Gender,sexuality,and technology in male pregnancy: An analysis of Lee Mingwei and Virgil Wong’s installation,POP! The First Human Male Pregnancy

Liminality

Science fiction has long been a space to explore the relationship between new and emerging technologies and their consequent imagined societal disruptions. Science fiction may be held up to generate support for a particular utopian vision of an emerging science or technology (McCray, 2005). Others use fiction to explain how science or a particular technology works, or will possibly work in the future (Ingram-Waters, 2009; Steinmuller, 2003). Additionally, authors and artists may use fiction to explain the social implications, or future social implications, of science or a technology (Haraway, 1989; Penley, 1997; Squier, 1994, 1999, 2004). As discussed earlier, the film Junior (Reitman, 1994) is a humorous science fiction which demonstrates a breach in traditionally held norms and values of pregnancy. Susan Squier (1994) refers to the use of fiction to indicate relationships between science and non-science as the ‘traffic’ between science fiction and science. In her book, Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine (2004), she develops this concept of science-science fiction traffic more extensively into ‘liminality.’ For Squier (2004), liminality is a transitional discursive space where competing claimsmakers invoke science fiction-like constructs to engage in scientific meaning-making. Liminality is a useful concept because it can be used to identify how and where claimsmakers with less institutional power, including artists, such as Lee and Wong, and various publics, such as the commenters at YouTube, voice their concerns about the social implications of emerging science and technologies.

Science, science fiction, and meanings

Science fiction, in a range of guises, operates as a particular channel of influence in the creation of scientific knowledge. As Squier (2004) and others have already pointed out, science fiction helps us think about, and in some cases answer, the ‘what if?’ question (Steinmuller, 2003) posed by science. Feminist science studies scholars, in particular, have looked at the ways in which science fiction functions as a site for critical knowledge production about new reproductive and genetic technologies (Haraway, 1989; Kaplan and Squier, 1999; Penley, 1997; Schwab, 1999; Squier, 1994). These critics argue that fiction, especially avant-garde fiction, is an important site of discursive knowledge because it threatens taken for granted norms and values, challenges the agency of decision-makers (Schwab, 1999), breaks up the ‘monopoly of experts,’ and forms ‘new subjectivities, relationships, and practices’ around the technologies (Kaplan and Squier, 1999: 241). Indeed, Kaplan and Squier, referencing the most famous mammal to be cloned, call these processes of disciplinary transgression ‘playing Dolly’ (1999: 241). Drawing upon the work of queer theorist, Eva Hayward, transgressive meaning-making that arises from liminality can occur in more precise locations, including the points of contact between humans, non-human species, and technologies (2010a, 2010b, 2012). Lee and Wong’s installation offers a space for audiences to visually experience Lee’s pregnancy, which is itself presented as a highly connective human-biotechnological hybrid form.

As cisgender male pregnancy is not biotechnologically possible, Lee and Wong’s installation is definitely transgressive science fiction. But as a stand-alone piece, available to anyone with access to the Internet, Lee and Wong’s installation is also a site of discursive knowledge production, regardless of their intentions as artists when they created it. As the top hit in Google and other global search engines following a query of ‘male pregnancy,’ this particular installation piece could be one of the most influential sites of male pregnancy meaning-making. Indeed, that is how I first encountered Lee and Wong’s site 15 years ago. In the following section, I will describe their website.

Textual analysis of POP! The First Human Male Pregnancy

‘POP! The First Human Male Pregnancy’ is the title of a website (available at www.malepregnancy.com, and pictured in Figure 1 as a screen capture) that purports to track the progress of Lee, as he becomes the first human cisgender male to gestate a pregnancy. ‘POP!’ is actually a long-running and relatively unchanged virtual art installation project by Lee and Wong that offers audiences a chance to engage in the speculative fantasy of male pregnancy. There are numerous online entries dedicated to dispelling the ‘hoax’ of Lee’s pregnancy at question and answer sites such as About.com and Snopes.com. The piece is also directly referenced in the Wikipedia entry on ‘male pregnancy.’ ¹ Viewers can reach the website through a variety of routes. Perhaps they were directed to the link from online commentary on contemporary art. Conceivably they followed one of USA Today’s ‘Weird News’ hyperlinks. Or maybe they decided to investigate the phenomenon of male pregnancy following an Internet search of that term. ² OPEN IN VIEWER

