symbolized through the

Amelia Winger-Bearskin, “Indigenous Wisdom as a Model for Software Design and Development,” Mozilla Foundation, October 2, 2020, accessed November 27, 2021, https://foundation.mozilla.org/ en/blog/indigenous-wisdom-model-software-design-and-development/. 19 Ibid. 20 Cizek et al., Collective Wisdom. 18

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figure of the mother. Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born, first published in 1986, is a groundbreaking text in its exploration of the maternal subject. She drew from her personal experiences of becoming a mother in conjunction with a critique of the social and cultural institutions that informed perceptions of motherhood, including the alienation of the maternal through capitalist domestication and medical discourse.21 Rich’s work touches upon a common theme in many understandings of maternal subjectivity that have emerged: historically, the mother has been defined by others, including religious figures, medical experts, and philosophers, who account for the inability of the maternal subject to match an idealized Cartesian autonomous subject as making her inferior. In turn, there were subsequent (and unsuccessful) attempts to homogenize and standardize a maternal subject that is inherently unstable, as the processes affiliated with the maternal are processes of becoming in relation to care for an other. The consistent inability for maternal experiences and actual manifestations of maternal subjects to meet these idealized, impossible standards is treated as an inadequacy of the mother, as opposed to acknowledging that the narrow preconceptions of the maternal are in need of rethinking. For instance, in her investigation of fetomaternal microchimerism, Rebecca Scott Yoshizawa points out how it is a common axiomatic presumption that immunology functions in a self/nonself model, where the body rejects cells that are not of the self. However, pregnancy complicates this theory as the fetus is a foreign body inside the maternal body, meaning that foreign fetal antigens should spur maternal immune rejection of the placenta, resulting in complications or the end of the pregnancy (e.g. miscarriage, preterm birth, or stillbirth). If the maternal immune system is truly tasked with this maintenance of maternal self, why, reproductive scientists ask, are fetuses not routinely rejected?22 Yoshizawa challenges the various theories that immunologists have come up with to explain this apparent disturbance to the self/nonself theory, which include describing the placenta and embryo as parasites that “trick” the maternal body into supporting the fetus through the temporary phase of pregnancy, only to return to a normal state of immunological self/nonself duality after birth.23 Yoshizawa argues that the issue is not the fact that the maternal body does not always reject the fetus in an immunological response, Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1995). 22 Rebecca Scott Yoshizawa, “Fetal–Maternal Intra-Action: Politics of New Placental Biologies,” Body & Society 22, no. 4 (December 2016): 86, doi:10.1177/1357034X16662323. 23 Ibid., 88. 21

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but that the understanding of the pregnant body and fetus as two isolated individual subjects (self/nonself) is in need of refinement. In her exploration of the maternal subject, Lisa Baraitser draws from various psychoanalytic understandings including Julia Kristeva and Bracha Ettinger, along with Jessica Benjamin, D.W. Winnicott, Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, and Judith Butler. In addition, she incorporates philosophical critiques and perspectives, including Emmanuel Levinas, along with a range of literature pertaining to the maternal, both academic and popular, such as Adrienne Rich and Sara Ruddick. Even as she incorporates from these various thinkers and writers in conjunction with her personal, anecdotal experiences of becoming a mother, Baraitser points successfully to the limits of these attempted definitions. What becomes apparent through Baraitser’s analysis of the maternal subject is that each attempt at consolidating a definition of what constitutes this subject is always incomplete. This incompleteness tends to manifest itself as directing focus away from the maternal subject to her relation to the child. The challenges of articulating maternal subjectivity is that even though there are strong universal claims to what such a subjectivity should be, it is experienced in a localized, embodied manner that heightens qualities of understanding subjectivity in general.24 There is slippage between the localized and the personal, emerging from a particular intersection of identity, social status, and political claims, as well as the innumerable variances of maternal experiences relating to pregnancy, birth, and raising children, manifested through different familial organizations. Baraitser identifies distinctive qualities of maternal subjectivity, while also pointing to areas of difference and incompleteness. Even with such multiplicities of maternal experience, Baraitser highlights how interruption is a common characteristic. Moreover, she defines the maternal subject as one of interruption: “both she who is subjected to relentless interruption, and she whom interruption enunciates; a subject, that is, who emerges from the experience of interruption itself.”25 Interruptions are not considered aberrations, as breaking the normative flow of time or experience, but form the grounding of the maternal subject. Instead of treating these interruptions, and their affiliated challenges, as negative, Baraitser notes how they allow the mother to be “re-sensitized to sound, smell, emotions, sentient awareness, language, love.”26 In particular, Baraitser focuses on the mundane, everyday interruptions associated with raising

Baraitser, Maternal Encounters, 18. Ibid., 57. 26 Ibid., 3. 24 25

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young children; these seemingly incessant moments that arise, constantly drawing the mother back to the present. Instead of treating the mother as just a “messy interdependent excess,”27 it becomes possible to consider how the mother attempts to create a grounding within the chaos caused by persistent interruptions that have both physical and psychological tolls.28 Instead of romanticizing the perseverance of the mother in such a state, delegating persistent acts of care to simply labors of love, Baraitser treats maternal subjectivity in a complex way where maternal self-experience through interruption can invite creative possibilities, which can be generative as opposed to depleting. In contrast to perpetuating idealized expectations of maternal fidelity, Baraitser draws our attention to the moments of minor failure that incessantly and dutifully persist in repetitive acts of care, giving rise to “our capacity, through the austerity of certain encounters with otherness, to do and experience something different.”29 In short, Baraitser is interested in that moment when the cry of a child reaches the ears of the mother— that moment when panic strikes, the mind blanks, and whatever she has been doing is put aside as she considers what to do next. The interruptions affiliated with caring for a completely dependent being warp the mother’s sense of time, space, and self, as she enters a “subjective state in which it has become impossible to operate in the realm of reflective thought, and forces into awareness another form of subjective experience and thinking.”30 Alison Stone considers how the maternal subject can enable a rethinking of subjectivity in general, with an emphasis on bodily relations. She points out how in Western philosophy, the self is placed in opposition to the maternal body, which must be rejected for subjectivity to be possible. As a result, “these ingrained assumptions make it relatively difficult for us to recognize mothers as subjects, and they make it relatively difficult for mothers to regard themselves as subjects or to exercise their capacities for subjectivity.”31 However, instead of trying to redefine the mother to match expectations of the Cartesian subject, which is impossible since it is based on the rejection of the maternal body, mothers “can only be subjects of a new kind, who generate meanings and acquire agency from their place in maternal body relations […] [Maternal subjectivity is] a specific form of subjectivity that is continuous with the maternal body.”32 Stone makes sure to emphasize that hindrances to treating mothers as subjects are informed through “habits of Ibid., 53. Ibid., 57–8. 29 Ibid., 81. 30 Ibid., 63. 31 Stone, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity, 1. 32 Ibid., 3. 27 28

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thought and imagination” of those surrounding mothers, making it challenging for mothers to recognize the embodied maternal self as a legitimate subject.33

Marni Kotak: Little Brother—art, life, and technology Performance artist Marni Kotak’s practice engages with the intersection of art and life. That is, she frames aspects of life as performance events, presented through an aesthetic lens that enables a rethinking of life. Kotak utilizes technical objects in conjunction with actions that slip between performance and life activity, providing an effective starting point for considering digital and maternal subjectivity. Kotak is recognized for her 2011 performance and exhibition, Birth of Baby X, when the Microscope Gallery in Brooklyn was transformed into her ideal birthing center, with the exhibition culminating in her giving birth to her son Ajax on October 25. The live birth, which took place under the care of a midwife and doula, was attended by a restricted group of fifteen invited guests. Within the context of the gallery, the attending guests were welcome to witness birthing as an aesthetic experience. I have previously analyzed how Kotak’s treatment of giving birth as performance functions as a means of challenging the enframing of pregnancy through medical technology that treats the pregnant and birthing subject as standing-reserve for human propagation.34 Shortly after the exhibition was announced, it garnered international press recognition, as various reporters and commentators criticized Kotak’s decision to stage such a spectacle, while also attracting fierce outcry for her giving birth outside of a medical context. As I have noted elsewhere, such criticism emerged from a misinterpretation and mis-presentation of Kotak’s performance, which was made to appear as if it was taking place in a packed theater.35 In addition to raising the inevitable question that haunts performance—how can that be art?—some of the negative responses targeted Kotak’s actions as a mother.36 Kotak’s artistic explorations of motherhood has continued through the ongoing durational performance series, Raising Baby X (2011–), which involves raising her son. She indicates how the project quickly came under scrutiny: “when I announced the start of the project, I was accused of turning my son’s

Ibid., 2. Putnam, “Performing Pregnant,” 203–4. 35 Ibid., 206–7. 36 Ibid. 33 34

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life into some kind of Truman Show.”37 Creating performance art with children, even one’s own children, can garner criticism, as it can be argued that children are unable to consent to participating in the production of live art. In response to such feedback, Kotak has been placing a chest-mounted GoPro camera on him since he was three months old, “capturing the intricacies of his childhood from his own point of view.”38 She has been collating the collected footage as the digital performance Raising Baby X: Little Brother. The GoPro camera came on the market in the early twenty-first century. Its development was led by Nick Woodman, who “craved a camera he could strap to his wrist so that his buddies could see his surfing exploits.”39 His experimentations began with designing a wearable camera that could withstand the physical stress of surfing. The GoPro is recognized for its distinctive, wide-angle footage and unique perspectives, as its portable size and rugged design enable it to be used under conditions that otherwise would be unfavorable or even impossible with standard camera equipment. This small size and versatility means that multiple cameras can be attached to the body (on the chest, wrist, or helmets) and on equipment (skis, surfboards, boats, airplanes)—anywhere that it is possible to stably rig it. In a 2013 interview with Forbes magazine, Woodman describes how it is a “life capture” camera as opposed to a “reaction capture” camera.40 That is, GoPros are designed to be turned on and to continuously record, as opposed to experiencing a moment and reacting to it through documentation.41 Moreover, the material characteristics and physical affordances of the GoPro camera create distinctive quality footage captured while also facilitating the capacity to record video in contexts that may otherwise not be possible. French philosopher Gilbert Simondon is recognized for challenging presumptions of technological progress and its relation to humanity. A key factor of Simondon’s philosophy of technology is the emphasis that he places on objects, including their material properties. He does not just consider technology as merely a mediator of human activity or tools at our disposal. Instead, he investigates how specific technical objects function, articulating

Kotak quoted in Niku Kashef, “The Durational Performance of the Parent-Artist and Other Subversive Acts,” in Inappropriate Bodies: Art, Design, and Maternity, ed. Rachel Epp Buller and Charles Reeve (Bradford, ON: Demeter Press, 2019), 159. 38 Kotak quoted in Ibid. 39 Ryan Mac, “The Mad Billionaire Behind GoPro: The World’s Hottest Camera Company,” Forbes, March 4, 2013, accessed March 5, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2013/03/04/themad-billionaire-behind-gopro-the-worlds-hottest-camera-company/. 40 Ibid. 41 Article author Ryan Mac points out how Woodman wore chest-mounted GoPros when his wife gave birth to two of his three children (ibid.). 37

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the interactions of machines with humans and their environment in detailed mechanical description.42 His approach contrasts other notable philosophers of technology such as Martin Heidegger, who focuses on the essence of technology, which does not include attention to the physical properties of tools but technology’s role in constructing being.43 Simondon believes that people’s general lack of understanding about how technology functions, resulting from the Industrial Revolution and the shift from artisanal goods to mass production, has instilled a sense of technological alienation.44 This emphasis on technology as an object, including how it functions and how it relates to its mixed technical and geographic milieu, is meant to counter this alienation and treat technology as an integral aspect of human culture and society.45 Simondon argues that technical objects function as mediators between human beings and the world.46 This process lacks finality, as human use of technical objects modify the world, which in turn alter human beings and their engagement with technologies. Rather, there are “successive stages of an individuating structuration, going from metastable state to metastable state by means of successive inventions of structures.”47 Thus, the interactions of humans with technology and the world constitute a milieu that is modified through technological use. Such an entangled state of humans with technology also encompasses the geographic, “natural” (or non-technological) elements of an environment, constituting a more holistic understanding of how technology functions than the traditional subject–object relationship. Returning to Raising Baby X: Little Brother, the technical affordances of the GoPro camera—its durability and ruggedness, small size and flexibility in placement, wide-angle lens, and capacity to record high-quality digital video over long periods of time—means that as a technical object it is more than just an appropriate tool for Kotak’s performance. It creates a mixed milieu of technology and human performance, which in this context involves the raising of a small child. In contrast to other technologies used in parenting, such as infrared camera baby monitors or “nanny cams,” the child in Little Brother is outside the scope of the lens and behind the camera (see Plates 1 and 2). The title of the work, Little Brother, alludes to its surveillance quality as a play on

Pascal Chabot, The Philosophy of Simondon: Between Technology and Individuation, trans. Aliza Krefetz and Graeme Kirkpatrick (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 10. 43 Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, trans. Cecile Malaspina and John Rogove (Minneapolis, MN: Univocal Pub, 2016); Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Perennial, 1977). 44 Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 16. 45 Ibid., 19. 46 Ibid., 183. 47 Ibid., 169. 42

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the archetype of “Big Brother,” though the figure of shadowy authority here is not a totalitarian government, but instead a child: a person who is commonly considered as vulnerable and in need of protection. The footage from Little Brother is not from a stable point of view, like the video used in the childcare monitors listed above. Instead the camera wiggles, shifts, and toddles in sync with Ajax’s movements. As Kotak began using the camera with Ajax when he was three months old, he would not have the capacity to convey an awareness of it that older children or adults have. Instead, he is oblivious of its function, not moving his body to get a better angle or shot, which means that the framing is off center or at awkward angles. At certain moments, his fingers move in front of the lens, conveying a tactile curiosity in the object. Thus, this work is a digital performance since the GoPro camera functions as an individual in the performance that forms and informs actions. Kotak, in contrast to Ajax, is aware of the camera, making me wonder if her actions are simply her being a mom or performed with a certain conscientiousness of them being documented. However, considering the nature of her durational work as merging art and life, where performances do not necessarily begin or end as life moments become opportunities for performed aesthetic engagement and performances become the sites of life happening, such a distinction is not possible. From Erving Goffman’s perspective, social interactions are always performed, with motherhood being no exception.48 Motherhood is always already the performance of (gendered) parenting. Kotak’s practice continues a longer trajectory in performance art that is rooted in everyday actions, including artists Mary Kelly and Mierle Aderman Ukeles who engage with care and maintenance labor from a maternal perspective.49 Kotak also cites performance artist Linda Montano as an

Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1959). Both Kelly and Ukeles are celebrated for their contributions of art that integrates life through their focus on the maternal. Refer to Judith Barry and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, “Textual Strategies: The Politics of Art Making,” in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, ed. Amelia Jones, 2nd edition (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 66–72; Andrea Liss, Feminist Art and the Maternal (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Lisa Baraitser, Enduring Time (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2017); Natalie Loveless and Mary Kelly, “Feminist Intergenerational Inheritance: A Conversation,” in The Maternal in Creative Work: Intergenerational Discussions on Motherhood and Art, ed. Elena Marchevska and Valerie Walkerdine (London and New York: Routledge, 2020), 13–25.

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influence, who has been creating multiyear durational performances as art/life works since the 1970s.50 Performance artist Marilyn Arsem states: Performance art is experience – shared time and space and actions between people […] It is an action created by an artist for a specific time and place […] Performance art reveals the vulnerability of living. Performance art reminds us that life is fleeting. We are only here now.51 Moreover, performance art, from Arsem’s perspective, draws from and accentuates our everyday experiences, transforming them into fleeting, shared aesthetic moments, where art, like life itself, is ephemeral in its presence. These qualities are integral to Kotak’s practice. It is not that performance art captures or solidifies these moments, but instead shifts the frame of engagement to invite different relational perspectives and understandings. Little Brother constitutes the footage collected from the art/life durational performance, whereas Raising Baby X is not restricted to what is captured on camera. Instead, the footage from the GoPro functions as a record of the performance while the presence and use of the camera informs how the performance unfolds. Like family home movies, these videos present select moments from the experiences of growing up.

In her avid attempts to blur the boundaries between art and life, Montano’s practice draws from autobiographical experiences while using her everyday experiences as source material and site of presentation. From 1983 to 1984, she collaborated with Taiwenese performance artist Tehching Hsieh to create the one-year performance The Year of the Rope, in which the two artists were bound together continuously by an eight-foot rope, though they could not touch each other. Starting in 1984, she began Seven Years of Living Art. Each year was designated a particular color, based on one of the seven chakras. Montana dressed monochromatically in that color, spent some time each day in a corresponding colored room and listened to a specific tone. This project lead to Another Seven Years of Living Art (1992–8) and Another 21 Years of Living Art (1998–2019), where she “compassionately practices an appreciation for life” and explores “the art of consciousness.” In some instances, Montano would present performances within the gallery context, such as hosting counselling sessions in the New Museum in New York City during the 1980s, or more recently presenting Art/Life/Death—her 78th birthday party combining spiritual ritual, celebration of life and creative activity, and contemplations of death—at 11 Jane Street, an experimental art space in Saugerties, New York. Linda Montano, Letters from Linda M. Montano, ed. Jennie Klein (London and New York: Routledge, 2005); Linda Montano, “ANOTHER 21 YEARS OF LIVING ART (1998– 2019),” accessed March 9, 2020, https://wayback.archive-it.org/7078/20181022154402/https:// www.lindamontano.com/another-21-years-of-living-art-1998-2019/; Frances Marion Platt, “11 Jane Street Hosts Linda Mary Montano’s Art/Life/Death 78th BirthdayArama Party,” Hudson Valley One, January 23, 2020, accessed November 27, 2021, https://hudsonvalleyone.com/2020/01/23/11-janestreet-hosts-linda-mary-montanos-art-life-death-78th-birthdayarama-party/. 51 Marilyn Arsem, “THIS Is Performance Art,” in Responding to Site: The Performance Work of Marilyn Arsem, ed. Jennie Klein and Natalie Loveless (Bristol: Intellect, 2020), 1. 50

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However, the videos of Raising Baby X: Little Brother are more than just documentation of childhood from a different point of view. They are presented as artistic works, inviting opportunities for aesthetic engagement with the mundane and repetitive experiences of raising and being a child. Footage is edited as excerpt reels and series of clips from a single life event (playing in the snow, visiting a park), so it is not simply a continuous feed. That is, Kotak makes artistic decisions of how the footage is compiled and presented online. For instance, in the video of Ajax interacting with a snowman,52 there is a moment when he runs across the snow as Kotak chases him. Their shadows merge in the bright winter light as his breathing gets faster from the physical exertion. He conveys sounds of nervous excitement that mingle with Kotak’s joyful, motherly voice. Such a mundane activity of a mother and her child playing are framed within the moving image, inviting aesthetic engagement not just as an interaction of a mother and child, but stimulation of the visual and aural senses through light and sound. The Years 1 and 2 excerpt reel begins with a shot of Kotak reading a story to Ajax, with a mirrored toy in front of them that shows the two figures together as the light of the GoPro camera blinks in the reflective surface. This shot establishes how the footage is captured and by whom, being one of the few sequences where Ajax’s body is shown. In other words, even if Ajax is unaware of the camera or that he is “performing” (at least in his younger years), Kotak is not just a mother raising her child but also an artist framing these experiences as aesthetic events. This slippage between mother-artist and artist-mother is important, as the two roles are not distinguishable, though they are not always harmonious either and can lead to moments of tension. Kotak describes how she initially emphasized public presentations, including elaborate stages for birthday parties. However, she states: Over time, I have come back to focus on the everyday act of raising my son first and to create the art out of this process. Many of the daily aspects of raising a child are somewhat mundane, so in order to elevate commonplace activities, I wear gold dresses and other beautiful attire at home […] In this sense treating the private performance of motherhood, viewed only by Ajax and my husband Jason, as I would a public event.53

Marni Kotak, “Raising Baby X: Little Brother – Year 3 (Excerpt 1),” Vimeo, 2015, https://vimeo. com/83369102. 53 Kotak in Kashef, “The Durational Performance of the Parent-Artist and Other Subversive Acts,” 160. 52

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As Kotak’s performance events become increasingly more private, she does continue to enable public access to select videos from Raising Baby X: Little Brother through the video sharing platform Vimeo.

From digital performance to digital object The distribution of videos on platforms such as Vimeo are possible because of their affordances as digital objects. Once the video is uploaded to Vimeo, it becomes part of an interconnected network through which it can be viewed and shared, but also stored in a database. Yuk Hui describes how a digital object is not defined as such due to its nature as binary code, but its functionality and capacity as data. In his analysis that draws together Gilbert Simondon and Martin Heidegger, Hui defines the digital object as “basically data, sharable and controllable; they can be made visible or invisible through the configuration of the system.”54 That is, digital objects are constituted through the logical statements that comprise data, metadata, data format, and its ontologies (or the computerized categorization system of data that enables it to be read by other machines) as well as its capacity to process data. As such, Hui highlights their material qualities and interconnectivity that defies understandings of an isolated or autonomous object.55 That is, digital objects are not just information or content but also physical and material structures. What makes the digital object significant, as indicated by Bernard Stiegler in his foreword to Hui’s book, is not that these objects are relational, but that they constitute a type of relationality that is recursive and their connectivity is quantified and quantifiable.56 In other words, the digital object forms through recursive functions and is programmable, meaning that its capacity to form and inform human behavior surpasses the technical objects discussed by Gilbert Simondon. Within such a context, human experience is reduced to quantifiable calculations, and by extension, the human animal is treated as a predictable and programmable machine.57 For Hui, what differentiates the digital object as a new type of industrial object is its capacity for interobjective relations. Typically, attention is paid to subject–object or intersubjective engagement, including human–computer interaction and the capacity for

Yuk Hui, On the Existence of Digital Objects (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 1. Ibid., 1–2. 56 Bernard Stiegler, “Foreword,” in Yuk Hui, On the Existence of Digital Objects (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), ix. 57 Hui, On the Existence of Digital Objects, 26. 54

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humans to connect to each other using digital technologies. Hui argues that paying attention to interobjective relations acknowledges technological dimensions that are ignored or reduced through intersubjective analysis. In particular, he addresses digital technology’s capacity to predict and direct use: “The digital object opens up worlds, unifies them, and discloses to the users of the other possible worlds that objects are not passive syntheses but refer you to somewhere else, out of anticipation; this is usually called serendipity.”58 Hui refers to this capability as tertiary protention, developing the concept from the work of Edmund Husserl and Stiegler. For Husserl, protention means  the “anticipation of the next moment […] [with] primary protention being the anticipation of the immediate coming moment, for example, melody when listening to a song, and the secondary protention being anticipation or expectation based on past experience.”59 Hui takes the concept of protention and builds a technological dimension, as Stiegler did when developing the notion of tertiary retention, which is the externalization of memory through technics.60 Kotak’s videos from Little Brother are an example of tertiary retentions. As the externalization of memory, when these videos are played back they influence the relationship between primary retentions (perception) and secondary retentions (memories), as each time viewing the video will inform how it is remembered and recalled. As such, Kotak’s videos function like typical family videos and images shared on social media platforms, though they are from the atypical perspective of the child. This externalization of memories is not unique to digital technologies, as Stiegler defines technics in the broadest scope to include photography, film, writing, and even simple tools such as hammers. Unlike home videos recorded on VHS and photographic albums, digital objects capture our interactions as traces of data, which are then used to influence our actions. For instance, when watching Marni Kotak’s videos on Vimeo, there are several videos suggested for me to view in a sidebar. At the end of each video, a new one will start automatically, some of which are from a different video account. Such recommendation systems can be found on various online platforms, from social media to online shopping to streaming services. These recommendations are selected based on traces of data that are collected and analyzed, resulting in a cultivation of taste through pattern recognition. Even though it appears that humans have the capacity to make choices, these choices are algorithmically determined, meaning that

Ibid., 219. Ibid., 221. 60 Bernard Stiegler, What Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology, trans. Daniel Ross (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013), 87. 58 59

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the logical capacities and operations of these digital objects are informing how humans behave and subsequently relate to each other. This exchange functions as a digital performance. Moreover, as a relational object, the digital object exceeds the influence and capacity of its creator. In fact, digital objects complicate typical understandings of subject–object relations that treat such interactions as direct or contained. The multifaceted and multifunctional aspects of the digital object, as both information and capacity for material relations that communicate both with humans and machines while ordering and being ordered, introduce a novel means of engagement between humans and technics. The utter relationality of digital objects correlates with the relationality of maternal subjects. The two are not identical, however, as the quantifying capacity of the digital objects impacts the maternal subject while it alters subjectivity more generally. The consequences of human–machinic interactions by means of digital objects, as Stiegler and others forewarn, are unprecedented.61 The increased reliance on and ubiquity of digital objects relating to every aspect of human existence, from politics and economics to medicine, education, childcare, and biological activities, mean that there is a potential to quantify and calculate anything and everything. Artists, such as Kotak, draw our attention to how we use digital technologies to document and share the upbringing of children, which then in turn are subject to new modes of mediation. At the same time, these tools can be adopted to enable different modes of thinking about mothering and care, with maternal artistic practice existing as a form of care in its own right.

Wendy Red Star: Decolonizing photography The technological milieu does not just consist of its present utilization, but also connects to historical precedence. In the digital photography series Apsáalooke Feminist, artist Wendy Red Star and Beatrice Red Star Fletcher, her daughter, pose for the camera wearing bright elk tooth dresses, which function as traditional symbols of prestige for Apsáalooke women. The composition of these images is rich with color from the clothing and woven textiles, as well as a background consisting of digitally manipulated ripples that make the photographic medium evident. The digital patterns blend with those of the textiles that fill the frame, as human figures are immersed in the rich, intricate forms. Red Star and Beatrice assume different poses in the four

See Bernard Stiegler, Automatic Society: The Future of Work, trans. Daniel Ross (Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2017); Stiegler, The Age of Disruption.

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images, always staring directly at the camera. The images convey emotional complexities and ambiguity, including a sense of pride and tenderness. In one image, Beatrice sits with a number of dolls in the foreground, as her mother reclines on the couch, looking back at the viewer. The staging of these images, a co-creation between mother and daughter, conscientiously references the longer history of Native American portraiture, such as the work of Edward Curtis and Charles Milton Bell, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.62 These precedent photographs presented Native Americans, conveyed in the stark black-and-white tones that photographic technologies afforded at the time, by non-native male photographers, as “part of the United States government’s ongoing attempts to systemically document Indigenous people, who, they falsely believed, were destined to disappear.”63 Portraits were also taken during the diplomatic visits of Native American leaders with US government officials, where “Native delegates fashioned themselves in diverse ways to assert their individuality and independence, often returning home with copies of their own.”64 This history of photography is a history of oppression and colonization, but also a history of expression, self-presentation, and identification.65 Throughout her practice, Red Star uses what have been symbols of domination as a means of decolonizing photography, emphasizing agency of the indigenous subjects. Red Star has undertaken some of this work in collaboration with her daughter, which is significant when considering that colonization involved the allotment of tribal land to men, even though the Apsáalooke were a matriarchal society.66 Moreover, the relational political space that Red Star’s photographs create is one that does not exclude the maternal, despite its obfuscation through colonization. In her 2014

Abaki Beck, “Decolonizing Photography: A Conversation With Wendy Red Star,” Aperture, December 14, 2016, accessed November 27, 2021, https://aperture.org/editorial/wendy-red-star/; Wendy Red Star and Shannon Vittoria, “Apsáalooke Bacheeítuuk in Washington, DC: A Case Study in Re-Reading Nineteenth-Century Delegation Photography,” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 6, no. 2 (Fall 2020), doi:10.24926/24716839.10672; Coco Picard, “Channeling the Nuances of Motherhood Into Art,” Hyperallergic, April 29, 2020, accessed November 27, 2021, http://hyperallergic.com/556805/channeling-the-nuances-of-motherhood-intoart/. 63 Red Star and Vittoria, “Apsáalooke Bacheeítuuk in Washington, DC.” 64 Ibid. 65 Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (London and Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2019), 6–7. 66 Robert Sullivan, “Wendy Red Star’s New Exhibition Is Part Historical Corrective, Part Ghost Story,” Vogue, March 2, 2019, accessed November 27, 2021, https://www.vogue.com/article/wendy-redstar-art-exhibition-a-scratch-on-the-earth-newark-museum. 62

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exhibition 1880 Crow Peace Delegation, presented at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon, Red Star incorporated a Xeroxed photograph of an Apsáalooke chief that Beatrice colored over.67 Highlighting the significance of intergenerational conversations, Salma Monani and Nicole Seymour point out how the “mother-daughter collaborations […] present alternative modes of education,” as children take control and responsibility in learning.68 Here the maternal subject is the instigator of artistic production in collaboration with her daughter, where the relation of co-creation is an intergenerational engagement with photographic technology. As such, the Apsáalooke Feminist series point to the extensive entanglements of this technology in the colonization of the Americas, as well as working with this technology as a means of resistance. Red Star takes an intergenerational approach that utilizes technology as a simultaneous means of creation and critique, with the maternal subject as integral to this process. Technology informs how a work can be produced while impacting human actions and how we relate to each other, including intergenerational engagements. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay highlights the distinctive qualities of photographic technology, which created new forms of encounters. Such encounters involve more than technical skills, they include civic skills as well.69 Red Star’s portrait series points to the early history of photography where staging and posing for the camera functioned as a simultaneous performance of the self (on behalf of the native sitter) and a gesture of colonization (on behalf of the non-native, male photographer), where in both instances, the camera as a technical object played an active role informing how humans behaved, with relational implications (such as the colonization of indigenous Americans and resistance to these efforts) that exceed the camera and photograph. Notably, Red Star’s portrait series features the maternal subject in this space of political performance.

Red star as quoted in Salma Monani and Nicole Seymour, “How Wendy Red Star Decolonizes the Museum with Humor and Play,” Edge Effects, October 8, 2020, accessed November 27, 2021, https://edgeeffects.net/wendy-red-star/. 68 Ibid. 69 Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York and Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2008), 22. 67

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Megan Wynne: Standing apart in the attention economy Megan Wynne creates performances that can be read as critically engaging with the milieu of social media while introducing atypical adaptations of these tools. Specifically, Wynne uses the camera in her maternal performances with her children as a means to bring sustained attention to mundane moments of motherhood twisted askew, which enable her to stand apart and deconstruct representations of the maternal as she occupies them. Like the other artists discussed in this chapter, Wynne’s artistic practice is deeply entwined with performed acts of maternal care. Some of her works consist of performancesto-camera created in the context of her home with her children. The resulting videos are consistent in style to parents sharing interactions with their children on social media, including the recognizable format of the smartphone—that is, the shot is framed vertically in a manner that is unusual for film or video, but that has gained a distinctive presence with the increased use of smartphone cameras as people hold their device in the palm of their hand when shooting. Wynne takes commonplace activities such as coloring with markers and applying stickers, shifting them or exaggerating them to a point where they retain familiarity, but evoke discomfort. The video Mask of Motherhood (2016) begins with Wynne’s face filling the center of the frame that is shot vertically in “selfie” mode. The hands of her children slip in and out of the borders, coloring onto her face with magic markers (see Plate 3). One child describes how they are trying to make her look “pretty” as opposed to “sick,” alluding to the challenges a mother faces when needing to care for young children even when she is ill. In the video Wynne attempts to maintain a passive presence and hide emotion, but stillness is impossible. At moments when the tip of the marker or the tug of skin from her daughters’ hands come to be too much, she flinches and jerks involuntarily, moving the camera so it also shakes. Thus, the camera is part of the performance. She holds it as an extension of her body, turning it back onto herself in “selfie” mode so she is able to watch the actions unfold in process, bringing to mind the works of early video art practitioners, such as Bruce Nauman and Vito Acconci, who used the television monitor as a mirror.70 Wynne’s use of the smartphone camera draws attention to its use as a technical object. Due to its extreme proliferation, the smartphone is likely to be used as a handheld camera in spontaneous moments. This quality combined with its

Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October 1 (Spring 1976): 50–64.

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particular technical affordances—vertical framing, automatic changes to light and focus—mean smartphone cameras have created a distinctive aesthetics of moving image that have become commonplace through the popularity of social media as distribution platforms. Wynne does not hide the fact that she is using a smartphone to record the unfolding actions, either through shooting or in post-production. Instead of treating the camera as merely a tool for documentation, it is a technical object that is part of the broader milieu of the performance, which is also part of the milieu of their family life and her life as a mother. Wynne presents these consumer aesthetics within the context of an artwork that invites engagement beyond what is typically found on social media. As such, her videos resonate with other videos that parents and caretakers share of their children online, though she defamiliarizes these gestures through her performed actions with her children, such as letting her children draw on her face for eighteen minutes and documenting the process. The resulting video Mask of Motherhood is edited down to eleven minutes, with excerpts and stills placed online. Watching the entire eleven-minute video involves a different type of engagement for the viewer when compared to videos of mothers interacting with children found on social media. As a performance art piece, Wynne is drawing focused attention to otherwise unnoticed activities, adapting the tools of social media in ways that encourage viewers to pause. Artist and writer Jenny Odell emphasizes how art enables the cultivation of different types of attention, including sustained attention, which can function as a means of resistance in the attention economy. In the attention economy, human attention is treated as a commodity, with different entities competing to capture and engage such attention, as experienced through social media and digital interfaces.71 With digital cultures dominated by Silicon Valley ideology, Odell observes, “what the tastes of neoliberal techno manifest-destiny and the culture of Trump have in common is impatience with anything nuanced, poetic, or less-than-obvious.”72 Artworks, in turn, can function as a means of cultivating different forms of attention that counter the increscent flux of information provided through digital channels. She argues that “If it’s attention (deciding what to pay attention to) that makes our reality, regaining control of it can also mean the discovery of new worlds and new ways of moving through them.”73 Throughout her book How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Odell cites examples of performance, video, conceptual, and other experimental artists whose work and practice

See Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 1st edition (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017). Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2019), x. 73 Ibid., 94. 71 72

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draw from the mundane while framing it differently, asking the audience to pause and consider something in an alternative way. She describes this method as “standing apart,” which means “to take the view of the outsider without leaving, always oriented toward what it is you would have left.”74 Odell makes sure to emphasize that to stand apart does not mean to wholly reject or disregard, but instead functions as a type of dwelling differently. As such, standing apart functions as a type of refusal where “resistance still manifests as participating, but participating in the ‘wrong way:’ a way that undermines the authority of the hegemonic game and creates possibilities outside of it.”75 The manner in which Wynne frames her maternal labor and care through her art practice is both mothering the “wrong way,” as playful engagement becomes the impetus for cultural critique, and creating art in the “wrong way,” as she relinquishes some of her creative agency to her children. Wynne utilizes similar techniques in Motivation (2016). Like Mask of Motherhood, this video begins with Wynne looking into her camera. She is lying on the ground with her two daughters next to her. On the carpet, there are children’s motivational stickers—brightly colored adhesive rewards with smiling stars and flowers around peace signs declaring “GREAT,” “BRILLIANT,” and “SUPER.” Wynne’s eyes dart back and forth between her daughters who are moving outside the frame. They begin to place the stickers on her skin, though Wynne presents facial expressions of discomfort and pain. It soon becomes evident that the footage is being presented in reverse and the children are peeling off the stickers. The video is then played in the manner in which it was shot. The stickers come to form a second-skin on Wynne’s face, covering her eyes, nose, and mouth in a thick layer (see Plate 4). At one point she flinches, and one daughter asks, “Are you okay? Does it hurt?” to which Wynne responds, “a little bit. I’m alright.” Such a response brings to mind how a mother can be expected to perform duties of care under all circumstances, despite how draining and demanding such activities can be. At the same time, it is touching to see a daughter express concern for her mother’s well-being as they collaborate in this activity. The excessive application of smiling stickers is humorous, yet Wynne’s physical strain cultivates feelings of discomfort and emotional ambivalence. Like Mask of Motherhood, Wynne is drawing attention to mundane activities of children interacting with their mother, though through the excess use of stickers and the technique of playing the video in reverse, she destabilizes the symbolic language of play and maternal care, as she stands apart through her actions as mother and artist, inviting

Ibid., 61. Ibid., 62.

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space for aesthetic engagement and thinking differently about the dynamics of a mother and her children as relational subjects. In addition to using technical and digital objects that comprise this shared milieu, Wynne’s activities also provide an opportunity to reconsider the role of digital technologies and social media in mothering, with an emphasis on maintenance and gendered acts of care as opposed to disruption and innovation. Winger-Bearskin, Kotak, Red Star, and Wynn present maternal subjects through their artistic practice, firstly as identifying themselves as mothers and secondly as agents in producing artworks. The intersection of digital technologies with performed gestures is significant for these artists, which is not limited to representations of the maternal, but is entwined with their acts of parenting that highlights shared vulnerability as the grounding of collective action and co-creation. The subject as artistic producer is not the autonomous subject popular in modernist thought, which according to Amelia Jones, is epitomized in the figure of the artist that emerged during the early Renaissance.76 Instead, these artists exhibit agency through intersubjective relations with their children, countering illusions of the artist as a unique individual and exemplifying how subjectivity is relational.77 The maternal subject as a dynamic, relational subject, informed through interactions with technical and digital objects as well as the relationality of digital objects within a broader milieu, make possible the enmeshment of the labor of mothers with the actions of artists. Lisa Baraitser describes how the mother-artist not only redefines the artist but also the maternal, becoming “the name for the possibility of a relation that can manage the tension of both connectedness and separation, and between the past and the future, the creation, that is, of a border space […] that links as it separates.”78 These are what I refer to as strange mothers—mothers who do not confine themselves simply to acts of taking care and artists who refuse to separate their identity as creators from their maternal roles. Such is the grounding for the aesthetics of interruption, which is developed in the next chapter.

Jones also emphasizes how, according to Kant, only men and not women could be considered artistic geniuses. Amelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory Identification and the Visual Arts (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 20 and 24. 77 Ibid., 20. 78 Lisa Baraitser, “Foreword,” in The Maternal in Creative Work: Intergenerational Discussions on Motherhood and Art, ed. Elena Marchevska and Valerie Walkerdine (London and New York: Routledge, 2020), xxii. 76

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Mother interrupted

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nshrined (2016) opens with Irish artist Aideen Barry wearing a platinum blonde wig and gray suit, typing at a computer in an anonymous office setting (see Plate 5). Piles of paper rise and shrink next to her, conveying the passage of time, productivity, and accumulation of work. Every once in a while, Barry pauses from her typing and ejects a chicken egg from her mouth. A pregnant belly grows at an impossible rate, until she gives birth to a young boy, who appears to be about one year of age (and is Barry’s third and youngest son). Barry continues her work, pausing only to pump milk in bottles that she places upon the stacks of paper crowding the desk, which waver under the additional weight until the piles collapse onto her. The video ends with her limbs emerging from the accumulated paper, while the child plays with remnants of chicken eggs, oblivious to the mass that has come crashing down onto his mother (see Plate 6). A stop-motion animation created using digital photographs, the work has a stilted quality, caught in a tension between verisimilitude and animated impossibility, which is amplified through an exaggerated Foley soundtrack. The title of the work is a response to Articles 41.2 and 3 in the Irish constitution, which enshrines a mother’s place in the home as her national duty: In particular, the State recognizes that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved. The State shall, therefore, endeavor to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labor to the neglect of their duties in the home.1 Office of the Attorney General, “Constitution of Ireland,” Electronic Irish Statute Book (EISB), accessed January 8, 2021, http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/cons/en/html.

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Even though these articles are not literally enforced in the twenty-first century,2 they have significant sexist, ideological weight, indicating that familial care is the responsibility of mothers while articulating a woman’s primary national and civic duty as taking place in the home. There is also the implication that maternal labor and care responsibilities need to be isolated from other forms of work, and to engage in other labor risks “neglect of [a mother’s] duties in the home.” Enshrined is one of various works by Barry that engages with the complexities and contradictions of the maternal in Ireland. Throughout the twentieth century, the strong influence of cultural conservatism perpetuated by the Catholic Church coupled with strict anti-abortion legislation, restrictions on contraception and divorce as well as legislation that prevented married women from taking civil service jobs, has meant that motherhood has functioned as a constructed institution in Ireland to control women. In 1983, the Eighth Amendment to the Irish constitution (Article 40.3.3), which equated the right to life of the unborn as equal to that of the mother, was implemented after a landslide popular vote, restricting abortion under all circumstances. Moreover, the maternal has particular political, cultural, and social meaning within Ireland, where the landscape of the island is imagined as a suffering reproductive female, or “Mother Ireland.” At this moment in the twenty-first century, Ireland is in the midst of a cultural and social transformation. Feminist artists in Ireland, such as Barry, have played significant roles in drawing attention to epistemic restrictions rooted in sexist ideological bias. The work of these strange mothers engage with and challenge a rich symbolic discourse regarding the maternal, epitomized through the figures of the Virgin Mary and Kathleen Ní Houlihan, who is the nationalist figure of an older woman for whom the young men of Ireland died to protect and was popularized during Ireland’s fight for independence from the British Empire. Irish artists are also actively involved in instigating social changes. For instance, Cecily Brennan, Alice Maher, Eithne Jordan, and Paula Meehan formed the Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment in 2015, combining reproductive activism with artistic activities. In addition to cultivating a successful social media campaign and online petition, artists

A marriage bar was in place in Ireland from 1924 until the 1970s, making Ireland one of the last European countries to abolish these restrictions. This legislation prevented married women from working in civil service positions. Even though this legislation only applied directly to the civil service, it was not uncommon for women to be barred from working in the private sector. See Eileen Connolly, “Durability and Change in State Gender Systems: Ireland in the 1950s,” The European Journal of Women’s Studies 10, no. 1 (2003): 65–86; Irene Mosca and Robert Wright, “The Long-Term Consequences of the Irish Marriage Bar,” Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) Discussion Papers, no. 12301 (2019). In addition, these articles have enabled provision of a child benefit in the mother’s name of €120 per month per child.

