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.