Clitoral Conventions

Clitoral Conventions and Transgressions: Graphic Representations in Anatomy Texts, c19001991 Author(s): Lisa Jean Moore and Adele
E. Clarke Reviewed work(s): Source: Feminist Studies, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Summer, 1995), pp. 255-301 Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3178262 . Accessed: 21/02/2012 21:19
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CLITORALCONVENTIONSAND TRANSGRESSIONS: GRAPHICREPRESENTATIONSIN ANATOMY TEXTS,C1900-1991
LISA JEAN MOOREand ADELE E. CLARKE

The body is what it is perceived to be; it could be otherwise if perceptionwere different. -David Armstrong, "Bodiesof Knowledge:Foucault and the
Problem of Human Anatomy," in Sociological Theory and Medical Sociology, ed. Graham Scrambler
There is a regress involved in positing the anatomical body as the touchstone for cultural bodies since it is a particular culture which chooses to represent bodies anatomically. Another culture might take the clan totem as the essence or truth of particular bodies. The human body is always a signified body and as such cannot be understood as a "neutralobject"upon which science can construct "true"discourses. The human body and its history presuppose each other. -Moira Gatens, "Power,Bodies, and Difference,"in
Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates,
ed. Michele Barrett and Anne Phillips Depictions, picturing and seeing are ubiquitous features of the process by which most human beings come to know the world as
it really is for them ... [Slocial change is at once a change in the regime of re-representation.
-Gordon Fyfe and John Law, "Editors' Introduction: On the Invisibility of the Visual,"in
Picturing Power: Visual Depiction and Social Relations
Anatomy is one of the key sites for the productionand maintenance of sex and gender as embodied dualities, as these excerpts imply. It offers an institutionalized discourse rife with vivid representations which claim the body for medicine and then insist on simplification and universalization. This discourse travels widely. Within feminisms, "the anatomy probFeminist Studies 21, no. 2 (summer 1995). ? 1995 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 255
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Lisa Jean Mooreand Adele E. Clarke
lem" has been and continues to be highly charged and deeply consequential. In this essay, we take up the social construction of female genitalia by those claiming, via textbook publication in English, to do anatomy in the twentieth century.We examine how anatomists have represented, labeled, and narrated the various "femaleparts,"focusing especially on what (if anything) counts as "theclitoris." Anatomies matter to feminists and others because anatomies create shared images which become key elements in repertoires of bodily understanding toted around by all those who have seen them. Stefan Hirschauer has noted that "surgeons-like other medical students-learn the abstract body of anatomy from books with texts and illustrations. They swot it up-bone after bone and nerve after nerve-and they are examined on whether they know it by heart. They ... acquire ... in In their education ... the ingrained abstract body."' the West, it is not only surgeons but most people who, through scrutiny of anatomical representations,construct our own means of visualization, recognition, and interpretation of the bodies as "the anatomical body."That is, anatomies become accepted public and private images. And anatomies of "privateparts" are perhaps the most intently and minutely examined as they often provide us with some of the earliest available, "mostscientific," and supposedly, therefore, neutral knowledge of body parts least visually accessible in contemporaryWestern daily life. The feminist anatomy problem stands at the intersection of cultural, gender, and technoscience studies. One of the core tasks over the past decade for those who study gender, sciences, and technologies has been examination of the construction of sex/gender differences both within and across disciplines from the social sciences to the natural sciences and biomedicine, and from classical times to the present. Of all the biomedical sciences, basic or gross anatomy (rather than fine or microscopicor cellular anatomy) is often considered by scientists and many others to be a science that "hasbeen done,"is essentially accomplished-if not once and for all, many times In over.2 terms of the anatomy of the clitoris, two decades ago it was said that "the structure of the organ [is] perhaps the least controversial aspect of the subject."3 Precisely because anatois not cutting edge biomedical science and has supposedly my
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been comparatively stable, we can see its (re)constructions more vividly. Yet in certain ways its very stability becomes our problematic. That is, anatomy has been naturalized and normalized in the Foucauldian sense. It has become a taken-forgranted idiom within discourses of difference(s),not only in the biomedical sciences but also in society much more generally.4 Central to the claimed stability of anatomy as discipline and practice and to its naturalization is the fundamental assumption that the body itself is natural, knowable, real, and essential. In sharp contrast, we instead assert that anatomies are socially constructed and diverse not only across historical time but within particular eras. Anatomy is a contested domain. Bodies are heterogeneously constructed by individuals and collectivities situated differently in terms of time, space, and commitments of many kinds.5But anatomical constructions of the body are extraordinarily complex precisely because of the kinds of realism and essentialism with which they are imbued, especially those bodily elements linked to sexualities. The difficult dualism of essentialism versus constructionismis nowhere more apparent. Carole S. Vance and Linda M. Blum, among many others, have addressed this and called for qualifications, for the specificities of constructionisms.6 The closely related dualism of nature versus society or natural versus social/culturalhas recently been taken up in an array of works in social studies of science. Here it is argued that not only is "the social" constructed but also "the natural."7These approaches assert the co-constructionof nature and culture/society. That is, this perspective assumes a material relativism in which elements construed as social and those construed as natural are each and all analyzed as are their interrelations. Conventionally termed "symmetricalanalysis" in science studies, this approach attempts to problematize both the natural and the social and in so doing to dissolve the dualism. In the elaborate dances of meaning making and action which take place between and among such elements, each offers particular constraints, opportunities, and resources for the other, becoming co-productive and, hence, co-constitutive. The processes and productsof co-constructionare empiricalphenomena. Brought to bear on twentieth-century anatomical texts on genitalia, co-constructionismpoints us toward examining the
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producers of these anatomies, the anatomies themselves, and their users/consumers/audiencesfrom medical students to surgeons to lay publics. And it points us especially toward taking the diversities among anatomies very seriously,a task which is central to this essay. We examine the construction,reconstruction, and maintenance of gender and sexual differences in genital anatomy in the twentieth century, focusing especially on the clitoris. We are not interested here in distinguishing between various terms used for different parts of the female genitalia historically, although many, such as the clitoris as a rod with the labia as its wings or the clitoris as the "frenzy of Venus," are quite wonderful. We are not engaging the extennor sive and complex debates about orgasm;8 are we examining clitoridectomy, although we applaud recent works which address the complexities of the situations of the estimated 80 million women on this planet today whose clitorises have been excised.9Rather, we focus on visual representations of the clitoris in anatomy texts published in English during the twentieth century and their accompanyinglabels and narratives. By the twentieth century, the nomenclature in these representaWe tions has become fairly standardized.10 examine the conventions of anatomical representation, comparisons between female and male genitalia, including the deployment and referents of the nomenclature, and the heterogeneity of visual and textual representations. What is at stake in the contestations we describe is the very definition of the clitoris. What is it? Where is it? Where does it begin and end? When does it exist? By what criteria is the clitoris to be defined? By types of cells? By physiological processes of engorgement? By historical precedent or traditional anatomical claims? Who counts-or "should" count-as an anatomist? To whom? Under what conditions?We do not answer all of these questions in this article, but do attempt to map the terrain in which the contestation takes place. Ultimately, the contestation is about whose anatomies will prevail and in which social worlds." Because anatomies construct, preserve, and portray some of the supposed essentials of essentialism, prevailing anatomies are highly consequential not only for biomedicine but also for many other disciplines and for people's own understandings of
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their bodies. This is especially the case in terms of sex and gender as analytic categories in many disciplines. Sex and gender are not only constructed within disciplines, but they are also made robust via simultaneous alignments across multiple disciplinary axes. One discipline can rely upon another discias pline's "conclusions" foundational in building its own knowledge, regardless of anatomical or other kinds of accuracy.12 Anatomy has been relied upon as "stablescience"by many other disciplines and practices such as physiology,gynecology,and sexology. Examining its instabilities as we do here can therefore be consequential because other disciplinary axes along which sex and gender are accomplished13 also intrinsically are unstable and changing, and they require regular rearticulation and reframing to maintain their cutting (i.e., classificatory) edges. We hope to contribute to the disruption and redirection of that reframing. We began this project for several reasons: as a vehicle through which we would engage the literatures on representation in cultural/feminist studies of sciences and technologies; because we knew that the history of the pre-twentieth-century clitoris had "beendone"and done well;'4and not least because we anticipated some fascinating complications. The complications emerged vividly when, in 1981, a group of women called the Federation of Feminist Women'sHealth Centers published a book titled A New View of a Woman'sBody which offers a new feminist sexual anatomy, especially a "new"clitoris, and very elaborate hand-drawnvisual representations. Yet we also knew we were about to go walking on eggs. A recent book on women's bodies noted: "Atoo exclusive concentration on the female body ... perpetuates the concept of the female as 'other'or 'exotic,'an objectof scrutiny in a society tainted by voyeurism and fantasies of control."15 Wendy Brown has made similar points about deploying distinctively female body parts such as "the breast"for shock, erotic, and even seductive scholarly value. Angela Davis, Hazel Carby,and Donna Haraway have all discussed the dangers of addressing women's sexuality without addressing the heterogeneity of its racialization and the differences among women.'6These dangers are "dilemmas of visibility,"confronted by all artists and others seeking to represent women, including anatomists.17 The concept of di-
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lemmas of visibility makes clearer some of the potential costs incurred by representation per se, including tensions between difference and sameness and between revelation and protection. Yet as feminists we also know that the costs of silence and sins of omission are high, so we proceedwith due caution.18 We begin by situating the clitoris in twentieth-century discourse more broadly. We then introduce the conventions of anatomical representation of genitalia, leading into our empirical study of clitoral imaging across the twentieth century. In conclusion,we return to theoretical issues in the social/natural constructionof the clitoris. WHO CARES/CARED ABOUT THE CLITORIS?
