SYNTHETIC BECOMING

Retrospective Exposure emerged from a Feminist Technoscience Governance Collaboratory (FTGC) project, led by Professor Jacquelyne Luce, which explored how circulating knowledge about in utero exposure to diethylstilbestrol (DES), a synthetic estrogen and endocrine disruptor, shapes understandings of gender/sex/sexuality and ideas about chemically induced transgressions. The slide deck is built of the narrative excerpts from interviews, archival material, and researcher memos that give evidence to an ethnographically informed text of the same name. It closes the distance between the narratives and the experiences from which they enter the world, removing both speaker attributions for the excerpts and the contextual frameworks of analysis. Set in a repetitive loop in new degrees of proximity and connected by a digital red thread, the narrative excerpts reweave relations of care, generation, authority, knowing, and vulnerability.

The following includes select images from the installation, which were projected onto a large piece of wood. Photos of the exhibit are at the bottom of this page.