Once viewers reach ‘POP! The First Human Male Pregnancy,’ they are greeted with an extremely sophisticated, interactive, and convincingly authentic website. An apparently pregnant Lee, clad only in a pair of blue briefs, is pictured in the center of a set of different hyperlinked graphics. Lee stands, bathed in golden light, with his arms stretched downwards, palms facing out. He looks directly into the camera at his audience. His stance seems open and welcoming, as if he is personally inviting viewers to scrutinize his life, his choices, and his pregnancy. Complementing this image’s message, to his right, printed underneath a real-time clock, is the following invitation: ‘Join physicians and scientists around the world in monitoring Mr. Lee's pregnancy online.’ Thus, an audience is offered an opportunity to engage the phenomenon of male pregnancy as if it were a viable and accessible medical technological event. Both Lee and Wong, who plays the role of Lee’s physician, never step out of character, so to speak, which makes the science-fictional prospect of male pregnancy all the more tangible for audiences.

Just underneath Lee are headshots of three people, two apparently cisgender women and one cisgender man. Beneath each headshot is a snippet of a personal statement allegedly made in reaction to Lee’s pregnancy. The first picture is of ‘Liz,’ a woman of color in her early 30 s from the United Kingdom. She wears a pensive expression. She writes, ‘This is against God. Mr. Lee is a sick man. Repent now before it’s too late.’ Next to Liz is ‘Anne,’ a mid-20 s white woman from the United States, who writes, ‘Go, Mr. Lee! All my prayers and best wishes to you. I’m so happy for you and your baby….’ Lastly, there’s ‘Bob,’ a man of color from Senegal, who looks to be in his 40 s or 50 s. Bob writes, ‘I’ve dreamed about this my entire life. Sign me up!’ Under each snippet, viewers are invited to ‘read more’ and are directed to corresponding message boards. Liz’s snippet leads to a set of 10 messages, all negative, while Anne’s and Bob’s messages lead to two different sets of 10 messages, all positive. ³ Of the 10 negative messages, six include criticisms based on religious morality, two offer concerns about out-of-control science, and two imply that this is a selfish act that will endanger gay men’s lives and women’s reproductive roles. As with the positive messages, the comments contain typos, misspellings, odd spacing, and inconsistent capitalization. Of the positive messages, the overlapping themes addressed include the possibility that men who carry babies will be more empathetic humans, that many men and one transwoman are ready to try it, and that male pregnancy, generally, is a happy occasion. Lee and Wong have designed this particular feature so that it appears that real-time audiences can interact with Lee regarding his pregnancy. In actuality, the message boards are illusions that only represent potential audience interactions. Audiences can still interact by relating to or rejecting the ‘sample’ audience messages, but they cannot leave messages at the site.

To the left of Lee’s image, above the real-time clock, is a set of interactive graphics. Viewers can choose from three sets of medical images: an EKG, an ultrasound, and Lee’s current telemetry readings. In each case the graphic videos are looped, showing only a few seconds of authentic-looking medical images. The EKG flashes a strong, steady heartbeat. The ultrasound shows a grainy black and white image of a fetus’s profile. The telemetry readings show bar charts in a time-lapse series of Lee’s weight gain, his blood pressure, and the fetus’s fundal height. Returning to the concept of biomedicalization, we can see that ultrasounds and telemetry readings are normal parts of pregnancy monitoring. Perhaps Wong and Lee include the EKG to reflect some of the additional measures taken for such a unique pregnancy.

Below the real-time clock, viewers may click on Lee’s daily pregnancy journal. Unfortunately, Lee’s journal is not available but ‘will be back online shortly.’ Viewers do get a lovely pop-up image of Lee, holding a pot of lilies, while reading outside in a garden (see Figure 2). ⁴ OPEN IN VIEWER

Underneath the link to Lee’s journal is a link to his video archive. Three videos are available for viewers: ‘Mr. Lee on a bus,’ ‘Mr. Lee having a voracious meal,’ and ‘Mr. Lee buying groceries.’ The three short videos average less than 20 seconds each and are overlaid with snappy upbeat music. The camera seems to follow Lee throughout a single day. Lee wears shorts and a long gray short-sleeved shirt. His belly is distended like that of a pregnant woman at six months’ gestation. His breasts appear somewhat larger than one would expect of cisgender male breasts belonging to a relatively thin person. In the first video, Lee simply boards a bus and walks to the back of it. If other bus passengers notice something amiss in Lee’s large physical body, the camera does not record it. In the second video, Lee consumes a meal. The film has been sped up so that Lee’s eating is quite comical. This particular film is set to music that could be found in a Lord of the Dance performance. In the final video, the camera follows Lee as he shops for groceries. Lee is in profile for most of the film, and thus appears more obviously pregnant than in any of the other films. Like the other films, though, persons in the background do not seem to notice Lee as anything other than a normal, if large around the middle, cisgender male.