The female clitoris itself has had to navigate many rough seas in its long and embattled history to escape and elude the many hostile pirates and male bounty hunters on its path, including both those who would seize and destroy it, as well as those who would continually rediscover,reinvent, and degrade it. -Nancy Scheper-Hughes,"VirginTerritory:The Male Discovery of the Clitoris,"MedicalAnthropology5 (1991).
Who cares or has cared about the clitoris, and what do or did they have to show and tell? Most of the several different literatures on the clitoris are relatively scant in relation to those on the penis. The online University of California Melvyl Library Catalog found 3 records of books on the clitoris and 35 on the penis; a Current Contents title words search found 19 citations on the clitoris and 347 on the penis; and a MedLine search found 78 articles with the clitoris as keyword, and 1,611 with There are also distinctive literatures on clitoridecthe penis.19 in the history of medicine, in anthropology,as a device tomy exploredin literary criticism, and in feminist works.20 That particularly female organ, the clitoris, site of diverse pleasures and dangers appears textually most often in anatomy, pictorial pornography,sexology, and in some other literatures, especially feminist and lesbian fiction and nonfiction. We directly and primarily address anatomy, but continuities with pornography and feminist literatures abound. We do, however, echo Paula Bennett who notes how very little work has been done on the clitoris and how rarely it is taken up even by feminists-an intellectual absence she calls "criticalcli-
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It toridectomy."21 seems that whether to address the clitoris is a dilemma for academic women across disciplines and regardless of the use of visual representations. Making the clitoris visible inside-or outside-the academy is a risky act.22 Particularly relevant for our purposes are three contemporary feminist studies of different types of medical texts which take up the clitoris in different but related ways. First, in a classic early feminist study, Diana Scully and Pauline Bart analyzed gynecology texts in terms of sexual "information" provided before,during, and after the Kinsey era, crediting Kinsey with being the first to debunk the myth of the vaginal orgasm and to reassert the clitoris as the primary orgasmic site.23 Over a decade later, Mita Giacomini and her colleagues looked at eight anatomy texts currently in use at a major Western medical school in terms of gendered representations. They found that the male standard prevailed:in text sections dealing with standard nonsexual anatomy, males were shown in 64 percent of the illustrations, females in 11 percent and neutral in 25 percent. "Equalityof representation"was largely achieved, however, in the chapters and sections on urogenital anatomy.24 Finally, in the most recent study of anatomies, using both numerical content analysis and very thoughtful textual analyses, Susan Lawrence and Kae Bendixen examined how anatomy texts have presented female and male anatomy between 1890 and 1989. They found, unsurprisingly, that "in illustrations, vocabularyand syntax, these texts primarily depict male anatomy as the norm or standard against which female structures are compared." That is, despite decades of public debates about gender representations, they found little or no textual change in anatomy. Additional representational conventions included presenting material on males as "the x" with a subsection on "the female x," and more generally presenting the male material first and then asking readers to reconfigure their mental images to transform the male into the female version. Depictions that were supposedly unsexed/ungendered were also often male rather than female without being labeled as such. The clitoris was usually represented as a "small"or "diminutive" In homologue to the penis.25 sum, scholarly focus on the clitoris appears to be minimal, relatively dwarfed by phallocentricnarratives, images, and fascinations.
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Other scientific literatures such as evolutionary theory and genetics also address female genitalia.6 Psychoanalytic discussions are largely engaged with Freud's 1905 distinction between vaginal and clitoral orgasm. Here one feminist, Nancy Mann Kulish, also notes a lack of attention to "themental representations of the clitoris, in so far as the mental life is the realm with which psychoanalysis deals."27 we shall see, such As is "underrepresentation" not uncommon. Perhaps the largest literature on the clitoris is that which has been drawn together in the field now known as sexology or sexuality studies.28 Although the anatomy of the clitoris is obviof concern to sexologists, its physiology is the central foously cus. Alfred Kinsey's book on female sexuality appeared in 1953, five years after his book on male sexuality. William Masters and Virginia Johnson's work on female orgasm appeared in 1966. In 1976 and 1978, Thomas Power Lowry and Thea Snyder Lowry published the only two book-length treatments of the clitoris listed in Melvyl today,both centered on its importance to sexuality and sexual fulfillment and including comparative mammalian anatomy,history of terminology,and recent neurological studies of female genitalia.29 Darlaine Claire Gardetto has done a sociological study of the female orgasm as represented in different literatures, including sexology, psychoanalysis, and the early second wave of feminism, focusing particular attention on the politics of orgasm within the women's movement.30 Although feminist reinterpretations of the clitoris are one focus of this essay, it is important not to claim the feminist health movement as the origin of clitoral reconceptualization. Heterogenous social worlds construct and interpret the clitoris on multiple temporal planes. For instance, Janice Irvine argues that the 1960s were a time of ideological and disciplinary struggles within emergent disciplines and practices of the second wave of sexology. This profession/discipline's epistemologies were predicated on the centrality of the clitoral orgasm, in direct conflict with Freudian psychiatric interpretations of mature female sexuality as based on vaginal orgasm since Freud's Irvine cites three key strengths of the clitoral paper of 1905.31 model as it served the continued emergence of sexology:(1) the alignment of the clitoral model with the cultural imperatives of
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the field of sexology toward short-term, physical therapeutic treatments; (2) the ability to empirically observe and study the clitoris as an organ; and (3) the preexisting acceptance of the clitoris as a site of orgasm among sexology's bourgeois clientele.32 Thus, although there has been some attention to the clithe heterogeneity of anatomies has not been a core focus. toris, METIHODS Our research is intended to provide a descriptive analysis of anatomical representations of the clitoris throughout the twentieth century, but it does not aim to be an exhaustive or comprehensive survey of all existing clitoral imaging in this time period. Rather, we emphasize the range of variation within eras by employing an eclectic blend of methodological strategies, including grounded theory, deconstruction, content, and textual analyses.33 Library searches and retrievals were based on the following criteria of inclusion: (1) in English with an American or British publisher; (2) published 1850 to present; and (3) included diagrams or other visual images (narrative was secondarybut important). (See fig. 1.)
Fig. 1. Chart of Anatomy Texts 1850 - Present
SOURCE 1850-1900 1900-1950 1950-1980 1980-present .
UNIVERSE 68 199 344 255

- _ _ __ _ --
EXAMINED (estimated) 30 40 50 40
_ . .
ANALYZED 14 12 18
-
12
. - . .
Information to the 1950s taken from: United States Army. (1918/1961) Index-Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon General's Office. Washington DC: Government Printing Office. Third Series-Vol. 1/Fifth Series-Vol. 2. Since 1950s from: Melvyl Computer Database.
We selected ten to twelve texts with the greatest range of variation in both visual representation and narrative for each of the following time periods: 1850 to 1900 (used only for comparative purposes), 1900 to 1952, 1953 to 1981, 1982 to present.
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In short, we did not pursue traditional content analysis34but instead have attempted to portray range of variation and diversities of representations.35Because so many of the texts placed the clitoral images and narratives in referential (and in most cases deferential) positions to the penis, we realized after considerable analysis that we needed to examine representations of the penis in order to assess the information on the clitoris. We also sought to determine whether the distinctively feminist clitoral imaging in the publication of A New View of a Woman's Body in 1981 was consequential for subsequent anatomical text imaging in terms of changes in definition, labeling, and/ornarrative.36 CONVENTIONS OF ANATOMICALREPRESENTATION OF GENITALIA
[Visualizations] are the hinge which connects the intractable world with the docility of the printed page ... and they are the representatives of endless awkward objects and processes. -John Law and John Whittaker, "Onthe Art of Representation: Notes on the Politics of Visualization,"in Picturing Power:Visual Depictions and Social Relations, ed. GordonFyfe and John Law
here in both the art historical We use the term "conventions" and sociological senses. In art history, conventions are sets of specific practices characteristicof particular eras, a historicization of practices. Sociologically,Howard S. Becker has argued that conventions are products of pragmatic situations, aesthetics, and interactional networks. For example, most paintings done in the past century and a half since the development of an art market physically "fit"within the spaces of galleries, museums, and (large) private homes, and also aesthetically "fit"particular market niches. That is, the medium and its intended sites of display offer distinct constraints, opportunities, For and resources for certain genres of representations.37 examthe anatomies we examined were all in book form, with a ple, few in the "oversized" category.This medium obviously limits in certain ways such as size and dimensionalirepresentations ty. Bruno Latour has used the term "regimes of (re)presentation" to refer to paradigmatically different framings, such as sacred compared with secular art, which can be historical or
Lisa Jean Moore and Adele E. Clarke
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There have been many such "regimes of contemporaneous.38 in (re)presentation" genital anatomy. Let us turn more directly now to representations of the clitoris before 1900 to contextualize our own study. In the sixteenth century,both Renaldus Columbusand Gabriel Fallopius described the clitoris as a "female penis" and debate ensued about who was the first to discover and conquer this strange land.39 Around 1579, Ambroise Pare, a French surgeon, provided the following narrative of engorgement of the labia: "twoexcresences of muscular flesh which hang, and in some women, fall outside the neck of the womb; lengthen and shorten as does the comb of a turkey, principally when they desire coitus and when their husbands want to approach them, they grow erect like the male rod."40 Soon after, there was also a fundamental shift in the ways in which sex/gender were represented. Both Londa Scheibinger and Thomas Laqueur have argued that this shift was from a predominantrhetoric of hierarchy to one of categorical difference.41In the hierarchical system, which dominated biomedical ideas about the body from the classical Greeks to about the mid-seventeenth century,women and men were both viewed as human and as sharing, more or less, the same basic anatomy and physiology. Subsequently, a rhetoric of fundamental gender difference emerged, reflected in (re)constructionsof gender across the sciences over the past two centuries. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, anatomical representations of genitalia were obviously gendered but not highly detailed.
