Wonder Woman is striking down male doctors. In the original use--an issue of Sister: Los Angeles Women's Center from July 1973--it's showing women (pretty sure the original is unconsciously cisgendered, sigh) retaking control of their bodies by wielding specula on themselves.
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Why does this matter? It was REALLY SUPER DISCOURAGED for women to do this, in weird bizarre and sometimes legal ways. Activist Carol Downer GOT ARRESTED for showing another woman how to use a speculum. In 1972. The year before that cover. (See: https://bust.com/sex/14327-the-secret-history-of-the-speculum-14327.html …)
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Seeing Wonder Woman's medical speculum replaced by the journal is...interesting. The committee that named the journal was all male. We have hardly been the most inclusive field.
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So the speculum being figured in the cartoon as liberation has been replaced by a traditional journal...except one that is now largely run by women. And women and enbies are now able to "wield" that speculum in our field, perhaps? But it's still being turned outwards, not in.
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Why does the speculum still matter? Two things the field has NOT reckoned with:
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1. People with uteruses generally encounter specula at least once a year, for exams. It's uncomfortable at best, painful at worst, and intensely awkward/embarrassing. We are on the table, being examined, by someone who may have been trained on UNCONSCIOUS, UNCONSENTING patients.
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(Comfort, obviously, is not a consideration here. Or agency)
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2. Where's this speculum from? It's the Sims speculum. The one Sims invented by performing brutal, excruciating and repeated experiments on enslaved Black women. Did the founders/namers know about the Sims speculum? I *guarantee* you they did.
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So we've named our most prestigious medievalist journal after a medical instrument with a ghastly, racist history, one that still reminds many in the field of physical pain and emotional discomfort--while many of our dudes don't even realize it's awkward.
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And we have never yet addressed the ways that the racist, sexist legacy of the speculum--who's doing the looking, who's an object to be examined, whose consent matters, whose personhood counts--intertwines with the racist histories embedded in medieval studies.
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You should post a shorter piece that we can circulate.
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Replying to @annawaymack @dorothyk98
I have most of the notes, one book left I should go thru, and then I'll need one hissy-fit sort of day.
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