Lecture: Lucy Beech, Tamar Novick, and Cooking Sections, Disruptive Animality: The Productive Infertility of the Freemartin

Artist Lucy Beech and historian of science Tamar Novick present an online lecture that accompanies the exhibition CLIMAVORE: Seasons Made to Drift, at SALT Beyoğlu. This collaborative research developed out of Beech and Novick’s ongoing experimental writing project ‘Bovine Regimes’. Together they explore the biological phenomenon in cattle known as the freemartinism which occurs in genetically female cows born from a dizygotic twin pregnancy - where an exchange of blood and hormones between a male and female twin has occurred through placental connections rendering the female intersex. Beech and Novick explore how scientists used the freemartin to understand the role of hormones and and formalise the binary of biological sex. Freemartin research laid the foundations of modern embryology, fuelled a revolution in immunology, and streamlined agricultural breeding, prompting a flow of biological materials from laboratories to farm.