Fig.2. Thehumanclitoris,
seenfromleft. enlarged,
.8
with those of this century.42 (See fig. 2.) The Kobelt image shown here remains among the best done in the tradition of representational realism. Laqueur notes that "Kobelt's book was by far the most detailed account of the clitoris ever published but it did not radically revise established
views."43 Kobelt himself expressed
Not until the 1840s and the work of George Ludwig Kobelt do the clitoral representations echo strongly
ReprintedfromKobelt(1844).Plate III _ ,, r
surprise that more anatomists had
266
not addressed the question of clitoral erection:

this [erection]? ...
Is it likely that only the clitoris, so rich in nerves, should be exempted from
Plazzonus had already said: ". . . Wanton women them-
selves ... affirm that something in their private parts stiffens and stands out when they are involved in lascivious activity."And most assuredly! If our physiological textbooks were in the hands of as many women as they are of men, we could come upon many a disbelieving, smiling countenance.4
After Kobelt, the genital anatomies done over the last century which we sampled (N=15) offered a wide range of images from simple to complex, and a wide range in the labeling parts from simple to elaborate. Most described the clitoris as analogous and/orhomologousto the penis. Analogous here means an agreement or correspondence between things in certain respects which are otherwise different; in contrast, homologous means originating from the same cells during embryological Most viewed the penis as active and dynamic, development.45 and the clitoris, if it was even mentioned, was viewed as passive and unimportant. Henry Savage's text of 1880 which focused on the female went the furthest, describing the clitoris with active verb phrases like "extends,""cometogether,"and "sudden turn forward."46 our purposes, Savage demonFor strates the nonmonolithic and heterogeneous nature of the anatomy texts. On that positive note, we now turn to our study of the twentieth-century clitoris. CLITORAL IMAGING, 1900-1952: DECONSTRUCTING THE ANATOMICAL SUBTEXTS 'MINE IS BIGGER THAN YOURS"AND 'MIENHAVE SEX; WOMEN HAVE BABIES"
The tale of the clitoris is a parable of culture, of how the body is forged into a shape valuable to civilization despite, not because of, itself.
-Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud
The period covered in this section extends from the turn of the century,just when Freud published his paper on the vaginal orgasm in 1905, to 1952, just before the publication of Kinsey's book on female sexuality.47 the era before the turn of the cenIn tury, the clitoris had been labeled in some complexity by anatomists like Kobelt and Savage.48 Anatomical conventions
267
Fig. 3
. ;
were transformed in the first decades of the twentieth cen~~'~ '[ t ttury. The images from 1900 ?to1952 varied from simple to ~::'^l : complex. Three books surveyed included "peel away" ^^'^Cii In of anatomy.49 this ~versions _~ -" act of stripping A"peel away" layers of bodily systems, turning each page reveals new organs, culminating in the reproductive system with a visible pregnancy. Two examples are featured here (see .I fig. 3, 4 and fig. 5, 6). These representations appear stri: kingly similar to cut-out, dress-up dolls. All the "dolls" are thin, muscular, white.
i!
IL
skinned young women. The
*^^>^3^^3^i
-- - %E
'-
males as pregnant was con-
sistent in all the anatomy
texts examined. All but two of
the texts labeled the clitoris in their representations.50 The convention of homologous organs is sustained throughout this time period. For example, the anatomy Hickman includes two visual representations of the female and male reproductive systems with uncanny resemblance.51(See fig. 7.) The images, constructed and drawn in this way, can be viewed as an almost As strategic rendering of the body for comparative purposes.52 the viewer compares the two organ systems, the penis is predominant in size. In addition, this book is also a superb example of narrative and image working together to create a united (masculine) front of bodily interpretation. There is a section
Funeaux (1904)
text by Cleveland Pendleton
268
Fig. 4
Furneaux (1904)
269
Fig. 5. Female Pelvic Organs.Western Publishing House Physician'sAnatomicalAid
f
Fig. 6. Western Publishing House
called the "Homology of the Sex Organ" which states: "For every structure in the male system, there is a homologous one in the female."As you can see, the penis and the clitoris are represented as a homologous pair. Hickman goes on to state that "a structure may be quite well developed in one sex, but In quite rudimentary in the other."53 this time period, it is difficult to discuss the agency of the clitoris as discussion of clitoral
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271
functions is so rare. Only Jesse Feiring Williams discusses the fact that the clitoris is richly supplied with blood and nervesbut he does not discuss possible reasons or pleasurable consequences, not even in comparisonwith the penis.54 Because Gray'sAnatomy is often viewed as the staple anatomy textbook and was published continuously in a series of editions throughout our historical parameters, it is important to survey how this text has changed. Notice the labeled clitoris in figure 8. This representation from 1901 is a rare phenomenon.55 However,the Gray's 1948 text (see fig. 9) changes to fol8
.,..
Fig. 9
Gray'sAnatomy (1901) Gray's Anatomy(1901)
Gray'sAnatomy(1948) Gray's Anatomy (1948)
low the historical trend of not labeling the clitoris. In this case low the historicaltrendof not labelingthe clitoris.In this case
the labels of the clitoris have been actively deleted from the the labels the clitorishave been actively deleted from the representations, a strikingdifference from1901 wherethe clifrom 1901 where clirepresentations, striking difference toris is not only labeledbut in some respectsis also featured toris not only labeled but some respects also featured prominently.By noticing differences in representation, the prominently. noticingdifferences representation, relwitness a rupture in the conventions of drawingbody maps. witness rupture the conventions drawing bodymaps.
ative prominence of the clitoris, and labeling strategies, we ative prominenceof the clitoris, and labeling strategies, we This time period cannot be closed without mentioning the This time periodcannotbe closedwithout mentioningthe
contributions of RobertLatou Dickinson's contributions Robert LatouDickinson's HumanSex AnatoHuman AnatoHe introduces us to his normalizing models actually my.56 named Norma and Normman, his female and male embodi-
272
ments of "perfectmeasurements"as opposed to deviant anatoDickinson, a bit ahead of his colleagues in his my (see fig. 10).57 deep commitment to sex education for healthy marital life, also
Fig. 10
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Dickinson 1949
273
discusses clitoral agency and challenges Freud's positioning of female orgasm: "Exalting vaginal orgasm while decrying clitoris satisfaction is found to beget much frustration. Orgasm is orgasm however achieved." (Gertrude Stein would have been pleased.) Moreover,Dickinson posits that it does not matter what size the clitoris is; instead he creates narratives of nerves that effect powerful orgasms. Dickinson'sbook (see fig. 11) features hundreds of images of clitorises which he drew based on
Fig. 11
Dickinson (1949), Figure 77c
274
his gynecological patients; range of variation was a major focus of his work. Many of his images have seemingly arbitrary biographical notes on the individual models: some stress the marital status, virginal status, the usual method of orgasm, race, age, physical size, number of children, and/or presence of hair on legs. Dickinson takes women's sexuality very seriously as he discusses the clitoris's potential for erection and its role in orgasm.58
CLITORAL IMAGING, 1953-1971: FROM KINSEY TO THE FEMINISTS, OR, FIRST YOU SEE IT NOW YOU DON'T
If we are to address the question of those depictions that are dominant then we need to recover their invention, their social construction as inventions that embody authority as systematized, standardized and normalized. Here the question concerns which "subjectivitiesare encouraged, invited, or harmfully imaged"through picturing, rather than what is done to individuals in the name of power. -Gordon Fyfe and John Law, "Editors' Introduction: On the Invisibility of the Visual,"in
Picturing Power: Visual Depiction and Social Relations
Body maps appear to be different from the mid-1950s through the 1960s and up to feminist works beginning in 1971. For instance, the first eight texts surveyed varied little in their treatment of the clitoris; they omitted it.59(See fig. 12.) This crosssectional representation of female anatomy from Ernest Gardner, Donald Gray, and Ronan O'Rahilly,also repeated in their 1969 edition, includes a wormlike, unlabeled part of the body which we assume to be the clitoris.6 In most of these texts, there is either no clitoris represented in the female cross-sectional anatomy or something that could be a clitoris is there but not labeled. The absence of a labeled clitoris in the era 1953 to 1971 is especially noteworthy in that Kinsey's work attacking Freud's vaginal orgasm as myth and reasserting clitoral orgasm as central in women's sexual satisfaction was published in 1953, and Masters and Johnson'swork in 1966.61 From 1973 to 1978, multiple parts of the clitoris were beginning to be labeled again but not extensively discussed. In con-