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involved in the group, including Maher, Rachel Fallon, Breda Mayock, and Áine Phillips, designed banners for the 2017 annual March for Choice in Dublin, which cultivated a new iconography of feminist resistance drawing from art history and its political aspirations.3 The group functioned as a mobilizing force for Ireland’s artists, developing important grassroots networks that contributed to the successful repeal of the Eighth Amendment in 2018 through the popular vote.4 While there have been legislative turns across the globe to restrict access to reproductive health, the progressive turn in reproductive justice in Ireland functions as a significant model for exploring the impact of art and media on society and politics, as well as understandings of maternal subjectivity. Building upon the previous chapter’s definition of the maternal subject as in process and relational, as well as the strange mother as working in excess of cultural expectations of gendered care and kinship, formed and mediated in conjunction with psychosocial and geographic milieu, in this chapter I define the aesthetics of interruption. Through the aesthetics of interruption, I build connections between maternal and digital subjectivity focusing on art and visual culture in Ireland. Specifically, I consider a number of Irish and Irish-based artists whose work relates to and explicitly challenges the imagining of “Mother Ireland,” including Pauline Cummins, Laura O’Connor, and me, using these technology-based performances as a means of defining the aesthetics of interruption. As such, Mother Ireland is made strange. I then consider who is excluded from imaginings of Mother Ireland, focusing on asylum-seeker mothers living in Direct Provision and Travellers, Ireland’s, traditionally peripatetic ethnic group. The examples discussed, including a short monologue written by Rosaleen McDonagh, challenge the limits of maternal representation, while also enabling considerations of how the aesthetics of interruption can inform the understanding and constitution of digital subjects as an alternative to popular understandings of disruption perpetuated by Silicon Valley techno-culture.

Lisa Godson, “Solemn and Bedazzling,” The Visual Artists’ News Sheet Online, October 31, 2017, accessed November 27, 2021, https://visualartistsireland.com/solemn-and-bedazzling. 4 The vote to repeal the Eighth Amendment was 66.4 percent yes and 33.6 percent no, an inverse of the 1983 vote that originally implemented the amendment. Even though grassroots organizations such as the Artists Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment were vital to raising awareness around the harms the amendment has caused and to garner popular support, Theresa Reidy argues that the vote to repeal is indicative of a broader cultural shift in Ireland that is more accepting of abortion, as compared to 1983 voters. Theresa Reidy, “The 2018 Abortion Referendum: Over before It Began!,” in After Repeal: Rethinking Abortion Politics, ed. Kath Browne and Sydney Calkin (London: Zed Books, 2019), 21–35. 3

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The aesthetics of technical objects Prior to defining an aesthetics of interruption, it is necessary to identify how aesthetics is used in this context. Enshrined presents a complex milieu that combines the working mother with the act of expressing milk in the hyperproductive state of the neoliberal anonymous office. The breast pump is a particular technical object and not commonly treated as a source of aesthetic experience. However, Simondon argues that technical objects are capable of evoking aesthetic thought, as “any technical object, mobile or fixed, can have its aesthetic epiphany, insofar as it extends the world and becomes integrated into it.”5 Unlike Immanuel Kant’s definition of aesthetic judgment, which involves judgment of an autonomous object by a disinterested subject,6 Simondon emphasizes how technical objects can only be appreciated through aesthetic experiences as part of their milieu. He refers to this situated quality of aesthetics as techno-aesthetic.7 Perception of the technical object is not enough to constitute an aesthetic experience, as an understanding of the function of the technical object is necessary to fully appreciate its beauty.8 This approach differs from Kantian purposiveness without purpose, where the subject is not interested in the object’s function for aesthetic judgment, as experiencing a technical object as part of its milieu means experiencing it in action, with the functional integration of a technical object fulfilling a purpose.9 As such, Simondon does not focus on the art object per se, but on the aesthetic impression of art as an encounter, with “any act, any thing, any moment” having the capacity to be aestheticized.10 Therefore, the aesthetic significance of Enshrined occurs not just through the treatment of the stop-motion video as the art object but also in Barry’s use of the breast pump. The breast pump in Enshrined is an impetus for aesthetic encounter as it is presented in action. It not only extracts milk from the female breast, stored for later consumption, but also expresses a mother’s desire to feed her child while functioning as an acknowledgment of being apart from that child. Writer Maggie Nelson describes how pumping milk is more than just about providing nourishment, “A human mother expresses milk because sometimes she can’t be there to nurse her baby, either by choice or by

Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 197. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 96–113. 7 Gilbert Simondon, “On Techno-Aesthetics,” trans. Arne De Boever, Parrhesia 14 (2012): 2. 8 Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 202. 9 Ibid., 198. 10 Ibid., 193. 5 6

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necessity. Pumping is thus an admission of distance, of maternal finitude. But it is a separation, a finitude, suffused with best intentions.”11 For Simondon, from the aesthetic experience emerges the intention to communicate. In On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Simondon describes in technical detail an attempted telephone call, interrupted by noise, emphasizing the wonder of being able to communicate across continents.12 The breast pump is a device that encompasses a mother’s intention to nourish but is also a concession of being apart, like the telephone Simondon describes. The pump is presented as part of its milieu, integrated onto the human body as it takes the place of the hand expressing the breast. As such, it not only replaces the human body in the performance of a gesture, the act of expression, but it then acts on the human body to perform its function. These qualities are the impetus for aesthetic impression. The mother is both the operator of the machine and the one that the machine is operating upon. Barry’s use of the pump in Enshrined, producing milk that eventually causes the scenario to collapse through its accumulation, exemplifies maternal finitude. Nelson emphasizes the significance of images such as those presented through Enshrined when she quotes Kaja Silverman: “Our culture should support [the mother] by providing enabling representations of maternal finitude, but instead it keeps alive in all of us the tacit belief that [the mother] could satisfy our desires if she really wanted to.”13 Understood in terms of Simondon’s techno-aesthetics, Enshrined enables new means of thinking about the breast pump and motherhood, as a desire to communicate and maternal finitude, through creative experimentation.14 Notably, Simondon emphasizes how aesthetic experience is not restricted to the “consumer” of a work of art, but “it is also, and more originally so, the set of sensations, more or less rich, of the artists themselves: it’s about a certain contact with matter that is being transformed through work.”15 Barry has developed a distinctive method for producing her animated performance works utilizing the affordances of digital shooting and editing technologies. Barry creates her videos using digital single-lens reflex cameras, shooting the scenes one frame at a time. Working in this manner, as opposed to using a video camera, was a conscious choice, as it allows Barry to be both in front of and behind the camera, coordinating with mirrors and remote controls.

Nelson, The Argonauts, 99. Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 198. 13 Kaja Silverman quoted in Nelson, The Argonauts, 96–7. 14 Andrew Lapworth, “Theorizing Bioart Encounters after Gilbert Simondon,” Theory, Culture & Society 33, no. 3 (May 2016): 137, doi:10.1177/0263276415580173. 15 Simondon, “On Techno-Aesthetics,” 3. 11

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With twelve photographs providing one second of moving image footage, the process is time consuming and laborious. Her decision to work in the context of her own home is multifaceted: “I often shoot in my domestic environment as a means of being contextually authentic to the subject matter but also realistic to the parameters that exist in being an artist and parent with extremely limited resources.”16 Taking advantage of the increased ubiquity of image and video-editing software, Barry is able to produce high-quality work without the need of a production team, making the process feasible within a reasonable budget and the constraints of time that are affiliated with caring for small children. As a mother-artist, Barry has developed an artistic praxis in the milieu of her home as the site of maternal labor and art work. Instead of shooting continuous video, shooting one image at a time enables her not only to be both the image maker and subject of the image but also to accommodate the interruptions of parenting that prevent stretches of continuous studio time. The resulting aesthetics of her work is directly connected to her maternal subjectivity. As such, it can take weeks to produce a single scene, though like a work of knitting that can be placed down after a single stitch without unraveling, Barry is able to pick up the process and continue producing. In short, interruptions are integral to Barry’s moving image performances. These interruptions are visually present in the gaps of the final edited piece and the interruptions in the content of Enshrined (Barry’s workflow is interrupted as she gives birth to and cares for a child), but the work emerges from an interrupted method of production.

Aesthetics of interruption Barry’s practice exemplifies the mother as a subject of interruption, but also as an artist that produces an aesthetics of interruption. As noted in the previous chapter, Lisa Baraitser argues that interruption is not the deviation but the norm for maternal subjectivity. She states: “The mother after all, is the impossible subject, par excellence. Caught in an ever widening gap between her idealization and denigration in contemporary culture, and her indeterminate position as part object, part subject within the Western philosophical tradition.”17 This gap is manifest in Barry’s animations through the jittering frames of her stop-motion videos, as the gaps between images enable her to perform mundane activities in extraordinary ways. Moreover, an

Aideen Barry, Personal Correspondence to Author, December 18, 2017. Baraitser, Maternal Encounters, 4.

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aesthetics of interruption as it relates to the maternal, according to Moynagh Sullivan, “bear[s] witness to the fragmented, interrupted consciousness of the mother.”18 The result of this aesthetic interruption is an opportunity to “rethink the possibilities of the subjective experience.”19 At the same time, the maternal experience is brought to the fore as it is made evident in the formal parameters of the work of art. Through Barry’s work, this quality is manifest through the visual impact of the gap. In Levitating (2007), Barry appears to be performing domestic chores around the home, such as vacuuming and folding laundry, while levitating above the ground. This video is one of her earliest stop-motion videos and she created it by jumping in the air for each frame. Art critic Gemma Tipton describes how the labor intensive process of creating the video is captured in the content of the film, as it “demonstrates the artist’s exhausting quest to create an appearance of effortlessness.”20 The gap becomes the repository of invisible work that enables the impossible imagined scenarios that Barry crafts, much like the reproductive labor of mothers that escapes our grasp. The mother, as made evident in Barry’s work, is a subject of interruption that is anecdotal and situated, yet also dynamic and incomplete. The aesthetics of interruption is the means of conveying as well as constituting this subjectivity through multifaceted sensations that are produced as it is presented. I argue that the maternal aesthetics of interruption parallels present-day experiences of digital technology. These qualities are not merely analogous but also, as made evident through the digital performances of strange mothers such as Barry, entangled. The visual and sonic interruptions that accompany digital technologies— glitches, noise, lag, shifting pixels, latency, delays, dis-synchronicity, and so forth—have given rise to an aesthetics that emerges from machine breakdown.21 Carolyn Kane argues that “glitch, noise, and error constitute dominant forms of technologically-mediated perception and knowledge-forming practices in the historical present.”22 Challenging a linear myth of technological progression, Kane points out how noise and glitches point to the material qualities of digital technologies that are bolstered by a myth of transparency, as they are made to be invisible. Optimization, efficiency, convenience, and instant gratification

18 Moynagh Sullivan, “An ‘Unthought Known’ of Her Own: The Aesthetics of Interruption,” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 13 (2012): 108. 19 Ibid., 109. 20 Gemma Tipton, “Aideen Barry,” Frieze, accessed April 11, 2020, https://frieze.com/article/aideenbarry. 21 Michael Betancourt, Glitch Art in Theory and Practice: Critical Failures and Post-Digital Aesthetics (New York and London: Routledge, 2017); Carolyn L. Kane, High-Tech Trash: Glitch, Noise, and Aesthetic Failure (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019). 22 Kane, High-Tech Trash, 9.

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drive the ideology of technological innovation, against the backdrop of a world that is composed of noise. Interruption, like glitches and noise, shatters the illusion of transparency, “revealing new insights at their seams.”23 Kane refers to Steven Jackson’s concept of “broken world thinking,” which shifts attention from innovation and progression to maintenance and repair. Jackson argues how breakdown, as opposed to innovation, is the dominant state of technology.24 Breakdown can be generative and productive, as it draws attention to the technological infrastructures that is otherwise hidden through productivist framings. Jackson states: “It is therefore precisely in moments of breakdown that we learn to see and engage our technologies in new and sometimes surprising ways.”25 Such moments of breakdown require what Lucy Suchman refers to as situated action, or “actions taken in the context of particular, concrete circumstances.”26 It is within these moments, according to Suchman, that the representational characteristic of plans as devised actions become most futile, requiring engagement where the unfolding of knowledge and experience is contingent on context. The intentions of plans only go so far when technologies are put into use. Thus, just as the aesthetics of interruption draw attention to the maternal, as indicated by Moynagh Sullivan,27 the aesthetics of computer breakdown constitutes an aesthetics of interruption that bring the material aspects of digital and electronic technologies to the fore. Breakdown is not the deviation, but the norm. Breakdown correlates to what Lisa Baraitser describes as the maternal’s “moments of undoing,” when the mother is thrown off-kilter through interruption.28

Mother Ireland Just as there has been increased attention and diversification in the identification and constitution of maternal subjects, there have been more complex and multifaceted portrayals of the mothers in art and culture. In her study of maternal bodies in the visual arts, art historian Rosemary Betterton

Ibid., 11. Steven Jackson, “Rethinking Repair,” in Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, ed. Gillespie Tarleton, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kristen A. Foot (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 223. 25 Ibid., 230. 26 Lucille Alice Suchman, Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions, 2nd edition (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 26. 27 Sullivan, “An ‘Unthought Known’ of Her Own,” 108. 28 Baraitser, Maternal Encounters, 3. 23 24

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emphasizes the complexity of the maternal and the challenges of coming to a unified understanding of what constitutes it.29 Art does not just portray maternal bodies but also functions as expressions of subjectivity emerging from the experiences of the artists or the subjects of the work. Irish poet Edna O’Brien writes: “Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire. Ireland has always been a woman, a womb, a cave, a cow, a Rosaleen, a sow, a bride, a harlot, and, of course, the gaunt Hag of Beare.”30 The trope of Mother Ireland is enmeshed in the conceptualization of the maternal in Ireland, where the mother is treated as one who is self-sacrificing: a woman who exists only for maternity.31 The perpetuation of these myths, according to Gerardine Meaney “obliterate[s] the reality of women’s lives.”32 Hilary Robinson echoes these assertions when she states: “iconic representations of women in Ireland produce the function of the representation, ‘woman’, as being a cypher of nation, while reducing actual women, politically and empirically, to mothers.”33 The delegation of Irish women to specific roles of care taking is mythologized through the imagining of the Irish landscape as mother, which in turn have limited the possibilities for women in Ireland, including obligatory motherhood through a total ban on abortion through the Eighth Amendment (until 2018). Robinson adds that the idealization of motherhood exceeds culture and religious discourse, as the Irish Constitution “idealizes a representation, ‘woman’ (particularly in its construction of her relation to motherhood) while ignoring the autonomy and subjectivity of actual women.”34 The prioritization of an unattainable ideal that collapses woman with the maternal creates a double bind for feminist mothers in Ireland, as becoming a mother can be treated as supporting the conservative ethos that informed the formation of the Irish state. Such is the context within which the strange mother in Ireland emerges. These strange mothers interrupt dominating symbolic representations that have been used to perpetuate the systemic oppression of women and gestating bodies. Pauline Cummins has been at the forefront of feminist efforts to deconstruct the maternal in Ireland. Her 1985 multimedia work Inis t’Oirr: Aran Dance is an example of the reimagining of Mother Ireland, as she shifts the framing

Rosemary Betterton, Maternal Bodies in the Visual Arts (Manchester, UK, and New York: Manchester University Press, 2014), 1. 30 Edna O’Brien, Mother Ireland (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976), 11. 31 Gerardine Meaney, Sex and Nation Women in Irish Culture and Politics (Cork: Attic Press, 1991), 3. 32 Ibid. 33 Hilary Robinson, “Becoming Woman: Irigaray, Ireland and Visual Representation,” in Art, Nation and Gender : Ethnic Landscapes, Myths and Mother-Figures, ed. Sighle Bhreathnach-Lynch (New York and London: Routledge, 2018), 113. 34 Ibid., 117. 29

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of the maternal to consider sexual desire after giving birth, a taboo topic in Catholic Irish culture. Cummins draws parallels from the knitting of Aran jumpers in the West of Ireland to the sexualized, nude male body, where the manipulation of yarn and the resulting patterns are influenced by the knitter’s sensual desire; a knitter who is presented in Cummins’s work as a married mother. These jumpers have come to symbolize traditional Irishness through the tourist market throughout the island, evoking qualities of rural quaintness. Siún Carden describes how the garment has become synonymous with Irish culture, endowed with a mythological status around its origins and meaning, including the significance of the complex stitch patterns.35 The most common tale surrounding the patterns are that the jumpers were used to identify fishermen who had drowned in the Atlantic. Carden states “the Aran-knit garment functions as a document, placing the body of the individual within the context of a family lineage.”36 While this myth focuses on the role of the familial patriarch, Cummins subverts this seemingly innocuous garment through her drawing together of the male body and landscape in knitting patterns. She “radicalizes rather than rejects”37 this craft and allusions to traditional Irish domestic femininity using an interplay of lens-based imagery and the body through her speculation on the encoding and decoding of maternal sensuality into the iconic garment. Inis t’Oirr consists of slide projections that incorporate gestural drawings of knitting and patterns with images of finished sweaters overlaying a nude male torso. The work is narrated by Cummins, who moves from innuendo to explicit sexual reference as the piece progresses, functioning as a multimedia performance. Cummins is present not just through the inclusion of an image of herself wearing a sweater and her voice but also the gestural qualities of the drawings that convey a pent-up energy, bearing the traces of her actions. The bodies are incomplete forms, completed in the viewer’s imagination with the guidance of Cummins’s erotic narration. As such, there is a strong tactile quality to the work, indicated through the textures of the sweater patterns, the hairy nude torso overlaid with projected images, and the gestural qualities of the lines. Cummins’s language also emphasizes the sense of touch. At one point she lists verbs that evoke haptic sexual acts: spreading, glistening, slipping, sliding, pushing out, de-seminating, tipping the navel. Other descriptions evoke kinesthetic empathy, drawing attention to one’s own embodied state:

Siún Carden, “The Aran Jumper,” in Design Roots: Culturally Significant Designs, Product, and Practices, ed. Stuart Walker et al. (London, Oxford, and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 67. 36 Ibid., 69. 37 Catherine Nash, “Reclaiming Vision: Looking at Landscape and the Body,” Gender, Place & Culture 3, no. 2 (July 1996): 161, doi:10.1080/09663699650021864. 35

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The hidden male body, buried, suppressed. Touch the hip, into the waist. Squeeze, Rub up. The back. The spine bending, extending, joining the shoulder, broad, wide, thick. Arms, hairy, sinuous, strength. Thighs, joining, apart. And the butterfly motif. Through this process, Cummins transforms the domestic craft of knitting, traditionally performed by Irish wives and mothers, into a sublimation of sexual desire that bursts through repression. Her “Mother Ireland” challenges what Meaney refers to as the asexual “Virgin Mother Ireland,” or the conflation of the Virgin Mary and Mother Ireland in “Irish populist Catholic nationalism,” which dominated Irish culture during most of the twentieth century.38 In contrast to Catholic ideology that emphasizes how sexual acts must be reproductive rather than erotic, as a strange mother, Cummins undermines traditional presumptions of the Irish maternal, as she “represent[s] Irish women as sexually active and desiring both now and in the past.”39 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, to make strange means “to make difficulties, refuse to assent or comply, be reluctant or unwilling.”40 Through her sensual expressions, Cummins refuses to comply with the dominant Irish Catholic imagining of the mother as a virginal figure dedicated solely to the care of her family. As such, these overt, nonreproductive sexual desires make “Mother Ireland” strange. When first witnessing this piece at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in Dublin, I noted how it was presented in a darkened room, with the soundtrack playing through two sets of headphones. While the use of headphones is a common installation practice for works that include audio to reduce sound crossover, their use in this context added to the intimacy of the piece. Sitting alone on a bench, I listened to Cummins describe the “hidden male body” of Aran sweaters, unleashing the suppression of desire through the repetitious act of looping yarn over needles again and again, creating thick, woolly garments that embrace the wearer. As her language became increasingly sexual, I became aware of my physical presence in the room, observant of other gallery attendees who might enter the space but who did not listen to the provided headphones, thereby missing a vital quality of the

Gerardine Meaney, Gender, Ireland and Cultural Change: Race, Sex and Nation (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 7. 39 Nash, “Reclaiming Vision,” 166. 40 OED Online, “Strange, Adj. and n.” 38

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work that increases its intimate exchange. I was also grateful for these acts of avoidance, as it enabled me to witness this work in solitude and without the awkward acknowledgment of simultaneous private, intimate moments that the work affords. Such qualities of tension would be lost if listening was a shared experience over speakers. Cummins’s work encapsulates an aesthetics of interruption not just through the formal qualities of her images—gestural drawings that hold rich gaps of oozing sensuality—but also in its technical apparatus. The work was made using projected slides; still images that click audibly, providing a beat to Cummins’s narrative. Through this work and others, Cummins sets precedence for certain artists exploring the maternal using digital performance in the twenty-first century, including Aideen Barry. Meaney describes how processes of demythologizing Mother Ireland have been taking place since the latter part of the twentieth century,41 though it continues today as some of the roles for women delegated in the national constitution are finally being questioned. Writing in 1998, Meaney indicates two trends when it came to feminist challenges of Mother Ireland. The first involves countering the myth “through historical and social research, realist narrative and the assertion of an aesthetic of authenticity.” The second approach, which she refers to as postmodernist, “concentrates on destabilizing the myth from within, through parody, revision and re-appropriation of the figures, forms and representations of women.”42 In the twenty-first century, these trends are not so distinctive, as realism is not considered limited solely to verisimilitude in representation, but as Søren Bro Pold argues, the increased prominence of digital interfaces through the ubiquity of computing devices and sensors has meant a rethinking of realism that exceeds the visual.43 Illusions of transparency and visibility can in fact be obscuring mechanisms of control. Thus, the artists discussed in this chapter both inhabit the image of Mother Ireland to reclaim it while undermining the myth through realism and authenticity that reveals the seams of representation through an aesthetics of interruption.

Gerardine Meaney, “Landscapes of Desire: Women and Ireland on Film,” Women: A Cultural Review 9, no. 3 (December 1998): 237, doi:10.1080/09574049808578355. 42 Ibid. 43 Søren Bro Pold, “New Ways of Hiding: Towards Metainterface Realism,” Artnodes, no. 24 (July 11, 2019): 75, doi:10.7238/a.v0i24.3283. 41

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Uncomfortable state In her 2017 performance, Uncomfortable State, Laura O’Connor responds to the then ongoing political tensions surrounding the possibilities of repealing the anti-abortion Eighth Amendment. She begins the work standing in front of a green felt cut-out of Ireland, facing a laptop that is streaming her performance over YouTube.44 The live feed of the performance is projected onto the wall she faces, making it evident that she is using a green screen—the chroma keying technique used in film and video to create special effects— to transform the map of Ireland into a video of the Irish Sea, which is the body of water that women travel to access abortion in nearby England.45 The audience is presented with two simultaneous versions of the performance; one in the shared physical space of the artist, and the other mediated by the streamed digital video. O’Connor wears a skin-colored bodysuit and is applying green paint to her body, which renders her invisible in the waves of the Irish Sea in the streamed video. Over the course of an hour, she covers her body, resulting in a crude overlay of her corporeal form with the video of crashing waves that is both veiling and revealing. There is a lag between the live presentation of actions and the video feed, compounded by the delayed audio track that feeds back into the gallery, with the performance coexisting in digital and physical space. There is an ambivalence throughout the performance, though not just through its content that highlights Irish conservatism concerning gender, sex, and reproduction. Ambivalence is introduced through the juxtaposition of the live to the digital within the context of the gallery in a manner that emphasizes the mediation of the technical apparatus. While the performance could be viewed online and was streamed to several television monitors placed throughout the art space, Town Hall in Cavan, only within the context of the gallery where O’Connor was present both physically and digitally, was technological mediation most pronounced as the imperfections of digital rendering conceals while revealing O’Connor’s body, drawing correlations with the biopolitical control of women’s bodies in Ireland. Like Aideen Barry, Laura O’Connor’s practice is supported by increased access to video production through consumer digital technology. For this performance, she used the web camera built into her Mac laptop and a

For a video of the performance see Laura O’Connor, “Uncomfortable State #2,” YouTube, 20 May 2017, accessed 12 December 2021, https://youtu.be/u-sHNt4ffYs. 45 Laura O’Connor, “Uncomfortable State,” 2017, accessed November 29, 2021, http://www. lauraoconnorart.com/uncomfortable-state.html. 44

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program called Boinx TV to create the green screen effect. She then used a screen recorder app Camtwist and broadcast it over YouTube with Google Hangout.46 O’Connor’s use of consumer technology evokes various digital artists of the late 1990s and 2000s, such as Cory Arcangel, Seth Price, Paper Rad, and Petra Cortright, who tested the limits of newly available media, often appropriating, repurposing, and disrupting imagery and digital tools, cultivating distinctive takes on increasingly ubiquitous digital media.47 While the resulting style of the work is jagged and pixelated, these imperfect features in visual and aural presence point to the mediating qualities of the digital technology in framing the performance, functioning as an aesthetics of interruption. In a second iteration of Uncomfortable State, O’Connor plays with the presentation of the Irish landscape as a gestating body more explicitly. Presented in the Ballina Arts Centre in County Mayo during 2018, at the time of the referendum vote to repeal the Eighth Amendment, the green felt cut-out of the early versions of the piece is replaced with a human-sized chunk of grass in the shape of Ireland (see Plate 7). In place of a live performance, there is a two-channel video piece where she covers her body using grass from the island sculpture, and through chroma keying, overlays the Irish Sea in one channel of the video. The layering of grass from a miniaturized version of the Emerald Island, where the grass then becomes the means of placing her body under erasure, compounds the collapse of reproductive female bodies into the Irish landscape. The metaphor is pushed to such a literal extreme that it becomes a metonymy through her performed gestures. The island presented in the installed exhibition bears the impression of her body, bringing to mind Ana Mendieta’s Silhouettes series, as the presence of a body is marked through the index of its absence. Unlike the live version of the work discussed above where there was a notable lag between performed action and video presentation, the two videos are synchronous (see Plate 8). However, there is an imperfect quality of green screen that adds an eeriness as it does not quite hide the mode of production. The means of making is exposed through noisy, pixelated gaps that appear at the edges of the chroma key function where seams reveal the technological apparatus. The interplay of erasure and revealing is persistent throughout the work, correlating with the treatment of maternal bodies in Ireland that are both hidden and highlighted through politics, legislation, and Catholic ideology that retains a discomfort regarding the reproductive capacities of women.

Laura O’Connor, email to Author, December 23, 2017. See Lauren Cornell and Ed Halter, eds., Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2015).

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Glitching borders I present a challenge to the Mother Ireland trope from the stance of a non-Irish foreigner and mother in the interactive work Quickening where I reimagine the landscape of the border in Ireland. This border has a contested history since it formally divided the island of Ireland during 1922 into the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, with the southern part of the island becoming an independent state and the north remaining part of the United Kingdom. Over the years, the border has functioned as a customs barrier, a heavily surveilled area with a military presence, and a site of violent conflict, though it has also existed as a region that has developed its own cultural specificities as a place between two nations.48 After the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1999, which functioned as the official political end of the Troubles (a period of military and paramilitary violence in Northern Ireland), the border has maintained a minimal physical presence as a division between two nations. With the onset of Brexit after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in 2016, the border gained renewed attention. In 2017, I moved to the border between Co. Louth in Ireland and Co. Armagh in Northern Ireland with my family. Shortly after arriving, I was looking out of the window of my home studio when I realized that I was facing the border and began to wonder how this demarcation was situated in the environment. For the most part, there are minor indications of difference—a change in the road surface texture or street signs indicating that speed limits are in kilometers or miles. I regularly received text messages while sitting at home in Ireland, welcoming me to the United Kingdom as my mobile service switched between nations. I had learned about the violent conflict of the Troubles while growing up in the United States, but I had no in-depth understanding of the history and how it shaped the region. I began taking photographs of the border where we lived. I was interested in composing images where the location of the border was unclear, with the foreground in the North and background in the South or vice versa. These photographs became the impetus for Quickening. The digital images in Quickening cycle like a slide show, though with varying transparencies so they become layers. A soundtrack of field recordings from the area accompany the work. When an ultrasonic motion sensor is triggered, the cycling stops and the image begins to “glitch” in real time. The pitch and

Catherine Nash, Brian Graham, and Bryonie Reid, Partitioned Lives: The Irish Borderlands (London and New York: Routledge, 2016); Garrett Carr, The Rule of the Land: Walking Ireland’s Border (London: Faber & Faber, 2017); Diarmaid Ferriter, The Border: The Legacy of a Century of AngloIrish Politics (London: Profile Books, 2019).

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speed of the soundtrack also alters. Input for these alterations are based on the person’s distance from motion sensor, which in some iterations were me as a performer and when presented as an installation, spectators of the work. Some glitch art is created by “breaking” the code of a digital image, while in other instances, like data moshing, frames are removed so video images fail to play appropriately as images mash into each other, resulting in colorized blocky effects.49 The glitch of Quickening uses a pixel-sorting algorithm, where the pixels of an image are moved around to alter its appearance. The code for Quickening is run through Processing, an open-source Java-based programming language developed by Ben Fry and Casey Reas.50 The motion sensor is connected to an Arduino that inputs data to the Processing sketch. The resulting images appear to be scraped across the screen, as if a layer of pixels is being scratched off the surface or is being ripped at the seams (see Plate 9). At the same time, the pitch of the soundtrack drops as the speed slows down. Once a person gets close enough to the sensor itself, the placement of the pixels in the glitched layer becomes random and the soundtrack turns to static, creating a swarm of motion and noise. The title Quickening refers to the fetal movements sensed in early pregnancy, which are felt by the pregnant person and for centuries functioned as the primary indicator of pregnancy. I use this physical experience as a metaphor for the border in Ireland, where it is possible to sense the region’s history and anticipation of an uncertain future with Brexit. These phenomenological sensations, however, get lost when politicians bypass the local situated knowledge for expert opinions, like the obstetrician who relies on fetal Doppler or ultrasound to engage with the fetus while excluding communicated experiences with the pregnant person.51 The title also references the fact that I was pregnant while creating this work (see Plate 10), which happened to be during the campaign to repeal the Eighth Amendment, in which I was unable to vote as I am not an Irish citizen. Moreover, in addition to being an embodied, photographic response to this particular landscape in Ireland, I reconceptualize pregnancy as a metaphor in creative practice, with an emphasis on in situ experience, as opposed to anticipated outcomes.

For a more thorough formal analysis of data moshing and video compression codecs in relation to art history and media archeology, see Kane, High-Tech Trash, Chapter 5 “Chroma Glitch: Data as Style.” 50 Processing Foundation, “Processing,” accessed January 8, 2021, https://processing.org/. 51 See EL Putnam, “Pregnant Pause: Technological Disruption and the Neganthropic Aesthetics of Landscape in Ireland’s Borderland,” in Aesthetics, Digital Studies and Bernard Stiegler, ed. Noel Fitzpatrick, Neill O’Dwyer, and Mick O’Hara (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2021), 127–42. 49

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As part of the process of developing this work, I wanted to draw attention to how bodies shift and change once a person becomes aware of movements being tracked and how someone can try and test the parameters of a device. When coding the response of the sensor, I built in differing degrees of sensitivity, meaning that at certain thresholds, the impact of movement would have a more or less apparent impact on the glitching of the image. I first presented the work as part of a performance at a digital literature and art conference organized by Anne Karhio at the National University Ireland Galway. For this iteration, I walked backward from across the room toward the monitor playing the images, using a mirror to guide my way. The mirror helped disorient my movements in space as I played with the different invisible borders coded into the work, using subtle actions to move the pixels until they slipped to an unpredictable configuration. Movements are translated to data, which is then used to modify the images and sounds of the work. The mechanisms of tracking are invisible, but as Søren Bro Pold notes, I draw attention to “technological infrastructure and how this is potentially experienced affectively and felt by susceptible individuals.”52 In this way, the piece points to how data becomes a means of understanding and quantifying something otherwise intangible, like a physical gesture, but then as a digital object it is used to modify and inform further action. In this context, data is understood as embodied, which Lauren Klein and Catherine D’Ignazio highlight being a significant, yet often disregarded, aspect of data: bodies produce data, but bodies are also empirical collectors of data as lived experience.53 Instead of treating the digital image as a photograph, where significance rests on the presented surface, I engage with the material qualities of the medium through data as images are transformed in real time. Bodily movement becomes the instigator and receptor of aesthetic experience that draws attention to proprioceptive, visual, and sonic sensations. The intention here is not to create representations of verisimilitude, but to point to the construction of images, like borders and bodies, as entangled phenomena. The glitch, like the gap, lag, and noise, is another manifestation of the aesthetics of interruption. Glitches have gained popularity in digital art and design in recent years, extending beyond the experimental practices of artists desiring to crack the seamless interface as radical commentary, to filters, apps, and plugins that can be easily downloaded and implemented. The technique of glitching has artistic precedence, however, prior to the rise of digital technologies and home computing. Michael Betancourt describes how

Pold, “New Ways of Hiding,” 79. See Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, Data Feminism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020).

52 53

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early examples of glitch art focused on machine breakdown as the impetus for aesthetic experience, commonly described as “visual music,” citing Jay Fenton’s Digital TV Dinner (1978–9). Throughout his analysis of glitch art, Betancourt privileges the “wild” glitch, or glitches that emerge from machine breakdown, as authentic, arguing that “an engagement with the visual products of computational processes is not enough to define the glitch.”54 He dismisses such effects as stylistic and as lacking the critical engagement of glitches as rupture, since there is no material breakdown.55 The significance of the glitch, for Betancourt, comes from its “interruptive role,” which “suggests the materiality of media, offering the potential for a transition into a critique of digital capitalism, requiring a refusal of mystification.”56 In contrast, Carolyn Kane argues that the dichotomy of wild and domestic (or what Betancourt describes as stylistic) glitches is futile, since “if we were to reinterpret glitches in terms of ‘authentic’ or ‘non-authentic,’ we would encounter a host of dead-end problems related to computer simulation, the ‘art object,’ and image copying.”57 Even “wild” glitches, like that described by Betancourt in Digital TV Dinner, require artistic intervention to frame and present it as an artwork. Thus, Kane is not so interested in how a glitch originated, but “more with the unique contextual choices and critical and creative effects accomplished through final results.”58 Like Betancourt, Kane does not treat the interruption of the glitch as inherently critical, which is evident through the appropriation of the glitch in mainstream media and design. However, Kane places greater emphasis on the capacity of an artist to develop an artwork as opposed to the nature of the glitch (whether it is authentic or stylistic). The intention of the glitch of Quickening is not for it to be a critical gesture regarding computing, but is to draw attention to the material and technological nature of the digital image as composed of pixels, just as the border is a mapping technology for the framing and mediation of terrain.59 It functions as a means of revealing the structure of the image as entangled with the bodily gestures of its audience, as manifest through the data produced through the ultrasonic motion sensor that trigger the glitching effect. This apparatus reveals how the invisible presence of digital technology still has the capacity to be invasive.

Betancourt, Glitch Art in Theory and Practice, 3. Ibid., 6. 56 Ibid., 8. 57 Kane, High-Tech Trash, 15–16. 58 Ibid., 16. 59 See Putnam, “Pregnant Pause.” 54 55

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US curator, artist, and writer Legacy Russell argues in favor of the critical potential of the glitch, though this capacity does not reside solely in machine breakdown, but in how it is manifest in the world “away from keyboard.” Russell argues how the “glitch is something that extends beyond the most literal technological mechanics: it helps us to celebrate failure as a generative force, a new way to take on the world.”60 Challenging the dualism between the virtual self and the offline self as distinctive, Russell utilizes Nathan Jurgenson’s notion of “away from keyboard” (AFK) as opposed to “in real life” (IRL). AFK is the online shorthand to indicate taking a step away from the keyboard, but it implies a continued presence online: “AFK signifies a more continuous progression of the self, one that does not end when a user steps away from the computer but rather moves forward out into society away from the keyboard.”61 The glitch, for Russell, connects the virtual and AFK selves: “the production of these selves, the digital skins we develop and don online, help us understand who we are with greater nuance. Thus, we use glitch as a vehicle to rethink our physical selves.”62 What is glitched is not the digital image, as I discuss above in Quickening, but the material of the body itself, which is significant for marginalized and disenfranchised bodies, including queer people, trans people, indigenous people, Black people, and people of color. In the following discussion, I consider the people who glitch the imaginary of Mother Ireland, specifically non-national asylum seekers and Travellers, through their exclusion from mainstream Irish society.

