Scripting Scenes from a Material History:

Content Warning: discusses violence to enslaved people and sexual assault

Introduction

The script below is a revised version of a presentation I gave as part of a live broadcast titled The Truncheon and the Speculum, hosted by the Irish artists Jesse Jones and Sarah Browne in July 2016.^[1] It is one iteration of my work as research collaborator with Jones and Browne on the four-part art project In the Shadow of the State (2016). It developed from research I undertook into the material history of the vaginal speculum, the instrument typically used to dilate the vagina to enable inspection and medical treatment. I was interested in the speculum partly in response to the artists’ focus on how the body is regulated by the state, as the device has a potent and violent history of being deployed as an instrument of inspection and governance through official laws such as the nineteenth-century Contagious Diseases Acts, and as an element within carceral and medical regimes.^[2] It is also of interest in relation to the promotion of self-examination by second-wave feminists and in terms of contemporary design practices, in particular “user-centred” design, which suggests that objects, systems and spaces provide or inhibit certain affordances to users. The biopolitical discourse of the speculum’s use in formal settings seems overwhelmingly predicated on a politics of vision rather than feeling, where the design of the instrument implies that the “user” was and is the one who looks through the speculum, not the one whose body is looked at and who feels the effect of the instrument with their body.

My approach was further informed by an interest in the mutual constitution of subjectivities and things, and an understanding of the speculum not solely as a bounded artefact that exists as discrete from the body, but as an object that in its use becomes integral to bodily synthesis. In this, the disposition is towards understanding the speculum in relation to bodily and material culture, taking on board the body as not just a tool affecting the material world, but as also modelled itself by materiality.^[3]

In the Shadow of the State was co-commissioned by the Arts Council of Ireland/An Chomhairle Ealaíon with commissioning organisations Artangel and Create Ireland, the national development agency for collaborative arts. It was first heralded as one of nine “major, once-off commissions” funded by the Arts Council under ART: 2016, a scheme intended to support “a key response by our contemporary artists”^[4] to the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising, the armed rebellion that is generally cited as the foundational event of Irish statehood, followed successively by the Irish War of Independence (1919–21), Civil War (1922–23) and the inauguration of the semi-autonomous Irish Free State (1922) and the independent Republic of Ireland (1949). Almost all of the commissioned artists addressed the 1916 Rising directly, including Willie Doherty whose video work Loose Ends examined the legacy of the Rising by documenting sites of contested history, Rita Duffy whose Souvenir Shop explored the commodification of the Irish revolution, and the choreographer Fearghus Ó Conchúir, who, through his Casement Project, danced with “the queer body of British knight, Irish rebel and international humanitarian” Sir Roger Casement (1864–1916) who was executed for his part in the Rising.^[5]

The work by Jones and Browne was more circumspect than those other projects in relation to the master narrative “event” of the Rising and the time period bounded by its official centenary. They conceived In the Shadow of the State as an investigation of the position of the female body as the focus of repressed histories and political desires under the regulation of the state, and as an implicit counter-memory to the formal commemorative celebrations of 1916. Following a six-month research period, the work was devised to involve four site-specific performance events based around different materialisations of state regulation of the body. The first was Of Milk and Marble in February 2016, which was held in a former safe house in Derry and addressed the incursion of state violence into domestic spaces through the history of British military raids and strip searches. The last was The Touching Contract, held in Autumn 2016. This was a series of immersive performances that explored legal aesthetics and the touch of the state in everyday life. Its first iteration was held in the Pillar Room of the Rotunda Hospital, the world’s first maternity training hospital on its establishment as the Dublin Lying-in Hospital in 1745. Based around medico-legal themes of touch and issues of consent, that first version of The Touching Contract has been written about in relation to “how women’s bodies have been historically defined by patriarchal medical discourses” although a second version performed at the former Juvenile Court in Toynbee Hall in London, in November 2016, was also concerned with touch, migration and policing in the UK in response to the recent Brexit referendum.^[6]

Between Of Milk and Marble and The Touching Contract was The Truncheon and the Speculum, staged as part of the Liverpool Biennale in the summer of 2016. This comprised a series of workshops and a “tele-feminist” live video broadcast from News from Nowhere, the radical community bookshop run by a women workers’ co-operative at Bold Street, Liverpool. Although the project was allusive rather than a direct address to Irish history, the key contexts that informed The Truncheon and the Speculum were obstetric and reproductive injustices on the part of the Irish state, gendered religious institutional abuse and the movement to repeal the 8^th Amendment to the Irish Constitution. This was adopted by referendum in 1983 and equated the life of the “unborn” with the life of the pregnant woman and inhibited the liberalisation of abortion law.^[7] Until the repeal of this law in 2018, women living on the island of Ireland who wanted to terminate a pregnancy had to either travel outside the state or import “abortion pills” illegally.

