https://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article/8/1/37/61689/The-Xenopus-Pregnancy-TestA-Performative
There is an appreciable distance between the biochemistry of being pregnant and the experience of recognizing oneself as pregnant—a speculative gap that technology can serve to narrow or widen depending on how one chooses to choreograph an ontological state. Conducting an outmoded pregnancy test with live Xenopus frogs, we probed the contours of this gap. As we took an antiquated bioassay out of medical archives, we conducted a performative experiment—an intervention that blurred the boundaries between performance art, science, and ethnography. Like queer enactments of gender, performative experiments exhibit the performativity of conventional science and thereby make scientific modes of knowledge production and claims available for critical inspection. Moving beyond the domain of human self-fashioning and debates about the ethics of animal experimentation, our experiment also considered speculation linking the Xenopus pregnancy test to the extinction of other frogs. Amphibian biologists once hypothesized that Xenopus frogs brought a pathogenic fungus out of Africa. We found that this outbreak narrative projected colonial and racial stereotypes into the domain of animals and limited the scope of the scientific imagination. DNA test kits enabled us to determine that the frogs used in our study were not carrying the pathogenic chytrid fungus. Getting past stigma attached to particular species and locales, we found that parasites are nonetheless emerging within the biotechnology marketplace. Global commerce is generating hypervirulent strains of disease that threaten to disrupt human dreams and schemes.
On the morning of August 29, 2012, we conducted a pregnancy test at home with a live African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis). Under the watchful gaze of interested artists, a radio journalist, and frog enthusiasts who gathered in a Brooklyn cooperative house, we injected a woman’s urine into a dorsal lymph node of a frog named Loretta. Held firmly between sterile gloved hands, Loretta did not seem to notice when the fine needle of the syringe pierced her skin. But as a milliliter of fluid entered her body she contracted her legs and extended her claws in an apparent expression of discomfort. A wave of anxiety and mixed emotions passed through the room as Loretta’s movements quieted and she was returned to her water-filled tank, where she would be monitored for the following twenty-four hours via a live webcast on Ustream. We generated public field notes on a blog as we settled in to wait for Loretta to lay eggs—an event that would indicate that the woman was pregnant.
At first blush the decision to conduct a pregnancy test in a semipublic forum, to unnecessarily extend its duration over a twenty-four-hour period, and to use a live animal long retired from this particular line of biomedical service appears ridiculous, even unethical. Our performance exhibited human debts to Xenopus frogs—creatures that continue to be widely used as model organisms in the fields of developmental biology, endocrinology, and neuroscience.1 By injecting a frog in a semipublic space, we intended to render visible the ongoing violence taking place in laboratories behind closed doors. Xenopus frogs have long suffered so that humans might craft new social realities and science fictions. Starting from a position of noninnocence, confronting the routine violence of experimental practices face-to-face with a captive frog, we considered how humans have become dependent on complex entanglements with animals, ecosystems, and emergent biotechnologies.2
The Xenopus pregnancy test was used by one of us who wanted an answer to a very personal question: am I pregnant? By restaging this outmoded test, we denatured assemblages of technology, biology, and knowledge that standardize answers to this question. We considered how technology can expand or contract the temporal gap between the biochemical condition of being pregnant and the social experience of pregnancy. We explored this gap with what philosopher Dehlia Hannah calls a performative experiment, an appropriation of conventional scientific practice for purposes of art or parodic performance.3 Performative experiments take place in contemporary art worlds when material practices of scientific experimentation become aesthetic forms. In addition to drawing on theoretical resources from what has been called the performative turn in science and technology studies, the notion of the performative experiment also draws on queer theory—particularly the work of Judith Butler.4 Like queer enactments of gender, these art interventions exhibit the performativity of conventional science and thereby make scientific modes of knowledge production and claims available for critical inspection.5
Bringing forgotten twentieth-century scientific techniques into the domain of art, our experiment considered how human existence has become contingent on the use and abuse of animals in biomedical laboratories.6 Our performance was haunted by what Joseph Dumit calls implosion histories—stories, accounts, and connections that were initially paralyzing because of their enormity. Dumit insists that we remain ever attentive to the riot of stories that hover around everyday objects and scenes: “Following connections is the only way to proceed, no matter how worrisome the result.”7 Rather than stick with a clearly articulated hypothesis, we traced the contingencies of unexpected connections in multispecies worlds. Delving into the scientific literature, we found studies showing that Xenopus frogs, which originate from Africa, can be asymptomatic carriers of a deadly fungal disease. Xenopus became linked to an out-of-Africa hypothesis of disease emergence that repeated tired colonial tropes about the “diseased continent.”8 While studying how this outbreak narrative predictably stigmatized individuals, populations, locales, and lifestyles, we became determined to better understand the fungus. While humans are not harmed by this fungus, it has driven amphibians extinct as it spread around the world. As we conducted the Xenopus pregnancy test, to learn about our bodies and ourselves, we also used DNA test kits to search for fungal spores. Our mode of inquiry thus remained resolutely empirical, even as we explored the contours of hope and anxiety in biotechnical assemblages.