Mothering in imposed liminality In a nation where the constitution connects women’s bodies to maternity, making mothers the carrier of future Irish citizens, the question arises: who counts as Irish? In Ireland, citizenship had been granted through jus sanguinis (right of blood) and jus soli (right of soil) since 1922. Up until 2004, the right of soil was unrestricted, meaning as long as someone was born in Ireland, no matter how long the parent had been present in the country or their immigration status, that child would be an Irish citizen. However, the 27th Amendment abolished unlimited constitutional jus soli so only those born in Ireland and have at least one parent that is an Irish citizen or is entitled to Irish citizenship through naturalization (having resided in Ireland for at least

Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (London and Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2020), 30. Ibid., 30–1. 62 Ibid., 31. 60 61

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three years in the four years preceding the child’s birth) are granted Irish citizenship at birth.63 These restrictions to Irish citizenship came amidst a wave of immigration in the early twenty-first century, and with this a growing sense of xenophobia underlying anxieties surrounding increased multiculturalism.64 The push to national exclusion, which ends up translating to racial exclusion as an increased number of immigrants coming to Ireland in the 1990s and 2000s were nonwhite or not of European descent, means that myths of Mother Ireland are not intersectional, but as Meaney articulates, perpetuate whiteness as Irishness.65 The image of the Virgin Mary as Mother Ireland is implicated in maintaining these ideological values, accompanied by a cultural “paranoia that sought to exclude the sexual, maternal, nurturing, ever-hungry body, but also anything that threatened the nation’s white identity.”66 This paranoia culminated in the passing of the 27th Amendment with 80 percent approval in 2004, fueled by “popular hysteria about pregnant migrants ‘flooding’ Irish maternity hospitals with their nonnational babies.”67 These mothers, who are not Irish citizens, are not considered part of the imagined Mother Ireland, yet as women who give birth in Ireland, are still subjected to the legislation pertaining to maternal and reproductive health, which until 2018 included the Eighth Amendment. If Irish women are already disenfranchised, non-national and especially nonwhite women, are disenfranchised on multiple levels. Here, the “strange” of strange mothers involves implications of ethnic and racial difference, compounded through institutional processes of othering such as Direct Provision (DP), which is an institutional structure in Ireland established during 2000 where asylum seekers are held until their requests for asylum have been processed. Unlike the earlier examples of strange mothers discussed, here there is an imposition of strangeness affiliated with foreignness. I have been residing and working as an immigrant in Ireland since 2013, though as a white US citizen, I have not come under the scrutiny about my non-national status as many nonwhite presenting immigrants face. My children both have Irish citizenship, as at the time of their birth they had at least one parent entitled to citizenship. Their belonging in Ireland has not been questioned or challenged, unlike Eric Zhi Ying Xue who was born and raised in Ireland and was threatened with deportation to China at the age of nine in

Office of the Attorney General, “Irish Nationality and Citzenship Act 2004,” Electronic Irish Statute Book (EISB), accessed January 8, 2021, http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2004/act/38/section/4/ enacted/en/html. 64 Meaney, Gender, Ireland and Cultural Change, xv. 65 Ibid., 7. 66 Ibid., 10. 67 Ibid., 4. 63

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2018 as he was not an Irish citizen. He was allowed to remain after a campaign developed by his primary school with an active social media presence, bringing the problematic implications of the 27th Amendment into stark relief.68 I gave birth to my eldest child in Ireland during October 2014. In August of that year, when I was heavily pregnant and filled with first-time maternal anxiety, the story of Ms. Y hit Irish news sources. Ms. Y arrived in Ireland seeking asylum in March 2014. She soon found out she was pregnant, after being raped in her home country. Even though abortion was illegal in Ireland, pregnant people were free to travel abroad for abortion services, with many of them traveling to England.69 However, as an asylum seeker, Ms. Y lacked the capacity to freely travel abroad to do so. Changes to the Irish abortion law were also made after Savita Halappanavar died of a septic miscarriage in 2012 to enable abortion in instances where the life of the mother was under threat, including suicide. As doctors attempted to deem whether the distressed Ms. Y was suicidal, the pregnancy continued until Ms. Y had a C-section at the start of her third trimester as an alternative to terminating the pregnancy.70 The surgical act of the C-section in this context is a brutal invasion of the body where the Irish State obliged a woman to deliver a child rather than enable her to terminate a pregnancy. How Ms. Y’s experiences unfolded were informed by her non-national status, where legislative bureaucracy became a means of implementing reproductive violence. The experiences of non-national pregnant women, particularly those of ethnic minorities in Ireland, only come to popular attention in moments of trauma and tragedy, as was the case of Ms. Y and Dr. Halappanavar. These instances exposed the inherent flaw of the Eighth Amendment, which placed the right of life of the unborn as equal to the mother, as in both instances the life of the mother was treated as inferior. This equating of life meant the application of obstetric violence as with Ms. Y, or a life not worth saving as with Dr. Halappanavar. There are many more stories of non-national women in Ireland whose experiences of the maternal are excluded from the myth of Mother Ireland. Women

Aine McMahon, “Eric Zhi Ying Xue Faces ‘No Imminent Threat of Deportation’, Says Simon Harris,” The Irish Times, October 26, 2018, accessed November 27, 2021, https://www.irishtimes. com/news/social-affairs/eric-zhi-ying-xue-faces-no-imminent-threat-of-deportation-says-simonharris-1.3677320. 69 In 1992, after a highly publicized abortion case, the X case, which blocked a teenager from going to England for an abortion after being raped, the Irish approved measures to allow women to travel abroad for abortions without prosecution and to access information about abortion services abroad. See Lisa Smyth, Abortion and Nation: The Politics of Reproduction in Contemporary Ireland (London: Routledge, 2017). 70 Kitty Holland, “Timeline of Ms Y Case,” The Irish Times, October 4, 2014, accessed November 27, 2021, http://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/timeline-of-ms-y-case-1.1951699. 68

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raising children in the institutional environment of Direct Provision (DP), are not afforded the appropriate support to undertake duties of parental care in a hostile environment. DP is managed by the Reception and Integration Agency (RIA), though facilities management is subcontracted to private operators. It originally was intended to be a temporary bureaucratic buffer to cope with the increase of people seeking asylum in Ireland during the late twentieth century while removing them from the traditional system of processing immigration.71 However, as the number of applicants for asylum have increased, it has become an immigration purgatory as people end up spending years within the system without having a decision made on their case. People living in DP have their basic needs met, including housing, food, basic health care, and a meager allowance. There are strict regulations dictating daily life within DP, where people lack agency to make basic decisions resulting in parental disempowerment, with children regularly exposed to risky behaviors in these abnormal circumstances not designed for familial habitation.72 For instance, in 2018, Donnah Vuma, who was living in DP for four years at the time with her three children, made a request for some food late at night for her sick child. The staff member denied her request, which she then posted about on Facebook, drawing attention to the hostile conditions.73 Her story on social media exposes the degree of control placed on people’s lives within DP, particularly on mundane activities including when to eat and where to sleep, which contribute to major factors causing parental disempowerment.74 Zoë O’Reilly describes how people in DP are placed in an imposed state of liminality. This liminality is temporal, as it is uncertain how long they will be within DP, as well as spatial since they reside in overcrowded temporary facilities including hotels, hostels, caravan parks as well as former convents, nursing homes, and army barracks; sites that are either designed for temporary use or individual occupancy as opposed to family units.75 Parents living in these conditions report great challenges in raising children, including the basic Helen Uchechukwu Ogbu, Bernadine Brady, and Louise Kinlen, “Parenting in Direct Provision: Parents’ Perspectives Regarding Stresses and Supports,” Child Care in Practice 20, no. 3 (July 3, 2014): 257, doi:10.1080/13575279.2013.875462. 72 Lisa Moran, Sheila Garrity, Caroline McGregor, and Carmel Devaney, “Hoping for a Better Tomorrow: A Qualitative Study of Stressors, Informal Social Support and Parental Coping in a Direct Provision Centre in the West of Ireland,” Journal of Family Studies 25, no. 4 (October 2, 2019): 431, doi:10.1080/13229400.2017.1279562. 73 Ronan McGreevy, “Mother in Direct Provision Denied Food at Night for Sick Child,” The Irish Times, November 2, 2018, accessed November 27, 2021, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ ireland/irish-news/mother-in-direct-provision-denied-food-at-night-for-sick-child-1.3684032. 74 Moran et al., “Hoping for a Better Tomorrow,” 431–2. 75 Zoë O’Reilly, “‘Living Liminality’: Everyday Experiences of Asylum Seekers in the ‘Direct Provision’ System in Ireland,” Gender, Place & Culture 25, no. 6 (June 3, 2018): 822, doi:10.1080/ 0966369X.2018.1473345. 71

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capacities to protect and care for children in such hostile conditions.76 O’Reilly argues that the imposed liminality combined with a culture of control fosters “ontological liminality,” where liminality is internalized and “an ‘in between’ existence becomes part of one’s identity and everyday lived experience.”77 Strangeness is inflicted through these structures of imposed difference, as people in DP are prevented from fully participating in Irish society. In addition, many people in DP are ethnic minorities in Ireland, meaning that in addition to facing struggles within their living conditions, they experience racism and discrimination, making them feel unsupported and invisible in their communities.78 As such, those living in DP are unable to fully participate in life in Ireland, even though they reside within its geographic borders, thus being kept in a state of “outside or in between.”79 However, people in DP have managed to develop strategies to cope within such a disempowering framework. O’Reilly describes how through a negotiation of liminality, people cultivate “informal citizenship” through unofficial channels and relationships as they develop connections with communities.80 Strategies include the creation of support networks for performing parental duties and care work, including child minding, notwithstanding regulations that hinder such activities.81 Despite these efforts of connecting to Irish society, there is an exclusion of people in DP that is maintained through acts of bureaucratic inclusion: “the asylum seeker is marginalized from society through control and monitoring, and is simultaneously connected to the asylum system, by being a number, by living in a highly monitored and controlled space, and by being trapped in the time frames and spaces of the system.”82 Quantification enables the reification of exclusion as asylum seekers are detained in an imposed state of liminality where they are simultaneously invisible to the greater scope of Irish society, but are subjugated and controlled through this bureaucratic system. In turn, the maternal as it relates to parenting in DP is informed through circumstances that severely limit parental agency and the capacity to care for others. At the same time, the symbolic image of the maternal as it relates to people in DP is not considered part of the imaginary of Mother Ireland. The parental disempowerment and internalization of liminality have significant impacts on the capacity to care for children within DP and there

Ogbu, Brady, and Kinlen, “Parenting in Direct Provision,” 260–8. O’Reilly, “‘Living Liminality,’” 834. 78 Moran et al., “Hoping for a Better Tomorrow,” 436–7. 79 O’Reilly, “‘Living Liminality,’” 822. 80 Ibid., 836–7. 81 Ogbu, Brady, and Kinlen, “Parenting in Direct Provision,” 266. 82 O’Reilly, “‘Living Liminality,’” 830. 76

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is an exacerbation of inequalities.83 The maternal subject risks erasure and is replaced by quantified inclusion, and in some instances, racist stereotypes. These characteristics lead some mothers, such as Donnah Vuma, to turn to social media as a means of exposing these injustices. The parameters of Irish institutional control and regulation are brought to an extreme as these mothers are excluded from broader imaginings of the maternal in Ireland, except in extreme moments of distress. Considering the maternal subject in DP draws attention away from interruption, instead considering the endurance of lived experience that is typically hidden.

“Have I ever mattered?” During the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, social distancing and other public health  regulations meant the closure of theaters and performance spaces throughout Ireland, including the Abbey Theater in Dublin. In response to this unexpected disruption, the Abbey produced a series of fifty short monologues by fifty writers, streamed on YouTube over the course of four nights from April 28 to May 1, 2020. These short pieces comprised the series Dear Ireland. Rosaleen McDonagh wrote the monologue “Dear Ireland, you’ll hardly notice my absence,” which was screened on the final night of the first run of the series. It is presented as a single frame video; a head shot of the actor Sorcha Fox, who portrays an unnamed woman. The wall behind Fox is plain white and she sits on a bed, with only a corner of the white metal bed frame visible. She starts the monologue stating “The man on the radio says ‘Every person matters, every single person.’” She then looks at the edge of the video frame describing the room around her—what the audience cannot see—as a hotel room. She does not explicitly describe herself or her situation, making short declarative statements that do not necessarily flow from one to the next. She regularly pauses so that the words take on an irregular rhythm of breathing, creating a pattern of delivery that leaves gaps in the story. What she implies and does not reveal can be as loaded, if not more so, than what she does state. She describes how she is living in temporary accommodation, alluding to what has become the government’s response to homelessness through the privatized allocation of welfare, meaning that people who are homeless are housed in hotels rather than providing longer terms solutions to an increased national housing crisis.84 She mentions living in trailers and how the manager of the

Baraitser, Enduring Time, 7. Gordon Deegan, “19 Dublin Hotels Received over €1 Million Each for Accommodating Homeless People in 2019,” TheJournal.Ie, February 2020, accessed January 8, 2021, https://www.thejournal. ie/homeless-dublin-hotels-cost-5017050-Feb2020/.

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hotel where she currently resides had canceled her wedding party when they arrived there ten years earlier because they were not “settled” people, but Travellers. Note she does not refer to herself by that term, but instead speaks of the exclusion and the prejudicial suspicion she experiences. Travellers are an indigenous ethnic minority in Ireland, traditionally itinerant like the Roma, in contrast to the majority “settled” culture.85 While the exact origin of Travellers in Ireland is not clear,86 during the 1960s, Travellers faced increased scrutiny as the government developed social policies aimed at assimilation.87 The author of this monologue, Rosaleen McDonagh, is a Traveller woman with a disability, a playwright, and an activist who describes her writing as presenting a “Traveller feminist perspective.”88 In her Dear Ireland monologue, McDonagh references the exclusions that Travellers experience regularly in Ireland, while drawing attention to the particular struggles Traveller women face. Fox’s character refers to the challenges of raising a family in a trailer by simply stating “the trailer, my eldest boy, the wheelchair, the school. Things got hard to manage.” She describes how they moved to a private apartment, but were exploited by a greedy landlord. Her husband committed suicide and she then sent her children to live with their mother-in-law after living temporarily with brothers and sisters as she “render[ed herself] homeless.” After disclosing her plans to commit suicide, Fox’s character highlights the isolation and loneliness that preceded the Covid-19 pandemic, though the virus has managed to render individuals in already precarious circumstances, like this unnamed Traveller woman, even more vulnerable. While on the one hand, there are cries from the Irish government that “we are all in this together,” Fox’s character asks: “Have I ever mattered? Me children, me family, me people, do we matter? Dear Ireland, now is the time to show me. Tell me I’m precious. Dear Ireland, give me a sign. Let me know that you love me.” A mother, excluded from the imaginary of Mother Ireland, speaks to Ireland as a child would to her mother.

Even though Travellers have been living in Ireland for centuries as distinct from “settled” communities, they were only recognized as an ethnic minority by the government of Ireland in 2017. Marie O’Halloran and Michael O’Regan, “Travellers Formally Recognised as an Ethnic Minority,” The Irish Times, March 1, 2017, accessed November 27, 2021, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ politics/oireachtas/travellers-formally-recognised-as-an-ethnic-minority-1.2994309. 86 Jane Helleiner, Irish Travellers: Racism and the Politics of Culture, Irish Travellers (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018). 87 Bryan Fanning, Racism and Social Change in the Republic of Ireland, 2nd edition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), 112. 88 In 2017, McDonagh was the first Traveller elected to Aosdána, an exclusive association comprising of Irish artists whose work is deemed as making an outstanding contribution to the creative arts in Ireland. “Rosaleen McDonagh – First Traveller Elected to Aosdána”, Pavee Point: Traveller and Roma Centre. accessed June 24, 2020, https://www.paveepoint.ie/rosaleen-mcdonagh-first-travellerelected-to-aosdana/. 85

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In this short monologue, rapidly crafted in a time of crisis, McDonagh points to Ireland’s greatest exclusion and most explicit example of institutional racism, which has a disproportionate impact on Traveller women, who have to struggle with sexism from within their own communities as well as broader settled communities.89 As an ethnic minority in Ireland, Travellers are not seeking assimilation with settled culture, which as noted above, has been the predominant political strategy since the I960s.90 Instead, there is a desire to be accounted for. Here strangeness is manifest through the unfamiliar when compared to dominant Irish settled culture, but also through the difficulties of Irish society in accounting for Travellers. At a time when every person was supposed to matter in a national effort to stem a pandemic, McDonagh highlights who is excluded. Such a delivery reveals the vulnerability of the Traveller mother, but also is a call for recognition and acceptance. The gaps of the story reveal the gaps of Ireland’s imaginary of the maternal, and as such McDonagh interrupts promises of national care. These gaps allude to more than the content of the story. Fox’s stilted delivery takes on a heightened meaning through what is not stated—McDonagh’s experiences of exclusion as a Traveller woman with a disability and without children. To be a parent, according to McDonagh, is “the most valued status” in her community, and as part of a family with nineteen siblings, the notion that all women want children was not just an abstract societal expectation, but “being part of the rearing was an incredible inculcation into children’s emotional development and wellbeing.”91 However, McDonagh has cerebral palsy and has experienced compounded exclusions of sexism, racism, and ableism as a result, particularly when it comes to sexual reproduction. Living in a residential facility, McDonagh describes how she drew connections between the history of eugenics, where women with disabilities and of ethnic minorities such as Roma were deemed unfit to be mothers and sterilized as a result, and her own experiences. She states: Being put on contraceptive pills without our consent or knowledge was the norm. Most of us were loaded up with medication. There was a silent knowing that some of the older women had scars across their stomachs. Elaine Edwards, “Dealing with Racism Is an Everyday Reality for Travellers, Conference Hears,” The Irish Times, November 3, 2018, accessed June 24, 2020, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ politics/dealing-with-racism-is-an-everyday-reality-for-travellers-conference-hears-1.3685756. 90 Fanning, Racism and Social Change in the Republic of Ireland, 112. 91 Rosaleen McDonagh, “Rosaleen McDonagh: ‘Traveller Women Who Don’t Have Children Are Pitied,’” The Irish Times, April 17, 2021, accessed June 15, 2021, https://www.irishtimes.com/ life-and-style/health-family/rosaleen-mcdonagh-traveller-women-who-don-t-have-children-arepitied-1.4526284. 89

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They were constantly cradling dolls in their arms. It seemed like we were living in the 1950s.92 McDonagh provides an account of her experiences of infantalization, where “paternalism from service providers infringes on choices, rights and freedom,”93 including the choice to become a mother. Here, the significance of reproductive justice comes into stark relief. McDonagh observes how women with disabilities tend to be evoked in debates surrounding abortion and reproductive rights,94 such as being used to bolster anti-abortion arguments. In these instances, the emphasis is placed on the child as the one with disabilities, not on the rights of the woman with disabilities to have children—a selective attention of rights that undermines women’s agency where people with disabilities are always spoken for. Moreover, experiences of intersecting oppression limit choice, especially when it comes to reproductive rights. As reproductive justice advocates stress, reproductive rights are not just about the choice to have an abortion but also raise questions surrounding who gets to be a “legitimate” mother.95 As the experiences of asylum seekers and McDonagh makes evident through her writing, in Ireland, “legitimacy” is influenced by intersections of race, ethnicity, and disability, which are enforced through government action, the ongoing influence of the Catholic Church, along with community and familial norms and expectations.

Interruptions, not disruptions In Enduring Time, Baraitser nuances her earlier work concerning the mother as a subject of interruption, stating: “We may not experience ourselves as flows and ebbs and intensities. We are mediums for these things, for sure, but the affective experience of living in chronic time is not one, I would suggest, of becoming.”96 Baraitser does not disregard her theorizations of the subject of interruption, but refines it, drawing attention to the enduring repetition between ruptures. She “stay[s] close to lived experiences of time that appear neither eventful nor vital […] temporal tropes that are linked together by an apparent lack of dynamism or movement: waiting, staying, delaying, enduring,

Ibid. Ibid. 94 Ibid. 95 Ross and Solinger, Reproductive Justice, 3. 96 Baraitser, Enduring Time, 13, emphasis added. 92 93

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persisting, repeating, maintaining, preserving and remaining.”97 These are the moments of immanence, according to Barrister, where transcendence seems impossible, yet does occur through what she refers to as “care.”98 As she elaborates, existing in a constant state of rupture where change is incessant does not “help us very much” in the current dynamism of digitally mediated capitalism.99 Here, I would like to differentiate interruption from another term that has become popular in relation to digital technologies and cultures—disruption. Disruption has become a recognizable term in Silicon Valley and the tech industries it has inspired, associated with what economist Joseph Schumpeter refers to as “creative destruction.” He describes how creative destruction is a kind of mutation “that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one” and “is the essential fact about capitalism.”100 Shoshana Zuboff observes how entrepreneurs have “seized upon” this notion as a means to legitimate “permissionless innovation.” She states “Destruction rhetoric promoted what I think of as a ‘boys and their toys’ theory of history, as if the winning hand in capitalism is about blowing things up with new technologies.”101 When it comes to technological innovation, disruption means a total change in the market, for example, what followed the advent of Google or the invention of social media networks such as Facebook, where user data became a prime commodity for the development and execution of targeted advertising. As Zuboff describes: “all aspects of human experience are claimed as raw-material supplies and targeted for rendering into behavioral data.”102 In conjunction with the collection of data, there is the modification of behaviors through technological use to increase capacity for data collection, or what Zuboff calls instrumentarianism.103 Bernard Stiegler warns that the increased automation of computational capitalism associated with disruption, as is occurring with increased reliance on algorithms and technosolutionism for economics, education, and governance, is an extreme form of rationalization, instigating a new barbarism of the machine.104 The ethos of disruption celebrated in

Ibid., 13–14. Ibid., 14. 99 Ibid., 13. 100 Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 83. 101 Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 50. 102 Ibid., 19. 103 Ibid., 351. 104 Stiegler, The Age of Disruption, 8. 97 98

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this context emphasizes perpetual innovation, though as Zuboff points out, Schumpeter’s initial definition of creative destruction was “far more nuanced and complex than modern destruction rhetoric suggests.”105 Instead, the breaks that creative destruction introduce are meant to be rare events within capitalism, as an economy consisting solely of innovation lacks the necessary maintenance structures that make it sustainable. The unlimited progress of innovation is an illusion. Here lies the significant difference between interruptions, as I am using it in terms of the aesthetics of interruption, and disruption, as it is used in Silicon Valley’s (mis)interpretation of creative destruction. While the driving motivation of disruption is to cash-in on incessant innovation, the aesthetics of interruption emerges from the unpredictable complexities, repetitions, uncertainties, and at times even the breakdown of maintenance and care, whether it be of a digital system or a maternal body at work. Just as Kane’s interest in the glitch and noise is about cracking illusions of “optimal speed and capacity” in technological systems and Russell’s call to glitch the onlineAFK loop, the aesthetics of interruption in relation to the maternal reveals the limits of symbolic representations and myths of motherhood that perpetuate unrealistic, unattainable, and exclusionary preconceptions that inform and constitute subjectivity. Hence, I use the interruption as a key node for where maternal and digital subjectivity meet. The purpose is not just to find ways of persevering in the face of interruption, romanticizing what can be a psychologically and physically detrimental state of existence, but to cultivate a common ground of thriving as an interconnected agential being immersed in the chaotic flow of contemporary noise. The aesthetics of interruption points to how interruptions can be productive, but also acknowledges what is not presented or made visible—the hidden time that is endured in the gaps, glitches, noise, and lag. Thus, an analysis of rupture requires supplementation with unbecoming time, or consideration of what is excluded or erased, such as the disempowered mothers of DP caught in institutional stasis, the intersections of oppression that Traveller mothers experience, as well as failures of care systems that reveal that the relational characteristics of the maternal subject involve more than the mother-child bond.

105

Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 50–1.

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Failing Mother Ireland The treatment of asylum seekers and Travellers make the failings of Mother Ireland starkly evident through racial and ethnic exclusivity. However, these failings are rooted in the imaginings of the Irish maternal that involve what Gerardine Meaney asserts as discomfort regarding sexual reproduction, epitomized through the celebration of the Virgin Mary—a disembodied mother who gave birth without performing sexual intercourse.106 This ethereal attitude of discomfort around the biological functions of reproduction came into stark relief in a 2018 scandal around the failure of Irish medical doctors to contact hundreds of women who had falsely tested as having clear cervical smear tests, but in fact had abnormalities present. These cases only came to light after Vicky Phelan, who had tested as clear of abnormalities in 2011 but then was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2014, brought a case against the Health Service Executive (HSE) and the US laboratory that was subcontracted by CervicalCheck (the national cervical screening program in Ireland) to assess cervical smear tests. An audit showed that Phelan’s test was inaccurate, though she was not informed of this fact until 2017. In 2018, it was revealed that 208 women developed cervical cancer after inaccurate tests and 162 of these women were not informed of the initial test being incorrect, including Emma Mhic Mhathúna who passed away in October 2018.107 Dr. Gabriel Scally performed an investigation into the scandal, which included interviewing women impacted by it, and in his final report he points to a “whole-system failure” that enabled this to occur due in part to a poor open disclosure policy where “in essence, there is no compelling requirement on clinicians to disclose. It is left up to their personal and professional judgment.”108 The silence of medical professionals reveal the hypocrisy of Ireland, which claims to honor mothers’ contributions to the state through its national constitution while failing to care for reproductive needs. O’Connor addresses the trope of Mother Ireland in light of the CervicalCheck Scandal in her 2020 piece Cervical Screening. In the center image of this three

Meaney, Gender, Ireland and Cultural Change, 7–8. Editor, Simon Carswell Public Affairs, “CervicalCheck Scandal: What Is It All About?,” The Irish Times, May 1, 2018, accessed April 16, 2020, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/ cervicalcheck-scandal-what-is-it-all-about-1.3480699; “Emma Mhic Mhathúna Obituary: Young Mother at the Centre of the Cervical Cancer Scandal,” The Irish Times, October 13, 2018, accessed April 16, 2020, https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/emma-mhic-mhath%C3%BAnaobituary-young-mother-at-the-centre-of-the-cervical-cancer-scandal-1.3661741. 108 Gabriel Scally, “Scoping Inquiry into the CervicalCheck Screening Programme: Final Report” (Department of Health, September 2018), v. 106 107

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channel video, the camera is close up on O’Connor’s face, revealing only her mouth, into which she has inserted a speculum. The videos to the right and left show a side view of her face and the speculum. O’Connor slowly opens the medical device as the song “Mother Ireland” plays in the background. As her mouth opens, fresh shamrocks begin to pour out. O’Connor continues to extend the device, stretching the flesh of her mouth to an extreme state. The plush greenery of this quintessential Irish plant flows from O’Connor’s Vagina dentate, presenting a disturbing image as the landscape of Mother Ireland is internalized and biological reproduction is brought to the foreground through yet another instance of gynecological failing in Ireland. The image is disturbing, but so are the events that provided the impetus for the work. In Cultural Methods, presented at the 126 Gallery in Galway during 2020, O’Connor grew shamrocks using data from a fertility tracker that she wore for three months. The use of biometric data to control varying growth factors for the shamrocks, specifically body temperature to control lights, breathing rate to control an oxygen pump, and heart rate to control a water pump, reveals how the control of data, like the withholding of medical data by doctors in the Cervical Check scandal, impacts the cultivation of reproductive health in Ireland.109 Utilizing O’Connor’s biometric data as a means of stimulating growth processes, the shamrocks create a floral doppelganger of the artist. This rendition of Mother Ireland, like Cervical Screening, instigates an aesthetic encounter with the uncanny.

109 Laura O’Connor, “Cultural Methods,” 126 Gallery, accessed December 22, 2020, http://www. lauraoconnorart.com/126-artist-run-gallery.html.

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he aesthetics of interruption and strange mothers have an unsettling quality where the supposedly familiar comforts of domesticity are rendered uncanny. The uncanny refers to the feeling or affective response to what is both familiar and unfamiliar, unrecognizable yet made strange. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, since the mid-nineteenth century, uncanny has commonly meant “Partaking of a supernatural character; mysterious, weird, uncomfortably strange or unfamiliar.”1 Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay “The ‘Uncanny’” is a common reference point for defining the concept. Here he describes the uncanny in aesthetic terms as a challenge to Enlightenment thinking’s emphasis on reason, emerging as a haunting return of the repressed.2 Freud’s treatment of the uncanny as an aesthetic property, as opposed to a psychological one, highlights its sensory qualities. While Freud’s understanding of the term tends to be commonly cited, the concept itself has taken on an uncanny quality, since according to Nicholas Royle, it is not only reread, but “re-read always strangely and differently.”3 Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli describes how digital technologies have invited new means of engaging with the uncanny, specifically due to the “massive empirical datasets that have the capacity to anticipate practices, responses, experiences, and expressions that previously have been used to distinguish the human from the nonhuman— thinking, empathy, and consciousness.”4 While the uncanny has long been associated with technological engagement, the current capacities and affordances of digital technologies have invited yet another rereading of the uncanny.

OED Online, s.v. “Uncanny, Adj.” (Oxford: Oxford University Press), accessed July 19, 2020, http:// www.oed.com/view/Entry/210106. 2 Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003). 3 Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 8. 4 Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, Digital Uncanny, Digital Uncanny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 1. 1

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In this chapter, I draw from various definitions of the uncanny to read different presentations of the maternal where the uncanny—making strange—functions as a mode of revealing. I consider how the uncanny quality of Fatima Tuggar’s montages uncover the normalization of whiteness in the maternal and digital culture. I then analyze the uncanny relationship between performance and performance documentation in the collaboration of Amanda Coogan and Paddy Cahill, which also reveals Ireland’s repressed histories of systemic institutionalization of women in its Magdalene Laundries. The result of these analyses is a defamiliarization of our engagements with digital technologies and understandings of the maternal, instigated through the aesthetics of interruption.

Uncanny assemblages and the Captive Maternal Fatimah Tuggar’s digital collage Lady and the Maid (2000) presents a domestic scene in the living room of a US post-Second World War suburban home (see Plate 11). As an image, it provokes curiosity—its composition is unsettling at first glance and invites deeper engagement. To the right sits a northern Nigerian woman, wearing a multicolored dress and smiling into the distance as she pauses from taking a bite of the meal from a plate that she holds in her lap. Her posture is low; too low for the armchair that she is occupying. A pile of household goods is stacked before her—pots, pans, a twentieth-century word processer, stacks of plates—set up in a tableau that is more appropriate for a marketplace or other exterior domestic space as opposed to the household interior that the rest of the room’s decor alludes to. A white woman stands to the left of the image, holding an empty tray and slightly bent over with her mouth agape, as she just spilled a calabash of yogurt. Her style exemplifies the 1950s middle-class US housewife; an idealized image of the wife and mother of the heterosexual, white nuclear family that has been perpetuated since the middle of the twentieth century. The two women are oblivious to each other’s presence. The more I look at the image, the more items appear out of place. A scrutinizing gaze does not create unity, but provokes even more confusion. Bits of china are replicated in the cupboards, the resolution and style of the images are incompatible, and the lighting does not match. There is an amalgamation of culturally distinctive (US and Northern Nigerian) domestic spheres that converge but do not coalesce. Jagged qualities indicate digital “cuts” are present, highlighting what Nichole Fleetwood refers to as the visible seams of the collage.5 Instead of attempting to hide the inconsistencies of combining images of distinctive form and quality, Tuggar’s Nicole R. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 178.

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compositions exaggerates them. These visual indicators are not merely stylistic, however, but function as gaps “in visual identification with the image and narrative.”6 Moreover, as Fleetwood elaborates, Tuggar’s visible seams create a “framework for understanding the structural relationships that digital media require through its viewership and interactivity.”7 While Fleetwood highlights the interactivity of Tuggar’s other digital projects that involve audience members manipulating images on a computer screen, such as Changing Space (2002) and Transient Transfer (2008), I add that interactivity is implicit to Tuggar’s play with nonlinear narrative and confusing juxtapositions in her static collages that force the viewer to rely on situated knowledge in a manner that reveals implicit biases. In the aesthetic and conceptual gap that Tuggar creates, “she insert[s] black female narrative subjects into discordant spaces and address[es] and decenter[s] habituated viewing positions.”8 Fleetwood highlights how Tuggar’s visible seam is a strategy of disruption that intervenes “in visual narratives of Western progress and technological development.”9 These gaps are also manifestations of a shared digital and maternal aesthetics of interruption, as described in the previous chapter, where in this instance, gaps reveal racial and regional assumptions of the maternal. Born in Nigeria, raised in the United Kingdom, and currently based in North America, Tuggar’s collages transcend national boundaries, as she combines photographs she takes from all over the world with appropriated imagery, contributing a transnational and transhistorical dimension to her practice. Through her crafting of nonlinear narrative structures, Tuggar collapses time through a pooling of the past, present, and future while merging local scenes with global networks, presenting the impact that digital technology and the databasing of information through communication networks such as the internet has on perceptions of time and space. With this process, she reveals the power structures inherent to and perpetuated through the use of technology, cultivating aesthetic sensations of the uncanny manifest as the sharing of spaces of difference situated in domestic scenes. For instance, in Lady and the Maid, Fleetwood describes how Tuggar makes evident “how technological narratives construct subject positions based on racialized, gendered, and US-centric norms […] We see how the resulting effects of colonialism and the growth in consumer technologies impact domestic space in the West and Nigeria.”10 The influence of consumerism in the United States, Ibid., 180. Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 181. 10 Ibid., 189. 6 7

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as exemplified through the white suburban housewife and the domestic interior style, had a major impact on developing images and expectations of the ideal (white) mother as the caretaker of her heterosexual family unit, taking advantage of the latest technological developments in household goods to ensure a clean and orderly home as a measure of her capacity to fulfill this role. Here is an instance of how technology produces maternal subjectivity. The white woman’s look of shock at her empty plate becomes a humorous expression of failure as the performance of perfection falls to her feet. In contrast, the Nigerian woman to the right dwells comfortably in this scene that merges culturally different experiences of domesticity. These narrative strands are some of the various unanswered and unanswerable questions in the montage, where the critique of this portrayal of the maternal is complicated through its juxtaposition to other elements of the assemblage, highlighting the normative whiteness that such critiques encompass.11 The complexity of Tuggar’s images point to differences in how gender norms are enforced differently depending on race and region. As Fleetwood observes: Specifically, black women have had to operate as menial laborers in the public sphere and in the domestic settings of white families, while simultaneously remaining invisible as subjects in these spaces. At the same time, white middle- and upper-class women have been bound to the home as domestic duty and safe haven from the dangers of public space.12 The title of this montage, Lady and the Maid, is intentionally vague, as it is unclear which woman fits what role. Thus, engaging with Tuggar’s collage imagery is a performance of the spectator, who draws up their own perceptions and biases to interpret the work, which reveals more the longer a person engages with the imagery. Tuggar describes her montage imagery as presenting a “slice of life without borders or edges, multiple experiences and viewpoints, fragments of experiences, less order and control.”13 Scenes of home are fractured and uncertain, relying on the viewer’s understanding of the familiar and unfamiliar while exposing implicit biases. Even though digital 11 Fleetwood mentions Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) and Sharon Millner’s Scenes from the Micro-war (1985) as two examples of feminist work that critique the gendered expectations of the domestic sphere in the United States. These critiques are based on white normative understandings of the US household, which Tuggar disrupts through her transnational and transhistorical portrayals. Ibid., 190–1. 12 Fleetwood, Troubling Vision, p. 191 13 Fatimah Tuggar, “Montage as Tool of Political Visual Realignment,” Visual Communication 12, no. 3 (August 2013): 375, doi:10.1177/1470357213482607.

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technologies are typically used to craft illusions of verisimilitude or perfection, Tuggar lets these aesthetic and perceptual inconsistencies render the image as clearly composed. Images appear out of place, but what is considered out of place depends on what the viewer considers familiar. I find myself creating different narratives as I relate each figure to different objects. The stories branch, twist, stop, begin again, as my eyes move right to left, foreground to background. My engagement reveals a bias of whiteness as norm that I am able to identify, challenge, and shift as the roles of lady and maid switch, merge, and then disintegrate. Like Kara Walker’s explicit and provocative silhouette scenes of the antebellum Southern US, Tuggar’s montages raise racial and class consciousness,14 though Tuggar introduces a regional dimension through her transnational compositions. Whiteness is marked, and as a white viewer I become aware and problematize my white feminist, colonizer presumptions. In her analysis of the Lady and the Maid, Amanda Gilvin describes how the 1950s world captured in the figure of the white woman alludes to the: Racist segregation and violence that characterized American society of that time, when domestic work was one of the few employment options open to many black women. The deliberate ambiguity demands a reckoning with the past—and how it shapes the present moments that we live and imagine.15 Gilvin’s comments acknowledge the history of racism in the United States, though they make it seem as if this belongs to past generations. Christina Sharpe challenges that racism is part of a bygone era, positing the persistent legacy of transatlantic slavery on Black subjects as being in the “wake.” Her use of the term wake is multiple, referencing the wake behind the slave ship where water is still amid the torrents, but also the ritualized wake in which people gather to consider a person’s death and to “awake.” Within this space of death and stillness, there is a coming to being that is entangled with care, but “care” is “a problem for thought” and “thinking needs care […] and that thinking and care need to stay in the wake.”16 The afterlife of slavery persists in racial systemic violence and oppression. Such injustices are explicit in the

Lorraine Morales Cox, “A Performative Turn: Kara Walker’s Song of the South (2005),” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 17, no. 1 (March 2007): 62, doi:10.1080/07407700701246109. 15 Amanda Gilvin, “Fatimah Tuggar: At Home in the World,” in Fatimah Tuggar Home’s Horizons, ed. Amanda Gilvin (Munich: Hirmer, 2019), 20. 16 Christina Elizabeth Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 5. 14

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prison industrial complex of the United States and acts of police brutality,17 but also, as Ruha Benjamin argues, are manifest through technologies that manage to detach individual humans from being held accountable for racist acts through what she refers to as the “New Jim Code.”18 Another way this legacy persists is through what Joy James refers to as the "Captive Maternal,” which she defines as “biological females or those feminized into caretaking and consumption” performing the reproductive labor that gave birth to and continues to support democratic societies.19 Western democracy, based in American Exceptionalism, merged Enlightenment ideologies with Western theories to birth a new nation (a nascent empire) that fed on black frames. Centuries later, Black Captive Maternals remain disproportionately disciplined, denigrated, and consumed for the greater democracy […] it is not their victimization that marks them; it is their productivity and its consumption. Throughout history, Captive Maternals provided the reproductive and productive labor to stabilize culture and wealth.20 The Captive Maternal exists in the gaps that uphold democratic societies in the United States and elsewhere; unacknowledged but vital for social reproduction that requires and maintains racial inequality, comprising what James refers to as the Black Matrix, which is the fulcrum holding hegemonic democracy aloft.21 Democratic ideology obscures racism and racial injustice in the birth of new nations described in the quote above, constituting what James refers to as “Womb Theory.”22 James’s framing of Black reproductive labor in the Captive Maternal and the Black Matrix creates a shift in understanding racial inequality as not just the overt racism of the past, as manifest through slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation in the United States, but also as entangled in concepts of political democracy today. The image of the 1950s white housewife, like the one presented in Tuggar’s montage, is dependent on the reproductive labor of the Captive Maternal and the Black Matrix. This dependency persists today, for instance, through the labor of Black mothers at the forefront of social

See Michelle Alexander The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Revised edition (New York: New Press, 2012). 18 See Benjamin, Race after Technology. 19 Joy James, “The Womb of Western Theory: Trauma, Time Theft, and the Captive Maternal,” Carceral Notebooks 12, no. Part III: Carceral Logic Today (2016): 255. 20 Ibid., 256. 21 Ibid., 257. 22 Ibid., 256. 17

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justice movements,23 including reproductive justice, as will be discussed in Chapter 6. At the same time, Captive Maternals are not victims lacking agency, but instead “leverage a Black Matrix to fracture the Western womb.”24 Thus, Tuggar’s montage reveals racial bias in a manner that is more poignant than Gilvin acknowledges. While Tuggar focuses on the image of the home, her presentation of care work has implications for understanding maintenance throughout social, political, and economic structures, as Captive Maternals fracture the comfort of the Western Womb of democracy.

The unhomely uncanny Tuggar’s capacity to destabilize narratives, creating gaps in image regimes through her material handling of a digital aesthetics of interruption, depends on the presumptions of her audience. She intentionally inserts the unfamiliar into the familiar, refusing to coalesce these juxtapositions, and instead takes advantage of the modular capacities of digital technology to render these scenes strange both conceptually and aesthetically. As such, her work evokes sensations of the uncanny through playful interventions that disorient subjectivities. Nicholas Royle describes the uncanny as a “peculiar commingling of the familiar and unfamiliar. It can take the form of something familiar unexpectedly arising in a strange and unfamiliar context, or of something strange and unfamiliar unexpectedly arising in a familiar context.”25 For the purposes of this analysis, I engage with various interpretations and uses of the uncanny, highlighting its multiplicity and complexity as an aesthetic and philosophical concept, which like the maternal, is not being pinned down, but diffracted to simultaneously present difference. In this chapter, I draw from Nicholas Royle, whose analysis is heavily influenced by Freud’s 1919 essay through a Derridean deconstructive lens; Katherine Withy’s analysis of Martin Heidegger’s definition of the uncanny, where uncanny is not just an aesthetic sensation but also an ontological condition of being connected to angst; and Alexandra Kokoli’s definition of the feminist uncanny, which incorporates a feminist approach to psychoanalysis that draws from and challenges Freud. What is considered familiar or unfamiliar depends on the situated knowledge of who experiences these sensations, and as such, it is autobiographical.

See Dani McClain, We Live for the We: The Political Power of Black Motherhood (New York: Bold Type Books, 2019). 24 James, “The Womb of Western Theory,” 256. 25 Royle, The Uncanny, 1. 23

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However, Royle emphasizes this quality of autobiography is atypical: “it is also impossible to conceive of the uncanny without a sense of strangeness given to dissolving all assurances about the identity of the self […] The uncanny is thus perhaps the most and the least subjective experience, the most and least autobiographical ‘event.’”26 In this context, autobiographic is not specific to a work of art or literature as being an expression of the creator’s personal history, but it relates to the sense of subjectivity of the one who experiences the work. This quality of the uncanny is significant, since it is a means of introducing difference through aesthetic sensations, enabling experiences of simultaneous, radical difference, without a need to coalesce or harmonize. As such, the uncanny enables unique subjective experience while also not being simply “narcissistic and ‘self-centered,’ nor a blank submission to otherness and alienation.”27 The pairing of the uncanny with the maternal, as subjectivity that emerges in relation to another, becomes an entry point for navigating the terrain of difference that such sensations encompass, without absolving subjectivity through difference. Royle describes how the present-day use of the term uncanny is rooted in the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution, imperialism, and the conceptual and scientific developments of that era.28 The uncanny as a sensation related to the technological is what Masahiro Mori refers to as the “uncanny valley,” which is the concept he developed to describe how the affinity for robots increases, but then hits senses of revulsion as they become more lifelike, much like the image of hiking a mountain with hills and valleys.29 The uncanniness of Tuggar’s montages, however, do not come from their verisimilitude, as her presentation of visible seams make the technological parameters apparent. Rather, the visible seams of Tuggar’s montages become a means of instigating the uncanniness of her work through their reference to limits, instigating what Royle describes as “an experience of liminality.”30 The formal compositions of Tuggar’s montages, which make the relations between image elements visible through their digital placements, enunciate the liminality of the image plane as frames and borders that have been left as explicit markers of difference through a breakdown of verisimilitude. Breakdown plays a significant role in Martin Heidegger’s definition of the uncanny, which Katherine Withy elaborates upon through its connection to angst, taking on an ontological dimension. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 26. 28 Ibid., 23. 29 Masahiro Mori, “The Uncanny Valley,” trans. Karl MacDorman and Takashi Minato, Energy 7, no. 4 (1970): 33. 30 Royle, The Uncanny, 2. 26 27

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Withy describes how “For Heidegger, the experience of angst is not just a breakdown of familiarity but a breakdown that reveals something.”31 The uncanny feeling is more than a revelation of what is normally not seen or what is taken for granted, it is “a positive revelation of what the human essence is like.”32 Withy, following Heidegger, argues that the uncanny is more than “awkward vantage points,”33 or temporary disturbances in shifting perspective that alter how everyday life is viewed and understood. Rather, the uncanny “is what underlies and in some sense makes possible everyday life.”34 Unlike Freud’s definition of the uncanny, which treats it as an atypical feeling in contrast to the norms of the everyday, Heidegger’s understanding of the uncanny treats the sensation of not-feeling-at-home as more prevalent than homeliness. Thus, for Heidegger, the uncanny is more fundamental than Freud’s understanding.35 In Being and Time, Heidegger describes how “tranquilized, familiar being-in-the-world is a mode of uncanniness of Da-sein, not the other way around. Not-being-at-home must be conceived existentially and ontologically as the more primordial phenomenon.”36 That is, the sense of homeliness or familiarity is uncanny as a state of being that is inherently not-at-home. Angst, therefore, is not the indication of a disturbance, but a positive revelation of ontological un-homeliness. Withy indicates how in some ways Heidegger’s definition of the uncanny behaves like Freud’s return of the repressed.37 However, while Freud is referencing a psychic event that is repressed in consciousness, only to return through uncanny affect, the repressed in Heidegger is the fundamental uncanniness of Being that is covered over by the illusion of familiarity and everydayness.38 In this way, the breakdown of angst functions like Heidegger’s understanding of tool breakdown.39 When a tool breaks down and becomes unusable, it remains present and familiar, though its damage reveals its use through what is missing.40 Like the smartphone that loses access to a mobile or internet provider, the transparency of a device that has become so fundamentally

Katherine Withy, Heidegger on Being Uncanny (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2015), 3. 32 Ibid., 4. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 177. 37 Withy, Heidegger on Being Uncanny, 220–1. 38 Heidegger, Being and Time, 256. 39 Withy, Heidegger on Being Uncanny, 59. 40 Heidegger, Being and Time, 69. 31

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implicated in the functioning of everyday activities yet taken for granted in its use, is now useless, revealing the context of its utility.41 As the context lights up around the tool that no longer functions, the breakdown of angst functions as a revelation of the uncanny, with this revelation encompassing more than making something strange, but the entanglements of social relations and practices that contribute to their contextual meaning become unfamiliar. Moreover, Heidegger’s more pervasive treatment of the uncanny, as Withy elaborates, is appropriate for interpreting the implications of Tuggar’s visible seams. Tuggar’s montages involve breakdown on a number of levels. First, there is the formal breakdown of the image, as she leaves visible the gestures of digital manipulation and challenges the norms of perception in composition through repetition, manipulation of size, and surreal juxtapositions. Second, there is the conceptual breakdown that she introduces through content, as she invites various narrative possibilities that coalesce depending on the viewer’s situated knowledge, implicit biases and prejudices, and means of engaging with the work. Finally, there is the breakdown of shared understandings of what it means to be homely, with hegemony and normalization challenged through cross-cultural play. The implications of these breakdowns could be interpreted as a return of the repressed of the Captive Maternal—the racial and gendered hierarchies of inequity that make colonizer democracy possible as one built upon and continuing to benefit from the legacy and afterlife of slavery. Understanding the uncanny in Heidegger’s terms, the breakdown of the familiar in Lady and the Maid reveals it to be an illusion of everydayness, thus denaturalizing the familiar as constructed relations that are self-sustaining, but not fundamental to being. That is, breakdown reveals how the familiar as a sense of homeliness is actually uncanny—not-at-home. In the case of Tuggar’s montages, part of what is revealed is the Captive Maternal that upholds democratic societies in the United States and elsewhere; unacknowledged but vital for social reproduction. The “familiar” image of domesticity and being at home that Tuggar challenges is not just rendered strange but also revealed as a colonizing illusion of white supremacy. The aesthetics of interruption as an aesthetics of breakdown is a means of describing the affective sensations, though the uncanny is not just a passing feeling but also, following Heidegger, associated with a positive revelation that draws back the curtain of the familiar as homeliness to un-conceal what is ontologically unhomely. The relevance of racial bias in Tuggar’s collage is rooted in the hegemonic presumption of whiteness as the norm. Sara Ahmed presents a

Withy, Heidegger on Being Uncanny, 60.

