Clips from impassioned live performances by artists Skunk Anansie, Solange, Etta James, FKA Twigs, Nina Simone, Beyoncé and the mother of rock and roll Sister Rosetta Tharpe, set the emotional framework for the video. While the song lyrics are important to the artists’ work and my interpretation of their expression, it is the range of embodied emotion that I’m more concerned with. Their voices hold generational struggle, and set free feelings of anger, sadness, longing, and even hope. The songs and images of these women give space to subjectivity, autonomy, and vulnerability, and are in direct conversation with oppressive images that represent the antithesis of that type of self-concern and freedom. Images of Dr. Marion Sims, the doctor who developed the practice of gynecology through “experimenting” on non-consenting enslaved Black women, for example, directly contrast the depiction of personhood represented in the performances. 

Other sets of found footage throughout the work come from the NBC5/KXAS Television News Collection, University of North Texas Special Collections. News clips from 1985-1990 discuss in vitro fertilization and birth control as advances in women’s reproductive health. While the benefits of these two practices are evident, I’m interested in how things like fertility and contraception were used during the eugenics movement to forcefully sterilize Black and brown women.