275
Fig. 12
Gardner,Gray, and O'Rahilly(1963), 609
trast, penile narratives and visual representations in the same texts are dense and active. David Sinclair,for example, does not display a clitoris but does show an orgasming penis.62Where there is a recognized clitoris, the homology convention is present in this time period as well. Simultaneous with this relative absence of clitoral attention, anatomists of the 1970s appear to be more comfortablediscussing human sexuality, albeit a sexuality defined in heterosexual terms, limited to penis-vagina inAn tercourse, and inherently linked to reproductivefunction.63 examination of the reading practices of this generation of anatomists might reveal how narrative anatomy was influenced by self-help sex advice books such as Alex Comfort's of Sex.64 Joy
276
FEMINIST GENITAL AND CLITORAL IMAGING, 1971-1981: PARTS" MORE BLANK SPACES AND UNLABELTED 'NqO
What is at stake here is the declaring of difference that is not measured against some norm. Introduction:On the -Gordon Fyfe and John Law, "Editors' Invisibility of the Visual"in Picturing Power: Visual Depiction and Social Relations On the one hand, the clitoris is the organ of sexual pleasure in women. On the other, its easy responsiveness to touch makes it difficult to domesticatefor reproductive,heterosexual intercourse. -Thomas Laqueur, "Amor Veneris, vel DulcedonAppeletur,"in Fragmentsfor a History of the Human Body, Pt. 3
Many groups of feminists began to focus on issues in women's health in the late 1960s, rebelling against a medical hegemony which mystified and alienated their own bodily functions from them.65One movement strand, the feminist self-help health movement, began in the early 1970s as "womenbegan to do vaginal self-examinations and to feel for the size and position of each other's uterus." The self-help women's health movement was extensively attacked by the medical establishment during these years, includingpolice raids and the arrest of CarolDowner and Colleen Wilson at the Feminist Women'sHealth Center in Los Angeles in 1972 for practicingmedicinewithout a license. was remedying vaginal yeast infections by sugTheir "crime" tampons.66 gesting the insertion of yogurt, and retrieving "lost" The impact of the women's health movement generally on
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terpret the clitoris began to surface in the early 1970s. In 1971, in the first edition of Our Bodies,
Feminist aspirations to rein-
277
Ourselves,the Boston Women'sHealth Book Collective explicitly refuted the distinction between clitoral and vaginal orgasms. Although their sexual anatomy diagrams are quite simple (see fig. 13), the narrative seriously challenged reigning anatomical conventions. In the 1975 edition, they continued their revisionist anatomy through expanding the range of possible visual representations of the clitoris by labeling it, like Gaul or the Holy Trinity,in three parts; the shaft, the glans, and the crura, which taken togethercreate the whole clitoris. These labels are the fresh intervention here, radically expanding what had been commonly designated as the clitoris. This is not an act of revealing; the clitoris itself is redefined. If that were not enough, as shown in fig. 14, the collective also exploded biomedical pictorial conventions by showing a woman looking at her own vulva and clitoris in a mirror-and This image of a woman looking at herallowing us to look too!68 less while we look at her) dramatically challenges self (much the subject/object distinction so rigorously constructed in alanatomies since the Renaissance.9 most all "traditional" Carol Horos's Vaginal Health defined the clitoris as the
Fig. 14
Boston Women'sHealth Book Collective(1976), 26
278
"most sexually sensitive organ in the female reproductive system," which "gets hard"and may "expandto two times its size Although Horos'svisual representations during stimulation."70 of the clitoris are simpler than subsequent renderings, clitoral orgasms are constructed narratively as events requiring the cooperation of several anatomical organs, including the labia majora,labia minora, prepuce, and crura. In 1981, A New Viewof a Woman's Body offereda fully develalternative feminist anatomy,a stunning exemplar of how oped the taken-for-granted has been challenged by the women's health movement. The bookwas producedthrough the cooperative efforts of women who had formed a feminist self-help health group.71They set out to investigate women's bodies for the purposes of illustrating them in a new textbook. To create new images of the clitoris, an extensive search of existing representations was undertaken. Suzann Gage, the illustrator of A
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279
New View of a Woman'sBody, noted of their literature review: "Whenwe were doing our book,we came up with the terms 'descriptive' and 'prescriptive'view of women's bodies. The prescriptive view has its roots in the patriarchyand the sexist attitudes of the time."In biomedicine,women'sbodies, not least the clitoris, are a battleground. (See fig. 15.) It is difficult to replicate for readers the radical experienceof looking through hundreds of pages of diminutive, functionless,homogenous,and uninteresting interpretations of the clitoris and suddenly seeing
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this stunning feminist revision.The New Viewof a Woman's of Health Centers, Body,by the Federation FeministWomen's is a radicalstory of women'sbodieswhere the clitorisis the and center.The collectivealso masturmain character-front batedin frontof one anotherand drewand createdthe narrahands-onexpetives of engorgement fromtheir observations-a riencein the fullest sense of scientificpracticebut with an exceptional mutualityandreflexivity72 The bookis a trainingmanual-a "howto know your body" forwomen,by women,and aboutwomen(see fig. 16). Perhaps
280
most radically,all the visual representations are labeled vis-avis the clitoris. Here, for example, instead of cross section of the pelvis, the label states "crosssection of the clitoris."The centrality of the clitoris is pervasive. From minor homologue it is transfigured into the raison d'etre of other organs. Deliberate, self-conscious effort is made to present the clitoris as a "functioning integrated unit."In Suzann Gage's words, "Ithink that we were revealing the truth. And how can you argue with anatomy? It is all the same. The erectile tissue of the clitoris functions the same as the penis. We used the same aggressive, active and deliberate way the penis was describedand applied all the same terms."Or, what is a good narrative of homology for the gander is a good narrative of homology for the goose! (See fig. 17 and note the dotted lines indicating the expansion of the organs during erection.) One of the most important aspects of this book, found also in a few others across the century,is the fact that it does not present a normative representation or narrative of the clitoris or women's bodies (see fig. 18). Rather, there are many kinds of clitorises represented in the visuals and narratives which stress both the range of experiences and range of bodies women have. Some of the drawn images are very inventive. In figure 19, for example, the glans of the clitoris looks similar to a large brain-we joked about it as mission control, the female parallel to WoodyAllen's spermatic guidance system in Everything You Always Wantedto Know about Sex. Moreover,the agency of the clitoris is addressed with a pictorial narrative about orgasm, a step-by-step account-a guide for "howto have an orgasm."The homology convention which asserts the shared cellular embryonic origins of the clitoris and penis is evident in this book as well. Finally, the clitoris is capable of erection, illustrated in these before-and-after pictures.A New Viewof a Woman'sBody is a radical reinterpretationindeed. A few years after what might be termed "the feminist clitoris" was represented, activist and Ms. editor Robin Morgan wrote TheAnatomy of Freedom:Feminism, Physics, and Global Politics in which she states:
Recent medical research also had made clear the illusion of difference and separateness . . . [it] shows us once and for all the interior of the penis via microcamera: the inside walls are virtually the same as those of the vagina.
281
Fig. 17
Federation of Feminist Women'sHealth Centers (1981), 48-49
282
Fig. 18
normal of This series photos thevulva clitoris of and shows some themany of healthy, of variationsthesize,shape, andtexture thefeatures theclitoris. of color of
This woman's area rosy color pink 29-year-old lips is visible the at and out Her flare widely. glans clearly to opens topandtheclitoral opening thevagina She one and slightly. hashad birth oneabortion. Thiswoman's hoodis rather long, the Her completely covering glans. inner seemtoberolled and lips together have crinkly a texture. fourchette Her baseoftheinner is well de(the lips) fined theperineal above and area the anus a plane. is 19and forms flat She hasnever pregnant. been Thelower oftheinner ofthis half lips clitoris itsmost is woman's prominent the The feature. outer enfold hood lips andinner lips.
