Xenofeminism by Helen Hester

Author:Helen Hester
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509520664
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2018-04-09T00:00:00+00:00

The speculum, then, is (at first glance) a relatively simple technology, allowing people from the US and elsewhere to perform vaginal self-exams and generate some sense of their bodily autonomy outside of profit-driven healthcare. Indeed, this device continues to hold a central place in cultural imaginaries of feminist empowerment-through-health up to this day.

The current branding for the Women’s Health Specialists of California, for example, features a raised fist clutching a speculum, and similar imagery appears on the front cover of the 2010 anthology Feminist Technology – a look at how the design, marketing, and use of particular objects might render them more or less helpful as gender-political tools. This choice of cover image is intriguing, given that specula are only mentioned twice within Feminist Technology – once, very briefly, as part of a passing comparison, and a second time as part of a discussion of their limits as a feminist technology. As one essay in the volume remarks, cervical screening and other gynaecological interventions are sometimes ‘not particularly comfortable, in part because of the construction of the steel or plastic speculum itself. A quick patent search reveals that the speculum has not changed in shape or style much since the one designed in 1892.’10

Concerningly, the collection has nothing to say about the processes via which said speculum came into being – namely, through experimentation upon enslaved Black women. Its inventor, J. Marion Sims – a nineteenth-century pioneer of American gynaecological surgery – kept these women as ‘property in the back of his private hospital’.11 The speculum was developed in the context of prolonged experimental abuse, in which dehumanized test subjects suffered through multiple invasive procedures and operations without consent or anaesthesia. Specula, then, introduce some crucial caveats into the discussion of xenofeminism’s penchant for appropriating technologies: such gestures must be attentive to the intersectional histories and entanglements of the tools they discuss. Otherwise, we might find ourselves in the position of uncritically celebrating the tools and products of torture.

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