Pregnancy
Digital HD video, 13:15
micha cárdenas

My hybrid poetry/bioart project, Pregnancy, presents a vision of trans latina reproductive futures, based on my experiences of cryogenic tissue banking, aka sperm banking, after having been on hormones for many years. At the 2014 Civil Liberties and Public Policy Conference, Morgan Robyn Collado stated that violence against trans women of color is a reproductive issue, because we are prevented from living long enough to realize our dreams of having children. I want more than just to live. Existing literature on transgender pregnancy and family planning, such as in lesbian parenting books, focuses almost exclusively on transgender men. Books such as Trans Bodies, Trans Selves, focus almost entirely on trans men, while making on the most brief reference to the fact that trans women can bank their sperm. This reproduces a transmisogynist dynamic where trans men are highly valued by queer communities and transgender women’s concerns and existences are erased. In response, my project Pregnancy puts women of color feminism in dialog with bioart through DIY biotech and poetry describing trans of color experience. The emerging trans of color feminism can inform feminist movements for reproductive justice in important ways. Pregnancy was written during a two month period in which I had to stop taking my prescribed hormones.

 

“20141219_165451.mov
I am no testo junkie,
this is no experiment,
these are not drugs, they’re my body.
I take hormones every day of my life out of necessity,
just to have a body I can live in,
to avoid death,
to survive”

Pregnancy is available for exhibition or screenings. To contact me about showing this work, use the comment box on this page, which will send me an email, and the comment will not be made public.

Forthcoming print version in Transgender Studies Quarterly’s Transfeminisms issue

July 2015 – Exhibited at That’s So Gay: Fall to Pieces at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto, ON

June 2015 – Performed at the National Queer Arts Festival as part of Mangos with Chili’s “All That You Touch You Change” in San Francisco.

April 2015 – Exhibited at Open Embodiments: Locating Somatechnics in Tucson

April 30th-May 5th – Exhibited in Los Angeles at the SCA Gallery in iMappening 2015, alongside my game Redshift & Portalmetal.