This woman's inner ar reladark lips small. flare from pink tively They out a hood areparted that can and so you almost pastthelight hymen see pink into vagina. her
has in Thewoman thisphotograph it hada recent Although episiotomy. into extends thevagina, cansee you of that runs thelower it past portionthe the across perlip right andextends the outside Since ineum. thecutruns inner herfourchette mem(the lips, the which stretches across area brane the is intact. where inner meet) still lips often (Women self-examination doing has find anepisiotomy completely that the ofthe altered structure fourchette.) near At bottomtheperineum the the of anus,thefleshis verybunched up Adwhere cutwassewn the together. a proditionally,smallhemorrhoid trudes theanus. from
a This of shows wellprofiletheclitoris defined with inner widenhood the lips surround clitoral the openingas they then tojoin at ing, narrowing together thefourchette. easytosee inthis It's how photo theskinon theinner lips from on differs that theouter The lips. inner arecovered a smooth, with lips hairless membrane theouter and lips are with more the covered skin like rest and hair. ofthebody, pubic
Federation of Feminist Women'sHealth Centers (1981), 128
283
Fig. 19 Glans(greatly magnified)
nerve Pudendal of the clitoris
3-15 Thenervesof the clitoris Federation of Feminist Women'sHealth Centers (1981), 46 . . Complimentarily,in A New View of a Woman'sBody, by the Feminist Women'sHealth Centers, new research has resulted in the first accurate illustration of the clitoris, showing that organ as having a shaft, a glans, and an engorgement process during arousal which results in an anatomical analysis of the clitoris, both relaxed and erect, as highly similar to the penis. What we've known for some time-that all males have remnants of female anatomy and all females remnants of male anatomy (both stemming from the literally bisexed state of the embryo up until the fifth week of gestation)-is now an objectiveproofthat we can see with our eyes.73
Here we see again feminist truth claims being made. Both A New View of a Woman's Body and Robin Morgan make the homology argument but deploy this argument to subvert the original intent of diminution of the female. As different repre-
284
sentations demonstrate, the "truth" changes depending on who makes the claims. The fact that these feminist "truths" are different interpretations of women's bodies than traditional (and usually male) biomedical "truths"illustrates the contested, socially constructed, and often strategic claims-making activities which are bolstered by supposedly "objective" proofs of the body.74 SE'TING THE ANATOMICALRECORD STRAIGHT (AND NARROW): CLITORAL BACKLASH C. 1981-1991
.. the work that leads to preparation of images reflects one of the traditional objects of art-that of perfecting nature by removing imperfectionand obscurity. -Gordon Fyfe and John Law, "Editors' Introduction: On the Invisibility of the Visual,"in Picturing Power:Visual Depiction and Social Relations The construction of gender goes on today through the various technologies of gender and institutional discourse of power to control the field of social meaning and produce, promote, and "implant"representations of gender. But the terms of a different construction of gender also exists, in the margins of hegemonic discourse. Posed from the outside of the heterosexual social contract, and inscribed in the micro political practices, these terms can also have a part in the construction of gender, levels of resistances, in and their effects are rather at the "local" subjectivity and self-representation. -Teresa de Lauretis, Technologiesof Gender: Essays on Theory,Film, and Fiction
Did the feminist reinterpretationof the clitoris have an impact on the dominant anatomy image makers? If there has been an impact, it appears to be a backlash of clitoral deletion-visual clitoridectomy after a few decades of minimalist inclusion.75 Overwhelmingly,the diagrams of the clitoris in the texts since 1981 are very simple, generally with only one part of the clitoris labeled. In addition, there are more explicit narratives of heterosexuality and evolutionary theory than there had been, both of which appear to be deployed to reinforce and bolster traditional gender constructions and norms. Although narratives centered on discussing female sexual experience are now acceptable, these sexual experiences are depicted as limited.
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We learn first that the vagina was designed to fit the penis. In full-blown evolutionary functionalist theory, woman was created as a receptacle for male desire. For example, Rod Seely, Trent Stephens, and Philip Tate, discussing female sexual response, state: "These secretions provide lubrication to allow easy entry of the penis into the vagina and easy movement of the penis during sexual intercourse."76 Whose lubrication is it anyway? The Alvin Silverstein text, by far the best exemplar of sexstereotyped representations of the body,discusses the penis as "a rod shaped copulatory organ, which fits neatly into a suitably adapted sheath within the body of the female."Moreover, his choice of where to find the ideal female body image seems to be a direct and hostile response to feminists: "Acomparison of the opulent nudes of a century or two ago with the latest Playboy centerfolds, for example, indicates that the current ideal is somewhat thinner than her great-great grandmother." Reinserting women into woman's properplace, Silverstein continues, "Withthe current emphasis on sexual pleasure and the controversyover the role of women (and men) as sex objects,it is often easy to lose sight of the fact that a large part of woman's body is adapted specifically for functions of conceiving, bearing and nurturing children."Last but far from least Silverstein situates the clitoris in a political movement:"the clitoris is one of the most important regions of sexual stimulation in the female and has become something of a cause celebre for feminists rebelling against the 'myth of the vaginal orgasm.'"77 In fact, feminists were reasserting, along with sexologists, the mythic status of vagina-only orgasms and (re)proclaimingthe clitoris as the fundamental site of orgasm.78 In addition to textual assertions about female anatomy, the visual representations of this time period change through the use of photographyof cadavers as anatomy specimens. The resulting new vivid realism of some 1980s' anatomy texts can be quite jarring (see fig. 20). Here external female genitalia are "fullyexposed,"represented with the first layer of skin pulled away. Although these are real bodies, they are dead bodies. Figure 21 is the diagram based on the cadaver picture. In sharp contrast with these "realerthan real"visual representations of female bodies are the computer-generatedgraph-
286
Fig. 20
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Vidic & Suarez (1984), 369
287
Fig. 21
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288
Fig. 22
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Stern (1988), 242
ERRATUM
in the that Weregret error appeared LisaJeanMooreandAdeleClarke's Conventions Transgressions: and in "Clitoral Graphic Representations volume21, number (summer 2 Texts,c1900-1991," 1995). Fig. 19 Anatomy twiceas bothFig. 19 andFig. 22. Thefollowingshouldhave was reproduced as into appeared Fig. 22 on page288. Pleaseinsertthiscorrection thatissue. and Ourapologies the author ourreaders. to
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FIGURE 22
1988:242 Stemrn
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ics images of Jack Stern's text in figure 22.79 Are we witnessing a new convention of anatomical representation emerging?How will these seemingly engineered representations inform our relationships to our bodies? Not only is the computerizedversion difficult to translate into an embodied state, but its intense universalizing effects also thoroughly delete the range of variation so well illustrated in the feminist A New View of a Woman's Body and even by Dickinson much earlier. The computer images also make the older style of illustration seem comparatively-and potentially dangerously-old-fashioned. This computer-generated universal anatomy negates any sense of corporeality,particularlywhen comparedwith some of the representations we saw earlier of the body as sexed, gendered, raced, classed, and cultured-with each of these characteristics The creation of this universal anatomical clearly embodied.80 model body introduces complicated theoretical and political considerations.Although representations of the body as raced, classed, cultured, and gendered have often been articulated within existing hegemonic discourses of inequities (certain types of bodies are consistently represented as ideal), universal computerized representations seem to delete the body itself, Women's bodies have also been dematerializing the body.81 quite routinely disappearing in reproductive discourses, not a good omen.82 Sustained across a whole century are linkages between female reproductive function and sexual function, either with sexuality in service to reproduction or discounted. For example, as late as 1987, Alexander Spence and Elliott Mason assert: "certainly, is not necessary for a female to experience an it for fertilization to occur."83 These late-twentieth-centuorgasm ry genital anatomy interpretations are in diametric opposition to interpretations of the late nineteenth century and earlier. According to Thomas Laqueur, it was then a common belief, shared by anatomists and society at large, that women reBoth arguments construct quired orgasm in order to conceive.84 women's sexual response as inextricably linked with reproductive function. Many of the representations and narratives of this time period suggest that the dominant and primarily male anatomists are trying to set the record straight, specifically TheAnatomical Record (a key journal in the field).
