A Polymer Flesh

Bodily functions, Bodily Bourgeois and Bodies under forced birth activism (aka pro life bollocks).

Bleached knickers

Unfolding wet laundry from it’s wet tangles, like combing freshly washed hair. I take a moment to look at the various stains on the gussets of my many coloured underwear, hanging them up like limp slices of ham. The sharp yellows, pale browns, and dark splotches contrasting the pink bows, blue lace and white cotton. The darker colours frosted a milky white with candy floss edges; the visible wear and tear of my period proof pants after two years of regular use. Their hard work is ugly. Sleucing them out, discarding my menstrual leftovers into the sink from is now a monthly routine.

My body, leave marks on fucking everything. It’s as if I drank bleach as a child and it reappeared in my knickers years later like swallowed chewing gum. Maybe, all the Maybelline cosmetics slogans are right, and I was simply “born with it”. Everything absorbed passes through eventually - perfume, moisturiser, hair dye, nail polish remover, sudocreme, body oil, air pollution, micro-plastics, nose spray, eyedrops, painkillers, Rennies, chocolate and other substances. The carcinogenic paint of a mortal coil can be found on the canvas of many people’s underwear.

These stains refuse to be erased, reset and removed from the evidence of reproductive labour, stubborn to the hottest and soapiest of washes. My body does things without my permission all of the time. I do things to it all of the time that it is also not prepared for. I’m sure I’ll be paying for it at an age when my insides are less resistant to my bad habits. In the meantime, we survive together. Together we emanate constant fluids in the form of tiny drops, alluring odours or bloody flash floods. The fluids that I hide, cover up, and don’t talk about yet they incessantly make themselves known to me every time I pull my pants down.

I cannot control gravity’s effect on an open orifice I never asked for, yet nor did the orifice ever ask to be gendered, shamed and forced to behave in line with expectations of others. What’s in my knickers is no one’s fucking business but my own: so I’m sharing it here.

My body is (a) joy and (a) pain. My body gives me anguish. My body tries to stop it. My body tries to tell me to stop ignoring my feelings. My body curls up inside itself, curling up in to the original foetal position. We recoil into a chrysalis until it is safe to emerge again. My body knows what to do when I don’t, and when my body needs help or an intervention - that’s subject to the judgement of our morally driven and poorly funded healthcare system. Or the politicians who reify that I do not have the right to do what I like with my body in order to survive.

“…I am horribly aware, suddenly, that my body is no longer private, no longer knowable to me. My body is, as I experience it, red and fleshy, soft and warm. But on the screen, there’s just a grainy greyscale, like a lunar landscape.” Emilie Pine, Notes to Self, p 53, 2018.

Abortion, baby.

(Forced birth activists: the new term for pro-lifers, I don’t care who’s offended).

I was dog sitting, alone, in the lovely seaside town of Bangor when the news of the overturning of Roe v Wade came to me through my Instagram stories. My stomach dropped out of me and remained in a sloppy pool on the sofa when I got up, legs a little shaky, muscles as stiff as cardboard, adrenaline racing through my bloodstream; a loaf of gassy dough in the form of a veined marble rock. My body reacted before I was fully capable of addressing the thoughts piling up in my brain. It was panicking even though it wasn’t in immediate danger. I stuck on Youtube and I was warmed, slightly settled, slightly emotional seeing Lily Allen and Olivia Rodrigo dedicating a song to the five justices of the Supreme Court of the United States at Glastonbury 2022. The music stopped and the crowd roared and I switched off the tv screen and was once again left in silence while the dog licked his balls. It sounded like the lapping of mayonnaise in an egg salad, the familiar, slimy hum of the patriarchy threatening my bodily autonomy.

There is a picture of me in my mum’s kitchen that perches on top of her kitchen dresser, amongst a plethora of loose printed images from phones and cameras over the years that she arranged like a paperless scrapbook. In it I’m embracing my two golden retrievers at the time, my face looks slightly smushed between their fuzzy snouts in a warped expression of ecstatic joy. One of my best friends took this photo on the morning that the eighth amendment to the Irish Constitution was repealed by a public referendum that we had voted for two days previously. Sometimes when I look at this photo I forget it’s circumstance, because I’m not brandishing a big number 8 with a line going through it, or waving a slogan above my head with tears in my eyes. There is no visibility of the political change that took place that morning in the photo, its association ends in my memory, and will have no place in the visual culture of images surrounding such a political event. The individual experience is melted into a collectively understood message, generalised and made obvious, moulded into the shapes of our historical narratives.

