Archives, Speculums, and Lasers: What the Birth of U.S. Gynecology can Teach Us About the Growing Popularity of Female Genital Cosmetic Surgery (FGCS)

This paper explores the potential gains of expanding discussions of FGCS to include not only theory and activism, but also history and lived experiences. Using historical, biographical, and autobiographical accounts in conjunction with the results of my own archival work, I situate FGCS historically and culturally within practices of neoliberal capitalism, emergent technologies, increased bodily surveillance, and the use of standardized systems of classification within practices of Western medicine in order to illustrate how these factors work in concert to produce “defective” bodies and the technologies marketed as necessary to fix them. A close examination of the late 19^th century development of U.S. gynecology under Dr. Marion J. Sims complicates narratives of pathologization and female bodies commonly cited in discussions of FGCS, in that his development of surgical techniques on enslaved and immigrant women adds dimension to the very categories at the heart of these narratives. I suggest that these categories—of “women” and “female bodies”—are flattened out in both pro- and anti-FGCS narratives when the history of their formation is left unexamined; by failing to acknowledge the projects of difference-making beyond sex/gender that these categories were formed in service to, the lived experiences of those people whom the categories are used to describe are assumed uniform. Such an assumption overlooks the fact that narratives of FGCS attach different meaning and value to different “female bodies,” and call upon them to do different representational work while simultaneously limiting both critiques of FGCS and opportunities for related outreach and activism.

 

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