Thank You for Your Service utilizes the form of a military funeral to bury the placenta from the artist’s pregnancy. The script for the eulogy appropriates medical journalists’ descriptions of placental growth as “military invasion”. Through speech, song, and movement, attendees are guided through the enactment of burial rites usually reserved for members of the US Armed Forces. Culminating in the installation of a permanent outdoor memorial at LA Artcore (Los Angeles), the performance can be understood in four parts: 1) Eulogy [00:21], 2) Hymn [3:16], 3) Procession [4:14], and 4) Burial [5:25].

Responding to the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision that reversed Roe v. Wade (1973), this performance proposes an argument for reproductive rights by conjuring the Third Amendment, which prohibits the government from quartering soldiers “in any house without consent of the Owner”. Drawing analogies between trophoblasts and military operatives, between wombs and motherlands, this performance aims to collapse the gendered spaces between law, land, and labor.

Abridged video documentation (8 min) can be seen below, full documentation (21 min) can be seen here.