Mother is a Woman

Overview

In “Mother is a Woman”, Fan extracted estrogen from urine samples collected from their post-menopausal mother. This estrogen was then blended into a face cream and distributed to Fan’s network of non-biological kin. This project grapples with the slippery constitution of “natural” and “synthetic” genders, posing a series of seemingly absurd questions: What happens if I re-feminize my body with my mother’s estrogen? If your body absorbs my mother’s estrogen, are you feminized by her? If so, who are you to her, and who are you to me? Can our epidermis be our first contact of kinship? Can kinship be infectious?