Liverpool was a resonant location for The Truncheon and the Speculum as it was the most popular destination for Irish women to access abortion services to the extent that the Liverpool-Ireland Abortion Corridor (LIAC) became “a historically and culturally constituted pathway”.^[8] The LIAC was referenced in the first minutes of the broadcast through images of spaces on the Dublin-Liverpool car ferry by photographer Miriam O’Connor to the soundtrack of Sail and Rail by the band Sissy. The lyrics imagine taking the ferry to England for an abortion with the musician Enya: “Me and Enya on the Sail and Rail/Two unwanted pregnancies, but soon we’ll be bikini-ready”.^[9] A further element in my presentation in Liverpool was the city’s involvement in the Transatlantic slave trade, particularly due to the involvement of enslaved women in the production of gynaecological tools and knowledge.^[10]

A further immediate context for the material culture of obstetric violence was the Irish state’s response in 2015 and 2016 to the campaign for full redress by survivors of the discredited medical practice of symphysiotomy, that involved the cutting of the symphis pubis with a so-called Gigli saw. Although the use of symphysiotomy had died out in most countries by the early twentieth century, it was revived in Ireland in the 1940s, arguably due to a Catholic medical ethos that sought to widen women’s pelvises so as to increase the possibility of future vaginal childbirth rather than perform Caesarean sections.^[11] The procedure was carried out on an estimated 1,500 women in Ireland up to the 1980s. Usually performed without consent, and often resulting in ambulatory disability, chronic pain, sexual dysfunction or/and lifelong incontinence, it was characterised by the group Survivors of Symphysiotomy as “a form of historical religiously motivated institutionalised obstetric violence.”^[12]

The transmission of The Truncheon and the Speculum from Liverpool took place over one hour. It was broadcast live online to an audience that included watch parties in homes, artists’ studios and art centres in Ireland, Britain and the US. In addition to my presentation, there was a discussion with Klau Kinky, a member of the GynePunk biohacker group whose aim is to decolonise gynaecology and who are involved in disseminating open-source instructions on how to create and use tools such as the speculum, and histological equipment to enable the analysis of body fluids at a molecular level.^[13]

(Reworked) script by Lisa Godson, first presented as part of The Truncheon and the Speculum broadcast from the Liverpool Biennale on 21 July, 2016

The object and use of the vaginal speculum is central to this presentation. This is the instrument that is inserted into the vagina, most typically in medical examinations, to dilate, hold open and enable the inspection of the cervix uteri. An alternative term for the same instrument, now archaic, was “diopter”, from the Greek διοπτρα (to see through). The origins of “speculum” are from the Latin word specĕre ( to look [at], observe), and so despite its use in dilation, it is the affordance of visualising that is built into the word and describes its “forness”.^[14] Each orifice of the body has a corresponding speculum: the Speculum Oris is used to open the mouth, the Speculum Oculi the eye, and there are specialised speculua for the ear, nose and anus.

 

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1. Thomas Clarkson buys a speculum oris, Liverpool, England, 1808

“There were specimens of articles in Liverpool, which I entirely overlooked at Bristol, and which I believe I should have overlooked here, also, had it not been for seeing them at a window in a shop; I mean those of different iron instruments used in this cruel traffic. I bought a pair of the iron hand-cuffs with which the men-slaves are confined […] I bought also a pair of shackles for the legs […] At the same place I bought another instrument which I saw. It was called a speculum oris. The dotted lines in the figure on the right hand of the screw, represent it when shut, the black lines when open. It is opened, as at GH, by a screw below with a knob at the end of it. This instrument is known among surgeons, having been invented to assist them in wrenching open the mouth as in the case of a locked jaw. But it had got into use in this trade. On asking the seller of the instruments on what occasion it was used there, he replied that the slaves were frequently so sulky, as to shut their mouths against all sustenance, and this with a determination to die; and that it was necessary their mouths should be forced open to throw in nutriment, that they who had purchased them might incur no loss by their death’.^[15]

 

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2. Madame Boivin improves her speculum, Paris, 1819–32

