Renovate my uterus: Aging queerly through performance art and karaoke

Abstract

Intimate Karaoke, Live at Uterine Concert Hall (IK-UCH) is a performance-based sound installation that examines vulnerability and shared intimacy through the site of my body by inviting audiences to sing their favourite karaoke song into my uterus while other audience members listen via stethoscope through my flesh. This article uses this project as a case study to examine the queering of the uterus as a site of production (not reproduction) and recoups the perceived uselessness of my middle-aging queer female body. This work connects to Linn Sandberg and Barbara Marshall's critique of the “problematic ways that aging and imagined futures are intertwined with heteronormativity in contemporary Western cultures” and how “some aging bodies and subjectivities are understood as desirable and taken-for-granted while others are constructed as unwanted and problematic” in their article, “Queering Aging Futures” (2). To make the body, vagina, cervix, and uterus structural materials for a venue is to renovate their functions outside of the logics of cisheteropatriarchy and reproductive futurity and further trouble mainstream perceptions of aging. I challenge heterocentric human reproduction as a marker of successful aging and as evidence of ‘living a good life’ by presenting queer feminist performance-based practices that centre my nonreproductive body as site for art production, presentation, and consumption.