Submitter: Clarissa Reche, State University of Campinas - UNICAMP, clari.reche@gmail.com
Abstract:
“No one is obliged to see” is a performance created together with my ongoing doctoral research, where the goal is centered in analyzing expressions of menstrual experiences and during fieldwork performed by ethnologists. Through the analysis interviews carried out with ethnologists and autoethnography experiments, I seek to work with visualization instruments that allow menstruation to unfold in complexity. When leaking from the silences, menstrual blood carries in its fluid questions about the multiplicity of bodies and about a production of knowledge that is capable of facing the sensual/aesthetic dimensions of lived experiences. I argue that the researchers' menstrual experiences were systematically suppressed from ethnological writing as a way of containing bodies and purifying the senses in favor of knowledge based on rationality and productivity. In the performance, I present a experiment with my own menstrual blood, created after coming into contact with amerindian’s menstrual cosmopolitics, such as the control of flow through the vaginal muscles. I developed a kaleidoscope that serves as a bloody trap. Working with remains and failures as raw material for a unsubmissive research, I propose malice as a possible form of decolonial relationship within the production of scientific knowledge.
Areas of STS Scholarship: Indigenous STS, Queer and Trans STS, Feminist STS
Authors/Participants: Clarissa Reche, State University of Campinas - UNICAMP
