This is my fantasy of a mythical future based on a patriarchal society:
Nowadays, women in some countries and areas don’t have appropriate security of abortion, as some governments make specifical rules to ban abortion. Although this situation doesn’t exist everywhere around the world, there are still areas where women are facing the problem of losing their body autonomy.
As for my country’s culture of reproduction, China values family and bloodline succession, Women, especially, the youth have deep pressure regarding the traditional reproduction values, like a uterus ultimately has to be tied and contributes to a family, or women have to take responsibility and complete the mission of having babies.
Witches have been always regarded as the symbol of unfortune and evil, their existence was not allowed, and they were killed. People are afraid of their abilities which can change and influence the entire patriarchal society and the world. In 1586, many women who were regarded as witches were killed cruelly because of the spread of a book called “Witch's Mallet”. There are some inhumane identification methods in it to hunt and find witches.
Inspired by all this context and history, my work is based on the perspective of patriarchal gazing, linking history and female ancestors to describe the world of future reproduction, that women can reproduce without the participation of sperm, and at the same time, it also expresses reproduction liberty and female uterus ownership.
My concept details are that if women can create babies by themselves without male participation in the future, this kind of influential revolution with the hegemony of sperm might have difficulties and barriers. Therefore, I used elements such as witches and witchcrafts to metaphor women and reproduction.
Inspired by the witch hunting history, the reproduction in my narrative is kind of ‘reborn’, which gives more female energy from our ancestors as a protesting to history guilt.
