Rebecca Close
Post-internet Queer reproductive work and the fixed capital of fertility
The Interface, the Network and the Viral as themes and modes of artistic response
100504
I detour according to the continent’s geopolitics of temperature.
Europe’s data frozen in Finland. Europe’s egg cells flying out of sunny
Spain.
Rebecca Close's thesis elaborates the concept of
“post-internet queer reproductive work” by fusing three scholarly
traditions: the study of queer work, theorizations of reproductive labor
and the concept of fixed capital. Offering an innovative take on the
dynamic interaction between sexuality and digital technologies in the
context of assisted reproduction, the thesis sets out how queer
reproduction struggles, as evidenced in the long history of
pathologizing queer parenting structures and the networks of care forged
during the HIV/AIDS crisis, are not just a glimmer haunting the
IVF-centred heteronormative fertility clinic but structurally linked via
the systems of accumulation that order capitalist expansion.
Theories
of knowledge, data, freedom, consent, work, time, the erotic, the gene,
the virus, the human face, the sonnet form, networks, animation, family
and plasticity circulate between friends, lovers, family members,
colleagues, workshop participants, speakers and audiences in a project
that layers critical, sociological, historical, audio-visual, editorial,
auto- and poetic gazes as a mode of interdisciplinary “gestural
writing”: a way of knowing that centres bodily feeling and political
becomings. In line with the expanded definition of queer reproduction
proposed by the project, this thesis addresses aspects of fertility and
the queer family that have remained at the margins of recent accounts;
including the reproductive politics of print media, housing, borders,
historical memory, bureaucracy, the racial politics of reproductive
tech, climate crisis, labour and creative practice.