Bringing scientific tools to the art gallery, staging confrontations with complex facets of empirical reality, also opened up an opportunity to imagine how the world might be otherwise. Tim Ingold has recently called on anthropologists to develop their “speculative ambitions.” The task for the anthropologist, according to Ingold, is “to open up a space for generous, open-ended, comparative yet critical inquiry into the conditions and potentials of human life. It is to join with people in their speculations about what life might or could be like, in ways nevertheless grounded in a profound understanding of what life is like in particular times and places.”9 Departing from the discipline of anthropology, this article opens up a number of methodological questions: What sort of tactics and techniques must be added to the toolkit of multispecies studies? Rather than pretend to stand apart and aloof from our subjects of study, how might we more fully embrace the performative aspects of multispecies research practices? How might we use performative experiments to probe speculative horizons?
“There can be no science without speculation,” in the words of Michael Fortun, just as “there can be no economy without hype, there can be no ‘now’ without a contingent, promised, spectral and speculated future.”10 Speculation in the biological sciences has linked the discovery process to commercial agendas. New findings have resulted in the production of lucrative drugs or biomedical interventions.11 As human reproduction became technologically mediated, consumers of emergent “hope technologies,” in the words of Sarah Franklin, found new possibilities for parenthood and kinship.12 But these same liberatory reproductive technologies generated new eugenic trends in humans and produced new forms of suffering in animals. These technologies also generated mass death in ecological assemblages. Working from a position of noninnocence and complicity—inheriting histories of animal experimentation and living with ecologically destructive processes—our performative experiment explored a series of speculative questions: How do biotechnical assemblages structure human hopes? Can we share the suffering created by our hope technologies? As biotechnology and global commerce change the conditions and potentials of life, how might we bring a renewed sense of responsibility to the realm of ontological choreography?
Working at assisted reproductive technology clinics in the 1990s, Charis Cussins developed the idea of “ontological choreography” to describe “the coordinated action of many ontologically heterogeneous actors in the service of a long-range self.”13 Thompson described how different actors were “coordinated in highly staged ways” to produce parents and children.14 This “deftly balanced coming together of things” united actors “that are generally considered parts of different ontological orders (part of nature, part of the self, part of society).”15 If reproductive technologies now standardize the ways that humans are produced, our experiment with Xenopus frogs illustrated how we might choose to destandardize this production process.16 Delving into the archives, we explored historical alternatives to choreographing the ontology of pregnancy.
The peculiar biotechnical affordances that make Xenopus useful in human pregnancy testing were discovered by South African researchers in the mid-1930s. If a potentially pregnant woman’s urine contains human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG), a hormone that is produced by the human body after a fertilized egg attaches to the uterine wall, then an injected frog lays eggs (fig. 1).17 The frog pregnancy test became part of standard medical diagnostic protocol, a hope technology for expectant mothers, which was used behind closed doors by doctors throughout the United States and Europe. Xenopus frogs can live up to thirty years in captivity if treated well, and each individual frog can be reused for a pregnancy test every two to three months, as soon as the female becomes gravid with eggs. In contrast to other early twentieth-century pregnancy tests, which required killing and dissecting the animals, the frogs were not permanently harmed during this bioassay.
Ontologies of human pregnancy have shifted over time, as multiple species have appeared and disappeared in distributed biotechnical assemblages. Before the Xenopus test, in the late 1920s, the “A-Z test” was widely used, which involved repeatedly injecting five female mice with a woman’s urine over several days. The mice were killed, dissected, and then examined to see if their ovaries were enlarged. Swollen ovaries signaled a pregnancy.18 The Friedman test substituted rabbits for the mice in the late 1920s and led to the association in popular culture of rabbit killing with pregnancy testing. Xenopus initially became popular because it offered faster turnaround time and better sensitivity compared with earlier animal models, enabling diagnosis of pregnancy shortly after a missed menstrual period—as early as two weeks after implantation of the fertilized egg.19 The fact that Xenopus did not have to be killed in order to determine the status of a pregnancy also “improved the public face of pregnancy testing beyond the laboratory.”20
New kinds of pregnancy tests produced what Franklin calls “biological relativity” in a topsy-turvy world with an oscillating, fluctuating, and unstable sense of normality.21 Pregnancy tests with animal models were gradually abandoned in the 1970s and 1980s as chemical tests became the norm in laboratories and later in the home. David Lynch, the director of the edgy and uncanny television series Twin Peaks, helped popularize the plastic pee-on-a-stick test with his 1997 television advertisement for Clearblue Easy. Lynch took the commission because it involved “the psychological torture of a beautiful young woman, a theme he has explored in other media.”22 Lynch’s Clearblue Easy advertisement played with the speculative gap that emerges with pregnancy tests—capturing the agonizing suspense of waiting (in private) through a white woman’s face reflected in a bathroom mirror. “When you’re waiting to find out if you’re pregnant or not, nothing else in the world matters until you know,” the narrator of Lynch’s commercial says, while a clock ticks loudly in the background and possible results flash on the screen: “yes, no, yes, no, yes, no. . . . ” Sarah Abigail Leavitt’s careful exegesis of this commercial considers the intense affects that bounce around during these sixty seconds: “Though it takes only a minute, it will be the longest minute of this woman’s life, for so much hangs in the balance.”23 The viewer does not learn whether the smile on the woman’s face at the end of the commercial is one of relief or anticipation.
