Proceedings of the Global Conference on Gender Studies
Year: 2024
DOI:
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The Politics of Reproduction: Touchpoints Between Contemporary British and Chinese Women’s Art
Yiqing Virginia Yang
ABSTRACT:
The theme of reproduction has been at the core of feminist movements, particularly concerning women’s human rights and bodily autonomy. In this paper, I focus on British and Chinese women’s work: Lana Locke’s Untitled (2006-2015) and Jiang Jie’s They Know Who They Are (2007) with analysis that explores overlaps between them as part of a transcultural condition. These overlaps are defined as “touchpoints” – a way to capture transient, fluid or intra-secting moments where ideas within artworks meet. Two touchpoints emerge from a discussion that is informed by new materialist and phenomenological feminist methodology. First, the entanglement of organisms is central to both works. In this reading, human lived experience is not made up of isolated encounters with the world; rather, the world in its entangled intra-action is generative of human lived experience. Furthermore, this entanglement challenges the binaries inherent in self/others, mind/body, and human/non-human. It opens up more possibility for all matter’s being-in-the-world to intra-act. A second touchpoint is the politics of reproduction centered on women’s bodies. The ‘invisible’ maternal body in these two artworks becomes a site of political action, as both British and Chinese governments make decisions regarding women’s bodily rights in divergent ways. This study facilitates an in-depth analysis of women’s art from a transcultural understanding and uncovers the inequalities inherent in gendered power relations.
keywords: Entanglement; Women’s Art; Reproduction; Touchpoints