[Versions of the speculum dating to at least the first century CE exist in the archaeological record and the instruments are depicted in early modern obstetric texts. The French midwife and surgeon Marie-Anne Victoire Gillain Boivin (1773–1841) is one of the first named innovators of a speculum, developing different versions of it over a decade, concomitant with the increasing professionalisation of surgery, the rising importance of eponymy in surgical instrument marketing and the “birth of the clinic”. Her naming of the cutler who made and sold the speculum speaks to the importance of “collaboration and the two-way flow of information between the instrument maker with his craft expertise and the surgeon with his medical knowledge.”^[16] Her account of this invention as co-developed and modified over time by a number of different agents are in contrast with that of other medical “inventors” such as J. Marion Sims whose account of his “discovery” is a characteristic “de nihilo moment of innovation (rather than laborious effort), as that quality which rendered invention divine”.^[17]]

“Since nearly a year when the first volume of the text of this work was published where there is a notice upon the speculum, page 70 several persons have claimed the honour of the improvements which belong to us. As these persons attached sufficient importance to it, as to occupy the Academie royale with a thing which had appeared to us of too small value to merit the attention of this learned body, we think it right to repeat here, particularly for those who do not possess the text of this work, the different changes which the speculum has undergone, to bring it into the condition represented in the 41^st plate of this atlas.

In 1819, the speculum such as M. Recamier, then, had made, was a simple polished, smooth pewter tube. M. Dupuytren added a bended handle…

1819 (2) It was at the same epoch and in the same place, that I had the tube cut into two equal portions […]

1821 But the negligence shewn in the confection of the instrument made me feel the necessity of adding to it an extra top […]

1823 The ringer branches rendered the instrument not commodious to put in the pocket; I replaced these […]

In 1829. I had the instrument made in silver […]

In 1832. I had a slight bending added to the horizontal branch […] It is made by Samson, mecanical cutler, rue de l’Ecole de médecine”.^[18]

 

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3. Dr. J. Marion Sims invents a vaginal speculum, Alabama, USA, c. 1845

[Dr. James Marion Sims (1813–83), was known as “the father of gynecology” through the development of various surgical and other medical techniques and a speculum, with this work largely happening through experimentations on enslaved women. The artist Michelle Browder devised the public sculpture Mothers of Gynecology which was unveiled in Montgomery, Alabama, in 2021 to honour the women he named in his memoirs and to denote their roles in medical innovation: Anarcha Westcott, Betsey and Lucy.^[19] It is made of discarded metal artefacts, including specula.]

“Passing by the store of Hall, Mores & Roberts, I stopped and bought a pewter spoon. I went to my office where I had two medical students, and said, ‘Come, boys, go to the hospital with me.’

[…]

Arriving there, I said, ‘Betsey, I told you that I would send you home this afternoon, but before you go I want to make one more examination of your case.’ She willingly consented […]

Introducing the bent handle of the spoon I saw everything, as no man had ever seen before. I immediately went to work to invent instruments necessary for performing the operation. The speculum, or retractor, was perfectly clear from the very beginning. I did not send Lucy home, and I wrote to her master that I would retain her there.

[…]

It took me about three months to have my instruments made, to gather the patients in, and to have everything ready to commence the season of philosophical experiment.

[…]

It inaugurated a series of experiments that were continued for a long time. It took Lucy two or three months to recover entirely. As soon as I had arranged a substitute for the sponge, I operated on Betsey.

Besides these three cases, I got three or four more to experiment on, and there was never a time that I could not, at any day, have had a subject for operation. But my operations all failed. This went on, not for one year, but for two and three, and even four years”.^[20]

 

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4. Walter Dickson, MD, comments on the effects of venereal disease on British sailors, London, 1868

[By the 1860s, it was estimated that more than one third of British soldiers and sailors were infected with venereal diseases, particularly syphilis and gonorrhoea. The origins, site and circulation of illness was located in women, particularly prostitutes. The Act for the Prevention of Contagious Diseases at Certain Naval and Military Stations was passed in 1864, governing particular garrison and port towns. Successive versions of this legislation were extended throughout the British empire—to parts of Britain, India, Ireland, Malta, New Zealand and the Cape Colony. These laws enabled police surgeons to apprehend any woman suspected of prostitution, compel her to undergo examination and then to confine her, usually in a “Lock Hospital”, and request her to be registered to undergo frequent re-examinations. The penalty for refusal was imprisonment.]