To the right of Lee’s picture is a magazine cover from an undated U.S. News & World Report (see Figure 3). Here Lee is presented in full profile, sporting a belly that might be described as ‘dropped’ (meaning that birth is imminent). Interestingly, the cover broaches two questions, each reflecting complex social problems: ‘Has science gone too far?’ and ‘Man(?) of the Year.’ The first question suggests concerns about out-of-control science. The second question, ‘Man(?) of the Year,’ addresses a different, though related, set of worries about gender roles, bodies, and masculinity. OPEN IN VIEWER

Underneath the magazine cover are seven listings of male pregnancy in the media. As of 28 October 2013, those listings include two articles about Thomas Beatie’s pregnancies as a transgender man. Notably, these links are the first visible and substantive change to the installation in its 15-year history. The links’ accompanying text states, ‘Mr. Lee congratulates fellow pregnant dad, Thomas Beatie.’ Further linked articles include a close-up look at the above U.S. News & World Report cover of Lee, an article hosted by CNN.com entitled, ‘Liberated Sea Horse Dads Carry the Babies,’ an article entitled, ‘Pregnant Men!’ from Egyptian Weekly Magazine which features pictures of Lee from the ‘POP!’ website, USA Today’s ‘Weird News,’ dated 4 April 2003, which lists the ‘POP!’ website under ‘Hot Sites,’ and Professor Michael C. Kearl’s encyclopedic website, ‘Gender and Society: A Sociological Tour through Cyberspace,’ which lists Lee’s pregnancy as ‘the first human male pregnancy (well, not really).’ Each of these listings plays with the notion of legitimacy and authenticity of the ‘POP!’ website.

From this initial page of the ‘POP!’ website, viewers may click to investigate male pregnancy and Lee Mingwei further. One page directs viewers to ‘the science of male pregnancy,’ where there are graphs of hormone treatments given to Lee, procedural steps of Lee’s pregnancy, and a glossary of medical terms. Viewers are also treated to a ‘radiographic’ image of Lee, which ‘shows the healthy fetus developing in his abdominal cavity’ right above his penis (see Figure 4). OPEN IN VIEWER

Another page directs viewers to an interview with Lee, in which he addresses definitions of masculinity and male bodies, the rights of transvestites and transsexuals, the politics of drag, his affinities with his mother and sister, and his childhood experiences with Ch’an Buddhism. For Lee, being male and masculine is not incongruous with pregnancy as a result of modern science. Lee comments that transvestites and transsexuals often live difficult lives due to discriminatory attitudes held by people who are not willing to question notions of gender. Lee remains inspired by his mother’s and sister’s journeys through pregnancy. And Ch’an Buddhism gives Lee a foundation in thinking about sharing his body with a new life as a natural course of action for him. When asked how he feels about being labeled a pregnant transvestite, he responds:

Well, it’s not really accurate. I’m still male afterall – biologically and anatomically. It’s interesting that some people believe the definition of being a man is so precarious! And unlike the men who feel this strong desire to physically become women, I’ve never wished for that … and I haven’t done that.

Another page offers answers to ‘frequently asked questions.’ Here, viewers learn that Lee’s due date is being withheld, that he will choose to bottle-feed the baby, that attending physicians to Lee’s Caesarean section will have experience with ectopic pregnancies, and that Lee’s pregnancy is neither a hoax nor an art project, despite the facts that Lee is an artist and that Virgil Wong, another installation artist, had already created and displayed an installation piece based on ‘POP! The First Human Male Pregnancy’ in 2001 at the Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei, Taiwan. Lastly, viewers have the opportunity to watch a seven minute documentary film, ‘When Men are Pregnant,’ that is also hosted on YouTube. ⁵

The film ‘When Men are Pregnant,’ is directed by Sophie Lepault and Capucine Lafait, two artists associated with Wong’s PaperVeins Museum, an online gallery. ⁶ In the film, from which the short videos discussed above were taken, the camera follows Lee around throughout a typical day. Lee walks through the streets of downtown New York City in the evening, pausing from time to time to arch his back in a stretch. His hands are often at the small of his back, not unlike a stereotypical image of a pregnant cisgender woman massaging the chronic ache in her lower back. The camera records only one reaction to Lee’s visible pregnancy from a seemingly unsuspecting member of the public. A white cisgender woman in her 30 s, with an American accent, exclaims, ‘It’s about time!,’ as Lee stops next to her on the sidewalk. Lee laughs. She then goes on to say that though she wants to have children herself, she would prefer it if her husband would carry them. Lee laughs again, and then says, ‘Tell him to come talk to me first,’ before he walks away.

