"Beginning next Tuesday, [Yale art major Alicia] Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself "as often as possible" while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process.
The goal in creating the art exhibition, Shvarts said, was to spark conversation and debate on the relationship between art and the human body. But her project has already provoked more than just debate, inciting, for instance, outcry at a forum for fellow senior art majors held last week. And when told about Shvarts' project, students on both ends of the abortion debate have expressed shock . saying the project does everything from violate moral code to trivialize abortion."
you can read the rest of the Yale Daily News story here.and here you can read about some of the aftermath, including Shvarts's telling Yale deans that she did not purposefully inseminate herself and induce abortions, in which the project is variously described/written off as "a hoax" or a "creative fiction."
i've only dipped a toe into the roiling fen of outrage that is this matter's public record, but it does seem interesting that so much of the attention moves along did-she-or-didn't-she, should-she-have-or-not type arguments--a sort of J.T. Leroy re-dux. as Dr. B. says, "in other words, we absolutely cannot get past our sense of ownership of women's pregnancies." i'm sure ron athey gets some of the same commentary, but maybe not half so much paternalistic moralizing.
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