“The disease is consequently erroneously treated, or it is neglected and allowed to run its course unchecked. A vast amount of illness arises directly or indirectly from this cause, incapacitating men for duty, and thereby seriously compromising the safety of ships—to say nothing of ulterior consequences, as shattered constitutions, the transmission of the taint to offspring, and the deterioration of the race”.^[21]

 

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5. Witnesses report to the Royal Commission upon the Contagious Diseases Acts, London, 1869

“The specula used at Devonport by the present visiting surgeon are the two smaller sizes of Ferguson’s glass specula. The kind of speculum used is left to the discretion of the visiting surgeon… The statement of women that they have been wounded by the examination, cannot be true of Ferguson’s glass speculum, which is of thick glass and could not break. But some specula, the expanding one for instance, is very liable to cut in a rapid use of it, and, ‘if not judiciously managed, a rough introduction (of any kind of speculum) might create an abrasion of the parts’.

[…]

In another district, a pregnant woman was examined with a speculum ‘up to within six or seven weeks of her confinement.’ There is a difference of opinion as to whether the women do or do not object to the periodical examinations. On the one hand, it is said by visiting surgeons and police that they ‘show no dislike’, that they ‘submit to the examination perfectly quietly’, ‘think nothing of it’, that it is only ‘newcomers’, and then very seldom, who ‘show reluctance’, or are ‘timid and nervous’”.^[22]

 

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6. JJ Garth Williamson protests against the Contagious Diseases Acts, London, 1870

“The candle of your Act shines in upon all their insides. Slight, small, young, delicate, healthy unfortunates, girls who but for the accident of birth might have been presented for the first time at the Queen’s last Drawing Room, are traversed by fortnightly violation, are taken forcibly from their mother’s homes, and split open by the State, equally with those who are most diseased, trodden and depraved”.

“I tell you that they are the end and doom of the general use of the speculum in this nation; the state towel is away from their mouths; their full cry has come up”.^[23]

 

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7. A registered woman writes to Josephine Butler, Chair of the Ladies National Association (LNA) for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, Liverpool, 1870

“It is awful work; the attitude they push us into first is so disgusting and so painful, and then these monstrous instruments—often they use several. They seem to tear open the passage first with their hands, and examine us, and then they thrust in instruments, and they pull them out and push them in, and they turn and twist them about; and if you cry out they stifle you with towels”.^[24]

 

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8. Dr. Stephen Smith warns against the use of the speculum, New York, USA, 1872

“At once a mania for an investigation seizes the individual victim, which nothing but the manipulations with the speculum can relieve. And alas! too often instead of relieving a proper apprehension on the part of the patient, even though she is correctly informed that the womb is not diseased, a new source of excitement is established which is far more dangerous to her happiness than actual disease.

[…]

The term ‘Speculum-mania‘, used by medical practitioners, may yet pass into the nomenclature of the alienist. It is certain that in some instances, and they may be far more numerous than we suspect, the local treatment has been regarded as the origin of a moral obliquity which terminated in abandoned lives, and occasionally in confirmed insanity”.^[25]

 

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9. The Surgeon to the Lock Hospital argues for the extension of the Contagious Diseases Acts to Liverpool. London, 1876

“In one district, situated in the northern part of the town, there is a region… known by various names, the least objectionable, perhaps, of which is ‘Blackman’s Alley’. These streets contain a large number of brothels of the very lowest class […] The female inmates of these dens of infamy are chiefly those who are the most virtuous in their own country, viz., Irish girls… The terms, ‘mere masses of rottenness and vehicles of disease’, would, I feel sure, be quite as applicable to them as to the women formerly found in Devonport, Portsmouth, or any of the other seaports which now have the benefit of the Acts. I have myself, on several occasions, seen one of these unfortunates crouched in a corner of the room, unable to move, begging to be removed to the workhouse hospital”.^[26]

 

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10. J. Marion Sims is celebrated, Alabama, USA, 1883

[Sims founded the Woman’s Hospital in New York in 1855 with the philanthropist Sarah Platt Doremus, where he continued some of his experiments, particularly on poor Irish women. He later toured Europe where he gave public demonstrations of his surgical techniques, publicised his treatment of the Empress Eugenie and was feted by “society”, for example in Dublin following a demonstration at the Rotunda Hospital. In 2018 the statue of him in Central Park, New York, was removed following a campaign.]

“The day which made him great was the day when the idea of his speculum first dawned upon him—that day when he first conceived the thought of throwing an abundance of light into the vagina and around the womb, and at the same time obtaining ample space to work and ply his instruments. This alone is enough to carry his fame down to the remotest ages, and his historian will need no more brilliant facts than these on which to rest the immortality of his name. This instrument caused his name to flash over the medical world like a meteor in the night.

