When Terri Kapsalis was doing graduate work in performance studies at Northwestern, she found a way to combine academics with her part-time job. She worked as a gynecology teaching associate, using her own body as a model to instruct medical students in pelvic and breast examinations. Once Kapsalis realized she was, in essence, performing on the job, playing the role of patient began to carry new and exciting connotations.
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She has since come to view the pelvic exam as “pelvic theater.” By studying the practice of gynecology as performance, she began to understand the dynamics of role-playing in power relationships and the ways women are affected by cultural ideas about the female body. Pelvic theater became the basis for Kapsalis’s doctoral thesis, which matured into her new book, Public Privates: Performing Gynecology From Both Ends of the Speculum (Duke University Press). The book mixes historical analysis with cultural critique, including a dissection of such pop-culture offerings as Dead Ringers, David Cronenberg’s movie about twin gynecologists, and Annie Sprinkle’s performance piece “Public Cervix Announcement,” in which audience members were invited to peer at Sprinkle’s cervix while she held a microphone between her legs to capture their comments.
Female subjects were often blindfolded or their heads were cropped out.
