First Fridays seminar – “Trans-species Possibilities”: Eben Kirksey & Tamara Pertamina – 2 Nov
Deakin University’s next “First Fridays” Gender and Sexuality Studies seminar will be held on 2 November. This public seminar – “The CRISPR Sperm Bank: Experience Trans-species Possibilities”, presented by Eben Kirksey, with Tamara Pertamina – starts at 4pm, and will be followed by drinks at around 5pm.
The venue is Deakin Downtown (727 Collins St, near Southern Cross Station). The First Fridays seminars are free, and open to people interested in the work, although bookings are required.
The CRISPR Sperm Bank: Experience Trans-species Possibilities
Tamara Pertamina is a transgender performance artist living in Indonesia. In June 2018 she created a new project – the CRISPR Sperm Bank – and pushed it through the streets of Yogyakarta. CRISPR-Cas9, a fast and cheap genetic engineering tool, has become a “hope technology” (cf. Franklin 1997). This molecule has become a sticky object that has collected together speculation about possible futures for the human species (see Kirksey, 2016; cf. Ahmed 2010).
Tamara’s CRISPR Sperm Bank might be seen as a para-ethnographic object, a conversation piece, aimed at getting people to speak and think differently about consumer choices that could soon emerge with the field of synthetic biology. Her earlier performance art brought critical attention to synthetic chemistry and the toxic legacies of colonialism and global capitalism. Previously she played with make-up to bring attention to the use of skin-whitening products in East and Southeast Asia.
Tamara Pertamina’s sperm bank opens up an opportunity to engage with a series of questions: How are political and economic forces structuring speculation about possible trans-genic futures? Whose hopes for CRISPR remain in the realm of abstract speculation and whose hopes are becoming increasingly concrete? Can queer theory guide creative ways for thinking about the potentialities of trans-biology?
About the Speakers
Eben Kirksey is known for his work in multispecies ethnography – a field that mixes ethnographic, historical, ethological, and genetic methods to study spaces where humans and other species meet. He first entered this field as an editor and curator. The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography, a special issue of Cultural Anthropology co-edited with Stefan Helmreich, situates contemporary scholarship on animals, microbes, plants, and fungi within deeply rooted traditions of environmental anthropology, continental philosophy, and the sociology of science. Collaborations with bioartists, who work with living matter as their media, produced The Multispecies Salon, an edited book which brought together insights from the humanities on the microbiome, health, food, environmental justice, and synthetic biology.
Tamara Pertamina was born in Tasikmalaya in 1989. In 2008 she moved to Yogyakarta, and worked as a busker until 2013. In 2006 Tamara participated in the work of the transgender community, ranging from busking to sex work projects. In 2012–2014, she was involved in the art project Makcik Project (Yogyakarta), curated by Grace Samboh. Her works concern gender issues and sexuality, the history of transgender in Indonesia, religion, and humanity.
Next month’s seminar: Friday 7 December, Aileen Moreton-Robinson (QUT)