Sex Lives of Animals without Backbones

*Access to images and objects- Archives and Special Collections at SUNY Upstate Medical University’s Health Sciences Library in Syracuse, NY.

Sex Lives of Animals without Backbones is about courage, pain, and biomedical power dynamics within the western healthcare industry. Using the metaphor of spinelessness as a lack of courage, I excavate hospital archives to find and validate subjectivity and intimate power relations amongst the vital mythology of scientific objectivity. My research focuses on clinical documentation of pain, through archival patient portraits, scientific imaging techniques, clinical notes, and fantastical photographs I make from studio set-ups of defunct medications, and tools from multiple medical institutions.

I am sick with a degenerative autoimmune disease. I am always a fucking patient (as is everyone with a body.) I sublimate this background into an alter-ego, a caricature of a neurotic, intellectual hero, in which I imagine myself as a figure of scientific authority. As a Jewish woman, raised with a familial identity that idealizes intellect to the point of fetishization, this is a stylized performance of a masculine archetype (yes, I am exploring what it means to be a woman through the usage of masculinity and its historical relationship to authority) used in sci-fi (e.g. Mary Shelley’s sublimation of self as the decidedly male Dr. Frankenstein.) I use this archetype to construct images and installations using the visceral details of medical history to sublimate the notion of myself as a sick woman into a fantasy world of infinite visibility and knowability.