Public Privates

by Kapsalis, Terri

• ISBN13: 9780822319214
• ISBN10: 0822319217
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1997-04-01
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

InPublic Privates, a book about looking and being looked at, about speculums, spectacles, and spectators, about display, illumination, and reflection, Terri Kapsalis makes visible the practices and representations of gynecology. The quintessential examination of women, gynecology is not simply the study of womenrs"s bodies, but also serves to define and constitute them. Any critical analysis of gynecology is therefore, as Kapsalis affirms, an investigation of what it means to be female. In this respect she considers the public exposure of female "privates" in the performance of the pelvic exam. From J. Marion Simsrs"s surgical experiments on unanesthetized slave women in the mid-nineteenth century, to the use of cadavers and prostitutes to teach medical students gynecological techniques, Kapsalis focuses on the ways in which women and their bodies have been treated by the medical establishment. Removing gynecology from its private cover within clinic walls and medical textbook pages, she decodes the gynecological exam, seizing on its performative dimension. She considers traditional medical practices and the dynamics of "proper" patient performance; non-traditional practices such as cervical self-exam; and incarnations of the pelvic examination outside the bounds of medicine, including its appearance in David Cronenbergrs"s filmDead Ringersand Annie Sprinklers"s performance piece "Public Cervix Announcement." Confounding the boundaries that separate medicine, art, and pornography, revealing the potent cultural attitudes and anxieties about women, female bodies, and female sexuality that permeate the practice of gynecology,Public Privatesconcludes by locating a venue from which challenging, alternative performances may be staged.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	3	(8)
The Performance of Pelvics	11	(20)
Mastering the Female Pelvis: Race and the Tools of Reproduction	31	(30)
Cadavers, Dolls, and Prostitutes: Medical Pedagogy and the Pelvic Rehearsal	61	(20)
Apparent Females and Female Appearances: On the Status of Genitals in Medical Textbook Illustration	81	(32)
Retooling the Speculum: Annie Sprinkle's ``Public Cervix Announcement''	113	(22)
Playing Doctor: Cronenberg's Surgical Construction of Mutant Female Bodies	135	(26)
The Other End of the Speculum: Woman-Centered Alternative Practice	161	(22)
Notes	183	(20)
Bibliography	203	(10)
Index	213