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phenomenological analysis of whiteness that is significant because it does not treat whiteness as an ontology or originary state, but instead as an experience that disappears while it coheres. According to Ahmed, “phenomenology helps us to show how whiteness is an effect of racialization, which in turn shapes what it is that bodies ‘can do.’”42 Ahmed explains how whiteness is lived with material implications without treating it as something that is innate. In particular, whiteness continues to be perpetuated through habit: “public spaces take space through the habitual actions of bodies” such that “spaces acquire the shape of the bodies that ‘inhabit’ them.”43 In turn, “spaces also take shape by being orientated around some bodies, more than others.”44 Such qualities are manifest in Lady and the Maid through how the women are presented as occupying space, contributing to its uncanny qualities. The white woman to the left, the 1950s-style housewife who one may presume to be suited to the suburban interior, is caught in the midst of dropping something. The space that had taken shape around her body suddenly clashes with her in this clumsy interaction with a domestic object. In contrast, the Nigerian woman to the right sits comfortably with a demeanor that does not make her appear out of place even though she does not match the style and formal composition of the collage—she is dwelling in the unhomely. Tuggar alters this home interior, revealing its implied quality of whiteness by altering its orientation from around the white housewife to the Black Nigerian woman, which is present through how the bodies occupy space in relation to objects. Tuggar’s collages do not just reveal presumptions of maternal whiteness but also challenge the exclusion of African Diaspora and Black culture from the digital imagination. In his analysis of Black cyber culture, André Brock counters the prejudices of a digital divide where African Americans are treated as technologically deficient: “When scholars first sought to understand information technology use by Black folk, the Black body was only legible through its perceived absence: absence from the material, technical, and institutional aspects of computers and society.”45 Brock highlights how the internet and digital technologies are built upon a presumption of whiteness as the norm, but this norm is rhetorically constructed and perpetuated through digital technological design and use. Brock states:

Sara Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (August 1, 2007): 150, doi:10.1177/1464700107078139. 43 Ibid., 156. 44 Ibid., 157. 45 André L. Brock, Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 1. 42

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Despite protestations about color-blindness or neutrality, the internet should be understood as an enactment of whiteness through the interpretive flexibility of whiteness as information. By this, I mean that white folks’ communications, letters, and works of art are rarely understood as white; instead, they become universal and are understood as “communication,” “literature,” and “art.” This slippage allows for a near infinite variety of signifiers for linguistic and aesthetic concepts—absent the specific racial modifier centering them in white American culture. From this perspective, Western technoculture has an inordinate role in shaping the internet experience in many online environments.46 Kali Tal points out that during the 1990s the “whitenizing of cyberspace” and dominance of whiteness was the norm, as it evaded questions and concerns of race. In addition, she argues that much of the discourse concerning the “multiple identities, fragmented personae, and liminality” have been part of African American and Black studies for over a century, including the scholarship of W.E.B. Du Bois.47 Understandings of whiteness and presumptions about race from the United States are perpetuated through Silicon Valley’s dominant position in developing the digital technologies that are used globally. For instance, while studying computer vision at MIT, Joy Buolamwini discovered how facial recognition was unable to “read” the darker tones of her face, as the system was trained on the white skin of its developers.48 The facial recognition software she studied is used around the world, meaning that the racial norms and biases built into the training set within a particular development context composed of predominantly white men in the United States has a global impact. Digital technologies have been formed through and informed by the habits of white, masculine, heterosexual bodies.49 This hold of whiteness is apparent through the bodies that come to comfortably engage with these technologies.50 This understanding of whiteness is based on the “effect of what coheres rather than the origin of

Ibid., 6–7. Kali Tal, “The Unbearable Whiteness of Being: African American Critical Theory and Cyberculture,” accessed June 14, 2020, https://kalital.com/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-being-african-americancritical-theory-and-cybercultur/. 48 Joy Buolamwini, “How I’m Fighting Bias in Algorithms,” TEDxBeaconStreet, November2016, accessed November 27, 2021, https://www.ted.com/talks/joy_buolamwini_how_i_m_fighting_ bias_in_algorithms; Joy Buolamwini, “Gender Shades: Intersectional Phenotypic and Demographic Evaluation of Face Datasets and Gender Classifiers,” MA thesis (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2017). 49 Judy Wajcman, TechnoFeminism (Cambridge, UK, and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2004). 50 Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” 158. 46 47

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coherence.”51 There is an unacknowledged presence of whiteness endowed in these technologies and the spaces they constitute that has made this transition feasible. Thus, unacknowledged racial bias is perpetuated through seemingly neutral technologies that are designed to accommodate the norms of whiteness, which are then upscaled to induce further exclusions of those whose bodies and habits do not fit these norms. Tuggar’s collage Working Woman (1997) engages with this bias more explicitly. A smiling Nigerian woman sits on the ground next to a mismatched office setting outside, consisting of a Macintosh computer desktop, rotary phone, power strip, and desk lamp (see Plate 12). The awkwardness of the scenario is exaggerated through the inconsistent size and quality of these images, making them appear not quite right together. The smiling woman holds a computer mouse in her elevated hand as the image of the screen depicts a smaller version of the collage as a whole, repeating ad infinitum. Her figure unifies the scene visually. The uncanniness of the image relates to its aesthetic breakdown of the visible seams, but also the revelation of racial and imperial biases in digital tech culture and discourse. The assemblage does not perpetuate a digital divide, as the working woman in the collage does not present a digital deficiency but is integrated into the interface of the computer’s screen as “a circular system of images referencing each other infinitely.”52 Instead the uncanniness of the image reveals how whiteness is presumed to be the unraced norm of digital technologies.

The return of the repressed As this analysis of Tuggar’s digital montages make evident, the uncanny is an aspect of the aesthetics of interruption that connects not only to formal qualities but also to the content of the works. The uncanny is one means of describing strategies of making strange for strange mothers. This analysis also extends the definition of performance from the subject of a work to audience engagement. I continue to reconsider what constitutes performance, shifting attention to the uncanny relation of performance to its digital documentation. In her work Yellow, Irish performance artist Amanda Coogan engages with the legacy of Ireland’s repressed histories of institutionalizing women. She first performed the work in 2008 at the Temple Bar Gallery + Studios in Dublin. Since then, she

Ibid., 159. Tuggar, “Montage as Tool of Political Visual Realignment,” 375.

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has presented various iterations of it, either with herself performing or another woman re-performing an interpretation of the piece, making it a key work in her repertoire.53 Yellow consists of the performer wearing a yellow dress with a five-meter skirt. She sits on a bucket of soapy water and, over the course of four hours, cleans the dress as she wears it. The audience is free to enter and leave the space for the duration of the performance. The performance consists of minimal distilled actions, emerging from mundane or routine gestures, though made extraordinary through their repetition and duration. Through this performance, Coogan defamiliarizes the act of washing a dress, transforming it from an act of domestic maintenance to a feminist uncanny event. Not much seems to happen. The performers are not perfectly repetitious, however, as exhaustion and boredom set in and each time an action is re-performed it becomes a distinctive iteration of the previous one. There is no momentous buildup, no resolution or conclusion; just actions looped over and over again. The collecting or pooling of time, to use Baraitser’s description,54 involve immanence with action and time itself, though do not preclude possibilities of change, transformation, or even transcendence. The repetition of Coogan’s performance, its material qualities and formal staging, invites uncanniness through its slow and subtle transformations. The term uncanny, unheimlich in German or unhomely, has a domestic connotation that Alexandra Kokoli argues lends itself well to feminist subversion of the home. In her analysis of second-wave feminist art, Kokoli considers the sexual division of labor that preoccupied many feminist artists during the 1970s, which tended to place women in the domestic sphere and in unpaid care work. Kokoli describes how the uncanny in this context functions as a subversive, feminist strategy.55 Emphasizing ambivalence and its related discomfort, the uncanny is unsettling, which works well for feminist artists and thinkers attempting to denaturalize what is codified and mediated. Feminist uncanny strategies “involve a process of defamiliarization, namely of uncovering the strangeness of what is assumed to be known, established or ordinary, which is tinged with an indictment of the division between the

Iterations of the performance were presented in 2008 at the Oonagh Young Gallery in Dublin, Ireland, at the Artist Space Gallery in New York City, and Trace Gallery in Cardiff, Wales. In 2009 Coogan presented an expanded version as part of the Tulca Festival for the Visual Arts in Galway, Ireland, and in 2010 as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival. The work was also re-performed as part of her 2015 solo retrospective exhibition, “I’ll sing you a song from around the town,” at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin. 54 Baraitser, Enduring Time, 4. 55 Alexandra Kokoli, The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 3. 53

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familiar and the unfamiliar in the first place, a division that is viewed as intrinsically hierarchical and imbued in the politics of power.”56 That is, the uncanny is not merely an unsettling aesthetic experience, but can be utilized strategically, similar to Bertolt Brecht’s verfremdungseffekt, or alienation effect, as a means of inviting the “revolutionary possibilities of making the familiar strange.”57 The uncanny functions as a sort of affective aesthetics of interruption, as pleasurable value judgments are destabilized through the dynamic interjection of the familiar with the strange. The uncanny qualities of domestic subversion evokes emotional ambivalence that reveals how “for the homemaker, the home has always been marked by profound ambivalence.”58 The uncanny qualities of Yellow result from various aspects of the work. The setup of the action of washing an elongated dress as it is worn while sitting on top of a bucket merges the garment with the body and the act of cleaning, much like bubbles collect and merge together as soap suds. While the performance involves the act of scrubbing, the dress has no visible signs of filth; what then is so dirty that must be scrubbed in such a methodical and seemingly endless manner? The work resonates with Ireland’s infamous history of institutionalizing over 10,000 girls and women in Magdalene Laundries between 1922 and 1996.59 These women, who were believed to have fallen from grace through sexual promiscuity or becoming pregnant out of wedlock, were forced to perform unpaid hard labor within Catholic-run institutions to redeem themselves. In her analysis of Yellow, Kate AntosikParsons argues how Coogan “reveals suppressed bodily realities.” AntosikParsons states: The title, Yellow, is a double entendre, suggesting a tainted quality, or a loss of innocence in addition to referencing the cowardice of those who conspired to incarcerate and ‘rehabilitate’ these women, fearful of their seemingly transgressive female sexuality. In this powerful, physically demanding performance, Coogan literally transforms the memories of oppression, humiliation and shame into actions that are projected through the body.60

Ibid. Royle, The Uncanny, 5. 58 Kokoli, The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice, 14. 59 Maeve O’Rourke and James M. Smith, “Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries: Confronting a History Not yet in the Past,” in A Century of Progress? Irish Women Reflect, ed. Alan Hayes and Máire Meagher (Baldoyle, Dublin: Arlen House, 2016), 107–34. 60 Kate Antosik-Parsons, “Bodily Remembrances: The Performance of Memory in Recent Works by Amanda Coogan,” Artefact: Journal of the Irish Association of Art Historians, no. 3 (2009): 10. 56 57

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In Yellow, Coogan performs the return of Ireland’s repressed abuse of women, who were treated as abject and excluded from society through institutionalization. The abject, popularized through the work of Julia Kristeva, tends to relate to the bodily grotesque.61 However, Kokoli identifies the abject as a subgenre of the uncanny, and expands its framework in art so that it “may or may not involve the subversively graphic imagery and potential to spark immediate gut reactions associated with abjection, but which more often than not provokes a more slow-burning disorientation and insidious undermining of certainties by allowing the psychically and culturally marginalized to step forth.”62 Even though Yellow does not present grotesque materials that evoke bodily acts of repulsion—in fact it presents the opposite through gestures of compulsive cleaning—the abject is present through the figure of the woman, who is defiled and forced to engage in hard labor as a means of cleansing the spirit. As noted in the previous chapter, in Ireland, women’s bodies have historically been placed under structures of biopolitical control, resulting in the silencing of women’s experiences, including the maternal and reproductive injustices. A woman’s body, therefore, cannot be politically neutral in Ireland, as “women’s bodies are the physical and metaphorical site where injustices occur.”63 Performances such as Yellow function as hauntings of these repressed histories, as women’s bodies perform legacies of collective trauma and injustice through gestural invocations. The feminist uncanny functions as a strategy throughout Coogan’s practice, though it is not only used to reference the biopolitical constraints and control of the gestating body and the maternal in Ireland. In April 2020, Coogan performed in windowpane, a short monologue that was part of Abbey Theatre’s Dear Ireland series, which as noted in the previous chapter, was a series of digital performances created in response to the Covid-19 pandemic and associated public health measures. Written by Shane O’Reilly, Coogan performed the monologue in her first language, Irish Sign Language (ISL). Both O’Reilly and Coogan are children of deaf adults, or CODAs. The monologue opens with a shot of Coogan inside a house cleaning a large

See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay of Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 62 Kokoli, The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice, 53. 63 Kate Antosik-Parsons, “A Body Is a Body: The Embodied Politics of Women’s Sexual and Reproductive Rights in Contemporary Irish Art and Culture,” in Reproductive Justice and Sexual Rights: Transnational Perspectives, ed. Tanya Saroj Bakhru (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), 36. 61

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window with wide, sweeping gestures. The camera remains in a static position outside of the house throughout the monologue, framing the window as a screen within a screen. Closed captions in English translate her fictional narrative, which starts with descriptions of mundane activities, anxieties around being far from her daughter in Australia and her etiquette around texting, and gossip about an online book club. The narrative shifts to more personal revelations including her strained relationship with a sister whose son has a challenging name to sign. This revelation points to the ableism that dominates verbal communication, which is structured around the capacity to hear. The formal structures of the monologue, as written in ISL, compounds this quality, as the hierarchy of communication is flipped and closed captioning, typically used to increase accessibility for minoritized audiences, becomes the means of access for those whose communication capacities constitute the dominant norm. This use of language is uncanny through its defamiliarization, and like the revealing of the Captive Maternal in Tuggar’s montages, points to the predominant structures and hierarchies that are attuned to the needs, interests, and perspectives of nondisabled groups and individuals. windowpane is one of many instances where Coogan has incorporated ISL into her performance practice. She regularly collaborates with the Dublin Theatre for the Deaf, which has resulted in works such as You Told Me to Wash and Clean My Ears at the 2014 Dublin Fringe Festival and Talk Real Fine Just Like a Lady at the 2017 Dublin Theatre Festival. In addition, she includes ISL as performed gestures, abstracting terms and phrases from the communicative context, such as using the signs for “look” and “remember” in her 2019 performance Floats in the Aether.64 Like her references to injustices against women in Ireland, Coogan’s performance practice reveals structures of oppression. Her use of ISL points to the predominant ableism in communication, as she caters to speakers of ISL and inverts hierarchies of access, as ISL speakers are able to differentiate between arbitrarily performed actions and ISL signs. The uncanny here is not just a return of the repressed, but as with Tuggar’s montages, there is an unveiling of habitual norms that are exclusionary.

See Kate Antosik-Parsons, “Visualizing the Spirit of Freedom: Performing Irish Women’s Citizenship and Autonomy in Amanda Coogan’s Floats in the Aether,” Review of Irish Studies in Europe 3, no. 2 (2020): 126–45.

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The uncanniness of performance documentation The uncanny qualities of Yellow extend from the live performance to its documentation. Coogan has worked in collaboration with Irish filmmaker Paddy Cahill to create numerous performance films, including Yellow The Film (2012). Yellow The Film is based on the presentation of the performance at the 2010 Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival,65 where it was performed for six evenings by a different woman each night (Coogan, Dee Roycroft, Ann Maria Healy, Anna Berndston, Olwen Fouere, and Victoria Mc Cormack), for four hours in St. Mary’s Abbey, a former Cistercian abbey.66 This series, curated by Helen Carey, was documented by Cahill in six, four-hour long single takes, which were edited together. Cahill juxtaposes the six performances in a grid to allow for simultaneous perception of these six evenings within the frame of the screen. Each performance was shot using digital capture technologies and was presented uncut in the final version of the film, which has a running time of four hours,67 an atypical method of cinematic production that demanded durational concentration from Cahill that mimics that of the performers. To enable him to move freely while shooting, Cahill custom-made a wearable rig, which at the time was available commercially, but prohibitively expensive. In contrast to the tripod, which felt too “formal and restrictive” to Cahill,68 this rig accounts for the physical and gestural aspects of capturing moving image, where the act of filming is emphasized as a performed action with technology. Placing the camera in the center of his body, Cahill is able to move around the performance space uninhibited, without interrupting the single shot through jolts and other unintended movements. The other technical issue that arose was that at the time of shooting, filmmakers were transitioning from shooting on tape to memory cards, with cards capable of storing only limited amounts of data. To overcome this constraint and record the four-hour long performances as single takes meant recording directly to an external hard drive, adding additional hardware and chance for technological failure since if the cable between the camera and the hard drive came unplugged, the footage would not save properly. Under the circumstances of capturing a four-hour live performance as a single take without the possibility for multiple

As the festival was then called. Coogan indicates the significance of performing the work at this site, which is not a dedicated arts space, as being where artist Alannah O’Kelly performed Omós. 67 Paddy Cahill and Amanda Coogan, “About Yellow,” Yellow The Film, January 17, 2012, accessed November 27, 2021, https://yellowthefilm.wordpress.com/about/. 68 Paddy Cahill, email to Author, August 2, 2020. 65 66

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takes, such propensity for failure is quite anxiety-provoking,69 attributing risk that parallels producing performance art. I emphasize these qualities of Cahill’s role in documenting Yellow because it highlights how shooting performance functions as a digitally mediated performance in itself, where the filmmaker’s capacity to produce is informed and restricted by technological affordances. In addition, instead of being just documentation, Cahill’s collaborations with Coogan offer different iterations of these performances while taking advantage of digital moving image technology’s ability to introduce new modes of perception and experience. Through Cahill’s work, the camera opens participation for a viewer while extending the space of creative potential for the artist, producing something different than a live performance by opening the membranes of engagement, drawing out the folds of experience into other times and other places. Such iterations do not negate or replace the live versions of the work, but instead they offer different temporal interpretations to present distinctive insights, and thus contribute new meaning to the live performances. Thus, the relationship of performance to the camera is one of translation—the live action and the captured trace are never quite the same. In addition, uncanny qualities are found in the replication of the performing figure through re-performance. The technique of a performance being performed again by someone who is not the instigating artist gained notoriety in the visual arts through the work of Marina Abramovič. In 2005, she reperformed five performances by five different artists, a re-performance of her 1975 work Lips of Thomas, and a new work as the series Seven Easy Pieces. Abramovič describes the motivation behind re-performing these works, which include Seedbed by Vito Acconci and Action Pants Genital Panic by VALIE EXPORT, was to present performances that have become iconic through their documentation as live actions. Notably, Abramovič presents an interpretation of works based on their documents, as she did not witness the live actions. In some instances the “original” does not exist as a distinct performance, such as Bruce Nauman’s Body Pressure (1972), which is only a set of instructions inviting the audience to undertake a series of actions.70 Instead of presenting a performance that replicates an “original,” which may not even have been a distinctive event, Abramovič used these six works as the impetus for her actions, appropriated and interpreted through her durational techniques that test the limits of the body. Coogan, who not only studied with Abramovič but

Ibid. Jessica Santone, “Marina Abramovič’s Seven Easy Pieces: Critical Documentation Strategies for Preserving Art’s History,” Leonardo 41, no. 2 (2008): 148.

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also had been involved with the production of “Seven Easy Pieces,” invites artists to re-perform Yellow along similar lines. Each presentation of the performance exists as an iteration of the work, with its execution depending on how the work is processed and presented through the body of the performer. Re-performance, moreover, is uncanny through its doubling of the performance, which is similar, yet not quite the same. Each iteration of Yellow varies depending on how each performer engages with the designated tasks, which are not developed through training or rehearsal in attempts to mimic Coogan’s actions. Helen Carey emphasizes that re-performance is not the same as reenactment, as Coogan’s work with other performers “manifest in her interest in the practice of other artists and in the possibilities of other artists inhabiting an armature.”71 While the context of the work remains consistent through formal parameters, including a performance score, Coogan intentionally presented minimal instructions to enable the performers to come to and inhabit the work as fits their practice, with the gestural language and bodily knowledge of each performer informing how the actions unfold. The differences between the performers become most apparent through the composition of Cahill’s film. The film begins with the six performers in situ. While Coogan and Anna Berndston begin by actively scrubbing the yellow cloth, others enter the actions with different paces and different gestures of engagement. Victoria McCormack starts by slowly examining the soap bubbles on her hands, as if in some sort of trance, focusing on the act of cleansing her skin and not engaging with the fabric until later on. Olwen Fouere prolongs and exaggerates certain actions presented in the score in a manner that is distinctively her own, such as manipulating the cloth in her teeth as she rolls her head slowly in circles. Coogan’s practice as a performance artist has not only been cultivated through extensive study and training in durational work, but as indicated previously, her first language is ISL, “a language that up to recently depended on embodied encounters for communication to occur.”72 Thus, her performance practice is informed through her lifelong experience of communicating through and with her body. The other performers, each with their own corporeal histories and trainings, including two trained actors, present the actions with different intentions, interests, and gestural takes. Over the course of the performance

71 Helen Carey, “Performing, Performance, Re-Performing, Re-Performance,” Amanda Coogan, September 24, 2010, accessed November 27, 2021, http://www.amandacoogan.com/helencarey. html. 72 Amanda Coogan, “Deconstructing and Re-Constructing Instances of Live Durational Performance Art: Yellow-Re-Performed,” Ph.D. thesis(University of Ulster, 2013), accessed November 27, 2021, https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.633031.

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film, the impact of duration on the body becomes apparent. The way exhaustion manifests itself in the body differs, with some artists taking longer pauses or working with less fervor as time progresses. Witnessing six different performers engage with the same actions over the course of six nights may appear more or less similar, particularly when the performers are dressed the same and staged in the same way. However, Cahill’s composition that presents all six performers in a grid on a single screen amplifies differences, also making the moments of synchronicity eerie. There are differences not just in the actions of the performers but also in Cahill’s technique of filming. As noted, each performance is shot with a single take, though Cahill moves the camera throughout the space, presenting different framings and compositions of actions that are in conjunction with and respond to the performers’ gestures. At around forty minutes, the camera presents a cropping of Coogan’s head and upper torso over Berndston’s hands scrubbing her skirt, making them appear to be one body. This temporary unification breaks when the camera pans up to Berndston’s face. Coogan then lifts the yellow fabric up over her face, covering the frame of the image. Berndston performs a similar gesture only moments later, becoming an instance of synchronicity, though performed in isolation and days apart (see Plate 13). Such unsettling qualities are amplified through the sound editing. Unlike the video, which plays all of the channels of images simultaneously at the same size, the volume of the audio channels varies. At some points, it is unclear who is producing what sound, creating a haunting quality as performances audibly seep into each other. As such, the film enables differences to come to the fore through the entanglement of performed gestures in the shared space of the screen. The body as a lived repository of memory informs how Yellow is constituted; the film presents an uncanny aesthetic encounter where the simultaneous display of these performances highlights their differences while enabling them to coexist. The question again arises: can performance documentation, such as that captured with digital technologies, be considered a type of performance? Just as Fatimah Tuggar’s montages evoke a performed response from her audience through bracketing and the phenomenological experience of perception and interpretation, performance documentation functions as a performance. Philip Auslander, who has written extensively on the relationship of performance and technology, argues that both documentation and live events provide experiences of performance, with the “playback” of documentation, whether photograph, moving image, recorded sound, or written account, being understood as the performance itself.73 He explains that this is possible due 73 Philip Auslander, Reactivations: Essays on Performance and Its Documentation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), 43.

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to the phenomenological experience of the documentation as unfolding in a perceptual present. Performance documentation encompasses a temporal complexity in relation to live action, as documentation is intended for a future audience.74 Focus is placed on the engagement with the documentation as a reactivation of the performance.75 Cahill’s film complicates Auslander’s description, as the film simultaneously presents six iterations of the performed actions of Yellow recorded over the course of six evenings as single takes. As such, the film enables the temporal duration of the initial iterations of the performances, though the juxtaposition of the six versions of the performances all on screen at the same time invites distinctive phenomenological experiences of these gestures. With the six performances presented simultaneously, it is possible to draw out the similarities and distinctions between how each performer responds to the performance score and the materials, while also creating visual and aural leakage between the frames. The combination of the performers’ actions with Cahill’s means of technological capture is what makes Yellow The Film a complex means of engaging with durational performance that does not just reproduce or represent the initial live actions, but also diffracts them while highlighting the uncanny aesthetic qualities of the work. In regard to Amanda Coogan’s performance Yellow, I was unable to witness the live version of the performances documented in Yellow The Film, though I have experienced several iterations of the performance as part of her 2015 exhibition I’ll Sing You a Song from Around the Town at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin.76 Cahill’s documentation of the 2010 performances draws out characteristics of these presentations that would otherwise not be immediately perceived. The capacity to replay and reexperience the performance invites new perceptions through the uncanny relationship of live performance to its documentation. Even though documentation functions as a type of performance, it does not capture the full sensory experience of the live encounter, including proprioception and temperature. My experience of Yellow, therefore, exists as an amalgamation of live re-performances by Coogan and other performers, different viewings of the documentation including Cahill’s film and photographs, written analyses and interpretations by Coogan, others who recall their experiences, conversations with Coogan

Ibid., 16–17. Ibid., 17. 76 I have interpreted this performance using Hannah Arendt’s concepts of labor, work, and action in relation to Article 41.2 and 3 of the Irish Constitution. See EL Putnam, “Not Just ‘A Life within the Home’: Maternal Labour, Art Work and Performance Action in the Irish Intimate Public Sphere,” Performance Research 22, no. 4 (November 7, 2017): 61–70, doi:10.1080/13528165.2017.1374708. 74

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and discussions with others about their experiences of the work, and my own recollections as I contribute to the discourse surrounding the performance. As such, this experience of performance cannot be consolidated through a reduced meaning, but invites contradiction and ambiguity with each subsequent interaction of memory and perception. The uncanny, therefore, is a multifaceted concept that in itself is uncanny. The use of the term throughout this chapter draws from the work of Freud and Heidegger, as interpreted by Royle, Withy, and Kokoli, to identify the aesthetic encounter of interruption as one that is revealed through breakdown. Tuggar’s visible seams produce gaps in signification and a breakdown in narrative coherence that reveal racial presumptions regarding the maternal and digital technologies through defamiliarization. The uncanny is also present in Coogan’s performance practice in terms of content, material, form, and action through its haunting of Ireland’s institutional history and engagement with re-performance. In Yellow The Film, the uncanny extends to performance and its relationship to documentation. Throughout these instances, the uncanny enables a coexistence of difference without a need for resolution. The uncanny identifies the sensations provoked through the aesthetics of interruption, though it also introduces ambivalence, which is a significant feature of rethinking the maternal and digital subjectivity, to be considered in the following chapters.

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4 Maternal Immanence and Embodied Transcendence

Anxious milk

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n 2017, Patty Chang began collecting fears. These fears, which have been gathered from friends, communities in Los Angeles, New Mexico, and Hong Kong, and later sourced from an online list,1 are recited by lactating women pumping breast milk, whose actions are documented and presented as the work Milk Debt. These performances are captured with each woman staring directly into the camera, holding the mechanical apparatus of the breast pump over her nipple, as she articulates each fear out loud, reading them from a screen or teleprompter. Anxieties pour from her lips as the liquid nourishment flows from each breast, with the act of pumping releasing oxytocin into the performer’s bloodstream. In some instances, the performer is in a public place—on Los Angeles’ public transport system, next to the Los Angeles River, on a pedestrian bridge in Hong Kong above gathering protestors. Some performers are in their home, including performances over Zoom and Skype, as Covid-19 curtailed the possibility of physically gathering to document the performance. The work highlights the interdependencies and shared vulnerabilities of human communities interlaced in infrastructures of financial and political power of broader technological and ecological milieux. Milk Debt, as presented at the 18th Street Arts Center in Los Angeles, California, during 2020, is composed of a five channel video installation that includes nine performers and the scrolling list of collective fears (see Figure  4.1). Chang draws connections between the human body and the

Fears were collected online using a Google Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/13SjI6kZO byK9PnDDbWQJU4skOFnsYOS57rO8iCvKluw/edit?usp=sharing (accessed November 30, 2021).

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FIGURE 4.1 Patty Chang, Milk Debt, 2020. Installation view at 18th Street Arts Center Olympic Campus Main Gallery. Photograph by Brica Wilcox. Courtesy of the artist.

landscape, where breast milk functions as a symbol of love and empathy in contrast to the angst encapsulated in the collected text. The development of the project has also been informed by certain events, including the Hong Kong protests of 2019 and the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.2 As such, it is a digital performance where flesh and circuit as body and technology are enmeshed through simultaneous immanence and transcendence in this multifaceted aesthetic encounter.

Flesh and circuit In the Hong Kong iteration of Milk Debt, on June 8, 2019, performer Melissa Lee stood on a pedestrian bridge where journalists gathered to document the activities of protestors below. At first look, she appeared to be like any other journalist, speaking into a camera as she read the text off a teleprompter— except that she was pumping milk from both her breasts and reciting the fears

Anuradha Vikram, “Milk Intelligence” (18th Street Arts Center, 2020), accessed November 27, 2021, https://18thstreet.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/18th_st_catalogue_2020_patty_chang_3_ single_pgs.pdf.

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collected by the friends and families of students at Hong Kong University.3 This specific performance is notable, as it took place just as mass protests began against a proposed Chinese extradition bill in Hong Kong. Therefore, the fears collected were “fraught with political fears—‘anxieties that are not always visible’ all the time, Chang reminded us, yet are constantly present.”4 Immanent processes of the body—the production of milk—are presented in tandem with transcendent, collective acts of protest in this cyborg of the human body with the body politic, as technologies of the pump and the video camera enable these simultaneous actions to coexist through moving image. The individual and collective, biological and political, are revealed as deeply entwined. As such, the work counters calls of a split between the body and technology—meatspace and cyberspace—as were prominent in the 1990s. In 1999, N. Katherine Hayles published How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, indicating a wider trend of how the increased ubiquity of computer technologies and the internet perpetuate illusions of technological disembodiment. She describes how information came to be the prominent means to understand how digital technologies function, where there is a “belief that information can circulate unchanged among different material substrates.”5 According to Hayles, “information lost its body,”6 as attention is not paid to the material factors involved in the transfer and uptake of information, which includes human bodies along with other physical matter. Hayles notes how “embodiment makes clear that thought is a much broader cognitive function depending for its specificities on the embodied form enacting it.”7 The erasure of embodiment was not novel to twentieth-century technological thought, which Hayles describes as becoming popularized through determining trends of cybernetic theory in the mid-twentieth century, including ideas that arose during the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics that Claude Shannon, Norbert Weiner,

As noted in Chapter 2, the act of pumping milk points to the desire to nourish a child while being apart from the child. It also becomes a necessary act to relieve the lactating body, as in the act of pumping and dumping during weaning or prolonged periods of separation. Chang describes how she intentionally focused on the act of breast pumping, as opposed to breastfeeding, since in the former the child is not present enabling the process and labor of producing milk to become visible. See 18th Street Arts Center, “PATTY CHANG | MILK DEBT: Conversation w/ Artist Patty Chang and Curators Anuradha Vikram and Asha Bukojemsky,” Vimeo, 2020, accessed November 27, 2021, https://vimeo.com/423763667. 4 Ysabelle Cheung, “Abject, Exposed and Potent Desires: Patty Chang,” ArtAsiaPacific, no. 114 (July 2019): 69. 5 Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 1. 6 Ibid., 2. 7 Ibid., xiv. 3

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Margaret Mead, and others attended, but extends to the liberal humanist subject that has dominated since the European Enlightenment. Through her discussion of the posthuman subject, which she defines as “an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction,”8 Hayles warns that there is a risk of perpetuating the disembodiment of liberal humanism, where a subject possesses a body that can be transcended through the use of digital technologies.9 This thinking, popularized through cyberpunk authors such as William Gibson, spread an understanding of digital subjectivity as disembodied and centered on human consciousness. It is brought to an extreme through aspirations for the technological singularity, or when computational intelligence will become capable of upgrading itself without human input.10 Cyberfeminist Sadie Plant has argued that advances in computation and telecommunications, especially the rise of the internet, allow for a transcendence of the physical body, as it is diffused through technological engagement. The hope was that with this transcendence, resources that had been restricted based on different bodily identifiers could now be available to everyone through an identity-fluid network.11 Such a division is misleading, however, as it perpetuates presumptions that the online and offline self are distinct entities. The 1990s was a crucial period in digital cultures. As Jennifer Kennedy points out, during this time, there were more people online and debates surrounding subjectivity and embodiment intensified.12 While this debate tends to be framed around either celebration or rejection of tech-utopianism, Kennedy argues that artworks such as Shu Lea Cheang’s net.art project Brandon (1994–9) are representative of an “emergent, alternative understanding of the entangled transformations of subjectivity and corporeality that were happening through the transition from analogue to digital culture […] complicating the split between ‘cyberspace’ and ‘meatspace.’”13 Brandon went live in 1998, created as an online response to the murder of Brandon Teena in 1993 in a transphobic hate crime. Kennedy describes how the “physical violence at the root of Brandon – the brutal

Ibid., 3. Ibid., 4. 10 Vernor Vinge, “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era,” in Science Fiction Criticism: An Anthology of Essential Writings, ed. Rob Latham (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 1993), 352–63. 11 Plant, Zeros + Ones. 12 Jen Kennedy, “Across the Nebraska Border and the Virtual-Material Divide: Contextualizing Shu Lea Cheang’s Brandon, 1994–1999,” International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, June 8, 2021, 196, doi:10.1080/14794713.2021.1934636. 13 Ibid., 197. 8 9

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and tragic death of twenty-one-year-old Teena and his friends Lisa Lambert and Philip DeVine – presents a challenge when considered in the context of thenpopular discourses concerning the relationship between ‘material’ and ‘virtual’ spheres.”14 Through her development and presentation of the work, Cheang engages with the infrastructures of the internet conceptually and as an artistic medium that enables a “generative and community-based modality for imagining Brandon’s story otherwise.”15 In a similar fashion, I am interested in shifting the frame of analysis of this debate between the embodied and the virtual. To do so, I break the dichotomy of bodily immanence and digital transcendence, drawing from Simone de Beauvoir’s ambivalent philosophical considerations of the maternal. Artists such as Patty Chang, Jess Dobkin, and Micol Hebron create works that use the immanence of the body with technology as the impetus for transcendent creative activities, proving the continued significance of fleshy relations. These works qualify Beauvoir’s definitions of immanence and transcendence while breaking down her hierarchical presentation of the concepts. These concepts are then applied to understandings of how the dynamic of digital technologies and bodies are not restricted to virtual presentations on the screen. In accordance with Legacy Russell, I discuss how through his performances of digital storytelling, Trystan Reese breaks the loop of on and offline as he “glitches” the body, undermining presumptions that biological pregnancy is exclusively performed by cisgender women.

Embodied engagements with digital technology In the essay “Maternal Ecologies,” Canadian artist and scholar Natalie Loveless shares an anecdote pertaining to her experiences of mothering mediated through digital technology: I was Skyping with my son while away at a conference […] and, as I was doing so, my eyes caressed the texture of his face, my mouth kissed the screen, my arms circled it. My son kissed back, hugged back, and cried that he missed me. It was intimate. He cried; I soothed. He cried; my breasts, still not fully dry, leaked a little. Social media facilitates a very material encounter: the materiality of breast milk; the material impact of an infant’s cry; the soothing clucks of a mother’s voice.16

Ibid., 196–7. Ibid., 202. 16 Natalie S. Loveless, “Maternal Ecologies,” in Performing Motherhood: Artistic, Activist, and Everyday Enactments, ed. Amber E. Kinser, Kryn Freehling-Burton, and Terri Hawkes (Bradford, ON: Demeter Press, 2014), 162. 14 15

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Caring actions were embodied through the corporeal experiences of the caress, the hug, the kiss, crying, and even lactation. Despite the fact that Loveless and her son were physically separated, their digital interactions were not restricted to the virtual realm, but manifest through the material qualities of physical existence.17 These qualities align with the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon, who does not perpetuate a fundamental distinction between humans and technology.18 Throughout human history, the use of technology has modified the capacities of humans to act, just as humans have contributed to the development of these technologies. Technical objects, therefore, function not as disjunctions of the human body, but extensions of it.19 Focusing on the relations of humans to technologies in ongoing processes of becoming escapes the dualistic snare of Cartesian thought. With the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, videoconferencing platforms shifted from a more periphery status, where they were utilized when meeting was deemed not possible due to geographic separation as in the example with Loveless discussed above, to being the primary means of synchronous contact as the risk of infection to this novel variant of the coronavirus was deemed too great for in-person gatherings. During 2020, after three years of preparation and development, Chang was ready to begin shooting in Los Angeles for Milk Debt.20 The implementation of extreme public health restrictions, including requirements to stay at home, meant Chang needed to adapt the work. As a result, she began documenting performances over Zoom and Skype. Her presentation of the performances over these platforms does not try to hide the distinctive aesthetic that they afford or the technological parameters of mediation. The video conferencing interface is presented in full, including Chang’s gestures, made manifest through the movements of the cursor as she uses the mouse. The transition of the work to online platforms captures the essence of the era within which it was made, using digital technologies in a manner that identify the restrictions and strain of the time. In one iteration of the work performed over Skype, the camera is shooting from a low angle looking up, in a portrait format that alludes to it being shot with a smartphone. The performer also wears a set of white

Loveless has created an extensive virtual project that cultivates a network of mothers through Fluxus-style performance actions in her work Maternal Ecologies (https://www.maternalecologies. ca/). See Loveless, “Maternal Encologies.” 18 Thomas LaMarre, “Afterward: Humans and Machines,” in Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual, by Muriel Combes, trans. Thomas LaMarre, Technologies of Lived Abstraction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 80. 19 See Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth, vol. 1 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 20 18th Street Arts Center, “PATTY CHANG | MILK DEBT.” 17

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earbuds, engaging the style and gestures affiliated with typical video calls, as she pumps milk and recites collective fears. Such qualities point to how digital technologies impact experiences of embodiment as the performer adapts her bodily positions and the placement of the smartphone to capture her actions. In her analysis of embodiment and digital technology, Anne Munster argues that these technologies introduce “odd kinesthetic and proprioceptive arrangements for bodies in many information interfaces, where the embodied self is forced into close proximity with itself as a dematerialized representation via the cursor, the feedback of virtual and actual gesture in immersive environments or bandwidth, and sensory compression in online interaction.”21 Despite the oddness of this translation of the body through representation, these affiliations of bodily gesture with digital reaction, or “assimilation of flesh to machine”22 have become so normalized as to become unnoticeable. Just as digital technologies have enabled different ways of organizing and engaging with information, more commonly referred to as data, these technologies have in turn modified bodies. For instance, referencing Simondon, Andrew Lapworth describes how the increased proliferation of touchscreens “subtly rewire the intensive connections of digital processes of image and sound with the sensori-motor capacities of the body in ways that elicit new affective experiences.”23 The touchscreen not only altered interface design and layout through the increased emphasis on tile presentations and large graphics to facilitate tactile engagement, but our bodies and gestures are also modified through the use of technologies. These modifications influence the corporeal, for instance repetitive strain injury, as well as inform how we occupy public space and relate to others, such as looking at a smartphone while walking and being oblivious to external stimuli, including other pedestrians, cyclists, and car traffic. Simondon emphasizes how these processes are ongoing and relational, though there is a tendency to isolate human subjects, technical objects, physical entities, and the environment as isolated discreet entities, ignoring their relational coexistence in a milieu. In Milk Debt, experiences of the embodied maternal in relation to technology reveals the multifacetedness of these engagements through a rethinking of immanence and transcendence not as hierarchical or opposed, but as co-constitutive. The immanence of pumping breast milk is merged with the transcendence of producing artistic work.