The next few scenes are of Lee as he visits some kind of anonymous medical facility. We hear his voice as he walks through darkened halls. Lee describes how he feels having a baby growing within him, how he envied his mother and sister for their childbirth experiences, and how he knows that his pregnancy is dangerous and that he might not even survive the birth.

At the end of the day, Lee returns to his simply furnished apartment, where his doctor, played by Wong, is waiting. His doctor listens to his heartbeat through a stethoscope. Then the two sit down on Lee’s platform bed. Lee begins to discuss how his pregnancy ‘forces the question about gender.’ He goes on to reaffirm his gender identity as male but then questions how his ability to gestate a pregnancy will alter how society at large will view him. Wong listens patiently. Lee ends with the idea that, in time, all persons, male or female, who want to carry a child will be able to, and thus pregnancy will be decoupled from gender.

Unlike the ‘POP!’ website, YouTube, a vast file-sharing website, does allow viewers to interact with posted material. Viewers have the options of rating videos with a 5-star system, ‘favoriting’ videos, and of leaving commentary. As of 5 August 2013, ‘When Men are Pregnant’ had been viewed 580,325 times. It had been ‘favorited’ 559 times. It had a 4-star rating, based on the average of 357 ratings. Lastly, there were 2189 comments, some of which were posted by the same authors. Some comments were less than a month old. Recent comments reflected a range of different viewer experiences, a small sample of which includes:

‘dudes don't have babies!!!’

‘Obviously BS!’

‘is he straight?’

‘Why haven’t this Dude been on Oprah by now? WTF?’

‘Where is the baby gonna come out of? o.O’

‘people, this sounds like the most far-fetched outlandish, impossible thing I've ever heard. But I looked this up and its true’

‘btw – i hope you all realise this is fake. this never happened! some guy created this and the fake documentary evidence as an art project. the artist name is Virgil Wong’

‘ok guys stop being skeptics. A baby doesnt need a uterus. It only needs its placenta to attach itself to an organ to draw nutrients from the parent. A pregnancy can occur outside the womb in a female. Look it up its called ectopic pregnancy but it si [sic] EXTREMELY dangerous which is why altho its possible most doctors wont try to fertilize a man. Because its dangerous not impossible …’

‘Are u guys dumb or something, saying this is weird, this man and all these people who have done this should be shot in the head. If there is a god he will be pissed for this.’

‘and it had to be an asian’

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 5.

From ‘POP! The First Human Male Pregnancy.’ Art installation, Virgil Wong and Lee Mingwei, 2001, Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, Taiwan.

Performative fiction as knowledge production

Lee and Wong’s installation is an example of a work of performative science fiction that has been specifically created to stimulate knowledge production. Taken in concert, the ‘POP!’ website, the ‘When Men are Pregnant’ film, and the physical installation of ‘POP! The First Human Male Pregnancy’ challenge medical and scientific knowledge, as well as traditionally held values and gender scripts, about human pregnancy. Most saliently, Lee and Wong insist that a cisgender male can be impregnated with a fertilized human embryo, carry a fetus to term, and give birth. But Lee and Wong have other, more subtle agendas, too, that are best reflected in some of the commentary left at the YouTube site. Lee’s pregnancy pushes boundaries of culturally sanctioned values, including those that pertain to masculinity, gender, sexuality, religion, and race. Lastly, Lee and Wong use their art to explore what Waldby (2000) has referred to as the ‘biotechnological imaginary.’ In an interview from 2002, Wong explains:

My on-going art project with Lee Mingwei, POP! The First Human Male Pregnancy, is another example of art anticipating an impending medical scenario. Reproductive medicine is at the forefront of bioethical concerns today, and the possibility of pregnant men opens up an intriguing dialogue on gender roles, infertility treatments, and media representation of medical science. ⁹