So when it comes to abortion rights, the right to choose and what it looks like when that right is denied, I think of my sister.

My sister got pregnant at 20. She had the baby, a girl. She named her after her favourite childhood teddy bear. She then got pregnant again within six months. She named her after her favourite classics subject in university, the ancient name for Egypt. She struggled to cope, her partner not willing or capable to hold down a job properly to pay rent on a house for them to live in, her mental health chipping away with every moment the baby’s needed her, which was all the time. I watched as she screamed at them, my mother scolding her for it, them falling out, the babies still lying there, my sister picking them up, cradling them, loving them, but fading away as they suckled on her. Her partner continued to be useless as their landlord evicted them, recommending that my sister go to a women’s shelter, my mother stepped in as the narcissistic saviour of her own daughter when offering to let them live in our house, which her partner assumed was going to be for free, which perpetuated the downward spiral of our broken family situation.

The situation never improved, which wouldn’t surprise anyone. Not really, not at all, in fact it only deteriorated more and more rapidly. Ten years and two more babies later, I now have no relationship with her, neither does my mother, despite her attempts. And that’s all of our fault, because we never learned or had the emotional space of our own to truly love and respect each other as people, even before any babies came along. We hurt each other over and over because none of us knew how else to gain any sense of control over everything that was happening and had happened to us.

I’m haunted by an idealisation of my sister, that if she had received the help she needed for her mental illness (diagnosed with bi-polar disorder at 15), being given the time and space to grow healthily and meet someone who truly looked out for her, that her babies would have arrived in better circumstances. It hurts because as much as we don’t know each other anymore, I still experience the grief of losing her. Raised in an aggressively heterosexual community and family, presenting as cis-gendered, capable of getting pregnant and in a relationship with someone capable of making you get pregnant; we were surrounded by this oppressive expectation of “Any day now…”. Encouraged to believe that aligning our life aspirations with parenthood will reward us, like most narratives in popular culture where the non-abortion choice is seen as the road to bounty, only reduces the desire to be a parent down to being like a trained dog.

The part that’s left out is that when you get an abortion, no one has any prior knowledge, you carry on with your life and nobody is any the wiser since your belly isn’t bloated like a blowfish. A chosen pregnancy becomes inherently public, your body becoming planet-like. The fact that pregnancy visually and politically makes your body become everyone else's business, terrifies me. In the words of Katherine Ryan, a baby can be a joy and my many friends, acquaintances and colleagues who have children are happy being parents, it genuinely brings them joy, which is great and I am happy for them - not what I want for myself. If I change my mind, I can, but my life is not empty without carbon copies of myself.

I’m not saying that if my sister had access to abortion services at 20 that her life would be any different. It’s a non-discussion, because she went through with the pregnancies. She expressed to me once (long after baby number 3 and the legalisation of abortion in the Republic) that she felt like she didn’t have any other choice - which is true given that abortion was illegal and getting to England would mean getting family involved, which was impossible given their anti-abortion sentiment. She was in university, working crap part time jobs to try and survive in university life in Dublin and she had no money to go anywhere. There should be no question placed to mothers of “Well if you could go back would you have…?”- it’s fucking cruel. It’s only poking at the sore of internalised fear that someone who had to go through with something that they didn’t want but obligingly loved and cared for anyway. The Dublin based Youtuber, Keelin Moncreiff, made an excellent point on her video last week about this common social faux-pas. She is 24 and expecting a child, documenting her life as she lives it. She was answering her followers questions and one of them posed: “Was it an accident or was it planned?” which she retorted in a tone of What’s your fucking point? She goes on to make an excellent argument on behalf of expectant mothers being made to feel accountable for whether they wanted to get pregnant or not in the first place, and how fucking fucked up that type of interrogation is.

Another brilliant Youtuber, Khadija Mbowe, released a video shortly after the verdict in the U.S. which discusses the very real and problematic impact of anti-abortion laws on the children it creates. People who go through with having children are held at ransom with their love for them under these laws. Like “aren’t you glad you had them anyway?”. Of course the kids will be loved, what else are you supposed to do, be a cunt and deny them and yourself basic human compassion? Some people do that anyway! Thankfully most don’t. This resentment will manifest in ways only the children will be aware of and be burdened with. My point being, my sister also once said to my mother, when they were discussing her seeking therapy to help her post natal depression, she answered: “I don’t want to talk to someone, because I will never be able to come home afterwards and face my kids.” Her love casts an ugly shadow of guilt, a guilt for ever feeling resentful, that I’m not sure she’s ever been able to bear.

