Self-Experimentation: Performing Gender, Beyond the Laboratory

At once celebrated as an essential part of medical history and development, and repudiated for fear of controversy and backlash, the self-experimenter converts their own body into a site for experimentation and testing. Ethically controversial, the self-experimenter still lurks at the fringes of medical research and has also found a niche in the wider cultural landscape in the likes of medical journalist Dr Michael Mosley. Thinking through this heroic, self-sacrificing figure, this paper will consider artists and activists whose work counters these narratives and, through their own self-experiments, draw attention towards the invisible and gendered labour involved in creating specimens for research. Gender writer and philosopher, Paul B. Preciado, self-medicated with testosterone to alter his chemical and molecular self – a specimen becoming masculine through bio-hacking tactics – and captured in his book Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (English translation 2013), published as Beatriz Preciado. ORLAN’s Harlequin Coat was first exhibited in 2007 and draws attention to the global trade in human and non-human tissue and how such tissues are categorised, advertised and sold. During a short sci-art residency in 2003-4, Kira O’Reilly was trained in tissue culturing techniques and she became acutely aware of the presence of the non-human in this work, the pig that was slaughtered for research purposes, and so created her piece inthewrongplaceness (2005), as a response to these ethical and personal dilemmas. These self-experimenting artists will be utilised to draw attention to contemporary issues around the commodification and exchange of body parts in a global economy of circulating biological specimens, both human and non-human, and particularly in relation to the gendered body.

Gianna is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre at the University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on contemporary theatre and performance in relation to medical science, live art, critical theory and feminist practice. Her monograph, Performing Specimens: Contemporary Performance and Biomedical Display, is due to be published in 2019, along with a co-edited issue of Performance Research, ‘Staging the Wreckage’. Other publications include Performance and the Medical Body with Alex Mermikides, and an issue of Performance Research with Martin O’Brien, ‘On Medicine’. Her work has also been published in Performance Research, Contemporary Theatre Review and other edited collections. She is a founding convenor of the Performance and Science working group for TaPRA.