Using Lee and Wong’s ‘POP!’ installation trilogy, let us attempt to answer these questions. First, who has the power to define scientific and medical knowledge? Scientific and medical knowledge pertaining to human pregnancy has long been the purview of the medical establishment. Innovation in both knowledge and technologies relating to human pregnancy comes out of basic and applied research settings, from universities to pharmaceutical companies. ¹⁰ Some of this knowledge is then widely circulated in the mass media. Scientific and medical knowledge about human pregnancy also has a strong local context. Many pregnant women and their partners get their information from their healthcare providers, their friends, and their families. Second, who are the competitors for the power to define scientific and medical knowledge about human pregnancy? As indicated above, the primary competitors are housed within medical, research, and industry locations. Competitors also include healthcare providers, friends, and family. The mass media are often a staging ground for competitions for knowledge production. However, other competitors include outsiders, such as Lee and Wong. This is not to say that Lee and Wong have similar levels of power as other competitors – most certainly they do not. Yet, they offer their counter-claims about human pregnancy in an attempt to compete for the power to define it. Third, where do interested stakeholders battle to define knowledge? The most powerful institutionally based competitors, as already discussed, generally compete in the mass media. Local competitions primarily happen in local contexts, for instance, inside a doctor’s office, or at a parents-to-be meeting, like La Leche League or Lamaze meetings. Competitors such as Lee and Wong use the Internet to promote their counter-claims. Sometimes, their counter-claims are picked up and then reported by the mass media. Fourth, how do competitors explain knowledge so that others, especially non-experts, may understand their claims? Experts use short-cuts and metaphors, drawn from popular culture, to which non-experts may then relate (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). Lastly, how do interested parties use science fiction to either create knowledge or to understand knowledge? Lee and Wong, as stakeholders in male pregnancy, use performative science fiction to get their message across. They use widely accessible images and stereotypes of pregnancy to question the boundaries of gender, sexuality, and reproductive technologies.

Lee and Wong’s installation, ‘POP! The First Human Male Pregnancy’ exemplifies liminality. Cisgender male pregnancy in humans is not yet a practical possibility. Yet Lee and Wong have created a liminal space in which audiences may engage with the idea of cisgender male pregnancy as well as its social implications and resultant issues as if it were a viable and accessible medical procedure. At the beginning of this article, I produced a descriptive analysis of the liminal space of male pregnancy engendered by ‘POP!’. I identified that male pregnancy gives rise to a host of concerns about gender, masculinity, race, religion, and biomedicalization. To push my analysis further, I might ask a series of questions: What is the role of the audience vis-à-vis the ‘POP!’ installations? What do Lee and Wong intend for their audiences? Are the ‘POP!’ installations invoked by other actors to explain scientific innovations and technologies similar to male pregnancy? Are the ‘POP!’ installations held up by other actors as a breach of what could happen if reproductive science and technologies are not closely monitored?

The answers to these questions require understanding liminality as more than just a space for meaning-making about male pregnancy. Because I am using Lee and Wong’s ‘POP!’ installations as a case study, I only have access to the data that has already been described here. Thus, I can read the ‘POP!’ website closely as if I was an audience member. I can also review the viewer comments left at YouTube. Lee and Wong have been particularly circumspect in giving interviews regarding the ‘POP!’ installations. To their credit, they have remained, for the most part, in character since the 1999 release of the ‘POP!’ website. Wong’s 2002 statement from above is one of the only published accounts of the artists’ intentions with ‘POP!’. Lee and Wong deliberately engage their audiences in a transgressive interpretation of human pregnancy when Wong says that ‘the possibility of pregnant men opens up an intriguing dialogue on gender roles, infertility treatments, and media representation of medical science.’ ¹¹ Thus, the role of the audience, based on analysis from my own reading of the installation, a review of viewer comments, and Wong’s interview, is that of a population of potential stakeholders who have been welcomed, to varying degrees, to think through the liminality of male pregnancy. This reading of invited participation and reflection certainly reflects Lee’s body of work.

