Elizabeth Rooklidge on Maria Mathioudakis

Untitled (Melting Specula with Acetone in Glass), 2023, plastic speculum, acetone, glass

[Image description: A closeup photograph of a plastic speculum laying in a glass vessel. The front end of the speculum is dissolving into foam.]

There is a piece in Maria Mathioudakis’s exhibition, Immanence, at the University of California, San Diego, that I can’t stop thinking about. Like it’s haunting me, persistently hovering in the back of my mind. Called Untitled (Melting Specula with Acetone in Glass) (2023), it consists of a plastic gynecological speculum placed in a glass vessel, with the ends of the speculum’s bills dissolving into a foamy liquid. It is, I notice immediately, incredibly elegant; its crystalline materials, shiny surfaces, and delicate bubbles are all exquisite in their ethereality. But the work is also unsettling. I find a disquiet creeping up in me the longer I spend looking at it. What is happening here? 

It’s not that I don’t recognize the object, the speculum. I’m a thirty-six-year old, cis woman with access to health insurance—many times I’ve had one unceremoniously shoved up my vagina and ratcheted open to reveal my internal structure. Dark until the speculum parts those musculo-curtains, allowing the doctor to position the standing lamp so they can look down that damp tunnel to my winking cervix. But all that is hidden from my view by the paper blanket draped over my lap, my knees holding it up like tent poles to create a space for the doctor to covertly investigate my insides. I just feel pressure, a pinching, even a painful scraping, and no acknowledgement that it hurts. 

The pelvic exam is, for many who undergo it, an anxiety-ridden experience. At best, it’s physically uncomfortable. At worst, like for survivors of sexual assault or medical abuse, it can be an utterly horrifying, even retraumatizing experience. I have not been through that horror, but the pelvic exam is, for me, still an experience of fear. Fear of pain, yes, but most of all fear of another person taking control of my own body.

Outside the gynecologist’s office, pop feminist culture tells me that I’m supposed to love my body, to have clarity about its form and a thorough understanding of its functions, and to appreciate it all with awe. But I’ve always found my vagina’s general vibe to be kind of . . . spooky. Mysterious. A little sinister. Maybe it’s because I grew up in a conservative Christian church, where talking about genitals at all was verboten. Or because during the summers I played a science-y computer game that was supposed to teach me human anatomy, but there were drawings of fig leaves covering breasts and genitals in all the diagrams. I didn’t receive any kind of actual information about anatomy—my anatomy—until seventh grade health class, and even then I was only presented with a chart that must have been illustrated in the 1950s, a relic. Looking, it seemed, was bad. I’ve gotten over that, for the most part, but still . . . the spooky vibe persists. 

All these dynamics are about looking and, I think, about seeing. There is a difference between those two terms. Looking, to me, speaks to some kind of surveying. Observing and assessing. But seeing is something else—it implies understanding. We use the term lightly, of course, but when we say something like, “I feel seen,” we feel we are being met with recognition of our individual humanity. Of the experience of being a particular person in a particular place and time. Our bodies, the vessels for our selves, are inherently tied up in that visibility. 

Sometimes we need tools in order to look, to see, and the speculum represented in Mathioudakis’s work is one designed to make looking possible. But the tool’s history is a grisly one: the speculum was developed in the 1840s by a white physician named J. Marion Sims, who devised the tool while surgically experimenting on enslaved Black women in a makeshift hospital in Montgomery, Alabama. [1] The first versions of the speculum appeared as early as 97 AD but did not find their way to North American medical practice until Sims bent the handle of a pewter spoon and inserted it into an enslaved woman’s vagina. [2] 

The women on whom Sims experimented—we only know some of their first names: Anarcha, Betsey, Lucy—suffered from vesicovaginal fistulas, or tears between the wall of the vagina and the bladder that allow urine to leak freely (they are most frequently sustained during difficult childbirths). They sound awful, certainly a condition I would want repaired. Sims’ invention of the speculum allowed him to do so, and for that he has historically been positioned as these women’s savior. Not that gynecological health was a particular passion of Sims’. “If there was anything I hated,” he stated in his autobiography, “it was investigating the organs of the female pelvis.” But these women’s enslavers kept sending them to Sims to treat their fistulas, despite his protests, and he finally took it upon himself to devise a surgery to repair them. Using the speculum he developed, Sims said, “The fistula was as plain as the nose on a man’s face.” [4] It was the bent spoon that allowed the doctor to look and to fix. 

For me, Sims’ savior status was fraught to begin with, but it entirely fell apart when I learned that he performed experimental surgeries on many of the women thirty times, without anesthesia, in his backyard, before successfully repairing any fistulas. [5] Not to mention that none of this could really have been done with these women’s consent, since enslavement fundamentally robs individuals of that agency. And when Sims eventually performed the surgery on white women, he did so under the auspices of his private practice—in a hospital, rather than in his backyard. He would go on to enormous fame for this surgery, acquiring titles like Father of Gynecology and, almost unbelievably, Architect of the Vagina. [6] This was only possible because of the abuse of Black women’s bodies.

