My Uterus

Yes. Let’s talk about my uterus, just in time for the free birth control and other uterus-related part of Obama’s Affordable Care Act to go into effect! Hooray for reproductive health wins! I have just finished and submitted a uterus to the Exquisite Uterus Art of Resistance Project! From their information page:

“In reaction to the what is being called the most current ‘War on Women,’ two artists, known notorious Feminists, and sometime curators Helen Klebesadel and Alison Gates are facilitating a collaborative art piece to be shown in an exhibition they are curating in conjunction with the  joint 36th annual Wisconsin Women’s Studies and 7th annual LGBTQ Conference planned for fall 2012 in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

Interested artists and other motivated participants are asked to embellish a plain cloth uterus “blank” (a square of organic white cotton canvas fabric with a simple black and gray medical illustration of a female reproductive system printed permanently on its surface.) Final works should be approximately 13″ square.  Participation is free except for the cost of purchasing the organic cotton canvas uterus and mailing. ”

Here’s a picture of the unadorned uterus (really, an entire female reproductive system and not just a uterus, but whatevs):

The blank uterus

Needless to say, this sounded amazing, so I ordered two uteruses (uteri?) for myself and my lover to get busy on. Entirely unsurprisingly, we got busy procrastinating until a few days ago, when we realized that the deadline for returned uteruses was today. So, while Jayel (Draco), who’s an accomplished professional artist with the experience and problem-solving skills to make his into something fantastic in only several hours’ time, I kind of spaced out and just doodled. Which actually worked out really well, and here’s why:

I wanted to get political with my uterus because this is a political art exhibition, but after some thinking (and all that procrastinating), I decided that the thing that pisses me off most about “the war on women” and all this anti-women’s reproductive health bullshit lately is that my uterus is not your political platform. It is not political. It is personal, and it is beautiful, and it is vibrant, and it is kind of random and squiggly, completely alive,  and utterly, totally mine. So that’s how I made it.

My uterus (doodles and craziness)

Jayel made his uterus a nexus of power and transformation: a marriage of the female reproductive tract and symbology for the sex chakra. He said that he felt his chi rooting in him as he worked on it (which was good, since I’ve been… er… the recipient of a lot of its power for a while now, and it was good for him to reclaim and reroot it). Please ignore the extra vagina hovering above the piece; that’s a printing error we cut off before mailing our uteruses to Wisconsin.

My lover's uterus (sex chakra)

Making these visual symbols of our regard for the female sexual system was a powerful act for both of us. I hope that we get these back some day… Who knows! There may be a uterus pillow born of our fertile imaginations someday!

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