Anna Munster, Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics (Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2006), 31. 22 Ibid. 23 Lapworth, “Theorizing Bioart Encounters after Gilbert Simondon,” 132. 21

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“Prey to the Species” Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy of ethics is rooted in an ambiguity between immanence and transcendence. She uses a phenomenological approach that situates a tension between the two, focused on the experiences of the lived body. In The Second Sex, she elaborates upon these concepts through the concrete experiences of particular women, notably criticizing domestic and reproductive labor affiliated with motherhood as a form of immanence. Beauvoir describes how historically, women have been delegated to immanence through patriarchal oppression to enable men to achieve transcendence.24 This association of women with immanence is rooted in how the sexual difference of bodies, with the female body as the reproductive and gestating body, has been used as a means to construct situations of patriarchal dominance through gendered roles and exclusions. As a result, the female body is treated as inherently immanent.25 Reproductive functions, including menstruation, pregnancy, and lactation, are specific to female mammals and vital for the propagation of the species, which according to Beauvoir, are in conflict with the woman as an individual and her capacities for transcendence. Mothers in particular are figures who are explicitly connected to human’s mammalian functions, causing Beauvoir to identify them as a prime example of women existing in a state of corporeal immanence as “motherhood left woman riveted to the body like an animal.”26 Immanence is the state of the world in the present, which is experienced through routine acts of labor and maintenance. For Beauvoir, freedom is experienced through transcendence, which involves movement toward an open future with indeterminate possibilities.27 Transcendence is made manifest through constructive activities, projects, and creative work, like art. Beauvoir’s detailed attention to biological facts and social circumstances in The Second Sex (even though her approach is unacknowledged as being limited to the experiences of white, cisgender, bourgeois women in Paris during the 1940s) is rooted in the emphasis she places on embodiment in the capacity to attain freedom. For Beauvoir bodies and biological facts continue to matter since “the freedom that characterizes human existence is not a radical freedom of the sort that might be possible for a disembodied Cartesian

Simone De Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 18. Emily Anne Parker, “Becoming Bodies,” in A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Nancy Bauer and Laura Hengehold (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2017), 88–9. 26 Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 75. 27 Ibid., 16. 24 25

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ego.”28 She treats the body as a situation, which means experience is framed by and occurs through the body, making material embodiment essential to her occupation of the world and, in turn, to her capacity for freedom.29 Embodied being creates limits that are tangible and vary depending on the materialization of bodies, which differ depending on the bodies themselves, the context within which they exist, and the changing reproductive capacities of female bodies over time, from menstruation to menopause. However, treating material embodiment as a condition for freedom, where “embodiment is simultaneously the ground and the boundary of our freedom to act and become,”30 is not restricted to the male/female and man/woman binaries that Beauvoir proposes, as to be explored later in this chapter in relation to trans pregnancy. For Beauvoir, the capacities for immanence and transcendence may both exist in human beings, but they are in a paradoxical relationship that, despite various attempts to salvage or overcome this divide, remains dialectical. While immanence concerns survival and the perpetuation of the species that has been relegated as a “feminine domain,” transcendence involves the creation of “values that deny any value to pure repetition.”31 In particular, there seems to be an incompatibility between immanence and transcendence as experienced through the embodied maternal. Beauvoir states: To give birth and to breast-feed are not activities but natural functions; they do not involve a project, which is why the woman finds no motive there to claim a higher meaning for her existence; she passively submits to her biological destiny. Because housework alone is compatible with the duties of motherhood, she is condemned to domestic labor, which locks her into repetition and immanence; day after day it repeats itself in identical form from century to century; it produces nothing new.32 Various artists discussed throughout this book engage with domestic and reproductive labor (immanent activities) as the impetus for artwork (projects of transcendence). In some instances, as with the work of Marni Kotak and Megan Wynne, immanent labor and transcendent work merge, as the activities of caring for children are framed as performances. The significance

Ruth Groenhout, “Beauvoir and the Biological Body,” in A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Nancy Bauer and Laura Hengehold (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2017), 76. 29 Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 46. 30 Groenhout, “Beauvoir and the Biological Body,” 77. 31 Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 74. 32 Ibid., 73. 28

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of these framings is not just in how the artists declare their mothering to be art but also in the manner in which these works circulate as art through gallery exhibitions and affiliated discourse. That is, this framing collectively acknowledges maternal labor as artwork through aesthetic experience, interpretation, and subsequent analysis, including the analyses performed in this book. Through these artworks, acts of the embodied maternal are not limited to the “rule of life,” but are acknowledged and interpreted as aesthetic experiences that function as projects, exceeding the present and cultivating relations with others that surpass the mother-child bond. These aesthetic encounters enable transcendence through maternal immanence in a manner that Beauvoir and subsequent scholars of Beauvoir have not deemed feasible. This twist on maternal immanence is significant, since it means that repetitive acts of immanence, including domestic activities and other acts of maintenance, need not be posited as counter to transcendence or even stifling transcendence as Emily Anne Parker asserts.33 Iris Marion Young argues in her response to Beauvoir that immanent acts such as housework are valuable because they contribute to preservation: “The preservation of the things among which one dwells gives people a context for their lives, individuates their histories, gives them items to use in making new projects, and makes them comfortable.”34 However, immanent, embodied maternal care is still treated as supporting yet incompatible with transcendence. In contrast, the aestheticization of immanence breaks down this distinction, where acts of mothering are understood as not just the support or maintenance that enables transcendence but also the instigator of aesthetic encounters that have transformative possibilities—immanence functions as a kind of embodied transcendence.

Mother’s milk Jess Dobkin’s Lactation Station Breast Milk Bar presents an amalgam of immanence and transcendence that extends the embodied relations of intersubjectivity to limits previously unforeseen in maternal art. In this work, which premiered in 2006 and has been presented in other iterations in 2012 and 2016, Dobkin invites the audience to sample small quantities of pasteurized breast milk (see Plate 14). She describes the piece as encouraging “a dialog

Parker, “Becoming Bodies,” 88. Iris Marion Young, “House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme,” in On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 142.

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about trust, risk, taste, culture and bodily fluids.”35 The work is a complex artistic endeavor, culminating in the tasting event, but incorporating months of preparation and research including consultations with experts such as microbiologists, public health officials, and lawyers to ensure taster-participant safety; fostering relationships of care and responsibility with donor mothers, whom she interviewed on video, which was played back during the performance and shared with the audience as they sampled the milk; and engaging with the media, including reactionary and negative press prior to the first iteration in 2006 at the Ontario College of Art & Design in Toronto, Canada.36 I confess: when I first learned of Lactation Station, I felt a sense of abject horror at the prospect of consuming another woman’s breast milk, even though I breastfed both of my daughters until after each turned two. My embodied reaction to the work is common, as Aristarkhova describes in her essay about the performance.37 It is a curious sense of disgust that is affiliated with human breastfeeding, since disgust is not connected with the crossspecies consumption of cow, sheep, or goat milk that is popular in many parts of the globe, “would it not be more repulsive to taste the milk coming from the udders or breasts of non-human animals, to do a cross-species tasting?”38 Even though I was unable to participate in one of the live iterations of the performance, I was amazed at how Dobkin was able to engage with her audience in video documentation of the 2016 version presented as part of “New Maternalisms,” curated by Natalie Loveless at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. Four audience members sit at a curved white, clean bar while Dobkin stands in attendance, wearing a light pink, buttoned-up shirt and white apron, shaking each taster’s hands and welcoming them. She hands out a menu with the names of the milk, which are based on information she gleaned from the interviews. Dobkin describes how “in the spirit of wine tasting I performed as sommelier, presenting the donor milk in pairings so that participants could compare the unique flavors and qualities of the milk, and facilitating discussion.”39 There is familiarity in the ritual actions she

Jess Dobkin, “The Lactation Station,” Jess Dobkin, accessed May 21, 2020, http://www. jessdobkin.com/jd_work/the-lactation-station/. 36 Dobkin outlines the preparations she made for the performance in Jess Dobkin, “Performing with Mother’s Milk: The Lactation Station Breast Milk Bar,” in Intimacy across Visceral and Digital Performance, ed. Maria Chatzichristodoulou and Rachel Zerihan (Basingstoke, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 62–73. For more details on press response, see Irina Aristarkhova, “Being of the Breast,” in New Maternalisms: Redux, ed. Natalie Loveless (Edmonton: University of Alberta, 2018), 79–107. 37 Aristarkhova, “Being of the Breast,” 88. 38 Ibid., 89–90. 39 Dobkin, “Performing with Mother’s Milk,” 68–9. 35

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performs; recognizable gestures and phrases that make the atypical act of adult humans consuming breast milk appear less strange. The tasters take the milk in sample cups, examine it visually and smell it prior to tasting, as one would wine or whiskey (see Figure 4.2). As the milk and conversation flows, the awkward smiles slip from the lips of tasters as they describe the flavor profiles of the milk—one is creamier, while another is more sour. Dobkin informs them of the diets of each of the donors—one consumed more meat during pregnancy and postpartum, while another has been vegetarian for years. One taster comments how it does not taste like the milk we are used to; the milk of another species that has been a homely staple of many diets, while the human mother’s milk is generally scorned in distaste, and in the lead up to the 2006 performance, considered a potential public health hazard.40 Distinctions can be drawn between how breast milk is collected and consumed in the performance as opposed to an infant latched on to the breast. Breast milk is a complex living substance. Not only is it “a complete and perfect food, an ideal combination of proteins, fat, carbohydrates, and nutrients” but it also contains rich microbiome that contributes to

FIGURE 4.2  Jess Dobkin, Lactation Station, 2006. Breast milk served at the public tasting. The Ontario College of Art & Design Professional Gallery. Photograph by David Hawe. Courtesy of the artist. Ibid., 70–1.

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human growth, development, and immune response.41 Additionally, the immunological composition of breast milk changes to meet the needs of a baby: “when a baby suckles at its mother’s breast, a vacuum is created. Within that vacuum, the infant’s saliva is sucked back into the mother’s nipple, where receptors in her mammary gland decipher it.”42 These qualities lead Angela Garbes to describe how breast milk, and not just the intimate act of breastfeeding, functions as a “private conversation between mother and child” taking place on a microscopic level.43 Breast milk is produced by the melting of human fat, which includes stores produced years and even decades prior to giving birth and producing milk. Biologist Katie Hinde describes how “You have information about your whole life span that could be in your milk […] Milk is telling the baby about the world its mother has lived in.”44 Communication takes place not just on the exterior of the body through sight, sound, and touch but also in the cellular interactions of these beings as they connect and exchange, in turn modifying the compositions of each being. Some of these features of relational engagement are not present in Lactation Station. Dobkin was required to sterilize the breast milk prior to consumption, meaning that it is no longer the living and dynamic substance as when consumed directly from the breast. However, the differences of taste between the milk samples relate to the food consumed by the donors, meaning that tasters are still engaging with the telling of the donor’s life stories on a microscopic level. Even though the relational experiences in these two contexts of consumption differ, they are not opposed. As such, the work functions as a means of experiencing transcendence through immanence as breast milk behaves as the medium of relation and exchange. A natural function, but not a resignation to biological destiny. A major provocation of the work is how Dobkin extends the intimacy of breastfeeding, which Andrea Liss describes as “one of the most intersubjective acts performed between mother and child,”45 from beyond this coupling to a communal configuration; a queering of family. While the project culminates in a live performance, this event constitutes a fraction of the complex network

Angela Garbes, Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy (New York: HarperCollins, 2018), 150. 42 Ibid., 153. 43 Ibid. 44 Hinde as quoted in ibid. 45 Liss, Feminist Art and the Maternal, 74. 41

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Dobkin cultivated in the process of its creation. She initially began working on preparation for the project while her daughter was an infant. A good portion of this process, as Dobkin describes it, was dedicated to building trust with donors and assuaging the anxious responses of health officials to the prospect of ingesting a human bodily fluid.46 Dobkin writes how during this time she was coming to terms with her own inability to breastfeed her daughter. In the performance she acknowledged her absence as a donor—a role she originally perceived as fulfilling—through the inclusion of a small photograph in a cowprinted frame, looking “haggard and defeated” as she attempts to tube feed her daughter.47 The queering of the family throughout Lactation Station relates to Dobkin’s experiences of becoming a mother, since as a queer, single woman who gestated her daughter, she performed an act of human reproduction that is treated as quintessentially heterosexual. She states: Once I became pregnant, I accidently stepped out of my very queer bubble and into a foreign world […] I was the only queer in my prenatal class […] I became acknowledged by the mainstream world in a way that I hadn’t been before, my pregnancy simultaneously increasing my physical visibility while making my circumstances more invisible.48 As she came to know more single, queer women through support and social groups, she describes how she became involved in networks that enabled her to meet the donor women who would eventually participate in the project. This decentering of the mother-child relationship and the family unit from being the primary source of nurture and intimacy offers possibilities for other modes of relating to and being embodied in the care of others.49 As Sophie Lewis argues in her radical consideration of surrogacy as a means of breaking the dominance of the family as an organizing unit of capitalism, “we need ways of counteracting the exclusivity and supremacy of ‘biological’ parents in children’s lives; experiments in communizing family-support infrastructures,

Dobkin, “Performing with Mother’s Milk,” 64–8. Ibid., 70. 48 Ibid., 65–6. Dobkin discusses her sexuality and experiences of being a queer mother in an interview with Charles Reeve, “Inside/Outside/Beside the Mothering Machine: A Conversation with Jess Dobkin,” in Inappropriate Bodies: Art, Design, and Maternity, ed. Rachel Epp Buller and Charles Reeve (Bradford, ON: Demeter Press, 2019), 177–87. 49 See Laura Mamo, Queering Reproduction: Achieving Pregnancy in the Age of Technoscience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Shelley M. Park, Mothering Queerly, Queering Motherhood: Resisting Monomaternalism in Adoptive, Lesbian, Blended, and Polygamous Families (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013); Briggs, How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics; Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now. 46 47

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lifestyles that discourage competitiveness and multiply nongenetic investments in the well-being of generations.”50 Through the “unregulated and unruly” substance that is breast milk,51 Dobkin invites her audience to use the physical sense of taste as a means of participating in a broader network of human interdependence through acts that are simultaneously individual and communal. In response to the 2016 iteration of the work, Irina Aristarkhova describes how Lactation Station makes “breastfeeding a practice of maternal citizenship, and co-creating breast milk as a cultural artifact.”52 This point is significant as it draws attention to the entanglement of immanence and transcendence through the aesthetic encounter. Lactation Station functions as an explicit instance of where immanence and transcendence are not dialectical, but collapse into each other, challenging Emily Parker’s interpretation of immanence as a “mode of transcendence that is trapped in a denial of itself.”53 A number of scholars, including Nancy Bauer, Sarah LaChance Adams, and Sara Cohen Shabot, describe how Beauvoir’s philosophical framing enables transcendence in motherhood.54 For instance, LaChance Adams focuses on how Beauvoir’s understanding of ambiguity in The Second Sex and her other works instigate the acknowledgment of maternal  ambivalence as the clash between mother and child. She states: “recognizing this clash is the beginning of negotiating mutual transcendence— the only kind of transcendence that is really possible.”55 However, Alison Stone remains skeptical. She describes how Beauvoir presents an ideal for mothers as a mutual transcendence with the child, though this requires mothers to exercise transcendence in the public world so that they can allow, indeed assist, their children to transcend them without  thereby feeling threatened or destroyed […] However, this proposed way of combining transcendence and immanence still rests on

Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now, 130. Dobkin, “Performing with Mother’s Milk,” 70. 52 Aristarkhova, “Being of the Breast,” 97. 53 Parker, “Becoming Bodies,” 88. 54 See Nancy Bauer, “Simone de Beauvoir on Motherhood and Destiny,” in A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Nancy Bauer and Laura Hengehold, Blackwell Companions to Philosophy 65 (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley/Blackwell, 2017), 146–59; Sara Cohen Shabot, “Laboring with Beauvoir: In Search of the Embodied Subject in Childbirth,” in A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Nancy Hengehold Bauer and Laura Hengehold, 134–45, Blackwell Companions to Philosophy 65 (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley/Blackwell, 2017). 55 Sarah LaChance Adams, Mad Mothers, Bad Mothers, and What a “Good” Mother Would Do: The Ethics of Ambivalence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 188. 50 51

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the assumption that motherhood is a realm wholly or predominately of immanence; thus a mother can be good if she is able to embrace this condition of immanence by virtue of finding transcendence elsewhere.56 Stone acknowledges the nuances of Beauvoir’s treatment of the maternal and the significant contributions that she has made, especially her attention to the lived body in maternal embodied experience.57 At the same time, Stone argues that Beauvoir persists in undervaluing the significance of the “fleshy relations with others” in their capacity to explore the “creativity inherent in our bodies.”58 Instead of trapping mothers in states of immanence, Stone emphasizes how the embodied maternal “discloses our fundamental ambiguity […] and the constitutive and corporeal character of our bonds with others.”59 Here Stone points to Beauvoir’s attachment to the hierarchical contrast of transcendence and immanence as articulated through her points regarding lived maternal experience and ambiguity presented in The Second Sex. In contrast, Stone argues immanence and maternity are more significant than Beauvoir acknowledges. As previously noted, Stone asserts that Western understandings of the subject are rooted in opposition to the maternal body, where subjectivity becomes possible only through rejection of this body.60 Stone’s argument that maternal subjects “generate meanings and acquire agency from their place in maternal body relations”61 is important for challenging the illusion of the body/mind dichotomy, as the maternal subject is one formed through, not in spite of, embodied relations with others. As a form of subjectivity that is immanent with bodily relations, the maternal is always present and not restricted to just the mother, but anyone who is dependent on a maternal caregiver. Bodily relations include caring for another person’s bodily needs— feeding, defecation, cleansing, sleep, and so forth—but also the intense bodily proximity associated with caring for young children. An infant must be carried with the head supported and placed in particular positions, such as on its back when sleeping and on its front for set periods to support the development of the neck. As children grow, they reach, they grab, they cling, they desire to be

Alison Stone, “Beauvoir and the Ambiguities of Motherhood,” in A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Nancy Bauer and Laura Hengehold (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2017), 129. 57 Alison Stone, An Introduction to Feminist Philosophy (Cambridge, UK, and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2007), 175–8; Stone, “Beauvoir and the Ambiguities of Motherhood,” 132. 58 Stone, “Beauvoir and the Ambiguities of Motherhood,” 132. 59 Ibid. 60 Stone, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity, 1. 61 Ibid., 3. 56

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lifted and held. Breathing patterns merge in time through skin-to-skin contact as pulse rates steady through the sharing of bodies. There is an intimacy and sensuality that is not sexual, but the haptic comfort of being close to another human being. I recall nights where I would sleep with my daughter next to me, facing each other, but when I turned my body away, perhaps just moving to a more comfortable position, I would hear her cry out, as if she could sense abandonment through the shift in body heat. As someone who breastfed on demand until each child was two, I felt the limits of my body intruded upon. First to satiate the cries of hunger, but later as hands grabbed me, pulling at my clothing for a taste of comfort; a reminder of a biological connection. Sometimes when breastfeeding, my daughter would become aggressive; grabbing my skin and pulling as she sucked, even grasping my throat. I winced in discomfort, yet let her continue to feed, even when my breasts felt as if they had run dry. Sometimes I would wonder if she was trying to crawl under my skin. The space between us had no boundaries. Lactation Station brings a degree of this closeness to adult relations, though in an aestheticized form that frames the act of consuming of another human’s milk in a nonsexual manner that is fundamentally intimate. Such corporeal melding is not restricted to instances of biological pregnancy. Jacqueline Rose describes the following experiences with her adopted daughter: Resting in the afternoon while my baby was asleep, in the days after bringing her home, I would suddenly jolt awake at the sensation that she was lying on top of me, only to realize that she was in fact inside me – a close-on crazy thought of overwhelming delight – whereupon I would drift back into sleep. I was going through an inverse pregnancy, moving backwards in time, letting her in, or rather, it felt, her claiming her place as she crawled inside my body and into my blood-stream. Had anyone told me in advance that this was an experience common to adopting mothers – not that I had heard of it before or indeed have I since – I have no doubt I would have lain awake waiting, fruitlessly, for it to happen.62 The boundaries between bodies blur through acts of corporeal care. While the bodily relations of caring for a newborn bring such dependency to the fore, the corporeal entanglements of human beings continue throughout our lives. The servicing of basic bodily needs entails reliance upon others in

62 Jacqueline Rose, Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty, Kindle (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), loc. 2451–7.

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some form or another. Not just maternal subjectivity, therefore, is understood as embodied, but subjectivity more generally speaking must be treated as enmeshed in immanent, bodily relations. Rather than considering these embodied experiences as trapped transcendence, artists like Dobkin explore the potential of transcendence “in precisely the places that it looks simply impossible to happen.”63 Here, maternal immanence becomes the means of engaging with transcendence, destabilizing their hierarchical relationship and proving how the two are more entangled than Beauvoir presents. Instead of the maternal body restricting freedom to capacities of reproduction, breast milk becomes a shared cultural artifact, underscoring flesh as vital to the connections we make with other humans in ways that are not restricted to romanticizations of care that place the mother under erasure in service of her children.

Digital transcendence Immanence and transcendence have taken on new dimensions through the advent of computing technology, specifically with the rise of digital networks including the internet and later social media. During the 1990s when the internet became more omnipresent and accessible, cyberfeminist theorists considered how networked capabilities allow for a transcendence of limits imposed on the physical body. Cyberfeminism is a term coined by Sadie Plant in 1994 to describe feminists who theorize, critique, and exploit the internet. These thinkers, artists, and makers countered presumptions that digital technologies and computers are a masculine creation.64 The hope was that with the absence of bodily cues, transcendence through the internet could enable liberation for women not possible in the hierarchical structures of patriarchal society. Plant argued that a “genderquake” occurred in the late twentieth century, where patterns of work in the capitalist economy shifted from continuous full-time employment with undeviating progression, to more discontinuous part-time work.65 Historically, women have worked in such capacities, placing them, according to Plant, in a position to benefit from such changes. In addition, changes in gender and sexuality became more pronounced as LGBTQIA+ individuals became more visible, increased

Baraitser, Enduring Time, 14. Mia Consalvo, “Cyberfeminism,” in Sage Encyclopedia of New Media, ed. Steve Jones (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2002), 109. 65 Plant, Zeros + Ones, 40. 63 64

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access to contraception and abortion meant greater choice and flexibility in procreation, and gender identity and expressions became more fluid. As Plant states: “anything claiming to be normal had become peculiar.”66 Such a state of disruption could be perceived as an opportunity to undermine dominating apparatuses of control. The virtual invites multiplicity and a means of transcending the limits of corporeal immanence. As Plant points out, “one individual can become a population explosion on the Net: many sexes, many species.”67 It is important to note that personal agency is key to this process of cultivating novel subjectivities. Judy Wajcman criticizes cyberfeminism as neglecting the continued significance of embodiment and placing too much emphasis on technology as enabling freedom: “Cyberfeminism may appear to be anarchist and antiestablishment, but, in effect, it requires for its performances all the latest free-market American capitalist gizmos.”68 Thomas LaMarre argues that the cyborg  approach, which arose as a means of challenging the opposition of humans to technology, ultimately relies on the blurring of these distinctions while perpetuating their dichotomous opposition.69 Too much emphasis is placed on the capacity of the virtual self as a rejection of the body. Julie R. DeCook also critiques cyberfeminism, specifically Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto.” While the cyborg body was meant to “transcend boundaries,” digital technologies may have “further reified and cemented these differences rather than usurping them—and, as recent conversations have begun to point out, this extends beyond gender and affects subjectivity and embodied notions of sexuality, race, and ability.”70 In particular, DeCook challenges the unacknowledged whiteness that is implicit to the cyborg identity, which is posited as being universal: “the concept of the cyborg has continued to allow for the centering of whiteness and white identity and a technoutopic worldview where technology is seen to be emancipatory, rather than oppressive.”71 Moreover, DeCook argues that it is important to understand the limits of the cyborg identity while acknowledging how this identity perpetuates oppressive institutions, particularly toward poor, racialized, and sexual minoritized groups.72 Ibid., 43. Ibid., 46. 68 Wajcman, TechnoFeminism, 73. 69 LaMarre, “Afterward: Humans and Machines,” 79. 70 Julia R DeCook, “A [White] Cyborg’s Manifesto: The Overwhelmingly Western Ideology Driving Technofeminist Theory,” Media, Culture & Society, September 28, 2020, 2, doi:10.1177/0163443720957891. 71 Ibid., 4. 72 Ibid., 5. 66 67

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As an alternative, Uri McMillan proposed the notion of the avatar in relation to technology, embodiment, and the body through his analysis of Black feminist performance, where “black performance art’s usage of the black body as its artistic medium is especially loaded when confronting a historical legacy of objectification and the generations of slaves who did not legally own the bodies they acted with.”73 He incorporates the figure of the avatar as a medium, between the physical and the virtual where “deployment of avatars in these performances, however, extends beyond mere mimesis; instead, these avatars are a means of highlighting (and stretching) the subordinate roles available to black women.”74 In the various performances he evaluates, including Adrian Piper’s cross-dressing persona “The Mythic Being” (1973–5), Howardena Pindell’s personification of white privilege in Free, White, and 21 (1980), and Nicki Minaj’s doubling in Kanye West’s music video “Monster” (2012), McMillan emphasizes how the critical capacity of the avatar is its ability to fold back onto itself as both embodied and disembodied, engaging with lived memory. McMillan’s treatment of the avatar dissolves the online/offline distinction, which is consistent with Legacy Russell’s principles of glitch feminism.75 The potential for subversion does not occur through transcendence, but the ambivalent and paradoxical relationship between immanence and transcendence that digital subjectivity entails, and in accordance with McMillan and Russell, potentially dissolves. Since the late twentieth century, when cyberfeminism developed, transcendence has manifested itself through the increased prominence of computing, though in ways that earlier scholars did not anticipate. The collective Laboria Cuboniks acknowledges the idealism of cyberfeminism, pointing out that during the 1990s, internet platforms were predominantly text based, which broke from the dominance on the visual that codified expressions of identity, enabling the explorations that Plant celebrated. However, this changed with the growing popularity of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and the advent of social media, which reintroduced reliance on the visual as the primary mode of negotiating communication.76 With the emergence of big data and the Internet of Things, data relating to specific individuals is captured, abstracted, and sold, becoming one of the most significant marketable resources of the twenty-first century. The increased use of internet-enabled electronic devices along with the popularity of social media as a means of volunteering

73 Uri McMillan, Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance, (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 8. 74 Ibid., 12. 75 Russell, Glitch Feminism. 76 Laboria Cuboniks, The Xenofeminist Manifesto (London and Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2018), 75.

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personal, geographic, and biometric information has led to the transcendence of human beings from flesh and blood bodies to data that is collected and analyzed for use in marketing products, political campaigning, the functioning of urban infrastructure in smart cities, the tracking of disease during the Covid-19 pandemic, and more. The result is that more and more individualizing characteristics, including the assignment of gender, race, class, citizenship, and even health are algorithmically determined.77 Through digital networks, subjects become dynamic categories that are defined through algorithmic relations, resulting in the simultaneous existence of multiple planes of identity that are interconnected, with digitally manifest forms of individuals created through unknown algorithms developed by institutions, such as government agencies, for instance the US National Security Agency (NSA), and corporations including Google, Facebook, and (now defunct) Cambridge Analytica. John Cheney-Lippold describes how these datafied selves transcend lived experience, but for capitalist purposes, where “algorithmic agents make us and make the knowledges that compose us, but they do so on their own terms.”78 Algorithmic mediation involves asymmetries of relations between the individual as human subject and data objects, where agency is usurped. Moreover, it has become apparent that digital transcendence has not brought about the liberation of identity as Plant anticipated, since it lacks the key component of user agency. These limitations are experienced through the moderation and mediation of gendered and sexed bodies on social media, including whose bodies are deemed inappropriate through censorship. As noted previously, Beauvoir engages with a phenomenological methodology that treats the body as an instrument. She argues throughout The Second Sex that sexist patriarchal societies limit the instrumentality of the female body, which is experienced as out of place. As such, the “world as revealed through the feminine body is not a practical world ready-to-hand.”79 Moments of breakdown, or incompatibilities between female bodies and masculinist frameworks, reveal the broader incapacities of these systems to accommodate and accept female and maternal bodies. Micol Hebron’s Internet Acceptable Male Nipple Template (2014) makes these failures evident (see Figure 4.3). The project started in 2014 when Hebron posted a digital pasty of a male nipple on her Facebook account that could be used to cover female nipples. Female nipples are deemed offensive

Cheney-Lippold, We Are Data, xii. Ibid., 11. 79 Sara Heinämaa, “The Body as Instrument and as Expression,” in The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Claudia Card (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 80. 77 78

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FIGURE 4.3  Male Nipple Pasty Meme (2015), remastered 2021, Micol Hebron. Courtesy of the artist.

on certain social media platforms, most notably Facebook and Instagram, while male nipples are acceptable. The cropped nipple, an organ without a body that is identified as male, is indistinguishable from a female nipple at such close range, functioning as a humorous commentary that highlights the mediation of “offending” female bodies online. The male nipple in this context is a virtual body, with the only indication of sex being linguistic (a delightful presentation of Judith Butler’s theorizations of gender as performative),80 existing as a cropped digital image that is used to censor female bodies through

See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999).

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their overlay, while simultaneously deeming these bodies as acceptable for presentation on social media. At the time Hebron created the project, female nipples were banned outright on Facebook and Instagram, though concessions were later made for “brelfies,” or breastfeeding images.81 Tina Kinsella highlights how even with such exceptions, which are limited to a baby “actively breastfeeding” or “latched on” while feeding, Hebron’s project highlights a contradiction pertaining to female breasts, where there is a “double bind that eroticizes the female breast through hyper-visualization while simultaneously banishing the maternal nipple from visibility.”82 Female breasts are accepted on social media when sexualized through the prominent display of cleavage, but the display of the nipple—the site of lactation that is affiliated with the maternal—on these same platforms is considered inappropriate. Kinsella argues that in this way, Hebron’s nipple pasty project highlights anxieties around breastfeeding in public, since it is the nipples, and not the breasts, that are deemed offensive.83 Notably, images affiliated with Chang’s Milk Debt were banned both on Facebook and YouTube.84 In her comprehensive analysis of commercial-content moderation, Sarah Roberts draws attention to the many invisible, yet significant, workers who are responsible for reviewing user-generated content and deeming it acceptable or unacceptable for continued presence on social media platforms. These platforms rely on copious amounts of user-generated content, though their corporate structures influence what is deemed appropriate. Commercialcontent moderators spend time reviewing all content that is flagged as inappropriate, which entails reviewing violent, pornographic, racist, and otherwise problematic content, including footage from war zones. Roberts points out how this practice tends to be “hidden and imperceptible. For the most part, users cannot significantly influence or engage with it, and typically do not know that it is even taking place.”85 Despite the invisibility

Tina Kinsella, “The Artistic Practice of Micol Hebron: Provoking a Performative Heuristics of the Maternal Body,” in Inappropriate Bodies: Art, Design, and Maternity, ed. Rachel Epp Buller and Charles Reeve (Bradford, ON: Demeter Press, 2019), 92. 82 Ibid., 94. That is not to state that lactation is never considered erotic, as Britni de la Cretaz discusses in their article regarding “adult nursing relationships” or ANR. Britni De La Cretaz, “Inside the World of Adult Breastfeeding,” Rolling Stone, August 26, 2016, accessed November 27, 2021, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/inside-the-misunderstood-worldof-adult-breastfeeding–249376/. 83 Kinsella, “The Artistic Practice of Micol Hebron,” 93. 84 18th Street Arts Center, “PATTY CHANG | MILK DEBT.” 85 Sarah T. Roberts, Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 14. 81

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of its presence, commercial-content moderation plays a significant role in shaping the landscape of social media.86 The judgments made by moderators are consistent with private interests, and for companies based in Silicon Valley such as Facebook and YouTube, are informed by the politics, legislation, social and cultural norms of the United States. Discernments are also highly influenced by libertarian ideology, masculine superiority, and white racial monochronism that dominates Silicon Valley culture.87 In addition, as Roberts argues, commercial-content moderation is a key aspect of social media brand management.88 The intention is not so much protection of users, but protection of the brand. On both Facebook and Instagram, images can be reported as offensive, making it a possible tactic of mother shaming, which happened to writer Britni de la Cretaz in 2013 when one of their social media “friends” reported an image of them breastfeeding their 14-month-old child. The photograph was not deemed inappropriate by Facebook, since it was a breastfeeding photograph and nipple was not present, in accordance with their community guidelines. De la Cretaz’s story went viral when they reposted the image and it was reported several more times, leading to claims of inappropriate displays of public nudity as the story spread. Even though de la Cretaz is comfortable with breastfeeding in public, they report in an interview about their experience how “it felt like I was being sent a message that my body or my mothering or my feeding of my child was something I needed to be shamed for.”89 Both Hebron’s project and de la Cretaz’s experience convey how virtual bodies do not transcend corporeality, but are entwined with the mediation of bodies both on- and offline. The tensions surrounding the policing of female nipples on social media platforms, while pertaining to virtual images, are informed by social and cultural attitudes regarding bodies and impact the bodies of users through acts of censorship and the blocking of accounts. Images of bodies are deemed acceptable or unacceptable for circulation, and in this context, point to the tensions regarding public breastfeeding in the United States along with societies and cultures around the globe. Hebron’s project also highlights how social media platforms are dependent on perpetuating binary gender categories, since the offensiveness of nipples Ibid. See Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture; Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley: A Memoir (London: 4th Estate, 2020); Roisin Kiberd, The Disconnect: A Personal Journey through the Internet, Main edition (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2021). 88 Roberts, Behind the Screen, 104. 89 Jessica Levy, “The Internet Mom-Shamed Me. Here’s What Happened Next.,” Redbook, May 31, 2017, accessed November 27, 2021, https://www.redbookmag.com/life/mom-kids/a50529/viralmom-shaming/. 86 87

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is tied to gender. While the advent of the internet and increased ubiquity of digital technologies in communication has increased the visibility of gender fluidity, this exposure is coupled with the codification of biases through quantification. For instance, even though Facebook offers increased options for gender identity, even enabling people to enter what they wish in terms of gender and pronoun use, at the back-end users are coded as either male or female, perpetuating dominant norms and values while providing illusions of inclusivity.90 The collective Laboria Cuboniks, who developed Xenofeminism, a concept of feminist solidarity with alienation and gender abolition, state: If “cyberspace” once offered the promise of escaping the strictures of essentialist identity categories, the climate of contemporary social media has swung forcefully in the other direction, and has become a theatre where these prostrations to identity are performed. With these curatorial practices come puritanical rituals of moral maintenance, and these stages are too often overrun with the disavowed pleasures of accusation, shaming, and denunciation.91 Despite these reaffirmations of gender difference that have been used as the basis to perpetuate patriarchal dominance, gender and sexed distinctions are not as dichotomous as presumed to be under binary models. For instance, the capacity to lactate is not restricted to gender despite the fact, as Kinsella points out, “the breastfeeding mother usually appears as a part of the iconography that equates women with having a natural propensity for motherhood simply because of her biological capacity,”92 as certain trans men and transmasculine individuals who have had their breasts removed are still capable of nursing or “chestfeeding.”93 As Hebron’s project makes evident, social media networks are complicit in reaffirming binary gender difference, even when they appear to invite increased fluidity, challenging superficial celebrations of digital transcendence such as the apparent acceptance of a range of gender identities on Facebook. Rather, human engagement with digital technology encompasses both transcendence and immanence. Instead of treating them as hierarchical, with transcendence being considered superior, taking

90 Sasha Costanza-Chock, Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020), 49. 91 Cuboniks, The Xenofeminist Manifesto, 47. 92 Kinsella, “The Artistic Practice of Micol Hebron,” 94. 93 See Trevor MacDonald et al., “Transmasculine Individuals’ Experiences with Lactation, Chestfeeding, and Gender Identity: A Qualitative Study,” BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth 16, no. 1 (May 16, 2016): 106, doi:10.1186/s12884-016-0907-y.

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an embodied approach to technology, emphasizing how it is co-constitutive with bodies via Simondon’s thinking, can highlight its enmeshment with immanence. An embodied approach to technology does not focus on the ways in which these tools can transcend the corporeal, but engages with the rich complexities of the physical body in conjunction with how technology alters embodied experience (and vice versa). Legacy Russell argues that the utopic possibilities of the internet, however, should not be so quickly dismissed. Coming from the stance of a Black, queer, femme-identifying body, she argues how “imbuing digital material with fantasy today is not a retro act of mythologizing; it continues on a survival mechanism.”94 As noted in Chapter 2, Russell articulates how the critical significance of the glitch is not from its digital manifestation, but from using glitch to close the loop between online and “away from keyboard” (AFK). This process enables a glitching of the body: “Glitched bodies—those that do not align with the canon of white cisgender heteronormativity—pose a threat to social order.”95 The glitch, therefore, enables an occupation of technology through rupture.96 What happens when pregnancy, which tends to be treated as the epitome of the maternal as female embodiment through art and visual culture, is decoupled from the presumptions and prescriptions of gender?

Glitching pregnancy Advances in medicine and biotechnologies in recent decades, coupled with greater visibility and, to a certain degree, acceptance of transgender folk, has meant that categories of sex and gender are more dynamic. As a result, there has been an increase in pregnant men, or transgender and transmasculine individuals who retain female reproductive organs, thereby becoming pregnant and giving birth as men. What is striking about these experiences is not just how the pregnant man enables the decoupling of gender from pregnancy and birth, which is significant, but also how these stories and experiences are circulated through media channels, including social media. One such individual is Trystan Reese. He initially shared his story of pregnancy through Facebook and the parenting podcast, The Shortest Longest Time.97

Russell, Glitch Feminism, 22. Ibid., 25. 96 Ibid., 28. 97 Hillary Frank, “The Accidental Gay Parents, 5,” The Longest Shortest Time, November 22, 2017, accessed March 19, 2021, https://longestshortesttime.com/episode-144-the-accidental-gayparents-5-update. 94 95

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I first heard his story on the storytelling podcast Risk! and was struck not just by his experiences of becoming pregnant, giving birth, and raising children (he was already the father of two adopted children with his partner Biff before gestating his third child), but how sharing these stories through social media, podcasts, and other digital media channels influenced these experiences.98 That is, Reese’s subjectivity as a pregnant person was both influenced by and challenges the quantifying structures of obstetric medicine and social media. He interrupts the relationship between immanence and transcendence through his digital storytelling as a performance that negotiates the online and away from keyboard loop. His story reveals these structures while spilling over their limits, and at the same time unlinks the feminine from pregnancy while deconstructing the social norms and expectations that define a pregnant person and gestational parent as a mother by glitching pregnancy. Trystan Reese and Biff Chaplow first appeared on the parenting podcast The Longest Shortest Time in 2016, which became the multipart series “The Accidental Gay Parents.” Over four episodes, Reese and Chaplow tell their story of becoming adoptive parents to the children of Chaplow’s sister.99 Soon after, they decided to gestate a child. Reese was assigned female at birth and raised as a girl, then began aligning his body to his gender through hormones while retaining his reproductive anatomy. After the couple told their story on a fifth episode of the podcast, while Reese was still pregnant, it was picked up by mainstream media channels. At that stage, Reese had cultivated an online presence, including a Facebook page under the moniker “Biff and I,” where he shared his experiences of pregnancy and parenting. However, having the story featured in major media outlets, such as Cosmopolitan Magazine and The Daily Mail tabloid, increased his visibility, causing unsolicited trolling and harassment while he was six-months pregnant. Note that I am focusing on Reese’s storytelling in this analysis, which functions as a digital performance, as opposed to an ethnographic analysis. This analysis is based on his social media posts, initially Facebook and later Instagram, and podcast presentations. Instead of constituting a singular narrative, Reese’s stories exist as a digital constellation, which include a mix of live stage performances that are recorded and digitally shared as podcasts, news articles, and social media updates, but also responses and criticisms of

98 Kevin Allison, “Rarities,” RISK! Storytelling Podcast & Live Show, June 17, 2019, accessed November 27, 2021, http://risk-show.com/podcast/rarities/. 99 Hillary Frank, “The Accidental Gay Parents,” The Longest Shortest Time, June 24, 2015, accessed March 19, 2021, https://longestshortesttime.com/podcast-60-accidental-gay-parents; Trystan Reese, How We Do Family: From Adoption to Trans Pregnancy, What We Learned about Love and LGBTQ Parenthood (New York: The Experiment, 2021).

