Emancipatory Monstrosity

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.This paper reflects on how my artistic practice helped me to develop an alternative contribution towards discourse on infertility/reduced fertility resulting from cancer treatment. The discussions throughout this paper show how practice-based research can inform bodily insights and uses autoethnographic methodologies to develop embodied epistemologies about creative practice, cancer and infertility. My practice-based PhD formed the basis for this paper, which explored MRI and how our medical, technologically enframed subjectivity emerges and is experienced. My PhD considered the multiple correspondences between creative practice, textiles, matter, labour, illness and biopolitics which help me navigate the insights I gained from cancer concerning illness, bodily autonomy and infertility to fulfil the aims of this paper. This article builds on practice-based and auto-ethnographic insights to highlight issues of inequitable and unequal access to fertility treatment experienced by LGBTQ+ people, Indigenous and People of Colour. Throughout this paper, I recall instances during my cancer treatment where I was encouraged to pursue fertility treatment, having made it clear that I was not interested. Not only did this feel like a challenge to my bodily autonomy, but the research carried out for this paper shows that unequal access to fertility treatment is experienced across several intersecting axes of racialisation, marginalisation and sexualisation. The assumptions made within western medical hegemony and healthcare systems can indeed project cisheteronormativity onto patients and apply a one-size-fits-all approach that is isolating and harmful. The emphasis of corporeal knowledge, the mutual interrelation of matter and meaning, and reciprocal ethical relationships between human and non-human beings are perspectives that bind my practice, cancer and infertility. Therefore, queer feminist science studies, posthumanities and the abject are relevant theoretical frameworks that I apply throughout. By mobilising a variation of monstrosity as a figure that resists cisheteronormalisation, this paper lays out the release brought to me in my practice and treatment, and how a medical system that believes patients, accounts for diversity, and genuinely respects patient choice can provision more adept care for cancer patients and those seeking fertility treatment

Clinical Practice · Critical discourse analysis · Feminism · Infertility · Library Science and Information Systems

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