Whether the ‘POP!’ installations have influenced knowledge production about human pregnancy is trickier to measure, given what data is at hand. Other than being a search engine’s top hit for ‘male pregnancy,’ the only true audience interaction that I can assess is the collection of posted comments left at the YouTube site for the film ‘When Men are Pregnant.’ It is difficult to know if posters who seem to believe that Lee’s pregnancy is authentic are being truthful or merely sarcastic. However, if we leave this point aside, we can look at the other comments and see what issues are raised by the film. Though I cannot generalize about the content of all of the thousands of comments left in response to the film, I can look closely at the small sample of comments listed above to track convergences and divergences from the representative fictitious audience that Lee and Wong use at ‘POP!’. The poster who writes ‘dudes don't have babies!!’ identifies the problem of the questionable gender status of the pregnant male. Is a pregnant man really a man? The poster who asks ‘is he straight?’ brings together the question of sexuality with the question of male pregnancy. Must a pregnant male be gay as a requisite for his pregnancy? These concerns about bodies and sexuality are included in the criticisms at Lee and Wong’s ‘POP!’ message board. Another poster gives a surprisingly cogent (if grammatically incorrect) assessment of the biological factors of male pregnancy in which ‘a baby doesnt need a uterus… only its placenta’ and ‘its called ectopic pregnancy but it si [sic] EXTREMELY dangerous which is why altho its possible most doctors wont try to fertilize a man.’

In giving this statement, this poster says that while male pregnancy is theoretically possible, it is too dangerous to be practical. Here the fear of out-of-control science and over-medicalization is tied to the specter of cisgender male pregnancy. Again, questions about bodies and the technicalities of male pregnancy are included at the POP! message boards. Another poster draws on religious language to discuss the implications of male pregnancy in the following: ‘… if there is a god he will be pissed for this,’ echoing many of the fictitious comments Lee and Wong include at ‘POP!’. Lastly, one poster engages an extremely complex set of issues linking together race and sexuality and male pregnancy: ‘and it had to be an asian.’ By writing this sentiment, this poster reflects what Ling (1999) has described as the feminization and ‘gayification’ of the image of Asian males. Elsewhere at the POP! website, Lee and Wong address Lee’s Asian identity, though it is not included on the message boards.

Issues raised by Lee and Wong’s fictitious representative audience at ‘POP!’ overlap to some degree with those raised in the sample of comments included from YouTube. Notably, there are no positive portrayals like those hopeful and enthusiastic ones included by Lee and Wong. For those who critique male pregnancy, it is because it is threatening to normative relationships between gender, sexuality, technologies, religion, and race, in ways that reflect and extend what Lee and Wong include at the ‘POP!’ message boards. Lee and Wong’s liminal space is not just a place for play. Even with the descriptive analysis above, I have shown that the ‘POP!’ installations have important repercussions as a result of how fiction is used in knowledge production.

Conclusion

Though Lee and Wong have not made public claims to use ‘POP!’ to queer pregnancy, I argue that, as a cultural artifact, the POP! installation does just that. Lee and Wong’s installation, ‘POP! The First Human Male Pregnancy,’ does queer the meaning of pregnancy by decoupling gender from pregnancy. With the exception of one buried message board comment from a transwoman eager to try ‘male pregnancy’ technologies to get pregnant, Lee and Wong skirt around the issue of cisgender and transgender bodies in ways that are problematic for non-normative transgendered persons. Transmen such as Thomas Beatie can carry pregnancies with limited or no biomedical interventions while Lee’s thought experiment requires his pregnancy to be a highly biomedicalized process. While Lee and Wong include congratulations and links to stories about Thomas Beatie’s pregnancy, they also include a number of statements and images that confirm Lee’s cisgender identity. At the ‘POP!’ website, Lee and Beatie are presented as the same: men who have babies. To return to Cruz’s earlier critique, when highly visible transgendered persons identify or are identified with binary male/female gender markers especially during traditionally gendered processes such as pregnancy, the shock value that they garner upholds those gender binaries in ways that may further marginalize non-normative trans-identified persons. By including Beatie with Lee, as another shocking example of a man giving birth, Lee and Wong contribute to what DasGupta (2013) calls the trans-phobic narrative of male pregnancy. Again, though there is no indication that Lee and Wong intend to advocate for queer pregnancy with their installation, their installation does, to some degree, queer pregnancy. Yet, we can also see how their installation opens up queer pregnancy for further exploration. To return to Chen’s concept of animacies (2011, 2012), the biomedical technologies that Lee and Wong showcase not only facilitate the animation, or coming to life, of male pregnancy but also offer ways to think about queer pregnancy as post-human. The biotechnologies themselves operate as liminal subjects, capable of subverting existing norms of pregnancy. Perhaps pregnancy need not be normatively gendered or even definitively located in a human body.