Gynaecology today would not deserve the name of a separate and cultivated science, but for the light which Sims’s speculum and the principles involved in it have thrown upon it. It has been to diseases of the womb what the printing press is to civilization, what the compass is to the mariner, what steam is to navigation, what the telescope is to astronomy, and grander than the telescope because it was the work of one man. Those great philosophers, Galileo, Gregory, Herschel, and Sir Isaac Newton, all claim and deserve successive parts of the telescope. Sims alone discovered his speculum, and, like Minerva from the brain of Jupiter, it sprang from his hands alone, fully fledged and perfect when he gave it to the world”.^[27]

 

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11. Suffragette Fanny Parker writes about force-feeding in prison in 1914, Perth, Scotland, 1914

“Thursday morning, 16th July […] the three wardresses appeared again. One of them said that if I did not resist, she would send the others away and do what she had come to do as gently and as decently as possible. I consented. This was another attempt to feed me by the rectum, and was done in a cruel way, causing me great pain. She returned some time later and said she had ‘something else’ to do. I took it to be another attempt to feed me in the same way, but it proved to be a grosser and more indecent outrage, which could have been done for no other purpose than torture. It was followed by soreness, which lasted for several days”.^[28]

 

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12. Donna Haraway remembers the use of the speculum in the Women’s Liberation Movement

[From the late 1960s, many American women’s groups were focused on promoting safe access to abortion and for women to visualise and understand their bodies with the use of the speculum with a mirror and torch promoted for cervical self-examination, self-knowledge and for use with the menstrual extraction kit, developed by activists Carol Downer and Lorraine Rothman to remove uterine contents including early pregnancy.]

“Armed with a gynecological speculum, a mirror, a flashlight, and-most of all-each other in a consciousness-raising group, women ritually opened their bodies to their own literal view […]

More than a little amnesiac about how colonial travel narratives work, we peered inside our vaginas toward the distant cervix and said something like, ‘Land ho! We have discovered ourselves and claim the new territory for women’”.^[29]

 

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13. Uberkinky promote their medical grade specula, online, April 2016^[30]

[In almost all contemporary commercial marketing of speculums, the “user” is interpellated as a medical professional, with the instrument promoted solely in relation to their manual and visual needs. One exception is when the speculum is used in kink play.]

“Open wide! Want to dig deep and explore those hidden gems? Our speculums are just what the doctor ordered to initiate your sadistic play. Whether you want to provide yourself, or your playmate, with some special care and attention, these speculums promise not to disappoint. Reach all of those hidden areas that long to be played with. Adjust your speculum as required for a masochistic game of doctors and nurses. These sadistic instruments are easily inserted and offer heightened levels of climactic pleasure, as your own instruments tantalise those sensitive ‘spots’. Prescribe your playmate some salacious fun, and purchase a speculum today”.

 

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14. Welch Allyn promote their KleenSpec Disposable Vaginal Specula, online, 2016

• “Clear acrylic allows complete visualization of the vaginal canal
• Wide, ergonomic handle improves balance for easier manipulation during exams
• Available in a broad range of sizes, for all types of patients
• Look for the color-coded Welch Allyn handles
• Strong grip and yoke designed to be more flexible than low-cost substitutes”^[31]

 

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15. &c.

[From forced and unwanted gynaecological exams, to using unconscious anaesthetised women as non-consenting training models for medical students, the speculum continues to be weaponised.]

The New York Daily News reports “Brooklyn woman forced to get Pap smear at Rikers”, New York, January 2014.

Rocket News reports “Chinese Civil Servants’ Mandatory Vaginal Exam.”, China, December 2012.

The Guardian reports “Freed Pussy Riot members say prison was time of ‘endless humiliations’ with ‘forced gynaecological examinations almost every day“, London, December 2013.

Birthmonopoly.com reports “Arizona Birth Monopoly: Mandatory Surgery or Forced Vaginal Exams“, June, 2014.

Reuters reports “Women seeking birth control get unneeded pelvic exams”, USA, 2010

The New York Times reports “She didn’t Want a Pelvic Exam. She Received one Anyway. Medical schools and students are grappling with an unsettling practice: Performing pelvic exams on unconscious, non-consenting patients”, New York, 2020

Based on research commissioned by In the Shadow of the State, a co-commission of artists Jesse Jones and Sarah Browne by Artangel and Create; also supported by ART: 2016, the Arts Council’s programme as part of Ireland 2016, the centenary of the Easter Rising in the Republic of Ireland, and Dublin City Council.