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others through comments, emails, and other means of expressing opinions online. This constellation is varied, but incomplete, as Reese discloses only certain details, both online and AFK. Through this process of storytelling across different digital media channels and platforms, Reese is crafting a narrative of pregnancy and family that is fragmented yet interconnected. Gaps exist in this story through gestures of selective disclosure, which include the modifications of behaviors in different contexts. Even though Reese would document his pregnancy, writing and presenting images about it on the “Biff and I” Facebook page, he did not always engage in such open acts of visibility AFK. For instance, in an image uploaded on April 13, 2017, Reese posted two pictures of himself—one with him wearing a scarf and puffy vest where his pregnancy bump is not visible, with the text on the bottom reading “On the Bus” and a second without the outerwear, making his bump visible, with the accompanying text “At Work.” The online space of social media enables Reese to make his pregnancy visible in a way he may not do in other contexts. Through posting this image, Reese is making evident how he may engage in acts of obfuscation while in public places AFK, which cis women who do not want their pregnancy to be visible and known to others also practice. However, there are particular implications for trans pregnancy that cis women do not have to face, including the questioning and the challenging of gender identity both online and AFK, as comments on Reese’s post made evident. Such strategies of selective disclosure are not uncommon in trans experience, though become exasperated in pregnancy through the conflation of the feminine with gestation. Simon Ellis has published a number of studies on the topic of conception, pregnancy, and birth for trans and gender-variant parents. In one study regarding trans men and transmasculine patient experience, they state: Loneliness was the overarching theme that permeated participants’ experiences, social interactions, and emotional responses during every stage of achieving biologic parenthood. Within this context of loneliness, participants described complex internal and external processes of navigating identity. Navigating identity encapsulated two subthemes: undergoing internal struggles and engaging with the external world.100 These observations of loneliness experienced by Ellis et al.’s study participants is coupled with the sensationalism of transgender pregnancy, most notably Simon Adriane Ellis, Danuta M. Wojnar, and Maria Pettinato, “Conception, Pregnancy, and Birth Experiences of Male and Gender Variant Gestational Parents: It’s How We Could Have a Family,” Journal of Midwifery & Women’s Health 60, no. 1 (January 2015): 62, doi:10.1111/jmwh.12213.

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featuring Thomas Beatie in 2007 as the first legally recognized man in the United States to give birth,101 transforming “what for trans men, as for all parents having children, should be a personal and intimate experience.”102 On the podcast Risk!, Reese quantifies his visibility, indicating how he and Chaplow are an example of “safe” queers.103 That is, even though they are a queer couple, with one a visibly pregnant trans man, they minimized their physical affection and restrained behaviors while presenting on major media outlets to avoid triggering homophobic and transphobic responses, cultivating a “perfect transperson demeanor” designed to make their audience comfortable with their presence.104 Further examination of details that Reese discloses on social media suggests navigations of identity that Ellis et al. describe. As they point out, there is “some degree of conflict […] between the internal sense of self and dominant social norms that define a pregnant person as woman and a gestational parent as mother.”105 These varied performances of the self that depend on the situation of disclosure are instances of negotiating the terrain of such conflict while pointing out how visibility does not always have to be consistent, encompassing what Hil Malatino describes as trans care. This process involves “the practice of learning when and how to camouflage oneself, when and how to sidestep visibility, to not be seen or to be seen only fleetingly, flittingly, in order to evade identification, to avoid being clocked.”106 Reese is engaging with what Ellis describes as a “‘menu’ of disclosure choices, including: active nondisclosure (hiding), passive nondisclosure (passing, allowing assumptions), or active self-disclosure (telling, being open).”107 Such measures function as a means of protecting the self within the treacherous intersection of societal norms of pregnancy combined with mainstream discourse regarding the transgender body, both of which are already invasive and highly fraught embodied negotiations of subjectivity. Erving Goffman observes in his classic study that examines everyday social interactions through the lens of theater studies that we regularly engage in impression management within different situations, depending on the context,

101 Thomas Beatie, Labor of Love: The Story of One Man’s Extraordinary Pregnancy (New York: Seal Press, 2009). 102 Juno Obedin-Maliver and Harvey J Makadon, “Transgender Men and Pregnancy,” Obstetric Medicine 9, no. 1 (March 2016): 6, doi:10.1177/1753495X15612658. 103 Allison, “Rarities.” 104 Ibid. 105 Ellis, Wojnar, and Pettinato, “Conception, Pregnancy, and Birth Experiences of Male and Gender Variant Gestational Parents,” 64. 106 Hil Malatino, Trans Care (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 28. 107 Ellis, Wojnar, and Pettinato, “Conception, Pregnancy, and Birth Experiences of Male and Gender Variant Gestational Parents,” 67.

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region, and others that are present, as we participate in cycles of “concealment, discovery, false revelation, and rediscovery.”108 While he originally presented these ideas during the 1950s, his concepts have received renewed recognition as a means of interpreting practices of self-management online, “with the subject being progressively erased, redefined, and reinscribed as a persona/ performer within the proscenium arch of the computer monitor.”109 Shoshana Zuboff argues that social media has altered Goffman’s initial propositions, which included a distinction between front region, much like the stage set, and back region or backstage. She describes how in the twenty-first century, the backstage as a region where one could be their true selves is shrinking: “Experience is seamlessly rendered across the once-reliable borders of the virtual and real worlds.”110 Zuboff focuses on the consequences of this shift in terms of surveillance capitalism, as even our most intimate activities becomes datafied and available for fiscal extraction. Zuboff’s conclusion where “ubiquitous connection means that the audience is never far, and this fact brings all the pressures of the hive into the world and the body,” describes a virtual transcendence that occurs as the immanent body is subsumed through datafication.111 While this is accurate to an extent, such an interpretation is reductive when considering the complexities of navigating identity in trans pregnancy. The body seems to dissolve through the process Zuboff describes; trans pregnancy draws attention back to the fleshy relations of meatspace. The management of self through social media is not a way to transcend the pregnant body, but functions as immanent performances that make situations habitable, much like Iris Marion Young’s response to Beauvoir’s critique of the immanence of domestic labor.112 However, unlike Young’s analysis where such activities occur within the private sphere of the home, Reese’s selective disclosures—such as showing images that display how he may obscure his pregnant body on the bus but reveal it online—treat his immanent activities of pregnancy as the impetus for his digital storytelling project. As with the work of Patty Chang and Jess Dobkin where the expression and consumption of breast milk is the instigator for aesthetic experience, Reese’s presentation of

Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 8. Dixon, Digital Performance, 3–4. Also refer to danah boyd, “Why Youth [Heart] Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life,” in Youth, Identity, and Digital Media, ed. David Buckingham, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 119–42; Bernie Hogan, “The Presentation of Self in the Age of Social Media: Distinguishing Performances and Exhibitions Online,” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 30, no. 6 (December 2010): 377–86, doi:10.1177/0270467610385893. 110 Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 472. 111 Ibid. 112 Young, “House and Home.” 108 109

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his pregnancy as a digital performance functions as another instance where the immanent and the transcendent merge. While Reese and Chaplow’s management of their interactions and performances of the self through media situations may have diverted some more explicit transphobic and homophobic responses, they still experienced hostility and prejudice. For instance, Reese was subjected to a certain scrutiny of the spectacle, which included calmly responding to “really fucked up questions,” including questions about breastfeeding and conception, to satisfy fascination with the trans body.113 While pregnant cis women may be asked questions along these lines, Reese being transgender meant that such questions are more invasive. Mia Fischer critically analyzes the double bind that transgender people experience through increased visibility during the twenty-first century. In 2014, Time magazine declared that there has been a “transgender tipping point,” featuring openly trans actor Laverne Cox on the cover. Increased scrutiny soon followed this celebration of trans identity, with the passage of “bathroom bills” in states across the United States and other legal efforts to restrict a person’s gender to what they were declared at birth.114 People commented on articles about Reese and images on social media (including posts he shared and others shared about him), with some indicating their confusion in attempting to understand trans pregnancy. For some people this may be their first exposure to trans pregnancy. The structural qualities and algorithmic affordances of social media frame how Reese shares his story and how his story is shared, with the comments of others contributing to this growing narrative. Emphasis on personal disclosure contribute a sense of familiar intimacy that welcomes engagement as one would with a friend. At the same time, the format may provoke people to crudely respond, manifest as online bullying. Reese describes how increased media attention exposed him to transphobia that he had not yet experienced on such a scale: I had never truly grasped the level of transphobia that existed in the world. And I was ashamed that it had taken me so long to wake up to it. This is what my trans women friends had spent years yelling about. It’s not that I hadn’t believed them when they told me stories of victimization and violence; I did! But I didn’t viscerally understand their experiences until the full weight of this hatred was directed at me, and I completely caved beneath it.115

Allison, “Rarities.” Mia Fischer, Terrorizing Gender: Transgender Visibility and the Surveillance Practices of the U.S. Security State (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019), 1–6. 115 Reese, How We Do Family, 149. 113 114

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Online harassment is experienced through the viscerality of the immanent pregnant body. Reese describes how the increased media attention impacted his pregnancy, where “the every-once-in-awhile message of disgust from strangers quickly became a torrent of negativity. Every buzz of my phone brought a new level of nastiness—someone else calling me ‘a fucking cancer on this planet’ and ‘a disgusting circus freak.’”116 Trolling and other forms of online harassment challenge illusions of transcending prejudice through the internet, as these communication networks cultivate new means of oppression that are “intensified and amplified in online environments.”117 Like the violence of Cheang’s Brandon, there is a challenge posed here to the material and virtual split.118 Reese recounts how this made him feel that his “pregnancy had to go perfectly,”119 which led him to request an ultrasound at every appointment. Other impacts he mentions are sleeplessness and nightmares.120 While experiencing increased anxiety during pregnancy is not uncommon—I recall my own sensations of confusion and feeling out of control of the biological processes happening within me while pregnant— such experiences for Reese are compounded through transphobia and general lack of understanding surrounding trans bodies,121 including limited research and medical literature concerning trans pregnancy, despite the fact that it is not as atypical as presumed.122 Thus, the trans pregnant body does not dissolve or is subsumed through the virtual, but retains embodied and immanent significance. These influence and are informed through Reese’s digital storytelling. The distinctions between technology and embodiment, transcendence and immanence blur through the immanence of technology and transcendence with embodiment. Trans pregnancy as presented as a digital performance creates moments that are experienced through an aesthetics of interruption, where the body and pregnancy are “glitched” through processes of individuation that occur through interconnections online and AFK. Reese’s digital performance and the online bullying he receives reveals the limits of pregnancy and social media channels as quantified discourse. As Sasha Costanza-Chock indicates: “larger systems—including norms, values, and assumptions—are encoded in

Ibid., 147. Debbie Ging and Eugenia Siapera, “Special Issue on Online Misogyny,” Feminist Media Studies 18, no. 4 (July 4, 2018): 518–19, doi:10.1080/14680777.2018.1447345. 118 Kennedy, “Across the Nebraska Border and the Virtual-Material Divide,” 197. 119 Reese, How We Do Family, 144. 120 Ibid., 148. 121 Ibid., 103. 122 Obedin-Maliver and Makadon, “Transgender Men and Pregnancy,” 5–6. 116 117

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and reproduced through the design of sociotechnical systems.”123 The implicit interconnections of the social with the technical tend to be rendered invisible under the veneer of sleek design interfaces. Moments of breakdown include technological breakdowns as well as moments of what Costanza-Chock refers as disaffordances (when users’ actions are blocked or constrained) and dysaffordances (when a user must misidentify in order to access functions) that accompany discriminatory design.124 For instance, Costanza-Chock opens their book with a discussion of the scrutiny they face in airport security as a nonbinary, trans, femme-presenting person, since the technical functionality of millimeter wave scanners is based on the operator’s selection of a person being either male or female. Social breakdown emerges where the use of technology is based on a limited understanding of gender that the machine requires to function, revealing the inherently discriminatory design of the millimeter wave scanner in Costanza-Chock’s anecdote that goes unnoticed to people who fit easily into identifiable gender categories. Trans pregnancy functions as another instance where discrimination is made evident through the breakdown of quantification, as understandings of reproduction are rooted in cisgender and heterosexual biases. Instead of treating social media as a mirror, which presumes the online double is distinct from the corporeal self, it is a constitutive tool: both transcendent and immanent. In this instance, Reese is a father who gestated his child, making the maternal strange as gestation is revealed as not being an inherently feminine experience. Through trans pregnancy, Reese’s body occupies a space of refusal that cannot be reduced to binary norms. Here, consistent with Russell’s thinking, the glitch transfers from the machine to the body.125 Russell appropriates and modifies Beauvoir’s famous adage when she states, “one is not born, but rather becomes, a body.”126 This revision brings back the lived body of Beauvoir’s phenomenology. The trans pregnant body is a body that “pose[s] a threat to social order. Range-full and vast, [it] cannot be programmed.”127 Thus, it becomes a means of undoing gender through its refusal to be reduced and the rupture it introduces between “recognized and recognizable.”128 Reese continues to experience confrontations regarding his pregnancy and gender. In an Instagram post from August 4, 2020, several years after giving

Costanza-Chock, Design Justice, 4. Ibid., 38. 125 Russell, Glitch Feminism, 8–9. 126 Ibid., 12. 127 Ibid., 25. 128 Ibid., 28. 123 124

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birth, Reese presents a picture of himself sitting down and smiling while heavily pregnant. In the text accompanying the post, he writes: I don’t know how to tell women that I am not a threat to them. That my ability to give birth doesn’t take away from their ability to give birth. […] “If I am a woman because I can give birth, but now men can give birth too, then what does that make me?” I cannot answer that question for you, because the ability to give birth should never have been the foundation for your identity to begin with. What about the choice not to birth? What about the inability to birth? What about the feminist idea that none of us is required to birth in order to secure our role as valuable human?129 Inclusion does not have to mean erasure of cis women, and as Reese points out, the decoupling of pregnancy from an essential woman’s identity does not undermine or threaten a cis woman’s or mother’s experience. In fact, such decoupling expands the possibilities of these identities. The problem is not transgender pregnancy, but sexism rooted in patriarchal dominance that is revealed through Reese’s presentation of his pregnancy on social media and other forms of digital storytelling. At the same time, digital storytelling functions as a way to share his experiences, making his identity as a trans pregnant person more habitable as he is able to connect with others, engaging in a visibility that he may not be able to always do so AFK. Early discussions surrounding transcendence and immanence centered on the split between digital technologies (cyberspace) and the material body (meatspace). During the 1990s, increased home access to the internet fueled what was primarily a bifurcated debate between techno-utopians and cyber-dystopians, though as Kennedy argues in her analysis of Cheang’s Brandon, more nuanced approaches to the relationships between humans and technology were present. Simone de Beauvoir’s phenomenological, existential considerations of immanence and transcendence enable a means of approaching this differently, since she continues to emphasize the significance of embodiment. However, Beauvoir treats transcendence and immanence in a hierarchical relationship, where the maternal as immanent is something to be left behind, resulting in a disdain toward maternal bodies. Through the analysis of artworks in this chapter, I have shown how transcendence is possible through—not in spite of—maternal immanence, and in manner that enables the mother to be treated as a relational subject in her own right, as opposed to being simply in service to the care of others.

Trystan Reese, Instagram post, 4 August 2020

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Cyberfeminists, such as Sadie Plant, argue how digital technologies could enable suppressed groups, such as women, to overcome discriminations connected to their embodied states through technological transcendence. However, the advent of big data and the rise of surveillance capitalism have ushered in a new phase of digital transcendence as datafied versions of our selves are being formed and utilized by government and corporate entities in ways that exceed our influence. These datafied shadow selves function as transcendent entities, but inform our embodied existence, influencing perceptions of race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, health, and other identifying categories connected to physical bodies. As such, digital technologies have enabled transcendence as envisioned by cyberfeminists, though in this iteration, transcendence is being controlled and managed through algorithms that outstrip individual agency. Transcending the body through cyberspace comes with risks and has not enabled the experiences of freedom for marginalized groups as previously envisioned. As Beauvoir’s thinking points out, transcendence is always already embodied. Legacy Russell’s glitch feminism proposes that the utopic possibilities of the cyberspace and digital technologies need not be disregarded, but can function as a means of glitching the body. Trystan Reese’s digital storytelling as a pregnant man closes the online and away from keyboard loop, while highlighting the ambivalence of digital networks, experienced as transcendence through the immanence of everyday, embodied performances.

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he ancient Greek myth of Medea continues to haunt and fascinate imaginations. Canonized in Euripides’ famous dramatic text, the story of Medea encapsulates the ultimate maternal taboo of filicide. Philosopher Stephen Asma describes her as “one of the most chilling characters of all time.”1 She has persisted for millennia, appearing in visual, literary, and performing arts of various forms. Susan Iles Johnston suggests “in confronting Medea, we confront our deepest feelings and realize that behind the delicate order we have sought to impose upon our world lurks chaos.”2 Twentieth- and twenty-first century reconsiderations of the myth, including artistic and literary interpretations from a feminist perspective, have shifted emphasis in the story from being simply the tale of a monstrous mother, to a woman entrapped in and degraded through social forces and interpersonal relations that ultimately left her in a position of psychological and emotional wreckage. Such considerations do not condone the act of murdering one’s children, though they do present more nuanced interpretations of Medea as a mother and a foreigner. Yara Travieso’s dance film La Medea (2017) is one such interpretation. However, La Medea is not a typical dance film; it was directed, performed, shot, and edited in real time and broadcast over the internet, integrating

Stephen Asma, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 54. 2 Sarah Iles Johnston, “Introduction,” in Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy, and Art, ed. James Joseph Clauss and Sarah Iles Johnston (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 17. 1

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audience participation in the theater and online. The story encapsulates the recognizable narrative of the myth, though through the lens of Latinx culture, described on Travieso’s website as a “Latin-disco-pop-feminist variety show.”3 It first premiered as part of the PS122 Coil Festival at BRIC House in Brooklyn, New York, in January 2017, and was broadcast on the internet livestreaming platform Twitch. La Medea functions as a celebration of the pluralist culture of the United States—a nation formed through colonial settlement and reinforced through centuries of immigration. In addition, it highlights the impacts that systemic sexism and racism have on the capacities to raise children in twenty-first-century neoliberal societies. The blend of language and dance styles by performers of different racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds, including dialogue delivered in a mix of Spanish and English, complements the immersive qualities of the live performance and the interconnections of dance with digital technologies. In this chapter, I consider how La Medea functions as a networked digital performance that is a creative response to maternal ambivalence. I then follow this with considerations of the role of social media in countering maternal isolation as knowledge sharing networks, including around birth through an analysis of Helen Knowles print series based on birthing videos shared on YouTube and as a means of connecting motherartists through the AMMAA (the Archive for Mapping Mother Artists in Asia). I examine the affordances and limits of social media networks in relation to maternal and digital subjectivity, focusing on ambivalence and developing different means of networked engagement, to be expanded in the following chapter. Staged in a black box theater, La Medea loosely takes the form of a television tell-all special, hosted by Mama Vaya Caos. The performance opens with the band, Jason and the Argonauts, presenting the back story of Medea and Jason, and how after helping Jason steal the Golden Fleece, Medea “left the sunny shores of her home / to be cast aside / no kinsmen and alone / a savage bride” (La Medea 2:28). Drawings illustrate the story, showing a pregnant Medea on the ground, walking alone, and then holding two small children with many disembodied eyes watching her. Even from the beginning of the production, Medea is presented as the foreigner who is alone yet scrutinized. The camera cuts away, revealing that these images are from a mural in the theater. The performance quickly moves between dance sequences and vignettes that tell the story of Medea as “one of the most controversial women in history,” according to Mama Vaya Caos, though

Yara Travieso, “La Medea,” Performances, 2017, accessed November 27, 2021, http://yaratravieso. com/performances.

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this version positions itself as getting behind the “hype” to show the “real story” of the “woman behind the myth” (La Medea 10:10). Throughout the production, Medea is presented as a woman—a mother—who is trying to hold it all together as her world falls apart. The story is told through a feminist lens that presents Medea as a complex character who manages to find empowerment even when subjected to sexism, racism, and xenophobia. This presentation is not a simple flipping of the story, but involves a dismantling of the myth through twenty-first-century systems of oppression and prejudice. In an interview with Miami Artzine in 2018, director Yara Travieso describes how she wanted to “dig deeper” into the Euripides story of Medea, which presents her as merely a vengeful monster. She states: “I wanted […] to embody Medea as a real person in a world that is improbably problematic to her.”4 Travieso does not just try to cultivate sympathy for Medea by telling the story from a different perspective. Rather, she constructs a telling of the story that is rich with paradox and maternal ambivalence, dissolving simplistic notions of good and bad mothers. La Medea also involves experiments of performing with digital technologies, drawing attention to the formal parameters of live production. For instance, camera operators moved through the crowd with the performers, as footage is presented on screens within the theater space and, after in situ editing, streamed online. These cameras did not just document actions, but the performers interacted with them through gestures and eye contact turning these machines into additional actors (see Figure 5.1). At the same time, the use of screens opened the performance space beyond the black box (see Figure 5.2), with some of the scenes taking place backstage and projected in the theater. Near the start of the performance, Mama Vaya Caos announces how the show is an “unprecedented event” being broadcast to “thousands of millions of people all around the world” (La Medea 8:56), referencing how it was being streamed online. She also declares that online audience members can pose questions to Medea through chat features. The interplay of performance with the affordances of technologies enables the production to occupy an amalgamated space that extends access while fashioning a unique aesthetic experience. Such features can be detected in the multiple audience perspectives and entry points for engagement. For instance, in an early segment of the performance, Medea has a flashback of helping Jason steal the Golden Fleece, killing her father and

Charlotte Libov, “‘La Medea’ Upends the Classic Greek ‘Medea,’” MAZ: Miami Art Zine, October 24, 2018, accessed November 27, 2021, https://www.miamiartzine.com/Features.php?op=Article_ La+Medea+Upends+the+Classic+Greek+Medea.

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brother, and then fleeing with him. A younger version of Medea moves through an illuminated tube of semitransparent cloth. A camera operator is with her as she dances with the camera lens, presenting a perspective that the audience in the theater can view on a screen. The shot from inside the cloth tube is what is streamed to the online audience who are unable to witness the actions that the audience members in the theater are able to perceive. This shot then cuts to a wider one in the theater, showing the fabric tussled into a simulation of ocean waves, displaying the theater audience’s perspective to the online audience. Both the camera and the screen play significant roles in the execution of this scene, which like the performance as a whole, is accomplished through the reciprocity of technology and gesture. Chris Salter describes how the use of projected imagery in theater productions extends back to the ancient Greeks.5 More recent changes and increased availability of moving image technologies build upon this history while transforming possibilities for live action. In the twentieth century, the advent of film and video gave rise to cinema and television, challenging the supremacy of live action and sent “theatre into a deep metaphysical crisis.”6 At the same time, the introduction of consumer video instigated new performance forms that can be detected in La Medea, introducing “new perceptual paradigms that uprooted longstanding assumptions about the relationships among screen, physical space, the live, and the recorded.”7 Instead of treating the capacity to manipulate and share time and space as a threat to live performance, the introduction of these new tools introduced new possibilities for performance. Projected video and other new media technologies became integrated into live action in the theater and other contexts, including the advent of Expanded Cinema in the mid-1960s and DJ/VJ clubs of the 1990s. Salter states: Viewers became witnesses to technological hybrids that detoured attention from the live actor in front of the projection surface to the play of pixels on the screen itself, transubstantiated by a new set of “performers”: both human digital alchemists as well as computers, mixers, and other interactive paraphernalia on the sidelines.8

Salter, Entangled, 113. Ibid., 115. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 5 6

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FIGURE 5.1  Rena Butler as Medea in La Medea, 2017. Directed by Yara Travieso. Photograph by Maria Baranova. Courtesy of the creators.

FIGURE 5.2 Shayla-Vie Jenkins as Medea in La Medea, 2017. Directed by Yara Travieso. Photograph by Darren Phillip Hoffman. Courtesy of the creators.

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These features are present throughout La Medea, which draw attention to various technologies used in the production as a means of driving the plot forward. In one sequence, there is a “backstage” interaction where Mama Vaya Caos confronts Medea, whose wrath is so great that she transforms into her own character—Vengeful Medea. The backstage interactions cut back to the live feed, which is shot over the shoulder of La Authentica (“the authentic one”), a male spirit-like figure who represents the true soul of Medea, creating a feedback loop of the scene as an image-in-image, like a televisual centipede. La Authentica breaks the tension with a fanning breath, stating: “what a performance!,” drawing attention to the merger of performance and reality that the show strives to encapsulate. This scene marks an emotional turning point in the performance as Mama Vaya Caos grasps the depths of Medea’s revenge plot. The visual qualities of the shot are uncanny due to the layering and feedback of the image, but also through the splintering of Medea into various characters. The interweaving of performance with technological apparatus culminates in the final death scene when Medea murders her children. The sequence begins with a transition of sonic cacophony to a soothing lullaby. Medea looks into the camera, touching the bottom of the lens with her fingers. The camera’s point of view shifts lower and upwards, looking at Medea like a small child gazing at his mother. All the performers, including the band’s singer, dance for the camera, waving their arms in gestures of welcome. They are not performing for the audience, but are trying to get two camera operators—who play the roles of the children—to join them. The cameras are taken from them as Medea leads them onto a small platform, where one of the cameras is now positioned on the ground. The children/camera operators lie down together as if going to sleep with their backs to the camera as the lullaby starts to become discordant. Medea looks directly into the camera and places her hand over the lens, though it is possible to see the children start to quiver and shake between her fingers. Medea then picks up the camera and stares directly into it. The notion of performing with and through technology is made explicit through these gestures, acknowledging the various perspectives and modes of engaging with the performance synchronously. The possibilities for live performance are extended through digital technologies, including the projected video within the theater and streamed video online. Interaction is not just between the performers and the audience, but performers, the audience and technical objects as well, taking on performance characteristics in their own right. The result is an aesthetic encounter that as a networked broadcast encompasses a milieu that extends action and synchronous engagement beyond the physical stage.

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The rise of networked broadcasting While La Medea is part of a more extensive genealogy of moving image and performance, Travieso takes advantage of new technological affordances of the twenty-first century: internet livestreaming. The first three performances of La Medea were presented on the platform Twitch, which gained notoriety since its emergence in 2012 as a site for livestreaming video game play. Twitch has greatly influenced the development of internet broadcasting, including the introduction of significant technological capacities that made it possible.9 Like other internet native media formats that support the production of user-generated content, Twitch has increased people’s capacity to produce content, while also facilitating access to content and forming networked audiences. Such processes are part of broader shifts in economic production, social interaction, and community connection, with the performing arts, along with other creative media and cultural industries, influenced by these changes on how people produce and consume content. The internet has enabled other ways to develop and promote artistic works with high production values, and a capacity to reach niche audiences in previously unforeseen ways. Such activities are not fringe occurrences, but as media scholar T.L. Taylor argues, have the possibility to glimpse into future trends of media industries. She states: “Live streaming intersects with conversations happening in Internet culture around user- created content, monetization, and forms of governance. It dovetails with broader analyses of media, especially around alternate production and distribution mechanisms,” cultivating what she refers to as “networked broadcast.”10 While Twitch initially developed as a platform for streaming video game play, the platform has come to be used in other ways including the production of creative works.11 The technological infrastructure and material capacities of Twitch made it an appropriate platform for an experimental dance performance like La Medea. A later iteration of the performance was presented in 2018 with Live Arts Miami at Miami Dade College in Florida and streamed over HowlRound Theatre Commons, a dedicated platform for theater and dance performances.12

T.L. Taylor, Watch Me Play: Twitch and the Rise of Game Live Streaming, (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018), 59–61. 10 Ibid., 38. 11 Ibid., 6 and 9. 12 Yara Travieso, “Performances of La Medea by Yara Travieso,” HowlRound Theatre Commons, October 25, 2018, accessed November 27, 2021, https://howlround.com/happenings/performancesla-medea-yara-travieso. 9

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Medea and maternal ambivalence Even though the myth of Medea originated in ancient Greece, the framing of the story through La Medea engages with twenty-first-century issues concerning gender, race, immigration, and cultural difference in the United States. La Medea is promoted as the “dismantling of an ongoing toxic myth,” challenging “the pervasive figure of the wild foreign woman.”13 In their review of the performance in Hyperallergic, John Sherer and Andrew Summers expand upon this “toxicity,” describing Medea as follows: She is a woman and a foreigner from a “barbarian” land who shows the patriarchy both middle fingers, and throws in her middle toes for good measure. Jason is a proto-douchebag: he ignores the fact that his glorious accomplishments are largely thanks to the strength and sacrifices of his devoted wife, and when the play begins he has abandoned her for a younger, richer woman—a princess who will help him secure a higher social position. So blinded is he by his patriarchal worldview that he honestly believes his callous maneuvers will help his family.14 This framing of Medea’s character shifts emphasis away from her being a “bad mother” to presenting her as a complex, ambivalent maternal figure while highlighting how she has been exploited and failed by political and social circumstances as a foreigner. One strategy used in the production to convey Medea as a multidimensional character is that she is not restricted to a single performer, but various performers play different facets of her persona. While Rena Butler or Shayla-Vie Jenkins played the primary Medea character, her vengeance becomes manifest as a separate performer, La Furea (performed by Sol Koeraus or Niurca Marquez). Her younger self is performed by dancer Tiffany Mellard, who also plays Creusa the daughter of King Creon whom Jason leaves Medea for. La Authentica, the true soul of Medea, is played by yet another performer, Erick Montes. Throughout the performance, Medea does not speak, but the singer of the accompanying band, Elizabeth de Lise, vocalizes for her through song lyrics. This dispersion of Medea across various performers provides a more elaborate portrayal of her character, enabling contradictions while highlighting her intra- and interpersonal struggles. She

Travieso, “La Medea.” John Sherer and Andrew Summers, “A Disco-Pop Take on ‘Medea’ Unfolds Across Multiple Stages and Screens,” Hyperallergic, January 30, 2017, accessed November 27, 2021, https:// hyperallergic.com/354827/la-medea/.

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is also presented as a decentralized though networked subject; a point of intersection between the maternal and digital subjectivity. The subject in this instance also exemplifies the complexities of maternal ambivalence. Sarah LaChance Adams and Tanya Cassidy describe ambivalence as “how one can be pulled in opposite directions,”15 and in terms of maternal ambivalence, this pulling apart involves the simultaneous presence of two contradictory emotions for one’s children. These sensations of ambivalence are not restricted to motherhood, for ambivalence can be manifest in many instances of human relations, but as Sarah LaChance Adams argues, “The maternal example brings human interdependence into relief while also affirming our independent (and often conflicting) interests.”16 At the same time, there is a distinctive taboo against maternal ambivalence that Barbara Almond highlights as contributing to its damaging impact, giving rise to guilt and shame that prevents a mother from working through these natural and complex emotions.17 However, maternal ambivalence is not solely an internal emotional struggle of the mother, but is exasperated when our networked systems of social being and support fail us. Reducing the story of Medea simply to an act of filicide inaccurately isolates the mother as a solitary individual, neglecting the impact of public structures that are implicated in her murderous acts. Treating the mother as the key figure responsible for a child’s well-being has become popularized through the twentieth century, especially in social and economic contexts dominated by neoliberal ideology that places the private family unit as the only means of raising and caring for children. This treatment of the mother is an instance of what Lauren Berlant refers to as cruel optimism, or when something that we desire or believe is good for us in actuality inhibits or damages our flourishing.18 LaChance Adams states: “Motherhood brings the paradoxes of being human into blinding light. It can be both strenuous and empowering. It can give one’s own life a new sense of legitimacy, yet it simultaneously certifies our finitude.”19 Isolating the mother as caregiver, while idealized, has devastating effects. As Roszika Parker notes:

Sarah LaChance Adams, Tanya Cassidy, and Susan Hogan, eds., The Maternal Tug: Ambivalence, Identity, and Agency (Bradford, ON: Demeter Press, 2020), 15. 16 LaChance Adams, Mad Mothers, Bad Mothers, and What a “Good” Mother Would Do, 5. 17 Barbara Almond, The Monster Within: The Hidden Side of Motherhood, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), xiii–xiv. 18 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2011), 1. 19 LaChance Adams, Cassidy, and Hogan, The Maternal Tug, 13. 15

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The individual mother is left to grapple with the fact that she is not only the source of life but also of potential death for her child […] The absence of public structures of recognition means that a mother feels solely responsible for life and death when, of course, these matters do not lie in her total control.20 These circumstances, according to Parker, are exacerbated in twentyfirst-century social and economic conditions. As the character Katrina states in Detransition, Baby (a novel about trans motherhood that explores the  possibilities of a three-parent family): “As far as I can tell, at least from the outside, motherhood is just some vague test designed to ensure that everyone feels inadequate.”21 Maternal ambivalence is intensified as expectations of perfect mothers proliferate, including on social media and other internet platforms, coupled with the gutting of social supports in nations like the United States and United Kingdom that prioritize the privatization of familial care. In 1987, Margaret Thatcher, then Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, stated: “Who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families.”22 Through a rhetorical flourish, the networks of care are dissolved to the sole responsibility of individuals and their families. This statement is not only political pandering, however, but was enacted through Thatcher’s conservative economic policies that pushed privatization. Thatcher along with former US President Ronald Reagan are  celebrated and revered for priming the global economy for the neoliberal take over that has encroached on every aspect of human interaction and exchange as privatized financial transactions.23 The implication is that care of the family is left to individual units, with increased pressure on mothers to take up the responsibility of this care. External support is available to those who can afford to pay for it, but even then, it depends on private services being accessible, which may not happen if a market opportunity is not present. La Medea also draws attention to racial differences in perceptions of mothers and how stereotypes regarding Black mothers impact societal actions. Black feminist theorist Jennifer Nash describes how “the relegation of the Black mothers to the realm of the symbolic has been inherent to

Rozsika Parker, Torn In Two: Maternal Ambivalence (London: Virago, 2005), 12. Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby (New York: One World, 2021), 174. 22 Margaret Thatcher, “Extract from a Transcript of the Original Interview with Douglas Keay, ‘Aids, Education and the Year 2000!’ Woman’s Own,” Margaret Thatcher Foundation, 1987, accessed November 27, 2021, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689. 23 See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 20 21

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the US project of race-making since the nation’s inception,”24 which can be traced to the violence and trauma of slavery. Hortense Spillers argues in her challenge to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 controversial report on African American families and poverty (which blamed matriarchal structures for the impoverishment of Black communities) that enslaved women were not recognized as women nor as mothers. Spillers asserts that kinship is incompatible with the treatment of enslaved individuals as property: “under conditions of captivity, the offspring of the female does not ‘belong’ to the mother, nor is s/he ‘related’ to the ‘owner,’ though the latter ‘possesses’ it, and in the African-American instance, often fathered it, and, as often, without whatever benefit of patrimony.”25 Maternal relations were only acknowledged to the extent that enslaved status was inherited as matrilineal. That is, the enslaved mother was recognized to the extent of property but not kinship: “even though the enslaved female reproduced other enslaved persons, we do not read ‘birth’ in this instance as reproduction of mothering precisely because the female, like the male, has been robbed of the parental right, the parental function.”26 While as an institution, slavery is based on “losing your mother,”27 Spillers indicates that these structures did not prevent the cultivation of kinship, as kinship took root in different forms. Sociologist and feminist theorist Patricia Hill Collins has written about the distinctive history and roles of mothers in Black communities. In her landmark text Black Feminist Thought, she describes how the role of mother is not limited to biological and direct family care. She refers to the biological mother as the “bloodmother” and “othermothers” are “women who assist bloodmothers by sharing mothering responsibilities” that have “traditionally been central to the institution of Black motherhood.”28 Women, mothers, and those who identify as mothers in the broad sense of the term, have historically played key roles in Black communities. However, these networks of making kin have been pathologized as inadequate and damaging, like in the Moynihan Report, which relies upon and perpetuates racist norms. In neoliberal societies like the United States and United Kingdom, which rely on the married nuclear family as the bastion of reproductive labor, there is a tendency to treat unmarried parents as unfit. Jennifer C. Nash, Birthing Black Mothers (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 5. Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 74. 26 Ibid., 77–8. 27 Nash, Birthing Black Mothers, 17. Also refer to Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013). 28 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), 178. 24 25

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Dani McClain highlights how this framing neglects the many other individuals responsible for the raising of children.29 At the same time, McClain describes how models alternative to the married nuclear family are treated as abnormal, inadequate, or suspect: “If you’re married, you and your children must be thriving. If you’re a so-called single mom, things must be a mess.”30 During the 1980s, when the United States was dismantling already meager social support systems, Ronald Regan vilified the image of unmarried Black mothers as “welfare queens,”31 instilling further biases and prejudiced perceptions. Kalia Adia Story describes how Collins emphasizes the damaging impacts of these stereotypes: “To Collins, the institution of Black motherhood was saturated with myth, self-policing, and too much outside influence over what it actually meant to be a Black mother in America.”32 When marriage and the nuclear family is treated as the successful means of raising children, and when governments and societies insist on these types of family units to fill these obligations of care, it leaves, as McLain describes, “so many people feeling unnecessarily deflated and out of options when that type of union doesn’t materialize.”33 Or in the case of Medea, disintegrates. Within this context, the story of La Medea can be interpreted as the story of a mother in a state of acute emotions—La Furea—where she is a networked subject that also experiences the brunt of community failings through social dissolution, patriarchal oppression, and systemic racism. As a fictional account, La Medea portrays an extreme of maternal ambivalence—a mother who kills her children,34 but presented within this twenty-first-century, US context, it is also an act of autonomy against structures of entrapment. As Parker states, “the mother reaches the point where her anger swamps her, asserting her needs and desires in opposition to her children’s. In anger she asserts her rights and claims her autonomy.”35 What is striking about La Medea is how it does not fall into the trappings of “romantic resilience” of Black mothers, which Nash identifies as informing the reduction of the Black maternal into symbols, like the pathologized stereotypes of the political right, but of another kind.36 Nash described how in recent years, in conjunction with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, Black mothers increasingly recognized as living McClain, We Live for the We, 49–50. Ibid., 60. 31 Briggs, How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics, 50–2. 32 Kaila Adia Story, ed., Patricia Hill Collins: Reconceiving Motherhood (Bradford, ON: Demeter Press, 2014), 2. 33 McClain, We Live for the We, 62. 34 Almond, The Monster Within, 202. 35 Parker, Torn In Two, 145. 36 Nash, Birthing Black Mothers, 20. 29 30

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in crisis due to the institutional racism of medicine and obstetric violence in what is acknowledged as a pandemic of Black maternal mortality, as well as suffering from the loss of their children through police brutality and murder.37 Even though the increased awareness of such institutionalized racism and violence is important for instigating change, Nash argues how in conjunction with this visibility, “Black mothers generally, and birthing Black mothers particularly, have become a political category, a woke credential, mobilized by a variety of actors on the US Left,”38 including former presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton. In contrast, Medea is presented within a frame of crisis, but cannot so easily be reduced to such a symbol. In the song sequence leading up to the murder scene, the lyrics describe Medea’s fear of her sons growing up to be like their father, “never going to let you be such a cruel man as he” (La Medea 1:07:24). The song alludes to a broader tradition of mothers singing lullabies with cruel lyrics as a means of sublimating violent desires, using creative acts to cope with maternal ambivalence.39 At the end of the sequence, when Medea covers the lens of the camera for a final time and the production ends in applause, a video shows her carrying the camera backstage. She places the camera on the table, seemingly unaware that it is still shooting, and as she sits down, credits begin to roll. From offscreen, she picks up a baby and begins to breastfeed. This final shot of Medea nursing a small child further complicates the myth, as she is not presented in the end as a heartless murderer of her own children, but as the mother feeding and soothing her child through maternal bodily care. Ambivalence remains unresolved. La Medea enables considerations of maternal ambivalence through the scope of a fictional performance, which “can provide more nuanced and variegated understandings of rationality, agency, and identity.”40 The paradoxical presentation of Medea’s emotional state through this iteration of the story maintains the complexity of maternal ambivalence. While various factors, such as Jason’s betrayal and Medea’s isolation in a foreign context, are presented as contributing to her revenge, contradictions remain. LaChance Adams states: In both popular culture and scholarly work, maternal rage is frequently considered either a result of postpartum hormones, the product of a more pervasive pathology, or the consequence of living in a racist, Ibid., 4–5. Ibid., 5. 39 Parker, Torn In Two, 72–3. 40 LaChance Adams, Cassidy, and Hogan, The Maternal Tug, 17. 37 38

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heterosexist, and classist patriarchy that idealizes the nuclear family. These diagnoses shed necessary light on the hard facts that women confront, the situation they are responding to, and thus add to our understanding of their experiences. However, to begin the inquiry in this way invites us to diagnose maternal ambivalence. This assumes that maternal ambivalence is first and foremost an atypical problem to be overcome. Instead, I see it as primarily a phenomenon to be understood, one that can shed light on fundamental structures of our relationships with others. In considering this as a problem from the outset, too much has been decided beforehand.41 While La Medea touches upon the factors that contribute to maternal ambivalence, as discussed in the above analysis, it does not succumb to these reductionist trappings in terms of its content, just as it does not easily elide into the physical or virtual stages of presentation. In both its form and content, as a portrayal of maternal ambivalence and a networked digital performance, La Medea crafts an ambiguous aesthetic experience that points to the paradoxical truths of our networked, interdependent humanness. Medea may seem to be a strange mother due to her succumbing to filicide, but instead the strangeness of this production is connected to La Medea’s uncanny unveiling, where ambivalence is not the aberration, but the norm. LaChance Adams emphasizes throughout her book how paying attention to mothers and especially maternal ambivalence brings our entanglements and vulnerabilities into stark relief, as “we are all fragile bodies that require the goodwill and generosity of others. Human bonds are essential to human life, but those bonds also place us at risk […] Recognizing our interdependence helps us to understand the true context for ethical life.”42 Just as LaChance Adams turns to maternal ambivalence as a means of understanding care ethics, maternal ambivalence, presented in an ambivalent state of live presence as a broadcast digital performance, can provide novel insights into networked societies. Such an approach is particularly vital as neoliberalism has emphasized individualist treatments of subjectivity in what are more obviously interdependent states of coexistence.

LaChance Adams, Mad Mothers, Bad Mothers, and What a “Good” Mother Would Do, 8. Ibid., 13.

