“I’ve always been grossed out by the vagina,” my friend, a gold-star gay, deadpans as we survey the landmark group survey “Scientia Sexualis” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. His rejection of female anatomy as objectively sexual is, in a sense, not far off from the point. Here, bodily organs, and the tools that poke and prod them, are recontextualized, freed from the patriarchal, heteronormative, cis-white frameworks that they are so often framed within. The result is an arresting confluence of paradoxical notions around sexuality, gender, science, medicine, and philosophy — it requires a double take.
There are works that are clinical and informed by the artists’ own lived experience, like Panteha Abareshi’s Medically Sanctioned Mutilation (2023), in which medical ephemera, including a magnifying glass and syringes, are assembled into a spiky sculpture that deals with disability and illness. And Xandra Ibarra’s Frankensteined contraption (made from discarded assistive devices like a wheelchair) that is punctured with flesh-like renderings of pierced nipples, titled Chest Rest (2020).
Then there are the figurative. Zoomed in, like Vesico Vaginal Fistula (2016) by KING COBRA (documented as Doreen Lynette Garner), in which a slab of black-silicone-coated foam bunches at a pearl-coated gap in the center with a lick of pink peeking out. Zoomed out, as in the golden nude bronze figure elegantly arched in a backbend and suspended from the ceiling in Louise Bourgeois’s Arch of Hysteria (1993). Or narrative: Nicole Eisenman’s vignette of a therapist’s office in The Session (2008).
Wangechi Mutu’s suite of collages, Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors (2006), hit close to home. I remember when I knew these clinical terms and conditions far too well as a nineteen-year-old battling ovarian cancer. My body: my enemy, my only hope, something to be studied, and something to be feared. My options, limited and left to the whim of a biopsy. My vagina, examined with a metal tool, with gloved hands, X-rays. While my situation was, as I was repeatedly told, a rare one, the way femme bodies are examined even in routine check-ups is more or less the same: a cavity to explore with foreign devices. Until then, I had never thought of my internal organs much, and my relationship to motherhood was a faraway concept, but in the months leading up to my operation, it was all others could ask me: Are you going to freeze your eggs? And after, can you still get pregnant? To be honest, I had bigger things on my mind; this issue of fertility felt too far off, too distant, to pose a threat. But at least I had the privilege of a choice.
Today may be nothing if not postmodern teetering on the post-apocalyptic, but what a woman’s body can and can’t do is still a topic limited to binaries and gendered notions of living. Conversations around our bodily functions, what they can and cannot do, how we are expected to perform, are omnipresent as abortion rights and gender-affirming care render such life-threatening for some. At ICA, the case is argued that while this conversation is pertinent, it doesn’t end here. Rather, it splinters off into a nervous system of visions and revisions of how the body has been and is understood.
Since the constitutional right to an abortion was repealed by the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, limited access to gender-affirming care has followed suit. To break it into numbers: forty-one states have abortion restrictions in effect, thirteen states have total bans, and twenty-three states have banned or limited gender-affirming care for minors.
Why this preoccupation with gendered bodies and what they do? These man-made tools probe femme bodies to heal, reveal, and sometimes harm. Today, there is hardly time to theorize the subtext of such charged spaces like the doctor’s office. Rather, an astringent and urgent time is before us as America eradicates the sexual and reproductive rights of cisgender women and transgender people.
At “Scientia Sexualis,” the exhibition title itself lands at the crosshairs of the sensual and the clinical. It is lifted from Michel Foucault’s seminal book The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (1976), in which the nineteenth-century development of the clinical pursuit of a “uniform truth of sex” is outlined by the French philosopher.
To center Black, trans, and decolonial approaches to bodily autonomy is to reckon with painful histories of reproductive violence in America — of Black women, particularly in the mid-twentieth century, and of immigrant women in ICE detention centers today. We see it in Palestine as well, too, with the onslaught of attacks all but cutting off access to medical care and resources necessary for staying alive. Look closely and it is everywhere. Sex and gender, weaponized and brandished against us. Such concerns around what can and can’t be done to the gendered body have become a presidential talking point, a hot topic bloated with hot air that refuses to pop no matter how much we push up against it. At ICA, it feels as if, for a moment, a new way forward is emerging out of the annals the exhibition so brazenly deconstructs.