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In sum, we have examined an array of twentieth-century anatomy texts seeking both representativeness and range of variation. We found that by and large female sexual anatomy was given short shrift comparedwith that of the male both literally and figuratively.New and classically modernist feminist anatomies seem to have been either inconsequential or to have Groupswhich have taken up provokeda backlash of deletion.85 the new feminist views of anatomy appear to be those involved with sexology and sexuality studies, groups also quite marginalized although rather differentlythan feminists have been.86 CONCLUSIONS
It takes all sorts to make a sex. -Eugen Weber, "'TheGoodParts":Review of Lynn Hunt, The Invention of Pornography:Obscenityand the Origins of Modernity,1500-1800,"New YorkTimes Book Review [On Rodin's 1890 sculpture Iris] To anyone not versed in the elaborate terminology and sophistication of the art world, and to more than a few intellectuals once they stopped talking esthetics, the figure of a headless, limbless woman with her legs splayed was nothing but a cunt. -Anne Higonnet, "Claudeland Rodin,"in Significant Others:Creativityand Intimate Partnerships, ed. Whitney Chadwickand Isabelle de Courtivron
We have sought here to provide insight into the multiple scientific, political, intellectual, and discursive battles that have been and continue to be fought on, in, and over female bodies through anatomy. In conclusion, we return to several themes regarding the social construction of the clitoris which are evident in our research. First, anatomies are socially constructed, and we found considerable range of variation in constructions of the clitoris among texts within time periods in the twentieth century. From tiny wormlike unlabeled structures to baroque fluidities of process, to computer-generatedabstractions, clitorises vary in anatomy both in representation and criteria of definition. Probably in part because of the comparative embeddedness of clitorises in flesh vis-a-vis the extrusion of penises, a seemingly wider range of constructions has been made. In a sense, "nature" here facilitates an elaborated clitoral politics, as con-
291
straint, opportunity,or resource depending upon who is doing the construction.Anatomy as discipline constructs men's penises to vary individually.However,for women, it has constructed standard, normalizedclitorises for all. Second and fundamentally,genital anatomies construct and maintain sex/gender differences. Normalization, universalization, and simplification strategies lodge naturalness in the sexed/genderedbody per se. Feminists have challenged and resisted such constructions of difference by adopting, adapting, and reasserting the idea that female and male bodies are not "really"that different. For example, the elaborate discussions by Suzann Gage and by Robin Morgan of the overlaps, sameness, and similarities of the sexes are intent upon diminishing differencespredicatedon female inferiority.We can hear echoes of the pre-eighteenth-century "one body" model as discussed earlier.7But here it is distinctively modifiedto both delete hierarchy and assert a new equality, providing an anatomical version of liberal "equality" feminism.88 Although the feminists involved in these debates sometimes claim that they are presenting "thetruth of the body"and take what might be termed a "realist"or "essentialist" biological stance, they are also more forthcomingthan other participants about the political nature of the anatomized body as turf. They are quite aware that, as Bennett notes: "Withthe clitoris, theorists can construct female sexuality in such a way that women become sexual subjects in their own right, taking their sexual, social, creative, and political power into their own hands."89 These feminists are considerably more reflexive about the anatomy they offer and its claims and consequencesin the competitive market in which anatomies, like other sciences, are To produced as knowledge.90 us the explicit backlash against feminist anatomies dramaticallyillustrates the continuous battles waged on the anatomical terrain.91 Latour has argued, As science is politics by other means.92 Representations too are politics by other means. Third, genital anatomy has by and large remained relatively stable and insulated from the challenges posed by feminists and sexologists over the past half-century. Further-and more contemporary-research is needed to determine whether feminists and others have seriously ruptured that stability and
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what disciplinarystrategies have been used to reestablish what in our analysis was classic 1950s' anatomy. Can these strategies be interpreted as sexism and heterosexism? How has anatomy maintained its insularity? The lag of texts behind practices and cultural visions is well known in social studies of Certainscience, but this seems beyond lag and quite political.93 as a discipline does not seem to be deferring to ly, anatomy (Freudian)psychiatry here but, rather, reinserting woman into her place in the reproductive economy.Yet anatomy can and has changed its mind.94 Fourth, an exceptional group of differently radical anatomies over the past century have emphasized range of variation of the clitoris and sexual organs/genitalia more generally: Robert Latou Dickinson's A TopographicalHome Atlas: Human Sex Anatomy, Thomas and Thea Lowry's The Clitoris, the Boston Women's Health Book Collective's Our Bodies, Ourselves, and the Federation of Feminist Women's Health Centers' A New What has it meant to take women View of a Woman'sBody.95 In another article, we plan to deconstruct and comseriously? pare their representations and narratives of sex, gender, and race. In fact, it has only been in these volumes that racialized differences have been presented. In all the other volumes, it is as though everyone is Western, physically similar, young and white, and/orrace is anatomically inconsequential. Last, labels hold power:whether the area of the body where the clitoris lies is labeled genital, sexual, or reproductiveanatomy, or some combination thereof, is highly consequential. Bennett's recent assertion that the place of the clitoris can be radically outside the reproductiveeconomy and that exchange of/traffic in women is obviously supported by our research.96 Throughout the twentieth century it has been feminists and certain sexologists who have cared and still care in a positive sense about the clitoris as a nonreproductivefemale body part. Anatomical "explanations"of the female body which insist on the genitals as reproductive,regardless of whether they are also viewed as sexual, serve as yet another way to discipline and naturalize women both in a Foucauldian sense and in terms of the performativeelements of female gender as defined by reproductive capacity. In this performative view, gender is seen to require constant and assiduous reenactment to be sus-
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tained-or refuted and renegotiated in anatomy as elsewhere.97 This view offers us a way to
give an account of how power, domination and sexual difference intersect in the lived experience of men and women. Gender itself may be understood in this model not only as the effect of ideology or cultural values but as the way in which power takes hold of and constructs bodies in particular ways. Significantly, the sexed body can no longer be conceived as the unproblematic biological and factual base upon which gender is inscribed, but must itself be recognized as constructed by discourses and practices that take the body both as their target and as their vehicle of expression.9
Anatomies thus frame ways of being/enacting "female"and "male." That is, it is not merely being one kind of body but automatically being inscribed with particular social functions because of having that kind of body that constructs gender.99 In short, it is the ways in which most anatomies themselves have been and continue to be accomplished that have made anatomy destiny. It need not remain so. NOTES
An earlier version of this essay was presented at the University of California Systemwide Council on Women's Programs Conference at Lake Arrowhead in November 1993 and at a meeting of the Women, InformationTechnology,and Scholarship Group at the University of Illinois/Urbana-Champaign in March 1994. We greatly appreciate the feedback given by these groups. We would also like to thank the following individuals for their helpful comments: Susan Bell, Monica Casper, Tia DeNora, Donna Penn, Ariadne Sacharoff, Susan Leigh Star, Matt Schmidt, Peter Taylor, and Shari Colburn.Jennifer Thomas helped producethe illustrations. In addition, we would like to thank the University of California, San Francisco Library Historical Archives staff, in particular University Archivist Nancy Zinn, for special efforts on our behalf. Finally, we appreciate the comments provided by the anonymous reviewers fromFeminist Studies. 1. Stefan Hirschauer, "The Manufacture of Bodies in Surgery,"Social Studies of Science 21 (May 1991): 309. 2. See Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth, eds., Body/ Politics: Womenand the Discourses of Science (New York:Routledge, 1990); Ludmilla Jordanova,Sexual Visions:Images of Genderin Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Madison:University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); and Jane Gallop, Thinking through the Body (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). We have learned much from "dissecting"classical anatomy. For instance, see Nancy Tuana, ed., Feminism and Science (Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 1989), 147-71; Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Genderfrom the Greeksto Freud (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1990); and Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Womenin the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge:Harvard
294
University Press, 1989), 189-213. On physiology, see Sally Shuttleworth, "Female Circulation:Medical Discourse and Popular Advertising in the Mid-VictorianEra," in Body/Politics, 47-68. On endocrinology,see Nelly Oudshoornand Marianne van den Wijngaard,"Dualismin Biology:The Case of Sex Hormones,"Women'sStudies International Forum 14, no. 5 (1991): 459-71; Marianne van den Wijngaard, "The Acceptance of Scientific Theories and Images of Masculinity and Femininity: 1959c1985," Journal of the History of Biology 24, no. 1 (1991): 1949; Nelly Oudshoorn, Beyond the Natural Body: An Archeology of Sex Hormones (London and New York:
Routledge, 1994); Merriley Borell, "Biologists and the Promotion of Birth Control
Research, 1918-1938," Journal of the History of Biology 19, no. 1 (1987): 57-87. For
neurology, see Anne Fausto-Sterling, "The Five Sexes," The Sciences (March/April 1993): 20-25. For genetics, see Joan Fujimura, "Race,Gender, and Science: A Situational Perspective"(Paper presented at the "Sex/Genderin Techno-ScienceWorlds" conference,University of Melbourne,June 1993); and Ruth Hubbard,The Politics of Women'sBiology (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990). For space biology, see Monica J. Casper and Lisa Jean Moore, "InscribingBodies, Inscribing the Future: Sex, Gender, and Reproduction on the Final Frontier," Sociological Perspectives 38 (summer 1995): 311-33. For the rhetorical and other practices of many sciences, see Nancy Stepan, "Race and Gender: The Role of Analogy in Science,"Isis 77 (June 1986): 261-77; Londa Scheibinger, Nature's Body: Genderin the Making of Modern Sciences (Boston:Beacon Press, 1993); Emily Martin, "The Egg and the Sperm:How Science Has Constructeda RomanceBased on Stereotyped Male-Female Constructed Roles," Signs 16 (summer 1991): 485-501, and Flexible
Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture from the Days of Polio to the Age of
AIDS (Boston:Beacon Press, 1994); and Evelyn Fox Keller, Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death (New York:Routledge, 1992). Reproductive anatomy and sexual physiology have, of course, been especially rich sites for the construction of embodied differences. See S.J. Kessler, "TheMedical Constructionof Gender:Case Management of Intersexed Infants,"Signs 16 (autumn 1990): 3-26; Jennifer Terry, "Lesbiansunder the Medical Gaze: Scientists Search for Remarkable Differences,"Journal of Sex Research 27, no. 3 (1990): 317-39; MarjorieGarber,"SpareParts: The Surgical Construction of Gender,"Differences (summer 1989): 137-59; Anne Balsamo, "On the Cutting Edge: Cosmetic Surgery and the TechnologicalProductionof the Gendered Body," Camera Obscura 28 (January 1992): 207-38; Allucquere Roseanne Stone, "Virtual Systems," in Incorporations, ed. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York:Zone, 1992), 608-25; Sandy Stone, "TheEmpire Strikes Back: A Posttransexual Manifesto," in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity,
ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York:Routledge, 1991);Adele E. Clarke,
Disciplining Reproduction: Modernity, American Life Sciences, and the "Problem of
Sex" (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming 1996); and Adele E. Clarke, "Controversyand the Development of American Reproductive Sciences," Social Problems 37 (February 1990): 18-37; John B. Blake, "Anatomy,"in The (Berkeley:University of CaliforniaPress, 1980), 42-43. 3. Thomas Power Lowryand Thea Snyder Lowry, eds., The Clitoris (St. Louis:W.H. Green, 1976), 2 (emphasis added).
4. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception (New York: Pantheon, 1973), and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison of American Physicians: Historical Essays, ed. Ronald L. Numbers
Education
(New York:Vintage Books, 1977). Jordanova. 5. George Herbert Mead, "TheObjectiveReality of Perspectives,"in GeorgeHerbert Mead on Social Psychology, ed. Anselm Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964); and Donna Haraway, "Situated Knowledges:The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,"Feminist Studies 14 (fall 1988): 575-99, reprinted in her Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (New York: Routledge,
295
1992), 183-202. 6. Carole Vance provides one of the clearest available discussions of the essentialist versus constructionist debates. Although she is focused on their manifestations in lesbian and gay studies, her points are much more broadly applicable. See Carole S. Vance, "SocialConstructionTheory:Problems in the History of Sexuality,"in Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality? International Conference on Gay and Lesbian Studies, ed. Dennis Altman et al. (London: GMP Publishers, 1990), 13-34; and Linda M. Blum, "Mothers,Babies, and Breast-Feeding in Late Capitalist America: The Shifting Contexts of Feminist Theory,"Feminist Studies 19 (summer 1993): 292-311. 7. See Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender,Race, and Nature in the Worldof Modern Science (New York:Routledge, 1989); Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1993);Adele E. Clarke and Joan H. Fujimura, eds., The Right Tools for the Job: At Work in Twentieth-CenturyLife Sciences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); and William Cronon, ed., ReinventingNature (New York:Norton, 1995). 8. Thomas W. Laqueur, "Amor Veneris, vel Dulcedo Appeletur,"in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Pt. 3, ed. Michel Feher with Ramona Nadaff and Nadia Tazi (New York:Zone, 1989), 109-10; Darlaine Claire Gardetto,Engendered Sensations: Social Construction of the Clitoris and Female Orgasm, 1650-1975 (Ph.D. diss., University of California,Davis, 1992). 9. Clitoridectomies,removal of parts of the female genitalia, were historically performed in Western medicine as a supposed cure for a wide variety of "female ailments." See Isaac Baker-Brown, "OnSome Diseases of Woman Admitting Surgical Treatment," 1866; reprinted in The Sexuality Debates, ed. Sheila Jeffreys (New York:Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 27-41. The figure of 80 million "living with the scars of their bodies and minds"was given in an Op-Edpiece by A.M. Rosenthal, "TheTorture Continues,"New YorkTimes, 27 July 1993, A15. See Alice Walker and Pratibha Parmar, WarriorMarks:Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993); Olayinka Koso-Thomas,CircumA cision of Women: Strategy for Eradication (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Zed Books, 1987); and Esther K. Hicks, Infibulation:Female Mutilation in Islamic Northeastern Africa (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1993). A.M. Rosenthal is covering the attempt at federal legislation introduced in Congress by Patricia Schroederand Barbara Rose Collins, to make clitoridectomyillegal in the United States. In addition, a key U.S. deportationcase was recently fought and won by a Nigerian woman on the basis of the threat of clitoridectomyof her daughters if she was forced to return to Nigeria. See Shannon Brownlee and Jennifer Seter with Betsy Streisand and Louise Tunbridge,"Inthe Name of Ritual,"U.S. News and WorldReport, 7 Feb. 1994, 56-58. 10. This standardization may, of course, be temporary:"A web of words, already pregnant with a theory of sexual difference or sameness, thus limited how genital organs would be seen and discussed. There were no terms in the Renaissance for what, since the eighteenth century, have been construed as essential signs in the body of incommensurabledifference. The boundaries of organs themselves and what could be known about them constrained and were constrained by the openness of the language in which they could be thought."See Laqueur, "Amor Veneris, vel Dulcedo Appeletur,"108. 11. See, for example, Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), in which she discusses the materialization of bodies and instructs us to investigate which bodies come to matter and why. 12. On triangulation, see John Farley, Gametes and Spores: Ideas about Sexual Reproduction, 1750-1914 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); and
296
Susan Leigh Star, "TriangulatingClinical and Basic Research:British Localizationists, 1870-1906,"History of Science 24 (March 1986): 29-48. 13. Candace West and Don Zimmerman, "Doing Gender," Gender and Society 1 (April 1987): 125-51; and Judith Butler, GenderTrouble:Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York:Routledge, 1990). 14. See Laqueur, Making Sex, and "AmorVeneris, vel Dulcedo Appeletur"; and Gardetto. 15. See Laurence Goldstein, ed., The Female Body: Figures, Styles, Speculations (Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press, 1991), x. 16. Personal communication with Wendy Brown, October 1993; Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (London: Women's Press, 1982); Hazel Carby, "White Woman Listen! Black Women and the Boundaries of Sisterhood," in The Empire Strikes Back, ed. Paul Gilroy/TheRace and Politics Group (London:Century Hutchinson, 1982), 212-35; and Haraway,Primate Visions. 17. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, "Dilemmas of Visibility: Contemporary Women Artists' Representations of Female Bodies," in The Female Body, 83-102; Tee A. Corinne, "ArtEssay: Artist's Statement on Sexual Art,"Feminist Studies 19 (summer 1993): 369-76. 18. Blum. 19. The searches were all undertaken on 20 July 1994. Melvyl as of that date contained approximately 7,919,324 titles representing 12,213,800 holdings in the University of California and California State University Libraries. MedLine tracks 4,000 journals and listed 1,583,986 articles from 1 Jan. 1990 to 9 Aug. 1994. The Current Contents catalog tracks 6,500 journals and on the date searched held 5,669,929 articles from 1 July 1989 to 13 July 1994. 20. John Duffy, "Masturbationand Clitoridectomy:A Nineteenth-Century View," Journal of the American Medical Association 186 (1963): 246-48; Andrew Scull and Diane Favreau, "The Clitoridectomy Craze," Social Research 33 (summer 1986): 243-60; Isaac Baker-Brown;G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Horrors of the Half-Known America (New Life: Attitudes toward Womenand Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century York:Harper & Row, 1976); and compareLawrence D. Longo, "TheRise and Fall of Battey's Operation:A Fashion in Surgery,"Bulletin of the History of Medicine 53 (summer 1979): 244-67; Wendy Mitchinson, "GynecologicalOperations on Insane Women, London, Ontario, 1895-1901,"Journal of Social History 15 (autumn 1982): 467-84; Nancy Scheper-Hughes, "Virgin Territory: The Male Discovery of the Clitoris,"Medical AnthropologyQuarterly 5 (November 1991): 25; Daniel Gordon, "FemaleCircumcisionand Genital Operations in Egypt and the Sudan: A Dilemma for Medical Anthropology" (3-14) and see commentaries on Gordonby Janice Boddy, "BodyPolitics: Continuing the Anti-CircumcisionCrusade"(15-17), Faye Ginsberg, "WhatDo Women Want: Feminist AnthropologyConfronts Clitoridectomy" (17-19), Soheir A. Morsey, "SafeguardingWomen's Bodies: The White Man's Burden Medicalized" (19-24), and Carolyn Sargent, "ConfrontingPatriarchy:The Potential for (24-25), all in Medical AnthropologyQuarterly5 Advocacyin MedicalAnthropology" (November 1991). Also, Paula Bennett, "Critical Clitoridectomy:Female Sexual Imagery and Feminist PsychoanalyticTheory,"Signs 18 (winter 1993): 235-59; Ann Koedt, "TheMyth of the Vaginal Orgasm,"Liberation Now: Notes from the Second Year, ed. Shulamith Firestone (New York:Radical Feminists, 1970), 37-41. 21. Bennett, 242. 22. Kal Austin (1994, personal communication)of the Department of Education at the University of Illinois Urbana/Champaignhas recently been studying sex education materials used in public schools and found that the clitoris is often totally missing or its function is not discussed. Instead, girls' breasts and their agonies over breast size are highlighted, paralleling boys' agonies over penis size. See also
297
Grigsby. 23. Diana Scully and Pauline Bart, "AFunny Thing Happened on the Way to the Orifice:Women in GynecologicalTexts,"American Journal of Sociology 78 (October 1973): 1048. 24. Mita Giacomini, P. Rozee-Koker, and F. Pepitone-Arreola-Rockwell,"Gender Bias in Human Anatomy TextbookIllustrations,"Psychologyof WomenQuarterly10 (summer 1986):413-20. 25. Susan Lawrence and Kae Bendixen, "His and Hers: Female Anatomy in Anatomy Texts for U.S. Medical Students, 1890-1989,"Social Science and Medicine 35, no. 7 (1992): 925-34. These researchers will next study the appearance and conforms in anatomy, obsteand "abnormal" structions of the female pelvis in "normal" trics, and physical anthropology (Susan Lawrence, personal communication, 12 Mar. 1993). 26. Evolutionarytheory concernedwith sexuality and reproductionoccasionally enrolls the clitoris as an actor. See Sandra Mitchell, "OnPluralism and Competitionin Evolutionary Explanations,"American Zoologist 32 (February 1992): 135-44. Additionally, see some of the feminist science studies literature that criticizes evolutionAssumpary theory on several different grounds: Elisabeth Lloyd, "Pre-Theoretical tions in Evolutionary Explanations of Female Sexuality,"Philosophical Studies 69 (1993): 201-15; Elisabeth Lloyd,All About Eve: Bias in EvolutionaryExplanations of Women's Sexuality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Haraway, Priand mate Visions; and Evelyn Fox Keller, "Reproduction the Central Project of Evolutionary Theory," Biology and Philosophy 2 (1987): 73-86. Lloyd, for example, found that "socialagendas appear in these stories [of evolution] through the obliteration of any female response that is independent from her function as a reproducer. Autonomous, distinct female sexual response just disappears"(209). But evolutionary theory largely ignores reproduction,and how it manages to do so and pass for adequate science is now itself a topic of inquiry in philosophy of biology. See James Griesemer, "TheInformationalGene and the Substantial Body: On the Generalization of Evolutionary Theory by Abstraction," in Varieties of Idealization: Poznan Studies, ed. Nancy Cartwright and M. Jones (Amsterdam:Rodopi Press, 1995). In examining the recent genetics of sex, Fujimura notes that although there are extended discussions of what is maleness and how it is determined, there is no mention of femaleness except in relation to "themale"-and femaleness is generally characterized as a genomic lack or absence of something. 