Ya que falló el evento online de Matriversity de esta tarde sobre maternidades subversivas, aquí tenéis otro, ahora mismo, en Berlín.
Indulge your curiosities about the pregnant female body: Mad Kate’s True True Name Performance Salon presents: Schwanger Lutscher. A welcoming, participatory performance installation by Sadie Lune. Tonight at EXIT, BERLIN (from 19 to 22 Uhr).
Fascination with transformation is nothing unusual, especially when it happens so clearly on the already objectified female body body. And perhaps our fascination, wherever it lies on the revulsion/compulsion spectrum to the physical changes of pregnancy is an aspect of our internal impulses towards or against breeding. Visceral urges to touch, feel, fondle, and examine a female body undergoing such a dramatic transformation as pregnancy, both in appearance and the somehow unreal knowledge that a new life is coming from this change, are common, whether they come from envy, eroticism, awe, disgust, «car-crash» voyeurism, disbelief or shared experience. Somehow a pregnant body becomes public property: comments and questions, projections and fears, advice and judgements abound unsolicited from strangers and community just by the obvious presence of this transforming body. People want to touch, and stare, and ask, and feel, but mostly know their curiosity and fantasies about this quickly changing body are usually socially inappropriate and should be squelched lest they further violate the privacy and autonomy of the pregnant person. Even asking consent to get physically close to the pregnancy can be as invasive as a stranger asking, out of no where, if they can touch your ass.
But hey, it is a an amazingly cool and weird phenomenon; why wouldn’t we be curious?
So I give you permission.
I invite you to touch and smell and nuzzle and feel, and wonder, and suck and fulfill your infantile urges and adult curiosities on my body.
I consent: to indulge your (and my own) desires to explore, physically a very pregnant body.
I take the power from the general social urge to protectively tell me what I should do with my changing but not fragile pregnant body (and little new life) and use it to open space for a sharing of the experience beyond those who instigated it.
Whether or not you have or will be nvolved in or close to a pregnancy, now is your change to explore it with your fingers.
I retain the right (as we all do, under all circumstances) to change my mind, to draw a line, to have enough, and you will respect that.