Time slowed down as we took the Xenopus pregnancy test out of the archives. This bioassay requires waiting much longer than the pee-stick test. Results with a frog can take as long as twenty-four hours to emerge. The Xenopus pregnancy test also delays the moment in a woman’s cycle at which knowledge is possible. It works reliably only two or three weeks after a missed period, in contrast to a plastic pee-stick test, which can deliver a result even before an anticipated period. While using this test, we viscerally experienced the appreciable distance between the biochemistry of pregnancy and the complex, embodied, and interpersonal experience of being pregnant. Xenopus frogs and the pee-stick test both detect HCG. Quantitative tests of HCG, performed after blood is drawn at a doctor’s office, can detect elevated hormone levels even earlier than the plastic pee-stick. The Xenopus test is thus slightly less sensitive than the pee-stick, which is itself less sensitive than a blood test. Therefore, the test itself—the chemical technology or animal assay—determines the temporal point in the progression of pregnancy at which a yes or no answer can be given. In other words, these pregnancy testing technologies can serve to narrow or widen a speculative gap, depending on how one chooses or happens to choreograph an ontological state.
Playing with speculative gaps, the uncertain and difficult space between the present and the imagined future, can yield unnerving results. As one of us began trying to conceive a child, the speculative ambitions of this project took a very personal turn. We experimented with possibilities of queer kinship and self-fashioning while pushing the work of participant observation into uncomfortable realms—exposing private dreams to public inspection and critique. Dreams of fostering a potential human life were harbored by one of us who was partnered in a lesbian relationship. The imagined child took shape in the couple’s eyes and minds as they bought clothes and toys suitable for various stages of life—tiny shoes that she would outgrow before she could walk, a dress that would be out of style by the time she grew into it, a fierce fuchsia ski jacket that they agreed would only work for a boy. They looked around at the children of heterosexual friends and neighbors, envying the ease with which biology helped to decide for them the shape of their eyes, the color of their skin, whose relatives they resembled. Every male friend became a candidate in the category of “uncle” or bio-daddy, whose influence in the imaginary child’s family constellation they would chart with quick back-of-the-envelope calculations. Men on the street were reduced to their genes. Potential sperm donors were everywhere, and nowhere, to be found.
Amid indecision, a tattooed dyke doctor told the couple “whatever you’ll do, you’ll regret it—so just get some sperm and get on with it!” Ultimately, the couple purchased sperm in the summer of 2012 from a commercial bank, a queer marketplace where genetic material is coded by markers of race and class. The business plans of these facilities involve adding value to raw DNA—making it better by enhancing associations with the genetic inheritability of desirable phenotypes and social traits.24 A relentless onslaught of choices presented themselves for queer self-fashioning. In the end, the couple chose a donor with whom neither of them shared ancestry simply because they thought he was the most beautiful. As their reproductive project proceeded, the couple embraced relations of kinship and affiliation that extended beyond their monogamous partnership.
Biological ties are often decentered in gay and lesbian notions of kinship, according to Kath Weston’s book Families We Choose (1991), since they are based on choice and love rather than shared genetic inheritance. Likewise, multispecies families—which involve companions like birds, dogs, cats, or frogs—involve queer sensibilities because they involve relations of care and love that reach beyond fixed blood ties.25 Power asymmetries among species, like the power asymmetries that bind children to parents in human families, meant that Loretta had no choice but to participate in our experiment. We purchased her with a credit card from 1-800-Xenopus, the toll-free hotline for a specialty laboratory animal supply company (fig. 2). Still, Loretta helped illustrate a deep kinship shared by humans and frogs—a similar biochemical makeup shared across divergent evolutionary lineages, with reproductive functions triggered by shared hormones. Once viewed as primitive creatures by experimental biologists, Xenopus frogs were formerly thought to be unable to experience feelings of pain or fear. But recent research has led to the revision of these earlier assumptions. According to a laboratory manual published in 2010 by the Taylor and Francis Group, “Xenopus have all of the neuroanatomical pain pathways as seen in mammalian species, and thus, like mammals, they are capable of experiencing pain.”26
Sharing suffering, according to Donna Haraway, involves paying attention to lab actors in precarious situations and “the practical and moral obligation to mitigate suffering among mortals.”27 With this in mind, we injected ourselves with saline solution before beginning our experiment with Loretta. The injections stung a little. They felt like a tuberculosis test, where a little bit of liquid is injected under the skin. By involving our own bodies in this art project—by being on the receiving end of saline injections, and by turning a potential pregnancy into a public spectacle—our intention was not to celebrate the heroics of self-experimentation. Rather than harbor a fantasy of ending all suffering by laboratory animals, or even claiming to “feel the pain” of the individual frog in our care, our intent was to situate human modes of self-fashioning within long legacies of animal experimentation. We experienced disquiet as our own bodies were turned into art objects. Our disquiet redoubled as we imagined and speculated, across species lines, about Loretta’s own subjective experiences during our experiment.