While researching the speculum’s history to better situate my understanding of Mathioudakis’s work, I came across the book, Public Privates: Performing Gynecology from Both Ends of the Speculum. In it, writer and health educator Terri Kapsalis notes that “gynecology is traditionally a discipline concerned with mastering the female body.” [8] And, she astutely points out, “visibility leads to mastery.” [9] The “masters” of the enslaved women on whom Sims experimented did not bring them to the physician for their well-being, but to maintain their value as laborers. The enslaving class had already mastered these women by turning them into de-humanized commodities to be surveyed and used, thus the visibility Sims opened up with the speculum served to reinforce the oppression and abuse that commoditization inflicts on dehumanized bodies. Does this history mean that the speculum is only a tool for subjugation? Contemplating the speculum in Mathioudakis’s work, considering the tool’s early history, I find it tempting to view the modern, duck-billed speculum that way. But visibility, as Terri Kapsalis writes, “can be oppression or liberation or both or neither.” [10]

Fast forward a hundred and thirty years from Sims’s bent spoon to the early 1970s and the upswing of second wave feminism. The metal speculum had been through different iterations, and women now had access to an affordable version they could get their hands on—it was plastic, transparent, light-weight. [11] Feminists who identified as “self-helpers'' used this tool for self-examination: Rather than putting their feet in stirrups and draping the paper blanket over their knees so a doctor could look at their vaginas, these women used the tool, along with a lamp and mirror, to examine their own vaginas, seeing all the way to their cervixes. 

Groups like the Federation of Feminist Women’s Health Centers (FFWHC) taught examination methods to women across the continental U.S. and in Baja, California. [12] With an extensive network of health clinics run by extra-medical health practitioners (or “laywomen”), the FFWHC worked, as Mathioudakis wrote in her MFA thesis, “to liberate access to all medical procedures related to reproductive health. If laywomen were all equal, then power moved horizontally in the context of their examination rooms.” [13] Thoroughly armed with detailed information from organizations such as the FFWHC, women could track yeast and bacterial growth, watch for STI symptoms, keep an eye on an IUD string, and monitor menstrual blood. While none of this is to say that women would never need treatment by physicians, they ultimately gained agency through visibility—to be able to both look at and see their own bodies—a right they’d been denied for over a century as the speculum remained a tool of the patriarchal medical establishment. The FFWHC’s logo? A hand holding a speculum. 

So the speculum is a tool of liberation. It is a tool of oppression. It is both. Yet I can’t help feeling that, as Kapsalis suggests, it is neither. I don’t know what to do with it. Yes, I can insert the speculum into my own vagina and look at myself—see myself—and there is power in that, but it also  means holding an ugly history inside of me. Yet don’t I already hold that history in my body anyway? I am a white woman. For as many bad experiences as I’ve had in the gynecologist’s office, I have ready access to health care. That care, my health, the most fundamental ideologies of “health”—it’s all built on a history of looking at non-white bodies and perceiving them as objects for medical experiment. Of seeing humanity selectively. And of erasing, making invisible, a history that would besmirch modern medicine’s reputation.

Considering this history, it makes sense that Mathioudakis’s work haunts me. The object itself is an appropriately ghostly one—the plastic speculum’s translucency, as well as that of the glass container and acetone, raise the specter of invisibility. We can just make out their shapes. The speculum is dissolving, its solid form disappearing into another state. It’s beautiful, but there is a violence here, the acrid chemical eating away at the plastic. I ask Mathioudakis what is happening, from her perspective, when she pours the acetone onto the speculum. “It’s an act of revenge,” she tells me, for all the pain the tool has caused. Fair enough, I think. But as I look at the speculum slipping away in front of me, I feel a panic rise in my throat. It is the thing that might make my vagina less . . . spooky, more visible to me. It might allow me to see myself. ​​

I return to Kapsalis: liberation, oppression, both, neither. It strikes me that the speculum is—in its simultaneity, its contention, its hope, its despair—an object that epitomizes our world. 

Elizabeth Rooklidge is a writer, educator, and HereIn’s Founder and Editor.

Notes

1.Terry Kapsalis, Public Privates: Performing Gynecology from Both Ends of the Speculum (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 32.

2. Ibid., 38.

3. Ibid., 34.

4. Ibid., 37.

5. While Sim succeeded in repairing fistulas in some of his patients, the amelioration was often only temporary—the fistulas regularly reopened when women birthed additional children. For a thorough accounting of Sims’s failure to develop a “cure” for the vesicovaginal fistula, see J.C. Hallman’s Say Anarcha: Young Woman, a Devious Surgeon, and the Harrowing Birth of Modern Women's Health (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2023). 

6. Kapsalis, 31. Sims’s posthumous reputation was explicitly hagiographic, aided by his nearly 500-page autobiography. For documentation of Sims’s problematic standing during his lifetime, see J.C. Hallman’s Say Anarcha. 

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid., 7.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

11. The affordability of this new speculum is not to be viewed as an unadulterated triumph—the transition of an object from reusable metal to disposable plastic comes at a cost to those producing it, often people of color laboring in abusive conditions, and to the environment.

12. Maria Mathiodakis, Immanent, MFA Thesis, University of California San Diego, 2023, 9.

13. Ibid.