The Eggcellent Adventures of Marijke De Roover Part 1: A Womb of One’s Own

THE EGGCELLENT ADVENTURES OF MARIJKE DE ROOVER

PART 1: A WOMB OF ONE’S OWN

The enclosed and secret room has been a potent image in women’s novels since Jane Eyre, but by the end of the century it came to be identified with the womb and female conflict… The secret room, the attic hideaway, the suffragette cell came to stand for a seperate world, a flight from men and from adult sexuality.

INTRODUCTION

Remember when the world became an itch for a deeper level? When a lot of us started to get the sense that almost everything around us was a laminated parody trying to appeal to aesthetics and terror and assumed ignorance? When the world became as much spin-induced apathy and the contagion of scary thoughts/abstract capital/winsome graphics as anything inter-galactic? When just switching between tabs on a laptop started to involve wading through multitude leagues of blubber between you and reality? When ‘reality’ appeared to be a viable alternative, somewhere out there, and not just an invention cooked up in a vat of desperately hopeful psyches?

It was then that I decided it was time to get knocked up.

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SETTING

In the room

two women to womb a baby.
baby baby not on board (Yet?)
baby baby not boarding too late at gate D (you know what I mean)
We travel too much to make this work (she said)
STABILITY! RESPONSIBILITY!
And with a little voice I say: can the doctor see me now.

how will we afford to live?

(PAUSE FOR EFFECT)

When do you start thinking of yourself as a mother? Is it when you give birth, at conception or when your uterus starts making saltos whenever you see a two year old doing something SO DARN CUTE?

HIT ME BABY ONE MORE TIME

How can I explain the urge to grow a tiny human?
What is at the essence of this feeling of longing? Is it truly to raise a child, or is it another yearning I think a child will fill for me in my life?

It has long been esthablished that the deep feelings of wanting to have a child have their roots in a learned desire from strong, long-standing social and cultural pronatal influences — not biological ones.

Deciding to become a mother is thus a political choice. Not a natural given.

(yawn!)

The female body has been both territory and machine, virgin wilderness to be exploited and assembly-line turning out life. We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body. In such a world women will truly create new life, bringing forth not only children (if and as we choose) but the visions, and the thinking, necessary to sustain, console, and alter human existence—a new relationship to the universe. Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed. This is where we have to begin.

HANG IN THERE. HANG IN THERE

(Mothers want to shoot me when I say I want to change the world, one diaper at a time)

(Men want to sleep with me so they can GIFT me life and meaning)

In a matter of a few decades, non-heterosexual females have gone from being cast as barren, sexual deviants, even monsters who were destined to dwell outside kinship logics and reproductive time, to becoming (potential) mothers bestowed with the trust of raising future generations.

Given the history of how feminine sexual deviances, such as sleeping with women, engaging in commercial sex, or being unmarried were grounds for losing maternal rights, jobs, and for overall stigmatization, this is quite extraordinary.

BECOMING FERTILE, a process that involves a desire to reproduce through pregnancy, is a rather queer phenomenon; it is profoundly shaped by effects of and access to fertility medicine itself. (DRUGS) The association of femininity with reproduction, including (but not limited to) pregnancy, breastfeeding, mothering, and fertility is a cultural fetish, and the question is, how do lesbian and other queer forms of engagement with reproduction challenge and reproduce such a notion?

SEE / SAW / SEED

poor little thing life is crazy and who even has time for sex. not me

Assisted conception such as IVF, which enables lesbian couples and single women to conceive, for example, can be understood as reducing rather than increasing patriarchal control over women’s reproduction.

Early feminist studies further identified ‘women’ in the process of reproduction as the body which reproductive technologies act on and change, that is, ??THE PREGNANT BODY??. Women who occupy other positions in the reproductive processes, for example women who experience conception from the position of being the partner of a pregnant woman, are unrecognized. I do not wish to imply that the bodily experience of a woman undergoing fertility treatment or pregnancy is the same as a partner who supports her through the process; however, the equating of ‘woman’ with ‘pregnant woman’ is heterosexually normative. It obscures a central feature of lesbian couples’ reproduction: a woman may take part in the process and experience of reproduction without being pregnant.

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Meanwhile, the techniques that control heterosexual reproduction have been increasingly externalized in recent decades. First, the (female) pill separated heterosexuality from reproduction, rendering obsolete the rationale that originally justified the hetero- versus homosexual schematic as an opposition between normal reproductive and pathological nonreproductive sexualities. Second, with the advent of in vitro fertilization, sexual recombination began to take place outside the body. Soon, the industrialization of the external womb will make the archaic distinction between masculinity and femininity obsolete, too.

The term ‘heteronormativity’ has developed within studies of sexualities to denote how heterosexuality is produced as the normal sexual practice. Prevailing norms of heterosexuality can be understood as operating on multiple social levels. The concept of heteronormativity does not encompass the full complexity of different social dimensions of heterosexuality. I use ‘heteronormativity’ to describe the way in which heterosexuality is normatively constructed, both socially and culturally. The term ‘heterosexual imaginary’ was developed as a critique of unacknowledged and under-theorized heterosexuality in feminist sociology. Ingraham’s ‘heterosexual imaginary’ refers to the way in which heterosexuality is normalized, and hence is considered to require neither exploration nor explanation. While gender has been deconstructed and analysed as a social construct in feminist sociology, heterosexuality remains ‘the normal’. Ingraham states: The heterosexual imaginary is that way of thinking which conceals the operation of heterosexuality in structuring gender and closes off any critical analysis of heterosexuality as an organizing institution. The effect of this depiction is that heterosexuality circulates as taken for granted, naturally occurring, and unquestioned, while gender is understood as socially constructed and central to the organization of everyday life.

It is clear that the heteronormative ideal of gender equality revolves around the ‘problem’ that pregnancy and motherhood pose to equality between men and women in the labour market as well as the home also shapes understandings of equality in same-sex families. The overarching argument for equality is that biology both does and does not matter; it might be important in the forming of kinship but not in the forming of care. Both heteronormative gender equality and lesbian mother/parenthood, I contend, thus require the downplaying of the ‘difference’ that pregnancy poses. However, the idea that a lesbian family consists of two mothers, that is, two women who potentially fill and thus compete for the same position of motherhood, is not as rosy as one might imagine, it can raise a particular set of affective charges and dilemmas.

When the idea of same-sex motherhood rests on an idea of gendered sameness, ‘becoming fertile’ means that lesbians and other queer women are drawn into a heteronormative discourse in which the position of mother remains singular and thus must be shared equally.

I would argue that an ideology of gender equality that departs from an unmarked white, middle-class nuclear family logic inevitably leads to an idea of parental equality that requires sameness, or the absence of difference. Among lesbians the difference that fertility–pregnancy–gestational motherhood makes is understood as problematic primarily when it risks undermining the status of the other parent, or when it results in a division of labour that can mimic that of heteronormativity and women’s subordination in a heterosexist world.

(PAUSE)

(little shrug, maybe crying)

Now the results are in, what am I going to do with myself? Now I am all out of spark. Just when now is the time – for greatness, for breaking out, for change. I put my hands on my belly. EMPTY. Baby?

Too little future / too much future.
Sometimes a catastrophe bleeds life.

ALSO

how to fluidly move from spoken text to song?

I’m no fucking Stephen Sondheim.

(moving to song now)

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