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Queering Bloodwork is a proposal for an at-home blood testing system, reimagining the kitchen as a lab, that would enable individuals to test and know their own bodies through indicators in the blood—one of the key biomaterials used in check ups and early diagnosis in medicine. Queering Vamps (queeringvamps.hotglue.me) is a speculative online network and forum for sharing information, resources, advice, and research in the queer bloodwork world.

Playing on the fearful idea of the "silent carrier", much spoken of in the context of infectious diseases, we ask ourselves: what if we the silent could be heard? If lack of knowledge gives space to fear, and fear can be weaponized and capitalized, what would the world be like if we could know everything? What if the monopoly on scientific knowledge could be broken, and our relations to our bodies re-established over new foundations?

We are interested in the possibility of auto-knowledge and follow-up with greater independence of the pharmacological and medical complex, democratizing medical-scientific knowledge to allow for emancipated bodies. By performing tests on ourselves, we may achieve further layers of knowledge of our own bodies in relation, for example, to nutrition, exercise, and other behaviours—and potentially other kinds of self-experimentation—independently of a doctor or hospital.

In thinking this world, we are drawing from existing and well-established technologies like insulin monitors, experimental technologies like portable impedance analysis devices, and from the experiences of people with chronic conditions who, through regular testing over time, become familiar with their corporealities in a different way, mastering another language to interpret their bodies in conjunction with embodied experiences. We are also drawing from ideas in preventative care practices, and hoping to expand these outside of terms in the medical field.

Through at-home testing that can be done over time, we are imagining a kind of knowing that compares or combines embodied phenomenological experience with the abstracted language of medical science. How would our relationships with (our) bodies change if we could observe cellular and molecular variations in our blood alongside embodied phenomenological experiences?

Queering Bloodwork and queeringvamps were created by Anna Bosch Sentmartí, Berta Jové Merí, Cecília Resende Santos, Fucan Gómez, and Stephan Leon as part of the Biopractices working group in Post-Inertia, a summer programme organized by Port-0 and Escola Massana in 2020. The Biopractices working group was led by Laura Benítez, researcher and coordinator at Biofriciton