Well, that explains *everything*

Dada-ist provocateur, Yale student and future cultural editor for the New York Times Aliza Shvartz explained this weekend the idea behind her blood laced senior art project:

It is the intention of this piece to destabilize the locus of that authorial act, and in doing so, reclaim it from the heteronormative structures that seek to naturalize it .... As an intervention into our normative understanding of “the real” and its accompanying politics of convention, this performance piece has numerous conceptual goals. The first is to assert that often, normative understandings of biological function are a mythology imposed on form. It is this mythology that creates the sexist, racist, ableist, nationalist and homophobic perspective, distinguishing what body parts are “meant” to do from their physical capability. The myth that a certain set of functions are “natural” (while all the other potential functions are “unnatural”) undermines that sense of capability, confining lifestyle choices to the bounds of normatively defined narratives.

Okay. It is now clear to me why I almost failed out of college. For MY senior thesis, I failed to externalize the suburbanist modalities of my personal hagiography by subjecting the "self" to ultracrepidarian fissures.

Meanwhile ... anybody want to wager she doesn't know what "normative" means?

Shock Value: Updated

Well, that didn't take long.

Yale: Student's Art Project Only 'Creative Fiction'

A Yale student’s bizarre art project in which she claimed to have repeatedly impregnated and induced abortions in herself is a work of "creative fiction," the university said in a statement this afternoon.

A college spokesman said the project was "designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding [the] form and function of a woman’s body."

I guess it takes a college girl (yes, I use the word "girl" deliberately, as only a child would pull a stunt like this) to find ambiguity in how the female body functions. I guess it's also safe to say she's not friendly with anyone in the medical school.

But she insists it's not about "shock value" ...

This is probably the most disgusting thing I've read about in years:

For senior, abortion a medium for art, political discourse.

Beginning next Tuesday, Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself “as often as possible” while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process.

Some of us pro-choice social conservatives (yeah, we do exist) have been saying for years that the scare tactics used by the Democrats in the abortion debate belittles the seriousness of the issue and leads to poor choices by the very people the abortion regime is supposed to help.

Reminds me of a quote by Abbott Lawrence Lowell:

"Of course there's a lot of knowledge in universities: the freshmen bring a little in; the seniors don't take much away, so knowledge sort of accumulates."