May 26, 2020
In this episode of Femmecult Radio, I interview performer, filmmaker, writer and all around effective troublemaker, Jex Blackmore. She is well known for her confrontational performance art which are usually held in civic spaces. Her work addresses the links between moral religious rhetoric, sexuality, and political policy. She has often been the target of protest by the Catholic Church for her outspoken and confrontational work. She has also been called a tireless crusader for bodily autonomy, in that her work seeks to interrogate oppressive social institutions and ideas that undermine reproductive rights, and the freedom of women to choose what happens to their own bodies.
She has been featured in many publications including TIME, Vanity Fair, Washington Post, NPR, Cosmopolitan and Salon, and was featured in the 2019 documentary "Hail Satan?" Her reproductive rights advocacy has ranged from disrupting anti-choice rallies to debating the Westboro Baptist Church and her recent exhibition in Detroit, "Sex Militant", was listed as one of the best art exhibitions of 2019 by the Chicago Reader.
In 2020, her endurance film "An Undue Burden", that premiered at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, interrogates barbaric, abusive state legislation that forces women to wait 24 hours or more following initial counseling by abortion providers before receiving the procedure.
In this interview we talk about the importance of building supportive communities in hostile environments, the problem with moral frameworks that divide people, and the harm caused by oppressive systems require citizens to conform to ideologies that do not address practical realities of everyday life.
For more on Jex, visit her online: https://www.jexblackmore.com/
Music Credits:
Nikki - SciFiSol
Music
https://www.scifisol.net