Public Privates

Performing Gynecology from Both Ends of the Speculum

Author: Terri Kapsalis
ISBN: 9780822319214

In Public 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 women’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 Sims’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,

Publisher: Duke University Press
Publish Date: 1997

Subjects: Health & Fitness / Women's Health, Medical / Gynecology & Obstetrics

This book is available in the following Community Centers: Women's Center (Location: Medicine)