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Distributing birth As children increasingly move away from home, ties between generations weaken with the nuclear family replacing models of community kinship. Mothers must find other channels for connection and communication. Many mothers are turning online to social media for the support previously provided through kinship networks,43 including YouTube where women upload and share videos of their birthing experiences. In her YouTube Portraits series (2012), Helen Knowles captured screenshots from selected birthing videos found on the social media platform, turning them into large-scale screen prints. The images are made by projecting these low-resolution video stills onto the printing screen, which is treated with a light-sensitive medium, transferring a pixelated quality that point to their origination as digital works. The prints are made up of an overlay of four colors—cyan, magenta, yellow, and black—that exaggerates the digital noise from the transfer process, obscuring the content of the images through patterns of interference. She translates an image from a digital object—a video shared on a social media platform—to a screen print, which is a still image produced with ink, engaging with a reproducible technology displaced by the advent of digital technologies in image production. This process not only involves a shift in medium but also means to freeze a moving sequence to a single image that is appropriated and diffracted. The formal, visual noise alludes to another enigmatic quality of the works. Knowles selects moments where the facial expressions and postures of the women are frozen in ambiguous states of physical extremes that could indicate pain or pleasure. In one video that Knowles used in the project, Alleingeburt / Unassisted Childbirth, a woman stands alone outside giving birth at night. The footage is shot using an infrared camera, making it visually reminiscent of cameras used to survey the activities of nocturnal animals. Such formal qualities draw attention to the mammalian characteristics of birth. Knowles’s rendition of the image shows the woman at the moment of crowning, exuding a posture of strength. She wears a short-sleeved white blouse, but no pants (see Plate 15). The image has a strong contrast between blacks and whites, as parts of her body emerge from the shadows, while her head slips into obscurity. Even though the original video is gray-tone, Knowles’s process of projecting the video image onto the screen introduced colored noise, further obfuscating the woman’s body. The posture of the woman and the

See Lorin Basden Arnold and BettyAnn Martin, eds., Taking the Village Online: Mothers, Motherhood, and Social Media (Bradford, ON: Demeter Press, 2016).

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formal qualities of the image are evocative of pornography, though instead of presenting scenes of conception, here are moments of birth. The stillness of the image, as opposed to the videos from which they are extracted, remove the context that indicate the content of these images, further contributing to their ambiguity. The source material birthing videos that were uploaded to YouTube are contributing to a growing graphic visibility of birth.44 The women in Knowles’s prints are presented unassisted and in the throes of extreme physical transformation, “fully in command of their own bodies.”45 The stillness of the print, in contrast to the dynamic quality of moving image, freezes these poses in the liminality of birth. As images, YouTube Portraits challenge taboos around representations of birth and undermine presumptions of abjection, inviting more nuanced understandings of the birthing process.46 Baraitser describes the significance of recording and sharing birthing videos on YouTube as follows: Birth, once confined to highly regulated spaces and publics such as the home, the hospital and the medical textbook, has now emerged much more “dramatically” into a shared digital domain, with hundreds of thousands of short films of live birth accessible to anyone with an internet connection, some with followings of many millions of viewers.47 Baraitser highlights how these digital portrayals of birth do not just transmit accounts of experience through images, but treat the body as itself technological and culturally produced, enabling “us to reconfigure our notions of place, scene, birth, origin and loss; our relations, that is, to the maternal.”48 Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English emphasize the gendered quality of the biopolitics of reproduction, where knowledge that has been passed down through midwives and other women lay healers was displaced through masculine medical discourse in the modern era.49 The breakdown of these gendered networks of knowledge transmission greatly impacted

Imogen Tyler and Lisa Baraitser, “From Abjection to Natality: Some Thoughts on Helen Knowles’ YouTube Portraits,” in Private View: Public Birth, ed. Helen Knowles and Poppy Bowers (London: GV Art London, 2013), 1–3. 45 Poppy Bowers, “Thoughts on Colour,” in Private View: Public Birth, ed. Helen Knowles and Poppy Bowers (London: GV Art London, 2013), 21. 46 Imogen Tyler and Jessica Clements, “The Taboo Aesthetics of the Birth Scene,” Feminist Review 93 (2009): 134–7; Tyler and Baraitser, “From Abjection to Natality.” 47 Lisa Baraitser, “Youtube Birth and the Primal Scene,” Performance Research 22, no. 4 (2017): 8. 48 Ibid. 49 Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, 2nd edition (New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2010), 48–56. 44

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reproductive health care, giving rise to new modes of communication and medical self-help, including the creation of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, who published the groundbreaking guide to women’s health, Our Bodies, Ourselves.50 The advent of the internet and twenty-firstcentury telecommunications have also led to new networks and means of connecting, or what Dariusz Jemielniak and Aleksandra Przegalinska refer to as collaborative societies. They point out how even though collaboration has long played a significant role in human social engagement, “we’ve only recently become more attuned to the rise of collaboration—enabled, as it is now, by the development of communication technologies largely independent of traditional organizational structures, procedures, institutions, and hierarchies.”51 The sharing of birthing videos on YouTube function as an example where human collaboration is facilitated through digital technologies as networks of connection, countering the isolation of the maternal in contemporary society. The internet and social media platforms enable mothers and motherartists to connect in a manner that transcends traditional networks and infrastructures in various ways. As Rachel Epp Buller states: “the digital world is at its best when it fulfills its potential to connect us across great distances, helping us to find commonalities.”52 In 2016, Ruchika Wason Singh began the AMMAA. The title of the project references the term amma, which is used in many Indian languages for referring to one’s mother.53 The project began as a blog where Singh investigated the maternal in Asian art, addressing what she observed as a significant lacuna in feminist discourse and Asian art history.54 Through a curated process, Singh has developed a website (https:// www.ammaathearchive.com/), where she maps, provides visibility, and offers mobility to Asian mother-artists, with the intention of identifying the practice of these artists while creating room for them in Asian art historical and feminist discourse.55 In addition to presenting and archiving the works of mother-artists,

Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, ed., Our Bodies, Ourselves, 40th Anniversary Touchstone (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011). 51 Dariusz Jemielniak and Aleksandra Przegalinska, Collaborative Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019), 10. 52 Ruchika Wason Singh and Rachel Epp Buller, “Making Space for Artist-Mothers in Asia: A Conversation,” in Inappropriate Bodies: Art, Design, and Maternity, ed. Rachel Epp Buller and Charles Reeve (Bradford, ON: Demeter Press, 2019), 309. 53 Ruchika Wason Singh, “A.M.M.A.A. - The Archive for Mapping Mother Artists in Asia,” in The Maternal Is Creative Work: Intergenerational Discussions on Motherhood and Art, ed. Elena Marchevska and Valerie Walkerdine (London and New York: Routledge, 2020), 72. 54 Ibid., 74–5. 55 Ibid., 72. 50

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many of whom work outside the commercial gallery system and do not have gallery representation, she provides visibility through exhibitions (online and in physical locations), workshops, and artists talks. Singh has also organized short-duration residencies that accommodate mothers unable to dedicate the longer blocks of time affiliated with traditional artist residencies, encouraging mobility for artists.56 Singh leverages the networking capacities of the internet to develop a new international community with a focus on underrepresented Asian mother-artists that bypasses the traditional gallery system of the art world and introducing the maternal into Asian feminist discourse.

The “social” of social media? While the internet and social media have significant benefits, these platforms also have their limits. For instance, AMMAA is a self-funded and self-motivated project that relies upon Singh as the primary organizer, meaning that it has a “slow but steady progression,”57 which counters the high-speed viral hype often affiliated with digital culture. Also, social media sites are highly profitable private entities. In her description of the social media network Facebook, Irish technology writer Roisin Kiberd states: Facebook’s vision of community, much like its vision of friendship, wears thin under scrutiny. “Community” implies a group of people with beliefs, or interests in common. It suggests a network of care. But what Facebook’s users share is that all of them generate data, media and interactions, which earn money for Facebook. What Facebook cares about, meanwhile, is its ability to continue profiting from this business model without taking responsibility for what happens on its platform.58 Social media may assist people to connect to others, influencing how communities form and function, but these platforms are not communities in and of themselves. Rather, they function as the means of facilitating such engagements to generate profit. User-generated content functions as digital objects, which as noted in Chapter 1, engage in interobjective relations that influence user behaviors through algorithmic parameters, including the moderation of content.

Ibid., 75–8. Singh and Buller, “Making Space for Artist-Mothers in Asia,” 316. 58 Kiberd, The Disconnect, 50. 56 57

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Even though birthing videos can easily be uploaded to video sharing sites such as YouTube, it does not mean that they will remain there. YouTube, like Facebook and other social media platforms, practices commercial-content moderation to regulate user-generated content while deferring responsibility for such content. Some of the links that Knowles posted as source material for her print series indicate that the videos are no longer available online. Thus, Knowles’s prints not only function as an artifact of specific moments captured in the birthing process conveyed in the videos but also exist as the remaining analog evidence of an expunged digital presence. Notably, the videos relating to the prints titled Birth with Orgasm have been removed for graphic content (see Plate 16). Content on YouTube is regulated based on “Community Guidelines,” including specifications for sensitive material. Commercial content moderators are responsible for reviewing flagged content and making decisions of what is deemed appropriate, based on interpretations of such guidelines. As discussed in the previous chapter, Sarah Roberts emphasizes how these guidelines are produced in the context of private corporations, thereby restricting the field of participation to serve the interests of these companies as they reinforce particular cultural norms and values.59 YouTube’s guidelines indicate that nudity is allowed when presented during childbirth, as only “Explicit content meant to be sexually gratifying” is forbidden.60 Dominant perceptions and cultural beliefs treat birth and sexual expression as incompatible, meaning that “birthgasms” are considered obscene, despite the fact that they function as an effective means of pain management.61 The persistent taboo surrounding sexuality and birth prevents challenges to the accepted notion that childbirth is inherently a traumatic event. While a birthing video is deemed acceptable, a birthing video that contains sexual expression is deemed explicit, since it is “sexually gratifying.” The significant role of commercial-content moderation in managing user-generated content on YouTube “disrupts comfortable and commonplace notions predicated on the one-to-one relationship of user-to-platform.”62 Moreover, while social media enables some sharing of content, such capacities are restricted and by no means are inherently beneficial to the users. Content moderation guidelines have focused on what may be considered offensive to users, with little attention

Roberts, Behind the Screen, 32. YouTube Policies, “Nudity & sexual content policies,” accessed November 27, 2021, https:// support.google.com/youtube/answer/2802002?hl=en&ref_topic=9282679. 61 See Lorel Mayberry and Jacqueline Daniel, “‘Birthgasm’: A Literary Review of Orgasm as an Alternative Mode of Pain Relief in Childbirth,” Journal of Holistic Nursing 34, no. 4 (December 1, 2016): 331–42, doi:10.1177/0898010115614205. 62 Roberts, Behind the Screen, 71. 59 60

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or oversight regarding accuracy or validity of information that is shared. As a result, in the past several years there has been a rapid rise and spread of far-right conspiracy groups on social media, such as Q-Anon, that undermine democratic processes, as well as the transmission of misinformation that inhibits public health efforts during the Covid-19 pandemic.63 The connections between individuals through social media networks are informed through the algorithms, structures, and moderation of these platforms,64 influencing how individuals and communities develop. Simondon defines these processes of becoming between individuals and collectives as transindividuation. An individual, for Simondon, “lives at the limits of itself, on its limit.”65 That is, individuals are not merely self-contained beings, but there is a relational communication between the interior, or psychological, and exterior, or sociological, milieu. For Simondon, relations are not merely connections between beings, but are vital to how individuals are formed. Therefore, individuation does not just involve processes of becoming for single individuals, but groups or collectives experience this process through transindividuation. Muriel Combes describes how according to Simondon the subject is both the individual and more-than-individual, or the preindividual, resulting in a tension or incompatibility.66 The preindividual is not deterministic, but consists of the physical potential from which the individual forms, though never fully comes into being. The tension between the individual and preindividual is not resolved through dialectic synthesis, but through relations with other subjects as the collective, or what Simondon refers to as transindividuation.67 Simondon accounts for the psychological and the social that form and inform individuals, while asserting that individuality is centered in affectivity and emotion, as opposed to reason (as with Kant) or See Joan Donovan, “Social-Media Companies Must Flatten the Curve of Misinformation,” Nature, April 14, 2020, doi:10.1038/d41586-020-01107-z; P.M. Krafft and Joan Donovan, “Disinformation by Design: The Use of Evidence Collages and Platform Filtering in a Media Manipulation Campaign,” Political Communication 37, no. 2 (March 3, 2020): 194–214, doi:10.1080/10584609.2019.1686094; Jamie Murphy et al., “Psychological Characteristics Associated with COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy and Resistance in Ireland and the United Kingdom,” Nature Communications 12, no. 1 (January 4, 2021): 29, doi:10.1038/s41467-020-20226-9. 64 For more details on how Facebook algorithms influence user behaviors, see Taina Bucher, “Want to Be on the Top? Algorithmic Power and the Threat of Invisibility on Facebook,” New Media & Society 14, no. 7 (November 1, 2012): 1164–80, doi:10.1177/1461444812440159; Taina Bucher, “The Algorithmic Imaginary: Exploring the Ordinary Affects of Facebook Algorithms,” Information, Communication & Society 20, no. 1 (January 2, 2017): 30–44, doi:10.1080/1369118X.2016.1154086. 65 Gilbert Simondon, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, trans. Taylor Adkins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 251. 66 Muriel Combes, Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual, trans. Thomas LaMarre, Technologies of Lived Abstraction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 31. 67 Ibid., 32. 63

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the unconscious (as with Freud and psychoanalysis).68 He states: “without affectivity and emotivity, consciousness seems like an epiphenomenon, and action seems like a discontinuous series of consequences without premises.”69 Focusing on the individual alone and neglecting the relational significance of affect presents reduced understandings of subjectivity. Social media treats subjects as individual beings to be mined for information, nudged toward more readable behaviors, and expected to take responsibility with no accountability for causing harm, except for removal of posts and banning from sites. As a result, social media disrupts transindividuation, or Bernard Stiegler describes, prevents transindividuation from occurring as the incalculable is reduced to the calculable.70 Referring to Thatcher’s proclamation, there is no “social” of social media, but instead there are connected individuals. This handling of the subject is not just ideological, but connects to how the internet is visualized and understood as a form. The internet is a network that depends on packet-switching, which is the breakdown of larger collections of data to smaller packets that are then shared over a distributed network. This structure was developed during the Cold War in the 1960s to withstand a nuclear attack.71 Paul Baran represents a distributed network as a grid or mesh system, encompassing several hundred major communication centers to distribute information in a nonhierarchical fashion.72 Anna Munster argues that Baran’s visual representation of distributed communication as a topographic network has dominated the imagined form of the internet, which is an invisible infrastructure lacking a visual form.73 Such an imagined formal capacity of sharing information has contributed to the robustness of the internet, but it “is simultaneously affectively composed out of the insularity of post-World War II American paranoia—don’t get too close to your close or distant neighbors”;74 the approach that has significantly informed attitudes regarding family, kinship, and community into the twenty-first century. Knowles’s prints, as uncanny artifacts of digital birthing videos point to the limits that social media places on transindividuation. At the same time, the content of the work—the experience of birthing—has significant potential for rethinking networked digital subjectivity as one that exceeds the limits Ibid., 30; Simondon, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 272–3. Simondon, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 274. 70 Stiegler, The Age of Disruption, 26. 71 Paul Baran, “On Distributed Communications,” Memorandum (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, August 1964). 72 Ibid., 3. 73 Anna Munster, An Aesthesia of Networks: Conjunctive Experience in Art and Technology, Technologies of Lived Abstraction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 22. 74 Ibid. 68 69

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of quantification and reveals gaps through the thickness of opacity. Cressida Heyes refers to birth as a limit-experience, which she defines as “a physical event that, by virtue of its very intensity, fractures the self’s understanding and bursts the bounds of its hitherto imagined possibilities.”75 By their nature, limit-experiences are grounded in the body and thereby “evades capture by processes of subjectification,” exceeding the capacities of language to communicate.76 For Heyes, “our ethical responsibility becomes the creation of spaces where more possibility for self-transformation is opened, where the self can see itself exceeding the background experience of the cultural moment.”77 Medical discourse and technologies attempt to quantify birth, though the nature of birth as a limit-experience overflows the codified narrative: “the individual experience of giving birth reveals the gaps between discourse and our own sensations, capacities, possibilities, limits.”78 Medicine may provide a sense of prediction, an explanation of biological processes, and influence how birth unfolds. However, such parameters are partial—birthing occurs in excess. Knowles’s prints draw attention to the qualities of birth as a limit-experience and its transformative capacity through their ambivalence and visual obfuscation. The visual obfuscation of Knowles’s images point to the limits of transparency surrounding birth, reaffirming Édouard Glissant’s call for opacity. In contrast to Western or colonizer thought and philosophy, where truth and knowledge have long been affiliated with the superiority of transparency over opacity, Glissant argues that this approach has meant the dissolution of difference, as meaning is assimilated and codified. Instead of treating opacity as confusion, like transparency is affiliated with understanding, Glissant proposes relational intertextuality where “opacities must be preserved.”79 Within such a means of relation, differences are able to coexist, as the search for absolute truth is replaced with opacities that “converge, weaving fabrics.”80 Like Simondon’s transindividuation, where the individual undergoes processes of becoming that are part of a collective situated in a milieu, Glissant’s attention to opacity engages with worldly entanglements that are rich in complexity. The structures of social media counter these complexities, reducing relations and individuals through algorithmic mediation to be more easily captured and quantified. Cressida J. Heyes, Anaesthetics of Existence: Essays on Experience at the Edge (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2020), 136. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid., 137. 78 Ibid., 128. 79 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 120. 80 Ibid., 190. 75

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Affective, relational engagement is rendered transparent for quantification purposes, as illusions of simplicity through the interface overshadow the messy chaos that human relations actually entail. Glissant’s call for a “right to opacity” has gained traction with digital studies, especially as surveillance capitalism is dependent upon the transparency of data as a means of extracting information, modifying behavior, and producing profit. David Berry and Michael Dieter refer to Glissant’s “right to opacity for everyone”81 as they contrast the normative ideal of transparency in computing: “Computation intensifies as it mediates, creating a richer context and sharper perception by sensors, trackers, bugs and beacons that do not just collect and store a happening, but actively and comprehensively inscribe and store everything that can be grammatized in real time.”82 From this approach, sharing birthing videos online, therefore, is not significant because it increases transparency in regard to knowledge around birth. Instead, these videos, as Knowles’s prints suggest, invite a chance to welcome thickness to giving birth as a limitexperience; one that may be made visible yet never fully known. At the same time, Heyes’s call for valuing the limit-experience of birth can model ways for enabling and accepting the opacities of digital subjectivity, inviting the coexistence of difference within a less deterministic discursive framework, whether that be medicine, computation, or both. Here, Glissant’s emphasis on relation provides the means of working toward such an outcome. Like La Medea, YouTube Portraits engages with ambivalence. The ambivalence of YouTube Portraits includes tension between the analog screenprint and the digital moving image, pleasure and pain, individual and collective, self-determination and control; pairings that are rife with contradictions. Sarah LaChance Adams describes how Beauvoir treats life as “inherently tragic and full of insoluble contradictions,” with Beauvoir’s ethics of ambiguity and ambivalence toward motherhood, as discussed in the previous chapter, being vital to acknowledging how human beings live in a paradoxical condition where we depend upon others, yet cannot rely on their generosity or collaboration.83 Freedom within human societies is not guaranteed, but must be sought after and is dependent on the welfare of others.84 Now that the limits and challenges of networked subjectivity, both maternal and digital, have been considered, approaches to cultivating healthy digital community ecologies—online and away from keyboard—are needed.

Ibid., 194. David Berry and Michael Dieter, eds., Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design (Basingstoke, UK, Ba and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 3. 83 LaChance Adams, Mad Mothers, Bad Mothers, and What a “Good” Mother Would Do, 157. 84 Ibid., 161. 81 82

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hile social media networks have offered opportunities for collaborative support for many mothers, such frameworks are restricted by the corporate interests and infrastructures of these platforms. In addition, community guidelines and commercial-content moderation that manage usergenerated content is rooted in the ideologies of these companies, which, as Sarah Roberts argues, serve stakeholder interests and brand management: “in a time of digital enclosure and vast commercialization of zones of expression, where such zones exist at all, it is not clear what other options people might have to voice dissent.”1 Social media platforms mediate large quantities of user data, which frame online engagement. Initiatives such as Our Data Bodies (ODB) function as grassroots efforts to shift user data away from privatized dominance in ways that support marginalized users. Virginia Eubanks, who is a contributor to and cofounder of ODB, describes how regimes of data surveillance have a disproportionate impact on marginalized groups, who “face higher levels of data collection when they access public benefits, walk through highly policed neighborhoods, enter the health-care system, or cross national borders. That data acts to reinforce their marginality when it is used to target them for suspicion and extra scrutiny.”2 Algorithmic models, such as those used to identify high-risk crime areas or possible criminal offenders, are problematic because this use of historical data is not so much predictive as determinative: high-risk crime areas are under higher surveillance, meaning that actions in these areas are observed and tracked more intrusively, leading

Roberts, Behind the Screen, 105. Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018), 6–7. 1 2

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to the tracking of minor infractions resulting in tickets. If a person does not have the financial capacity to pay a ticket, tickets can turn to warrants and warrants become arrests. Hence, poverty and social vulnerabilities become liabilities, as individuals are more likely to be criminalized. In this manner, algorithmic prediction determines the outcome as higher surveillance causes criminalization, as opposed to preventing crime. In addition, since many individuals in marginalized groups, including the poor, single mothers, and the racialized, are required to provide their data to engage in social services, they face a double bind as they are more likely to be surveilled and scrutinized. Such outcomes are not incidental, but “the management, control, and ‘correction’ of poor and racialized people provide the raison d’être of discriminatory design.”3 Technology is a means of perpetuating structures of inequality through the reproduction of social hierarchies while “mov[ing] past an individual’s intention to discriminate.”4 In response, ODB puts the principles of reproductive justice toward digital justice and activism. ODB is a US-based participatory research project “concerned about the ways our communities’ digital information is collected, stored, and shared by government and corporations.”5 Currently composed of Tamika Lewis, Mariella Saba, Seeta Pena Gangadharan, and Kim Reynolds, with past and current support from Virginia Eubanks, Alexis Notabartolo, and Tawana Petty, ODB merges community activism, capacity-building, and academic research. They have: Identified many similarities in how people across [Charlotte, North Carolina; Detroit, Michigan; and Los Angeles, California] experience data collection and data-driven systems. Patterns have emerged like insecurity and targeting, resignation and resistance, the separation of family—whether through incarceration, detention, deportation, or foster care systems—and speak to the way that individuals are forced to trade away their data to attain basic human needs.6 In addition to researching the impact of data disparity on these communities, ODB educates people about how data is collected and maintained, cultivating data literacy and a critical understanding of how data is used. Engaging a digital justice approach, ODB enables individuals and communities to “explore

Benjamin, Captivating Technology, 2. Ibid. 5 Our Data Bodies, “About Us,” accessed March 18, 2021, https://www.odbproject.org/about-us-2/. 6 Tawana Petty, Mariella Saba, Tamika Lewis, Seeta Pena Gangadharan, and Virginia Eubanks, “Reclaiming Our Data,” Interim Report (Detroit: Our Data Bodies, June 15, 2018), 1, accessed November 27, 2021, https://www.odbproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/ODB.InterimReport. FINAL_.7.16.2018.pdf. 3 4

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technologies’ power to investigate, illuminate, and develop visionary solutions to community problems.”7 Their work focuses on communities in Detroit, Los Angeles, and Charlotte, where marginalized and minoritized groups have been adversely affected through data collection and surveillance technologies, experienced as family separation, diversion of public benefits, housing insecurity, loss of job opportunities, over-policing, and criminalization. These factors have also been identified by the reproductive justice movement as inhibiting the capacity to parent children in safe and healthy environments.8 The name “Our Data Bodies” draws attention back to the bodies—the lived experiences—of those impacted through digital and data surveillance. As algorithmic decision-making and mediation have enabled a transcendence of the physical body, including deferring the implications of systemic racism, sexism, and injustice, ODB brings back the body to data, acknowledging that bodies of data are always already about bodies. In their digital justice and activist work, ODB produces alternative models of engagement with data as a different type of digital performance; one that interrupts the dominance of data-driven infrastructures while fostering community strength and resilience. Aesthetics in this context relates to the aesthetics of lived experience, which are modified to counter the sensing bodies of surveillance. Even though ODB is active in three cities, in this analysis, I focus on Detroit, Michigan. Mass surveillance and voyeurism in Detroit, formalized through the hi-tech downtown surveillance program Project Greenlight, have targeted and marginalized bodies through the integration of data systems between private businesses and the police.9 These bodies are mostly those of the city’s Black inhabitants, who are consistently tracked, monitored, surveilled and violated, with disproportionate impacts of disenfranchisement.10 In Detroit, ODB focused on how a “data trail” or “collected digital record of […] past decisions, resources, and interactions with government,” connects to experiences of foreclosure, eviction, and the shutting off of vital utilities, including water.11 The surveilling and tracking of bodies in the United States has a long history of racialized difference and has been used as a means of enforcing racial inequality for centuries.12 Therefore,

7 Tamika Lewis, Seeta Pena Gangadharan, Mariella Saba, and Tawana Petty, Digital Defense Playbook: Community Power Tools for Reclaiming Data (Detroit: Our Data Bodies, 2018), 6. 8 See Ross and Solinger, Reproductive Justice; Briggs, How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics. 9 Noah Urban, Jacob Yesh-Brochstein, Erica Raleigh, and Tawana Petty, “A Critical Summary of Detroit’s Project Green Light and Its Greater Context” (Detroit Community Technology Project, June 9, 2019), 6. 10 Petty et al., “Reclaiming Our Data,” 12–17. 11 Ibid., 4. 12 See Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

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as Tawana Petty argues, the blueprint for banning these technologies of mass surveillance in Detroit differs from predominantly white cities, meaning that digital justice is connected to racial equity and countering anti-Black racism.13 Such an approach is not reliant on social media and private networks of surveillance or platform capitalism, but seeks co-liberation through alternative models of digital performance as a distributed matrix. ODB’s Digital Defense Playbook is an educational tool and guide for workshop facilitation and community organization. Notably it is titled as a “defense playbook,” which is a sports reference used to describe a team’s collection of defensive strategies. Such an approach means that the intention is not to eradicate the use of digital and databased technologies, but instead to defend against how data are “manipulated, distorted, stolen, exploited, or misused, our communities are stifled, obstructed, or repressed,” impeding on abilities to “self-determine and thrive.”14 The playbook is divided into several sections, including an overview of ODB and the cities they are directly involved in, a guide for using the playbook in workshops, and notes for facilitators. It also contains a glossary of terms that relate to data technologies, risk assessment, and social justice, such as data, data-driven system, digital security, credit reports and scores, as well as stalker state, school-to-prison pipeline, white supremacy, and implicit bias. There are quotes from community members and an overview of themes that ODB teaches and promotes, which is then followed with a number of workshop activities to raise people’s awareness about how data are collected and used. The handbook includes resilience strategies, practical defense tips, and a number of short articles to further explain credit reports and data brokers. The first activity in the playbook, “Get ‘Em Thinking About Data,” involves raising the awareness of workshop participants about the extent that data surveillance has infiltrated people’s lives through mundane activities such as using Google Maps, a debit card, or Facebook. Focus is placed on group discussion and the sharing of stories, as people draw from their experiences to teach each other about how data are collected. “Data mining” and “Big Data” are no longer abstract concepts, but lived experiences. At the same time, such activities foster community engagement as participants start to formulate ways of countering the intrusiveness of data surveillance through the generation of collective power.15 The activity closes with participants

Catherine D’Ignazio, “Data Feminism Reading Group - Conclusion - Now Let’s Multiply!,” YouTube, June 18, 2020, accessed November 27, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBKCt6aP48&feature=youtu.be. 14 Lewis et al., Digital Defense Playbook, 5. 15 Ibid., 28. 13

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choosing from a list of prompts to respond to their experiences in the workshop, including “Share one word that represents how they are feeling right now (i.e. powerful, confused, supported, challenged, etc.); Use their body to express how they are feeling right now […] Share something they learned that they want to share with someone else […] Share something about their community that they are grateful for.”16 As these prompts indicate, there is an interplay between the individual and the community present throughout the strategies advanced in the Digital Defense Playbook, countering the individualism promoted through neoliberalism. Raising awareness is only the first line of defense against data surveillance, as the playbook continues with activities to gain further understanding of the intrusiveness of data collection practices and how to counter their effects. Activities include “Data Body Check-ups” that draw attention to how people meld their bodies to fit the molds created through data surveillance: “Although virtual, digital data collection and surveillance can physically impact us as humans and weigh us down. From time-to-time, we need to take a step back to identify the shape we are forced to take and re-shape ourselves towards resilience.”17 Individual and group data bodies are identified through story sharing, including creating a logo that represents the self and sharing it with another person. Attention is placed on the relationship between physical and digital bodies, with data bodies constituting: “the data itself, the institutions that collect or control it, and the needs and support our bodies must have met or receive.”18 Other “Data Body Check-up” activities include going through individual wallets to gain a practical understanding of digital and data surveillance (“What’s in Your Wallet?”), identifying ways private data is shared even unintentionally and the consequences of sharing this data (“Are You Sharing? I Might Be”), learning to think like data profilers who make the decisions that impact people’s lives, including accessing resources for basic needs (“Data Profiling, Digital Decisions”), and how to support others in the community in countering these systems (“Power Not Paranoia!”). Drawing from the immanence of lived experience, the Digital Defense Playbook promotes strategies of building resilience and strengthening community bonds through collective action.

Ibid. Ibid., 39. 18 Ibid., 40. 16 17

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#SurveillanceAintSafety In Detroit, digital justice efforts, including the activities promoted through the Digital Defense Playbook, involve countering the negative and invasive impacts of hi-tech surveillance, such as those implemented through Project Greenlight. Even though Project Greenlight is not named in the Digital Defense Playbook, its impact on the city of Detroit is recognized by digital justice activists, including the Detroit Community Technology Project, an organization that ODB contributor Tawana Petty has also worked with in the past.19 Project Greenlight is a data-driven policing and mass surveillance initiative in Detroit involving a private-public partnership between the Detroit Police Department (DPD) and businesses across the city.20 According to the Detroit Community Technology Project, it began in 2016 with eight Detroit gas stations setting up real-time security camera feeds monitored by the DPD. Since then, it has rapidly expanded to include over 550 participants in the city, including churches and reproductive health centers.21 The most prominent feature of Project Greenlight is that it increases surveillance capacity around local businesses through the installment of high-definition cameras connected through a live feed to the DPD and “robust” lighting.22 The videos are monitored in the DPD’s “state-of-the-art Real-Time Crime Center.”23 The center has access to video analytic software, license plate readers, GPS tether data, and facial recognition software.24 The program’s website describes how it improves the safety of the city through increased surveillance, specifying it is “promoting the revitalization and growth of local businesses, and strengthening DPD’s efforts to deter, identify, and solve crime.”25 Even though the project claims to have been effective, with incidents of violent crime reduced 23 percent at

See Detroit Community Technology Project’s “Mapping Project Greenlight,” where they map participants of Project Greenlight, expanding access to data collected in relation to the program, Detroit Community Technology Project, “Mapping Project Greenlight,” 2019, accessed November 27, 2021, https://detroitcommunitytech.org/?q=datajustice. 20 “Project Green Light Detroit,” City of Detroit, accessed November 12, 2020, https://detroitmi.gov/ departments/police-department/project-green-light-detroit. 21 Urban et al., “A Critical Summary of Detroit’s Project Green Light and Its Greater Context,” 3. 22 “Tier One Installer Agreement,” City of Detroit, accessed November 12, 2020, https://detroitmi. gov/departments/police-department/project-green-light-detroit/agreements/tier-one-installeragreement. 23 “Project Green Light Detroit.” 24 Detroit Board of Police Commissioners, “Detroit Board of Police Commissioners Regular Meeting” (Detroit Public Safety Headquarters, April 19, 2018), 21, accessed November 27, 2021, https://detroitmi.gov/Portals/0/docs/policecommissioners/BOPC%20Minutes%20%20%2004-1918.pdf?ver=2018-05-03-121332-883. 25 “Project Green Light Detroit.” 19

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all sites and 48 percent at the original eight sites since 2015, these claims are challenged and there are broader implications that increased surveillance has on Detroit communities that are not being accounted for, including the potential for predictive policing.26 Emphasis is placed on economic development and security with a focus on property, meaning that Project Greenlight functions as a high-tech example of “broken windows theory.” The phrase “broken windows” was coined by George Kelling and James Wilson in 1982.27 They claim that feelings of safety are connected to neighborhood order: At the community level, disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence. Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken.28 Importance is placed on property, not people, as the measure of disorder and crime. In the case of Project Greenlight, “order” is connected to increased video surveillance and the prominent display of branded signs, including flashing green lights to indicate participation in the program. Brian Jefferson describes how broken windows theory may have led to an increased sense of security, but is a flawed approach to ensuring community safety: Broken windows theory was another example of corporate-bureaucratic intellectuals explaining criminal justice datasets by completely sidestepping analysis of the criminal justice apparatus—the very same apparatus that renders subpopulations unemployable, rips family units apart, and cultivates true hatred for juridical authority.29 Jefferson points to the difference between geographic security and community safety, with broken windows policing placing a greater emphasis on the protection of property and economic interests that more often than not harm community inhabitants.

See Urban et al., “A Critical Summary of Detroit’s Project Green Light and Its Greater Context.” George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson, “Broken Windows,” The Atlantic, March 1, 1982, accessed November 27, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/03/brokenwindows/304465/. 28 Ibid. 29 Brian Jordan Jefferson, Digitize and Punish: Racial Criminalization in the Digital Age (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 129. 26 27

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In a short article in the Digital Defense Playbook, Tawana Petty describes the differences between security and safety, highlighting how many technologies used to implement security, such as police body cameras and alarms, do not guarantee the safety of human bodies. She states: Security is not inherently safe. In fact, most times security is on the opposite side of the spectrum. When people think of security, they are typically thinking about securing items, property, or even their identity. Very often, this mindset does not have a human factor involved […] When cities invest in the security of neighborhoods by adding surveillance cameras and increasing the militarization of police departments, it poses an imminent threat to those residents who are often deemed expendable. The security mindset without the human element is inherently unsafe.30 Project Greenlight has meant increased security, but not safety. Safety, for Petty, involves a healthy digital and non-digital ecosystem that comes from nurturing relationships. The Digital Defense Playbook offers strategies for cultivating such relationships. As Petty indicates, increased surveillance may enable increased security of property, but this does not guarantee the safety of individuals, especially marginalized and minoritized groups. As with other crime surveillance initiatives, Project Greenlight focuses on geographic location, which is visualized through a map on the DPD’s website.31 Connecting security to physical places is not new, however, and as Brian Jefferson describes in his comprehensive history of computation and policing, such measures have been in place in US cities for most of the twentieth century.32 Placing the emphasis on geography means that control and management of urban space functions as a means of deferring responsibility for supporting marginalized and minoritized communities while implementing policies that continue to disenfranchise groups and individuals. Datasets that emerge from these technologies “are never used to rationalize improving the material conditions to which criminalized populations are subjected but rather only to justify more surveillance, more patrolling, more control.”33 Jefferson also indicates how impoverished communities are not being deprived of technology, but “these areas find themselves increasingly immersed in networked infrastructures

Tawana Petty, “Safety vs Security: Are You Safe or Are You Secure?,” in Digital Defense Playbook: Community Power Tools for Reclaiming Data, ed. Tamika Lewis et al. (Detroit: Our Data Bodies, 2018), 82. 31 “Project Green Light Detroit.” 32 Jefferson, Digitize and Punish, 45–6. 33 Ibid., 22. 30

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made up of audio sensors, datacenters, drones, electronic ankle monitors, geographic information systems, mobile digital terminals, server rooms, and smart surveillance cameras.”34 Such a state comprises what is referred to in the Digital Defense Playbook as the “stalker state,” or: the immense, widespread web of systems of information gathering, storing, and sharing between public and private entities, local, regional, national and international law enforcement agencies, corporations, individuals, and many more, working together to track, trace, target, and ultimately stalk community members and entire communities.35 Focusing on geography, as opposed to the occupants and members of communities also enables the perpetuation of racism through the absorption of ideologies and practices into seemingly objective cartographic and spatial parameters. As Ruha Benjamin notes: “Geographic and racial imaginaries remain deeply intertwined, the former naturalizing the latter, whereby ‘desirable’ and ‘undesirable’ serve as euphemistic codes for valuable and disposable people.”36 Even though Project Greenlight is promoted as a project of security, Benjamin further argues “noble aims [...] serve as a kind of moral prophylactic for newfangled forms of social control.”37 Such measures potentially further criminalize individuals through increased surveillance, as attention is focused on protecting businesses as opposed to funding infrastructures that would counter crimes through communitybuilding. What dominates in the twenty-first century is not a social state, but a police state that lacks the appropriate support of social reproduction for urban populations.38 The focus on security, as opposed to safety, is not restricted to policing, but extends to the corporate protection of data. Google’s practices for data protection place the emphasis on privacy and security of the data, as opposed to the impact of this data on its users: Our security team is on-duty 24x7. Our full-time Information Security Team maintains the company’s perimeter defense systems, develops security review processes, and builds our customized security infrastructure. It also

Ibid., 21. Lewis et al., Digital Defense Playbook, 21. 36 Benjamin, Captivating Technology, 13. 37 Ibid. 38 Jefferson, Digitize and Punish, 48. 34 35

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plays a key role in developing and implementing Google’s security policies and standards.39 Throughout her groundbreaking book, Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Noble points out how Google distances itself from the impact of its search engine, treating harmful consequences such as displaying porn sites and hate groups as first listings when searching for “black girls” and “Jews,” respectively, as inevitable results of the algorithm. Instead, Google makes great efforts to secure private information, maintaining its right to track everything. Noble states: In the digital era, the recordings of human digital engagements are a matter of permanent record, whether known to people or not. Memory making and forgetting through our digital traces is not a choice, as information and the recording of human activities through digital software, hardware, and infrastructure are necessary and vital components of the design and profit schemes of such actions.40 Even though in the European Union the “right to be forgotten” is currently recognized, no laws of this sort exist in the United States. Also, as Noble points out, EU laws are limited in the transnational digital infrastructures that defy national boundaries.41 The consequences of Google’s never-ending data trail is not consistent. There are misperceptions that erasing or removing data counters the public good and violates public trust.42 Just as geographic surveillance and protection of property tends to disproportionately impact disenfranchised individuals who cannot afford the legal fees associated with increased criminalization, the harm of data security affects vulnerable and marginalized people even more than those who have the abilities, resources, and capacities to counter the lasting impact of the data trail. The Digital Defense Playbook provides people with the knowledge and skills to protect their data bodies, including the physical bodies that are placed under erasure through the digital transcendence of data-mining and surveillance, from the police and corporate mechanisms of surveillance and security, with an emphasis on providing safety.

39 Google as quoted in Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 127. 40 Ibid., 125. 41 Ibid., 122. 42 Ibid., 128.

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Digital justice as reproductive justice When efforts are placed on protecting property and increasing surveillance networks, community supports and capacities are left under-funded and responsibility is left to private family units, which, according to Petty, in Detroit are primarily Black mothers.43 Decades of public and private disinvestment have meant that these mothers are left with restricted agency to appropriately care for dependents.44 OBD’s principles and practices are dedicated to fostering community growth and support, especially for vulnerable persons, which are consistent with reproductive justice’s call for the “right to parent children in safe and healthy environments.”45 As noted in the introduction, reproductive justice differs from the pro-choice movement that has dominated reproductive rights debates in the United States and elsewhere. The pro-choice movement tends to limit their focus to bodily autonomy and choice with an emphasis on access to birth control and safe abortions. While these are significant aspects of reproductive rights, restricting the discussion around fertility and reproduction solely to an individual’s choice of whether or not to give birth precludes the wider scope of what reproduction entails. Such focus also reflects the interests and lived experiences of white, middleclass, heterosexual, cisgender women whose capacity to mother may not questioned and generally have the appropriate community structures in place to support parenting.46 Instead, reproductive justice takes a broader approach, connecting the “economic and cultural health of the community structures the degree of safety and dignity available to fertile and reproducing persons.”47 Understanding the entanglements of virtual and physical worlds is essential to survival, where safety within this context involves supporting both digital and non-digital well-being. Support is not just providing strategies to deflect the negative impacts of data surveillance, but also fosters community-building:

D’Ignazio, “Data Feminism Reading Group.” Historian Thomas Sugrue identifies the following features to have contributed to the breakdown of urban structures in Detroit: the flight of stable jobs from the city, ongoing persistence of workplace discrimination, and racial segregation in housing. Sugrue focuses his analysis on an intersection of race and class, with some attention to gender, though gender does not play a prominent role in his history of post-Second World War Detroit. Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), xxxvi. 45 Ross and Solinger, Reproductive Justice, 9. 46 Ibid., 2. 47 Ibid., 12. 43

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As we think about data systems and technology, there are measures we can take to increase our safety and maximize our security. We can add tools such as Signal or a VPN to make our technology more secure, but in order to make our interactions—digital and otherwise—safer, they must be connected to a healthy digital and non-digital ecosystem.”48 Nurturing supports online and away from keyboard develops community relations that are not focused on the “broken windows” but broken bodies and fractured neighborhoods that are the result of prolonged racism, sexism, impoverishment, and undermining of societal infrastructures. The actions promoted in the Digital Defense Playbook function as a digital performance of reproductive justice, as reproductive politics is inherent to their activities through the fostering of healthy community ecosystems. As Petty states: “One of the ways we can increase our safety, is by nurturing relationships […] In all we do, the human element must be part of our daily interactions.”49 The digital and reproductive justice work of ODB in Detroit and other US cities is part of a much longer history and legacy of Black women and mothers engaging in community-building and cultivating networks of care. These digital justice activities break the online/away from keyboard distinction, functioning as another instance where the immanence of everyday, repetitious activities contribute to the possibilities of freedom and transcendence. This work is significant, yet tends to be undervalued, as it is slow-going and lacks the fervor affiliated with other forms of activism, particularly the type of actions shared on social media. In other words, this type of digital justice does not go viral. I am going to shift now to other types of digital activism, focusing on the impact of Black Lives Matter (BLM) and the summer of 2020 when the murder of George Floyd evoked protests across the United States and the world in the midst of a global pandemic.