What gets me the most is how even though its in the constitution, this Roe v Wade overturning in the U.S. has now given forced birth activists in Ireland a new lease of hope. They still peddle this attitude of illegal abortion as national pride, Ireland as a pillar of moral righteousness. It is beyond me why harassment is okay in the case when it’s a crowd of nasty fuckers brandishing false imagery in our faces outside of clinics and on our streets. They want more children in a country where there is still no subsidised childcare, a cut throat housing crisis, the cost of living being unbearably high for even basic needs, working full time just to break even, appalling mental health services, overloaded schools, and where some jobs offer less security than being on the dole.

Even with a choice being available to women in the Republic of Ireland now, it doesn’t mean the stigma around abortion or pregnancy is gone. The fight isn’t over, especially for the North of Ireland still in a political limbo. The negative language and divisive attitude, and continued limits to accessible services are still going strong (with only 1 in 10 GP’s offering abortion services this time last year). Four years after that picture was taken, I may still not be able to access an abortion if I need one. My sister, now a mother of four, if she got pregnant again, may still not be able to access an abortion if she needs one.

Roe v Wade only means that a lot of girls and a lot of women and others capable of getting pregnant are going to die and suffer because of this. The looming threat of the Eighth Amendment being reintroduced is not in the far distance, it probably never was, we were just told to be happy and shut up about it.

Some great podcasts episodes:

This American Life - The Pink House at the Centre of the World

There are no girls on the Internet - The Jane Collective

There are no girls on the Internet - Looking for an abortion online?

Not Past It - You are killing women

Mommy, sorry? Mommy

March 2022, I was on a group trip in London, absorbing as much as I could within three days, my eye contact with a new place acting as geographical osmosis but I still depended on Google maps to guide me safely. It became a bodily journey as I shifted from exhaustion to elation, functioning to constipation, sweaty to shivering, adjoining the collective moving body from hotel room to gallery, sushi restaurant to airport lounge, bathroom cubicle to zebra crossing - sliding through the valves of London living. I found a private exhileration in exploring the innards of the London tube system like a digested laxative; the city bowels offered me peak introvert recharging time; it was liminal as fuck, and I loved it. Symptomatic of being underground and wormlike, black grime in my nose had replaced my snot; my interior bristles lubricated by track grease, evidenced by my repeated sneezes into clean tissues.

On my last day I was drawn to Southbank for the Louise Bourgeois show, having heard a recommendation that it was disappointing, only enticed me more. The gallery’s curatorial approach was overwhelming, contrasting the minimal nothingness of the underground but with a similar cave like structure, and security guards at every corner making sure feet didn’t cross over the subtle thresholds. These polymer boundaries maintained a distance between us – the audience - and her – the artwork; the fabric fleshes, the steel skeletons. The volume of works felt more akin to a travelling museum of Bourgeois props, overloaded like an ADHD brain. Bourgeois’ faces looked back at me as collages of expressions, the skin as an archive of every muscle movement held together, fine lines as thread, the puckered stitching scabbing over, the open wound of the mouth clothed like inhaled leather, the eyes two hollow and textured cavities, neither screaming nor climaxing. An appropriate adjective could have been “soft” but on reaching out, my nails would have clacked against the glass casings, reminding me to stay back, that this body was untouchable, a circus lion.

White rooms contrasted with polished blockwork, I consumed the profound serving of Bourgeois within the walls. My vague previous knowledge of the spider motif came from watching Enemy, 2013, directed by Denis Villeneuve (spoilers alert) where furry limbed arachnids pervaded the dusty and yellowed landscape. At the time I associated them to some wider societal issue as metaphor; things that are always there, that we want to squish and throw in the bin and can never really get rid of because we exist within its web anyway - you know, neoliberalism. Later, when deciding to write this, my millennial intuition resorted to the bottomless pit of Youtube to find a “meaning explained” video. The one I decided to watch ended up being dictated by a subdued misogynist, who’s point was that the spectre of horror in the film is symbolic of the fear of women (LOL). He only skirted on the actual point, being that the spiders mores so acted as the oppressive power of hegemonic obligations. This problem creates a type of psychosis in the main character which is represented as him being two different people, which leads to the poetic complexity of the film itself as two Jake Gyllenhals confronting each other. His wife suffers his behaviour but chooses to support him, his mistress is oblivious to his marriage and ends up dying, all played out as an internalised struggle of his own due to his own despondency to his rather normal, albeit, “successful” life. It helped me draw some clearer deductions, cutting and pasting text over text, deriving an almost fully formed conclusion. The interesting thing about it is how subtle Villeneuve used Bourgeois’ spiders, the film being set in Ontario, Canada where one of the bronze cast Maman sculptures is permanently installed in Ottawa city. The Maman as wife, mother and woman coping with her unfaithful husband, seems to more be the victim of the social system imposed on her and her body, to tolerate the betrayal for the sake of the survival of her family, her own desires. It’s reflective of Louise’s mother herself and Louise’s fairly rotten excuse for a father.

