The award-winning artist Ani Liu has long utilized speculative technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), to reveal the gendered and consumerist imprint on biological processes. Her own pregnancy has been a common focus for this work that stands at the intersection of art and science.

As part of Liu’s 2019 collection, The Consumerist Pregnancy Reports™, she created a garment that simulates labor pain for any gender so they can better empathize with the biological symptoms of pregnancy. Soon after, Liu created a silk garment in rigid boning that reflects on non-female and transgender pregnancy. The idea is to transcend design that tends to “normalize and remake stigmatized assumptions between gender, sex, fertility, and parenthood,” wrote the artist. Her speculative fashion creation emerged from discussions about fertility with non-binary and trans persons.

All of these works were partly inspired by Liu’s experience being targeted online by fashion and cosmetics brands during her pregnancy. “In looking at the objects being promoted to me, I became uneasy,” she wrote in her 2020 essay, The Consumerist Pregnancy. “For instance, the existence of skin-lightening creams implies that it is preferable to have light skin. A corset implies that there is an ideal.