“He called out for his mama” During 2020, among the various images and words shared on social media after the murder of George Floyd, it emerged that Floyd cried out for his mama in his final moments.50 His mother, Larcenia Floyd, died in 2018 and was not there to respond to his cries, but soon digital images of protest

Petty, “Safety vs Security: Are You Safe or Are You Secure?,” 82. Ibid., 83. 50 Lonnae O’Neal, “George Floyd’s Mother Was Not There, but He Used Her as a Sacred Invocation,” History & Culture, May 30, 2020, accessed November 27, 2021, https://www.nationalgeographic. com/history/2020/05/george-floyds-mother-not-there-he-used-her-as-sacred-invocation/. 48 49

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signs and graffiti stating “all mothers were summoned when he called out for his mama” started circulating on the internet. The phrase originally appeared on a protest sign created by Rachel Costa, a white woman and mother. The manner in which this statement and sentiments went viral across social media warrants a critical pause. This phrase functions as an instance where motherhood becomes a call for universal sisterhood, which as to be discussed, is recognized as having limits. The group Wall of Moms (WOM) was initiated by Beverly Barnum, a mother of two living in Portland, Oregon, who began mobilizing through Facebook. It quickly gained mainstream media attention after it first appeared at demonstrations in Portland, Oregon, on July 18, 2020. Dressed in yellow and linking arms to create a human barricade between protesters and federal agents, the Wall of Moms stood together, chanted, sang lullabies, and some even handed out sunflowers.51 As images and videos of these mostly white mothers in action went viral on social media, other chapters appeared across the United States to counter the increased intensity of police response to Black Lives Matter protests and deployment of federal agents. The rapid rise of the group was soon followed by criticism from Black activists and anti-racist educators. Other groups in the United States have taken the approach of identifying mothers at the forefront of activism, including Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) and Mothers of the Movement, which is a group of Black mothers whose children were killed by the police or gun violence. Some of these mothers, such as Candace Lightener who began MADD, were moved to action after their child had been killed.52 In contrast, the organizers of WOM mobilize in empathy for others who experience trauma. Such an impetus for activism is not inherently unsound, though it does evoke a longer historical legacy of non-Black women and mothers positioning themselves as saviors and moral authorities, warranting further scrutiny. Teressa Raiford, executive director of Don’t Shoot Portland, points to these qualities when she describes how “The media shows a line of white moms standing together, but these Black moms are organizing.”53 Brooke Henderson states in a Fortune Magazine article: “Black mothers have been leading the fight for Black lives from the beginning, and their motherhood has never protected them from violence.

Dani Blum, “‘The Moms Are Here’: Wall of Moms’ Groups Mobilize Nationwide,” The New York Times, July 27, 2020, accessed November 27, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/27/ parenting/wall-of-moms-protests.html. 52 Danielle Kurtzleben, “What The ‘Wall of Moms’ Protests Say About Motherhood, Race In America,” NPR.Org, July 28, 2020, accessed November 27, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2020/07/28/896174019/ what-the-wall-of-moms-protests-say-about-motherhood-race-in-america. 53 Raiford as quoted in ibid. 51

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But because it’s white women, Raiford says, they’re receiving sympathy and awe that Black mothers have never been afforded.”54 Catrice Jackson, an anti-racism educator, acknowledges this connection and points out that white women tend to put their personal experiences first, which includes their experiences of being treated with caution and respect as mothers without acknowledgment that such reverence is informed by race. In other words, the capacity of white women to mother is not questioned in the same way as Black, indigenous, and other mothers of color in the United States.55 WOM presents itself as a “rescue” for protesters, illustrated through chants of “Feds stay clear! The moms are here!” This trope is troublesome with disturbing racial and colonial implications. In her historical analysis of white womanhood and the weaponization of emotion against women of color, Ruby Hamad states: “The language of the white savior is not one of liberation or sisterhood: it is a language of imperialism.”56 Like ODB, WOM encapsulates performances that involve actions both online and away from keyboard. However, the use of digital platforms and qualities of performance vary greatly between the organizations. As noted previously, WOM began on Facebook, which is where planning and organizing took place, leading to on-the-ground action. The resulting performances are highly visible, even theatrical, as participants wear yellow and engage in particular actions, including the singing of lullabies and shouting chants that differentiate their group from other protestors. Images of their activities then went viral on social media, quickly gaining interest in the mainstream press while inspiring the formation of similar groups around the United States. In other words, social media networks enabled the rapid formation of WOM, while their style of performance captured people’s attention. As such, WOM managed to disrupt BLM protests of 2020. Disruption in this context is akin to the disruptions celebrated in Silicon Valley tech culture, where incessant innovation alters industries but is ultimately unsustainable. Instead of drawing attention to the racist injustices, which were the impetus for the BLM protests, attention is placed on WOM as activists. Upon viewing the viral videos and images of WOM on social media, Catrice Jackson states: “We were focused on white women saving or protecting the protesters who are out there, and that defeats the whole purpose of protesting––so that the voices of Black people are heard.”57 The stylized quality of WOM draws Brooke Henderson, “Early Members of ‘Wall of Moms’ Reflect on Where They Went Wrong as Protests in Portland Continue,” Fortune, October 6, 2020, accessed January 13, 2021, https:// fortune.com/2020/10/06/wall-of-moms-portland-protests/. 55 Ibid. 56 Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars, 151–2. 57 Jackson as quoted in Henderson, “Early Members of ‘Wall of Moms’ Reflect on Where They Went Wrong as Protests in Portland Continue.” 54

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attention and gains notice, which contrasts with ODB whose Digital Defense Playbook provides strategies for interrupting surveillance and data collection as a means of diverting the scrutinizing attention of the stalker state. Many of the mothers involved in WOM were moved to take action to support Black Lives Matter, even though they had no previous experience with activism or social justice. In a New York Times article, Dani Blum reports how this lack of experience in on-the-ground organizing led the Portland Chapter of WOM to partner with the organization Don’t Shoot Portland, which is supported by Black Lives Matter.58 In an article posted by the local Oregon paper, The Oregonian, just two days after the New York Times article ran, Alex Hardgrave describes how a rift formed between the two organizations. Don’t Shoot Portland publicly stating their break with the group in an Instagram post, after the “Wall of Moms founder Bev Barnum filed for business registrations without consulting the newly instated Black leaders and that the safety of Black members at the nightly protests in downtown Portland was overlooked.”59 In the image accompanying the post, a white X crosses out the announcement from WOM that describes how white group administrators have relinquished their roles to make space for Black and indigenous leadership. The WOM announcement states: “While we started with the heart-centered and courageous goal of bringing mothers together to stand against fascism, racism, and authoritarianism, we quickly found ourselves in a problematic but predictable place—too many of our group admin were White women.”60 The problem they note, where organizations that arise to support minoritized and marginalized groups are predominately made up of white women who do not have the experiences of racism as those they desire to support, is reminiscent of Koritha Mitchell’s study of anti-lynching activism.61 In her analysis of early twentieth-century lynching plays by Black women, Mitchell considers how representations of Black pain have been used to evoke maternal empathy. She considers the role certain productions had in cultivating the support of white women in countering the violence of lynching, which included the founding of

Blum, “‘The Moms Are Here’.” Alex Hardgrave, “Portland’s Wall of Moms Crumbles amid Online Allegations by Former Partner, Don’t Shoot PDX,” Oregonlive, July 29, 2020, accessed November 27, 2021, https://www. oregonlive.com/news/2020/07/portlands-wall-of-moms-crumbles-amid-online-allegations-byformer-partner-dont-shoot-pdx.html. 60 dontshootportland, “ANTI-BLACKNESS. DO NOT SUPPORT wallofmoms #WALLOFMOMS..,” Instagram, July 29, 2020, accessed November 27, 2021, https://www.instagram.com/p/CDO2rh_ hNJR/. 61 Koritha Mitchell, “Sisters in Motherhood(?): The Politics of Race and Gender in Lynching Drama,” in Gender and Lynching: The Politics of Memory, ed. Evelyn Simien (New York and Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 37. 58 59

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the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL). At the same time, she acknowledges the limits of such an approach, noting how the activism of white women tended to be “built on the foundations laid by Black women activists”62 without acknowledging this precedent. Her analysis of lynching plays parallels twenty-first-century social media in its capacity to evoke activist responses, the limits of empathy, and the tendency to draw attention away from contributions of Black women and mothers in social justice. Taking Ruby Hamad’s analysis of white woman and activism into account, the problematic nature of the group extends beyond having too many white women as administrators—WOM as a protest organization connects to a longer legacy of the White Savior complex and white maternalism, where white mothers see themselves as having innate qualities of virtue and care to save minoritized groups. Hamas traces the role of white maternalism in the long history of the spread and support of white supremacy across the globe through centuries of colonialism, systems of slavery, and European patriarchal dominance.63 In the post announcing their break from WOM, Don’t Shoot Portland states: “WOM was not started for BLM, but to get the feds out of PDX [Portland].”64 This difference in intention is noteworthy, since it highlights how WOM was formed in response to the presence of federal officers in Portland, which impacts the safety of white individuals, as opposed to supporting Black Lives Matter, which was created in response to threats to Black life. These objectives imply that the interests of WOM are to support white safety and security threatened by the presence of federal officers, as opposed to the ongoing devastation of Black lives through police brutality and institutional racism. The schism here is significant, since it points to how WOM’s actions are not that of co-liberation, but continue to prioritize personal interests and security. Petty puts forward co-liberation as an alternative means of articulating white allyship, where white people “firmly believe that their liberation, their humanity is also dependent upon the destruction of racism and the dismantling of white supremacy.”65 In co-liberation, emphasis is placed on the mutual benefits of justice movements for dominating groups and minoritized groups that encompasses “relationship building and demographic healing.”66

Ibid., 38. Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars, 135–65. 64 dontshootportland, “ANTI-BLACKNESS.” 65 Tawana Petty, “Anti-Racism Organizing Has Staled,” Eclectablog, December 2, 2017, accessed November 27, 2021, https://www.eclectablog.com/2017/12/anti-racism-organizing-has-staled. html.Petty. 66 D’Ignazio and Klein, Data Feminism, 71. 62 63

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D’Ignazio and Klein state: “There is a famous saying credited to aboriginal activists in Queensland, Australia, from the 1970s: ‘If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.’”67 Like a viral phenomenon in and of itself, social media platforms enabled WOM to rapidly come into being. In contrast, effective co-liberation takes time to cultivate a healthy community ecology both on and away from keyboard. The momentum and media attention of WOM was used to steer the group away from an on-the-ground activist response to upscale it as a movement against all injustices. On the current website, WOM claims their mission is to “stand with and for the oppressed by providing resources, support and advocacy.”68 The website itself is quite minimal and stylized, featuring a logo with a hand of indiscernible race holding a small bouquet of flowers. It contains links to press articles about the group and their Instagram account along with a donation button. There are no links to resources or other advocacy groups. The Instagram page is also highly stylized, presenting inspirational quotes that include the same logo as the website. Even though the Instagram account contains more anti-racist and social justice resources than the website, its branded presentation maintains a recognizable, unifying aesthetic experience that focuses on the group itself, rather than the causes they support. While the zealous activities of WOM may have gone viral, their actual contributions to social justice are questionable. Here lies significant differences between WOM and the work of ODB. The digital justice and reproductive justice activism of ODB illustrates Patricia Hill Collins’s description of mothering as not to dominate or control children or vulnerable populations, but have the purpose to “bring people along […] so that vulnerable members of the community will be able to attain the self-reliance and independence essential for resistance.”69 This work is not just about perceived moral obligations, or simply protection of the self and one’s own family unit, but stems from community survival. Moreover, in this comparison, the maternal figures of WOM are not strange mothers, despite their theatrical performances of protest that seem to indicate otherwise, since their actions reinforce perceptions of the mother as rooted in what Hamad refers to as white maternalism. That is, the mother is treated as inherently virtuous, and therefore capable of saving or caring for others, especially nonwhite women and children.70 In contrast,

Ibid. Wall of Moms, “Home | Wall of Moms,” accessed January 13, 2021, https://www. officialwallofmoms.org/. 69 Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 193. 70 Hamad, White Tears/Brown Scars, 148. 67 68

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ODB’s merger of reproductive with digital justice, where a number of its key members identify as mothers, introduces an alternative model of bringing together the maternal with activism that is grounded in models of kinship and care that exceed the nuclear family unit. As such, strangeness in this context functions as a means of behaving differently to interrupt regimes of datamining and digital surveillance through collective action rooted in principles of reproductive justice. Here, the strange mother is not a single figure, but the constitution of a distributed matrix.

Distributed matrix Drawing from the philosophy of William James, Anne Munster uses the mosaic as a means of formalizing networked experience, highlighting that any attempts to structure or coordinate the inherent slipperiness of networked relations inherently exceeds any kind of metaphor. Along these lines, I turn to the matrix as a different means of considering distributed communication. Irina Aristarkhova highlights that while the term emerged as a descriptor for the womb, this maternal connotation has been erased. Current use of the term matrix, including in computer science, “has no relation to the maternal body expect through etymology.”71 Aristarkhova reconnects this abstraction of the matrix back to the maternal body to point out how “the matrix is not only generative as space, but is in its renewed relationship to the maternal the very generation of space for the possibility of others.”72 Focusing her analysis on the sublimation of the maternal into the matrix and hospitality—“The mother is so tacitly embedded into the matrix and hospitality that she is nowhere to be seen”73—Aristarkhova produces an alternative way of considering relations to others in philosophy and bioscience. Her most explicit reference to digital technologies and computer science is through her discussion of the film franchise The Matrix, where the matrix functions as a machine-generated virtual ordering of reality.74 The definition of the matrix as an omnipresent “prison for your mind” connects to J.J. Sylvester’s nineteenth-century use of the term matrix to describe “an enclosed array of numbers.”75 Despite the fact that those enclosed in the “matrix” are trapped in womb-like capsules,

Irina Aristarkhova, Hospitality of the Matrix: Philosophy, Biomedicine, and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 16. 72 Ibid., 3. 73 Ibid., 4. 74 Ibid., 16. 75 Ibid., 11. 71

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which Nero dramatically births from in the first film of the franchise, the notion of the maternal is glaringly absent in the movie’s plot and subsequent analyses while the popular film franchise and the image of the matrix as a structuring apparatus quickly gained recognition. For instance, “The Red Pill” Reddit forum, which has gained notoriety for its affiliation with the alt-right and toxic masculinity, is a reference to how the main character Neo selects the “red pill” over the “blue pill,” which reveals the true nature of the matrix as a virtual ordering of reality. Debbie Ging describes how anti-feminist men’s rights movements have “re-appropriated this motif as its central ‘philosophy,’ whereby red-pilled men are considered to have been woken to feminism’s gynocentric and misandrist regime.”76 The irony in this cultural appropriation being that through its apparent rejection of gynocentrisim, the “manosphere” has turned to a film whose title shares the etymologic root with mother. In addition, the treatment of the matrix as inherently something to be escaped, as opposed to its potential for networks of hospitality that connects to its etymological roots, is consistent with the misogynist ideologies of alt-right groups. The matrix as a means of control is also present in Patricia Hill Collins’s neologism “matrix of domination,” which she coined in her 1990 book Black Feminist Thought. She defines the matrix of domination as “intersecting oppressions in one social location,”77 arguing that “all contexts of domination incorporate some combination of intersecting oppressions, and considerable variability exists from one matrix of domination to the next as to how oppression and activism will be organized.”78 That is, oppression is not restricted to single social categories, such as class, race, or gender, but comprise an intersection of oppressions that manifest depending on social contexts and relations of those present in this context. As such, the relationship between the oppressor and oppressed is dynamic and can vary. Design Justice scholar and activist Sasha Costanza-Chock elaborates upon Collins, stating that “every individual simultaneously receives both benefits and harms based on their location within the matrix of domination.”79 The matrix functions as a means of modeling the complexities of oppression: “regardless of how any given matrix is actually organized either across time

Debbie Ging, “Bros v. Hos: Postfeminism, Anti-Feminism and the Toxic Turn in Digital Gender Politics,” in Gender Hate Online: Understanding the New Anti-Feminism, ed. Debbie Ging and Eugenia Siapera(Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 47, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-96226-9. 77 Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 228. 78 Ibid. 79 Costanza-Chock, Design Justice, 20. 76

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or from society to society, the concept of a matrix of domination encapsulates the universality of intersecting oppressions as organized through diverse local realities.”80 Considering oppression in the form of the matrix not only enables understandings of the impacts of intersectionality in action but also can foster activist organizations to counter oppression. While the matrix in this context is used to model how oppression is made manifest, specifically on the lives of Black women in Collins’s work, it also can function as a relational model of activist response. Escaping the matrix of domination involves cultivating a matrix of co-liberation as a distributed network. The digital and reproductive justice strategies that ODB promotes are lived instances of such a distributed network. Its form and manner of functioning utilize the kind of iterative action that comprises programming languages that constitute digital technologies. The Digital Defense Playbook exists at the intersection of online and away from keyboard to develop a healthy ecology that builds community through education and group action through its promotion of a different kind of digital performance. Their work is an example of what adrienne maree brown, who is also based in Detroit, defines as an emergent strategy, or a “strategy for building complex patterns and systems of change through relatively small interactions.”81 Such processes tend to work more slowly and not have the immediate quantifiable data to satisfy metrics of progress, though have significant longer term impacts through the cultivation of human relations: “Emergence emphasizes critical connections over critical mass, building authentic relationships, listening with all the senses of the body and the mind.”82 Returning to the principles of reproductive justice, such communities enable “all fertile persons and persons who reproduce and become parents […] a safe and dignified context for these most fundamental human experiences.”83 The capacity to parent, including mothering in all its forms, is rooted in lived experience, which is determined by the milieu we inhabit. The capacity to engage with digital technologies through a shared ecology of the matrix connects them in the manner through which they function. Munster states: Code sequences change and evolve through usage and transfer and exchange across platforms, nodes, and users in online contexts and through

Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 228. Adrienne M. Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 4. 82 Ibid., 5. 83 Ross and Solinger, Reproductive Justice, 9. 80 81

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their extensive spread and deployment throughout communications systems […] Algorithms often function because they are able to make use of variation and rearrange sequences of code into different orders, resynthesizing these so as to maintain the associations between sequential events. The immanent variability of the actualized algorithm draws out its potential (virtual) inventiveness.84 Computer code does not just repeat, but it is iterative—it is repetition with a difference. This capacity for difference has enabled private technology corporations to encroach on many aspects of everyday life, capitalizing upon and subjecting nearly every gesture, action, and speech-act through capture. However, computer code’s iterability also means that with each looping sequence, there is a potential for difference and a capacity to alter the outcome. The Digital Defense Playbook takes advantage of this opportunity to introduce difference through the education of defensive strategies and community-building that interrupts the loop. Interruptions through defensive strategies, such as the gap, glitch, and the lag, point to the seams of digital infrastructures. These seams become the entry points for engaging with the iterative capacities of digital technology, enabling ways to alter outcomes. At the moment, corporate digital industries have focused on prediction in user behavior, as tech companies inform and mediate user interactions to increase the capacities for accumulating data. Prediction here is not about foreseeing the future, but determining the future through mediation. The nefarious quality of these manipulations are that they appear to constitute freedom and choice, though algorithms are carefully orchestrating what choices are available based on data collected from behaviors and preferences captured across different platforms and device usage through pattern modeling.85 Educating individuals and communities as to how data collection functions invites new capacities for interrupting these processes and breaking the patterns through the aesthetics of lived experience. The Digital Defense Playbook enables such capacities through digital performances of resistance. Here, a distributed matrix can function as a means of cultivating a collective ecology of safety and care, both online and away from keyboard. Thinking of digital performance in expanded terms enables a rethinking of subjectivity. I define digital performance to include performing for and with the camera, interactive media, engagement with social media, livestreaming, strategies for countering the encroachment of surveillance and algorithmic

Munster, An Aesthesia of Networks, 67. Ibid., 87.

84 85

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mediation, and more. In the various case studies, maternal subjectivity as a relational subject of interruption is used as a model for rethinking digital subjectivity through a shared aesthetics of interruption. Attention is shifted away from disruption and creative destruction as the driving forces behind innovation, which is not only unsustainable but, as Bernard Stiegler argues in his critique of disruption, inherently detrimental too.86 Instead, focus is placed on interruption and its affiliated ambivalence. The risk at this stage is that digital technologies have been afforded such high degrees of determination at speeds that far exceed previous modes of engagement, also enabling the deferral of responsibility for when such systems fail. Drawing the emphasis to moments of breakdown through the aesthetics of interruption enables these technologies to appear, as Martin Heidegger describes, as ready-to-hand, enabling reflexive and creative engagement. Maternal ambivalence highlights how conflicting interests and interdependence are inevitable. Instead of ignoring such entanglements, moments of ambivalence point to the limits of autonomy, functioning as uncanny revelations of how interconnected and vulnerable we all are. Moreover, the breakdown of digital technologies and maternal ambivalence function as interruptions that are not aberrations, but norms. Taking this as a starting point for understanding human–technological relations breaks from the allure and supremacy of technosolutionism and the inevitability of determinism. Throughout this book, the maternal and digital subjectivity are questioned, challenged, and rethought together. Presumptions of what comprises relational being in societies increasingly mediated through digital technologies and algorithmic determination are revealed as distributed networks. At the same time, preconceptions of the mother as a single, self-sacrificing universal figure of unconditional care, which are ideals that contribute to increased isolation of the family as a self-determining unit, are glitched. Focusing on moments of breakdown, both in terms of mothering and the digital, become moments of unconcealing as the seams of systems are revealed. The space of inquiry, however, is not just a space of reason, but an affective, relational space—a distributed matrix.

See Stiegler, The Age of Disruption.

86

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Index abjection 96 ableism 97 abortion 6, 50–1, 69 Abramovič, Marina Lips of Thomas 99 re-performance 99–100 see also Seven Easy Pieces aesthetics, technical objects 52–4 aesthetics of interruption 14 see also breakdown; glitches Ahmed, Sara 90–1 algorithms algorithmic governmentality 7 computational capitalism 76 digital subjectivity 10–11 mediation/determinism 8, 9, 11, 125, 185–6 surveillance and criminalization 166 transcendence 139 see also digital performance; individual technology ­companies ambivalence see maternal ambivalence AMMAA 157–8 ancient Greece 28, 144 angst 89–90, 106 ­Antosik-Parsons, Kate 95 Apsáalooke Feminist 25, 41–2, 43 Aran jumpers 58, 59 Aristarkhova, Irina 119, 182 Arsem, Marilyn 37 Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment 50–1 Asian mother-artists 157–8 Asma, Stephen 141 asylum seekers, and DP 68–72 attention, artworks and 45–6

Auslander, Philip 101, 102 autobiography 88 avatars 124 “away from keyboard” (AFK) 67 Baraitser, Lisa 31–2, 47, 54, 56, 156 Enduring Time 75–6 Barnum, Beverly 177, 179 Barry, Aideen Enshrined 49–50, 52–5 Levitating 55 Beatie, Thomas 133 Beauvoir, Simone de 109, 137 The Second Sex 112–13, 119, 120, 125 becoming 26, 30 Benjamin, Ruha 7, 8, 86, 173 Berlant, Lauren 149 Bern, Thomas 7 Betancourt, Michael 65–6 Betterton, Rosemary 56–7 biases cis gender and heterosexual 137 racial 92–3 big data 27, 124–5 biometric data 79 birth see birthing videos; YouTube Portraits birthing videos, social media and 155–6, 157, 159 Black feminist performance 124 Black Lives Matter 177, 178–9, 180 Black women/mothers 150–1, 152–3, 175, 176 activism 177–80 and reproductive labor 84, 86–7 blogs 5 Blum, Dani 179

206

bodily relations see maternal subjectivity body/mind dichotomy 120 Boston Women’s Health Book Collective 157 Brandon (1994–9) 108–9 Bratton, Benjamin 8 ­breakdown 88–90, 137 digital/technological 55–6, 186 see also maternal ambivalence breast pump 52–3, 105, 106–7, 111, 112 see also Lactation Station breastfeeding 121, 127, 128 Brexit 64 Bridle, James 7 Briggs, Laura 15 Bro Pold, Søren 60 Brock, André 91–2 broken window theory 171 Butler, Judith 10, 31, 126 Butler, Octavia 13–14 Cahill, Paddy, Yellow The Film 98–9, 100–2, 103 capitalism algorithms and 125 computational 76 economic framework 7 family as unit of 118 Marxist-Feminist critique of 11 see also creative destruction; cyberfeminism; surveillance capitalism Captive Maternals 86–7, 90 Carden, Siún 58 Carey, Helen 98, 100 Cassidy, Tanya 149 Catholic Church, Ireland 50, 59, 62, 78 censorship 127 Cervical Screening 78–79 CervicalCheck 78 Chang, Patty, Milk Debt 105–7, 110, 111, 127 Chaplow, Biff 131, 133, 135 Cheang, Shu Lea, Brandon 108–9 Cheney-Lippold, John 7, 125

Index citizenship 67–9, 71 collaboration 157 collective action 169 Collins, Patricia Hill 151, 183, 184 commercial content moderation 127–8, 159–160, 165 community engagement/building 168, 175–6 computer breakdown 55–6 consumerism 83–4 Conte, Jack 5 content moderation see commercial content moderation context collapse 21–22 Coogan, Amanda ­I’ll Sing You a Song 102 Talk Real Fine 97 windowpane 96–7 Yellow 93–6, 98, 100, 102–3 You Told Me to Wash 97 Costanza-Chock, Sasha 136–7 Covid-19 21–2, 73, 96, 106, 110 misinformation and 160 Crary, Jonathan 7 Creation Story 23–5, 29 creative destruction 76, 77 criminalization, algorithmic prediction 166 Cummins, Pauline, Inis t’Oirr: Aran Dance 57–60 cyberfeminism 122, 123–4, 139 cybernetic theory 107–8 cyborg identity 123 data protection 173 data surveillance, marginalized groups 165, 168 de la Cretaz, Britni 128 Dean, Aria 10 Dean, Jodi 4, 7 Dear Ireland (2020) 72–5, 96 DeCook, Julie R. 123 Derrida, Jacques 11 Detroit, Michigan 167 see also Our Data Bodies (ODB) Detroit Community Technology Project 170

Index digital activism, women/mothers 177–182 digital art, defined 27 digital collages 82–5 Digital Defense Playbook 168–9, 172–3, 174, 176, 185 see also Our Data Bodies (ODB) digital objects 39–41, 47 digital performance 26–7, 185–6 digital single-lens reflex cameras 53–4 digital subjectivity defined 10 disembodiment 108 and interruptions 6 and the maternal 6 networked 161–2 reflexivity 4 Digital TV Dinner (1978–9) 66 Direct Provision (DP) 68–72 disclosure choices 133, 134 disruption, ethos of 76–7, 186 Dixon, Steve 27 Dobkin, Jess, Lactation Station 114–21, 122 ­domestic labor 11, 113–14 see also motherhood/mothers Don’t Shoot Portland 179, 180 doubling 100 “Drowning in the Sound” (2019) 1–7 Du Bois, W.E.B. 10 Dublin Fringe and Theatre Festivals 97 Theatre for the Deaf 97 Ellis, Simon 132, 133 embodiment Beauvoir on 112–13, 138, 139 digital technology and 111 erasure of 107–8 Enduring Time 75–6 Enshrined (2016) 49–50, 52–5 eugenics 18, 74 Euripides 141, 143 see also Medea, La European Union 174 exclusion 74 Expanded Cinema 144

207

Facebook 125–6, 127, 158 gender identity 129 transgender pregnancy 131–2 see also social media facial recognition technologies 92 families, privatization of familial care 150–2 female bodies, and social media 125–7 feminism 10, 12 glitch 139 and Medea 141 and Mother Ireland 60 resistance and 51 second-wave, art 94 see also cyberfeminism Fenton, Jay 66 filicide 141 Fischer, Mia 135 Fleetwood, Nichole 82–3, 84 Floyd, George 176–7 Freud, Sigmund 81, 87, 89, 103 Garbes, Angela 117 gay marriage, Ireland 19 gender binary gender categories 128–9 erasure of, and discrimination laws 15 ­lactation and 129 see also nipple pasty project; transgender people geography, surveillance and 172, 174 Gibson, William 108 “gig” economy 8 Gilvin, Amanda 85 Glissant, Éduoard 162–3 glitch art 66 glitches 55–6, 63–4, 65, 67 of the body 130, 137 feminism and 139 Goffman, Erving 133–4 Goldberg, RoseLee 25 Google 173–4 GoPro cameras 34, 35–6, 38 GPS devices 8 graphical user interfaces (GUIs) 124

208

Index

Halappanavar, Savita 69 Hamad, Ruby 178, 180 Haudenosaunee cosmologies 24, 28 Hayles, N. Katherine 107–8 headphones 59–60 Hebron, Micol, Internet Acceptable Male Nipple Template 125–7 Heidegger, Martin 25, 35, 88–9, 103 Heyes, Cressida 162 Hinde, Katie 117 homelessness 72–3 Hong Kong 106–7 housework see domestic labor Hui, Yuk 39–40 Husserl, Edmund 40 immanence 109, 112, 117 aesthetization of 114 Beauvoir on 138 maternal 113–14 technology 136 transcendence and 119–20 immunology 30–1 Industrial Revolution 35 Inis t’Oirr: Aran Dance 57–60 innovation 56, 76, 77, 178, 186 Instagram 127, 137–8 instrumentarianism 8 interdependence 154 internet 108–9 cyberfeminism 122, 124 and feminist scholars 10 ­harassment 135–6 Internet of Things 124–5 livestreaming 147 utopic possibilities of 130 see also social media interruptions 6, 31–32 see also aesthetics of interruption; breakdown Ireland/Irish 19 artists, and activism 50–1 Constitution on the maternal 49–50, 51, 57 see also Direct Provision (DP); Northern Ireland Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) 59 Irish Sign Language (ISL) 96–7, 100

Jackson, Shannon 25–6 Jackson, Steven 56 James, Joy 86 Jarrett, Kylie 11–12 Jefferson, Brian 172–3 Johnston, Susan lles 141 Kane, Carolyn 55–6, 66 Kant, Immanuel 52 Karol, Coco 1–4 Kennedy, Jennifer 108–9 Kiberb, Roisin 158 Kinsella, Tina 127, 129 Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara 28 Klein, Lauren 65 knitting 58–9 knowledge transmission, gendered networks 156–7 Knowles, Helen, YouTube Portraits 155–6, 159, 161–3 Kokoli, Alexandra 94, 96 Kotak, Marni 113 Birth of Baby X 33 Raising Baby X: Little Brother 33–9, 40 Kristeva, Julia 96 Kwastek, Katja 27 Laboria Cuboniks (collective) 129 LaChance Adams, Sarah 119, 149, 153–4 Lactation Station Breast Milk Bar 114–21 Lady and the Maid (2000) 82–5, 90–1 LaMarre, Thomas 123 Lapworth, Andrew 111 Levitating (2007) 55 Lewis, Sophie 15, 118–19 liberal humanism, disembodiment 108 liminality 70–1, 88 limit-experience 162, 163 ­Little Brother see Kotak, Marni livestreaming 147 Los Angeles, California 105 Loveless, Natalie “Maternal Ecologies” 109–10 “New Maternalisms” 115 lynching, anti-lynching activism 179–80

Index Magdalene Laundries 95 Majaca, Antonia 13 marriage 151–2 Marxist-Feminist critique, of capitalism 11 Mask of Motherhood (2016) 44–7 mass surveillance see Project Greenlight, Detroit maternal ambivalence 119, 143, 149–150, 152, 153–4, 186 maternal care 120–1 see also motherhood/mothers; parenting maternal subjectivity 2, 29–33, 47, 84, 120–2, 186 matrix 182–4 Matrix, The (film) 182–3 McClain, Dani 152 McDonagh, Rosaleen, Dear Ireland 72–5 McMillan, Uri 124 Meaney, Geraldine 57, 59, 60, 78 Medea, La 141–9, 150, 152–5 medical discourse/technologies, birth and 156, 162 Mendieta, Ana, Silhouettes 62 Miami Artzine 143 Milk Debt 105–7, 110, 111, 127 Minaj, Nicki 124 miscarriage 6, 69 Mitchell, Koritha 179–80 Monani, Salma 43 Montano, Linda 36–7 Mori, Masahiro 88 Mother Ireland 51, 56–60 mother-artist 24, 47 mother-artists, Asian 157–8 motherhood/mothers 9 activism 177–82 Beauvoir on 113 immanence and 112, 114 intergenerational approach 43 in Ireland 49–50, 57 mothering as art 113–14 political activism 17 shaming of 128 strange 7 ­see also Black women/mothers; maternal; parenting

209

Motivation (2016) 46–7 Moynihan Report 151 Munster, Anne 111, 182, 184–85 Nash, Jennifer 150–1, 152–3 Native Americans, portraits 42, 43 Nelson, Maggie 52–3 neoliberalism 9, 22, 149–52, 154 networked self see digital subjectivity nipple pasty project 125–7 Noble, Safiya Umoja 174 Northern Ireland 63, 64 O’Brien, Edna 57 O’Connor, Laura Cervical Screening 78–9 Cultural Methods 79 Uncomfortable State 61–2 Odell, Jenny 45–6 online harassment 135–6 O’Reilly, Shane 96 O’Reilly, Zoe 70–1 Our Data Bodies (ODB) 165–170, 172–6, 179, 181–2, 184, 185 Palmer, Amanda 1 “Drowning in the Sound” 2–7 parenting 15 disempowerment 70–2 lived experience 184 podcasts 130 see also motherhood/mothers; reproductive justice Parker, Emily 119 Parker, Roszika 149–50, 152 Patreon (crowd-sourcing platform) 5 performance art 25–6 children and 34 ephemerality 37 performance documentation 102 Petty, Tawana 170, 172, 175 Phelan, Vicky 78 phenomenology 112 photography colonization and 43 resistance and 42, 43 Pindell, Howardena 124 Piper, Adrian 124 pixels 66

210

Index

pixel-sorting algorithm 64 Plant, Sadie 10, 108, 122–3, 125, 139 ­Zeros + Ones 9 podcasts 130 policing, data surveillance 170, 171 Pope, Michael 1, 4 population control 18 pregnancy 69, 95 performance of 2 and self/nonself theory 30–1 workplace discrimination 15 see also maternal care; motherhood/mothers; Quickening private-public partnership 170 privatization see neoliberalism Project Greenlight, Detroit 167, 170–3 projected video 144 property, focus on protecting 171, 174 protention 40 psychoanalysis 31 psychosocial implications of digitization 7 Q-Anon 160 Quickening 63–7 racial inequality, US 85–6, 167–8 see also whiteness racism, subjectivity and 10 Raiford, Teressa 177–8 Raising Baby X: Little Brother 33–9, 40 rationalization 11, 76 Ravetto-Biagioli, Kriss 81 Reagan, Ronald 150, 152 realism 60 Red Star Fletcher, Beatrice 41–2, 43 Red Star, Wendy 24 Apsáalooke Feminist 25, 41–2, 43 Reese, Trystan 130–9 re-performance 99–100 reproductive activism/justice 18–19 in Ireland 50–1 reproductive justice 167, 175–6, 181 reproductive labor Captive Maternals and 86–7 neoliberalism and 149–52 reproductive rights 75, 175

Rich, Adrienne, Of Woman Born 30 Risk! (podcast) 131, 133 Roberts, Sarah 127–8, 159, 165 Robinson, Hilary 57 Roma 74 Rose, Jacqueline 121 ­Rouvroy, Antoinette 7 Royle, Nicholas 87, 88 Russell, Legacy 67, 124, 130, 137, 139 safety 172, 173 Salter, Chris 27–8, 144 Schumpeter, Joseph 76, 77 security 172 self/nonself theory 30–1 Seven Easy Pieces 99, 100 sexuality, and birth 159 Seymour, Nicole 43 Sharpe, Christina 85 Sherer, John 148 Silicon Valley, California 5–6, 76, 92, 128 Silverman, Kaja 53 Simondon, Gilbert 25, 34–5, 52, 110, 160–1 On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects 53 Singh, Ruchika Wason 157–8 Skype 110 slavery 151 smartphones 44–5, 89–90, 110–11 social media 27, 45, 47 addictive 8 binary gender categories 128–9 brand management 128, 165 DP and 70 female bodies and 125–7 management of self 134 maternal isolation and 142 pregnancy, performance of 2 transgender pregnancy 130–2, 134–8 and transindividuation 161 WOM 181 see also Facebook; Instagram; internet; YouTube

Index Solinger, Rickie 18–19 Spillers, Hortense 151 Stiegler, Bernard 7, 39, 40, 76, 161, 186 Stone, Alison 2, 32–3, 119–20 stop-motion animation 49, 54–5 storytelling 24, 131, 133 see also Haudenosaunee cosmologies strangeness, defined 13 subjectivity defined 10–12 neoliberalism 154 as relational 47 Western world on 120 ­see also maternal subjectivity; transgender people Suchman, Lucy 56 Sullivan, Moynagh 55, 56 Summers, Andrew 148 surrogacy 118 surveillance capitalism 7, 134, 139, 163 surveillance programs see Project Greenlight, Detroit Tal, Kali 92 Taylor, Diana 26 Taylor, T.L. 147 technical objects aesthetics 52–4 and embodiment 110–11 as mediators 34, 35 technological alienation 35 Thatcher, Margaret 150 theatre, and projected video 144 There Will be No Intermission (2019) 6 Time magazine 135 Tipton, Gemma 55 touchscreens 111 transcendence 112, 113, 114, 117, 138 digital 122, 124, 125 embodiment 136, 139 see also immanence transgender people, and pregnancy 130–9 transgender rights 15

211

transindividuation 160–1 transphobia 135 Travellers 73–5 Travieso, Yara, La Medea 141–9, 150, 152–5 Tuggar, Fatimah Changing Space 83 Lady and the Maid 82–5, 90–1 Transient Transfer 83 the uncanny 87–8, 90 Working Woman 93 Turner, Fred 5 Twitch 147 Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival 98 uncanny 81–2, 87–103 and feminist art 94–5 and re-performance 99–100 Uncomfortable State (2017) 61–2 Utopian ideology 5–6 video conferencing 22, 110 video game play, streaming 147 ­video sharing platforms see Vimeo Vimeo 39 Vuma, Donnah 70 Wajcman, Judy 123 Wall of Moms (WOM) 177–9, 180–1 Wark, McKenzie 7 Weeks, Kathi 15 Western philosophy, and subjectivity 32 white supremacy, reproductive justice and 19 white women/mothers activism 177–80 white maternalism 178, 180, 181 whiteness 85, 90–3, 123 windowpane 96–7 Winger-Bearskin, Amelia 28 Creation Myth 23–5, 29 Wampum.Codes 29 Withy, Katherine 88–9 women with disabilities 75 Woodman, Nick 34 Working Woman (1997) 93

212

Index

Xenofeminism 129

Yoshizawa, Rebecca Scott 30 Young, Iris Marion 114, 134 YouTube 72, 128, 142 birthing videos 157 YouTube Portraits 155–6, 159, 161–3

Yellow 93–6, 98, 100, 102–3 Yellow The Film (2012) 98–9

Zoom 110 Zuboff, Shoshana 7, 76, 77, 134

Wynne, Megan 25, 113 Mask of Motherhood 44–7 Motivation 46–7

213

214

215

216

217

218

219

220

PLATES 1 AND 2  Stills from Marni Kotak’s, Raising Baby X: Five Years, video, 352 minutes. 2012–17. Images courtesy of the artist and Microscope Gallery.

PLATE 3  Megan Wynne, Mask of Motherhood, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.

PLATE 4  Megan Wynne, Motivation, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.

PLATES 5 AND 6  Aideen Barry, Enshrined, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.

PLATES 7 AND 8 Laura O’Connor, Uncomfortable State, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.

PLATES 9 AND 10  EL Putnam, Quickening, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.

PLATE 11  Fatimah Tuggar, Lady & the Maid, 2000, Computer Montage (inkjet on vinyl), 274 × 115 cm (108 × 45 in). Courtesy of BintaZarah Studios.

PLATE 12  Fatimah Tuggar, Working Woman, 1997, Computer Montage (inkjet on vinyl), 128 × 121 cm (50 × 48 in). Courtesy of BintaZarah Studios.

PLATE 13 Amanda Coogan and Paddy Cahill, screenshots from Yellow The Film (2012). Courtesy of the artists.

PLATE 14  Promotional image for Jess Dobkin, Lactation Station, 2006. Photograph by David Hawe. Courtesy of the artist.

PLATE 15  Helen Knowles, Alleingeburt / Unassisted Childbirth, 2012, from YouTube series. Courtesy of the artist.

PLATE 16 Helen Knowles, Birth with Orgasm II, 2012, from YouTube series. Courtesy of the artist.