That day in the gallery, the gargantuan metal Maman stood arched in frozen tip toe, the furry arachnid belly swollen beyond recognition to the point that we are witnesses to its private interior. The parallels of the generational trauma train, the two halves she was made from; nurture in the weave and disdain in the weft; the work traditionally domiciled to the one who does the biological carrying. Louise turned the mothering body into something that is feared and disgusting, typically smushed under shoes and swept away. This Maman is simultaneously elephant and insect, rejecting the domesticity that is both its web and it’s trap. There is a spider that devours her mate while mating, he is not only a source for her reproductive intuition but payment in the form of nourishment for her reproductive labour - a body for child support. Synonymously, this devouring transforms the female’s status to widow without there ever having been a marriage ceremony.  Automatically she is condemned to an existence defined by her lack of something.

The heavy duty art gallery creep rose up in my brain as I ascended the steep stairs. I had just escaped a loud, ugly echo - a man - boastfully and shamelessly comparing the works to seminal male artists of the 20th century that Louise’s textiles couldn’t mute. Seminal being the operative word here regarding the global issue of unwanted ejaculations. Louise contorts the mutating status as daughter of, wife of, mother of, whatever capsule notion woman is moulded around. A twisted, bent over, hyper sexed flesh in high heels and a nursing nightie - left hanging up and dangling – deconstructing and reassembling the body rhetoric, like a scrapbook from Pornhub.

I reached the upper floor, letting my eyes pass over drawings and sowings of webs and bodies, the ink bleeding bloody and blurry, the needlework intentionally visible. The act of repetition, of patterns, getting stuck in cycles; a process defined activity that I also succumb to in my own work for its mechanical pleasure. I empathised with this childlike escapism, hushed anguish and temporal obliteration,the numbing of pain rather than feeling it. There is a short docufilm where Louise talks about her father and his tangerine peel game, that was performed at the family dinner table to humiliate her. In it she marks a little didactic figure on the orange skin, which subsequently is (sub-consciously?) reproduced across all her chosen media; the reduction of her body to a lacking, to an object, to a piece of fruit, to a joke at a party by a man whose own ejaculation was as far as his positive contribution to her life probably went. She represents him as absence, as if she rubbed him out viciously from the nuclear family sentence, leaving nothing but ghostly indentations from the pencil: an empty chair where someone ought to be sitting. This very human residue, leaving a smell we all recognise as feral, crude, and raw. Art galleries mostly smell of cleaning products, which is funny, ironic, because cum also smells like bleach. Vaginal discharge acts like it. Both fuck up your clothes.

I left the gallery muffling a sigh behind my mask because I felt a kindred language being spoken. Much of the reason I make art is because it’s intricacies of meaning are far more revealing than that of verbal (and colonial) English. At a programme of shorts the other week at the QFT, Myrid Carten, another member of the artist programme I’m on, curated a playlist of short films including her own; a snippet of the feature length personal documentary she is making about her mother and herself. She talked candidly afterwards about the process of producing work that reproduces or renders your own trauma, saying “it’s not therapy but it is therapeutic.” The most damage caused is by all the things that can’t be said, because the body speaks through pangs of pain, strained heartstrings, bouts of anger, freeze responses and panics, that unless given a space to be let out, recurs and represses itself further inside of you, festering like a nest of breeding insects swaddled in silk. Art is a space that some form of healing can be had, but it doesn’t help outright. It becomes a place for the repetitious nature of your trauma to exist.

I recoiled into my coat from the not quite Spring/reminiscent of Winter wind as I skulked back outside and re-submerged myself to the underground like an earwig. A few hours later as my plane took off, I found solace in the fact that I got to have 45 glorious minutes up in the fantastic blue sky, not being on the planet below.