Copyright Lambda Rising Feb 1998Scenes From the Stirrups
Public Privates: Peforming Gynecology from Both Ends of the Speculum
by Terri Kapsalis
Duke University Press
ISBN 0822319217
paperback $16,95, 216 pp,
Years ago I did research on a rather obscure early nineteenth century American healer, Samuel Thomson. His populist approach to medicine included the radical notion that doctors should get paid only if they actually cured the patient. He lambasted doctors as elitists and criticized the profession for its anti-democratic, monopolistic impulses.
There has been a long tradition within our culture of attacking the medical establishment for its ignorance, exclusiveness, arrogance, paternalism, greed, objectification and commodification of the human body, especially the female body. Terri Kapsalis's Public Privates: Peforming Gynecology From Both Ends of the Speculum is a post-modernist rendering of the popular 19th century self-help/health reform/women's health tract, in which she posits that "gynecology is not simply the study of women's bodies-gynecology makes female bodies."
At times Kapsalis seems to be reinventing the proverbial wheel; at others she acts as if she just discovered the concept of women's health for the first time. Few if any references, except in the bibliography, are made to such feminist foremothers as Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English for their ground breaking For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts Advice To Women (Doubleday, 1078), or health writer Barbara Seaman.
Kapsalis exiles history. to the realm of unsupported narrative space. She privileges such concepts as performance, spectacle, spectators, and the like. The gynecological examination becomes another example of the Bakhtian carnival with its multiplicity of voices and perspectives.
I do not argue with Kapsalis about the abuses and misuses of women's bodies especially in the gynecologists examining room. My criticism of her presentation rests in the cynicism which underlies the post-modernist position. Since Kapsalis is appalled by patriarchal medicine's treatment of women as objects, as "it", she should be equally disturbed by post modernism's insidious atomization and fragmentation of the individual into an inauthentic entity who performs rather than authentically acts from an inner self-knowing.
The strongest writing in Public Privates occurs in Kapsalis's discussion of Dr. J. Marion Sims, M.D., inventor of the speculum. We learn that Dr. Sim's perfected his invention while experimenting on slave women. The chapter on Dr. Sims is an excellent expose on the harsh realities that "poor women, particularly poor women of color, continue to serve medicine" while "...medical technologies serve those in power."
Kapsalis skillfully analyzes and deconstructs the standard OB-Gyn teaching text, Danforth's Obstetrics and Gynecology. She points out, "of the photographs found in Danforth's, there is a most glaring and surprising absence. Among the scores of images, there is no photographic representation of healthy, normal genitalia." On the other hand, she points out that the text General Urology (used by medical schools to study male genitalia) contains no "closeup photographs of a penis," and that it contains no "images of pathological penises."
In subsequent chapters, the reader is introduced to performance artist Annie Sprinkle and her speculum spectacle, the movies of David Cronenberg, especially Dead Ringers (1988), and a concluding essay that speculates on "things to come." Kapsalis calls for "a change in how we conceptualize and create new practices and representations combined with a recognition that practices and representations are interdependent, and, at the same time, even one and the same." In her "alternative pelvic theatre" there will be a "multiplicity of attitudes, subjectivities and positionalities that women enlist when approaching and confronting gynecology" From this, the reader is to conclude that such a space is open to all women of all sexualities and gentler and that there is no "prescripted `proper' female performative." For all my difficulties with Kapsalis' language and presentation, she has made a contribution to the field of women's health concerns. In our age of homogenized medicine she offers the reader novel ideas on the vaginal spectacle which are rather spectacular.
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