27. See Nancy Mann Kulish, "TheMental Representation of the Clitoris:The Fear of Female Sexuality,"PsychoanalyticInquiry (summer 1991): 511. 28. See Janice Irvine, Disorders of Desire: Sex and Gender in Modern American Sexology (Philadelphia:Temple University Press, 1990); Vern L. Bullough, Science in the Bedroom:A History of Sex Research (New York: Basic Books, 1994); and Lawrence Birken, Consuming Desire: Sexual Science and the Emergence of a Culture of Abundance, 1871-1914 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988). 29. Lowry and Lowry; also Thomas Power Lowry, The Classic Clitoris (Chicago: Welson Hall, 1978). 30. Gardetto. 31. Laqueur, "Amor Veneris, vel Dulcedo Appeletur." 32. Irvine, 162-65. 33. The Libraryof the University of California,San Francisco,has extensive historical holdings which made this research possible. There has been a medical school at the site since 1864. Although content analysis offers a way to systematically organize manifest data analysis, it cannot yield the rich analytic categories developedthrough using grounded theory. Therefore, we have combined these approaches, emphasizing range of
298
variation of data and interpretations, and using the constant comparativemethod. On content analysis, see Earl Babbie, The Practice of Social Research, 6th ed. (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1992). On grounded theory, see Anselm Strauss, Qualitative Analysis for Social Scientists (New York:Cambridge University Press, 1987); Anselm Strauss and Juliet Corbin,Basics of QualitativeResearch:GroundedTheory Procedures and Techniques (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1990); Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory (Chicago: Aldine, 1967); and Barney Glaser, Theoretical Sensitivity: Advances in the Methodologyof Grounded Theory(Mill Valley, Calif.: SociologyPress, 1978). 34. See Lawrence and Bendixen; and Giacomini, Rozee-Koker, and Pepitone-Arreola-Rockwell. 35. Analytic concepts developedfrom the data include complexityof visual representations, diversificationof the clitoris, the use of the homologue/analogue comparisons with the penis, and presence or absence of narratives of engorgement. Efforts were made to constantly compare data both within and between time periods while also trying to situate and analyze outlying cases-those representations or texts which clearly did not fit into the roughly standard conventions of the time period. See also Lawrence and Bendixen. We grew increasingly appreciative of the insights of Lata Mani regardingpartialities and colonizingvisions, as well as the need for analysts to be reflexive in process. See Lata Mani, "CulturalTheory, Colonial Texts: Reading Eye Witness Accounts of Widow Burning," in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg,Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler(New York:Routledge, 1992), 392-408. 36. This componentof our investigation included interviewing Suzann Gage, the illustrator of the Federation of Feminist Women'sHealth Centers publication,A New View of a Woman'sBody (New York:Simon & Schuster, 1981), in order to enrich our understanding of this book's development and emergence on the anatomical scene. We also attended the American Public Health Association annual meeting's session "FemaleOrgasm and Redefinitions of the Clitoris,"including presentations by Carol Downer, Suzann Gage, and RebeccaChalker, 26 Oct. 1993 in San Francisco. The programlisted Lorraine Rothman as presenter; she did not attend. Instead, Thomas Laqueur, not listed in the program,also presented on the history of the clitoris. 37. Howard S. Becker,Art Worlds(Berkeley:University of CaliforniaPress, 1982). 38. See, by Bruno Latour: "Visualization and Social Reproduction:Opening One Eye while Closing the Other ... A Note on Some Religious Paintings," in Picturing Power:Visual Depictions and Social Relations, ed. GordonFyfe and John Law (New York:Routledge, 1988), 15-38; "Visualization and Cognition:Thinking with Eyes and Hands,"in Knowledgeand Society:Studies in the Sociologyof CulturePast and Present, ed. Henrika Kuklick and Elizabeth Long (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1986), 1-40; and "DrawingThings Together,"in Representation in Scientific PracMIT Press, 1990), 19-68. tice, ed. Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar(Cambridge: 39. Laqueur,Making Sex, 64-66. 40. Ambroise Pare, On Monstersand Marvels, trans. Janis Pallister (Chicago:University of ChicagoPress, 1982), 188, n 35. 41. See Londa Schiebinger, "Skeletonsin the Closet: The First Illustrations of the Female Skeleton in Eighteenth-Century Anatomy,"in The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century,ed. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 42-82; Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex; Thomas Laqueur, "Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology," in The Making of the Modern Body, 1-41, and Veneris, vel DulcedoAppeletur." Making Sex, and "Amor 42. George Ludwig Kobelt, "AnEnduring Master of Anatomy:The Female Sex Organs in Humans and Some Mammals,"in The Classic Clitoris, 19-56.
299
43. Laqueur, "Amor Veneris, vel DulcedoAppeletur,"99. 44. Kobelt, 44-45. 45. E.M.Kirkpatrick, ed., Chambers Twentieth-Century Dictionary (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1983), 41. 46. Henry Savage, The Surgery, Surgical Pathology, and Surgical Anatomy of the Female Pelvic Organs (in a series of plates taken from nature with commentaries, notes, and cases) 3d. ed. (New York:William WoodCo., 1880), 21. 47. Alfred Kinsey et al. Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (Philadelphia:W.B. Saunders, 1953). 48. See Kobelt;Savage. 49. William Furneaux, Philips' Anatomical Model of the Female Human Body (London: George Philip & Son, 1904); Arthur Giles, Anatomy and Physiology of the Female Generative Organs and of Pregnancy (New York:Paul Hoeber, 1910); and Western Publishing House, Physician's Anatomical Aid (Chicago:Western Publishing House, n.d. [1920s]). 50. See Furneaux; Giles. 51. Cleveland Pendleton Hickman, Functional Human Anatomy (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1940), 222. 52. Terry. 53. Hickman, 230. 54. Jesse Feiring Williams, A Textbookof Anatomy and Physiology (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders, 1923). 55. Henry Gray, Anatomy:Descriptive and Surgical (Philadelphia:Lea Brothers & Co., 1901), 1026, and Anatomy of the Human Body (Philadelphia:Lea & Febiger, 1948). 56. Robert Latou Dickinson, A Topographical Hand Atlas: Human Sex Anatomy, 2d. ed. (Baltimore:Williams & Wilkins, 1949). 57. As suggested by historian Donna Penn, this early-twentieth-centuryfascination with measuring specific parts of the body, anthropometry,must be taken in historical context. Several scientists were involved in the examination and interpretation of specific body parts for the purpose of quantifying deviance. See, for example, Terry; and Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood(Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1989). Although not within the scope of this study, it is important to acknowledgethe many ways communities (scientific and otherwise) construct and constrain the environments in which anatomy is done. 58. Dickinson, vi-b. Dickinson's theme of deviance and taking women seriously will be the subject of a subsequent paper. Dickinson was a major activist and perhaps the major physician activist in the American birth control as well as sexology movements. See Linda Gordon, Woman'sBody, Woman'sRight: Birth Control in America, 2d. ed. (New York:Penguin, 1990); James Reed, The Birth Control Movement and American Society:From Private Vice to Public Virtue,2d. ed. (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1983); Ellen Chessler, Womanof Valor:Margaret Sanger and the Birth ControlMovementin America (New York:Simon & Schuster, 1992), 273300; and Bullough. 59. Katherine Armstrong, Baillere's Atlas of Female Anatomy, 4th ed. (London: Baillere, Tindall & Cox, 1952); Davis Parke, Co., Anatomical Chromographsof the Human Male and the Human Female (Detroit: Parke, Davis & Co., 1958); David Sinclair, An Introduction to Functional Anatomy, 2d. ed. (Oxford:Blackwell Scientific Publications, 1961); C.F.V. Smout, Basic Anatomy and Physiology (London: Edward Arnold, 1962); Ernest Gardner, Donald Gray, and Ronan O'Rahilly,Anatomy: A Regional Study of Human Structure, 2d. ed. (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders, 1963); and Ralph Benson, Handbookof Obstetricsand Gynecology(Los Altos, Calif.:
300
Lange Medical Publications, 1964). 60. Gardner,Gray, and O'Rahilly,609. 61. These were major cultural and scientific events. Kinsey had a Ph.D. in zoology, having specialized in the study of gall wasps prior to his human sexuality research. Moreover, that research was sponsored by a major funding source, the National Research Council's Committee for Research on Problems of Sex, which funneled Rockefeller Foundation monies into sex and reproductive research. See Sophie Aberle and George W. Corner, Twenty-Five Years of Sex Research: History of the National Research Council Committeefor Research on Problems of Sex, 1922-1947 (Philadelphia:W.B. Saunders, 1963). 62. Sinclair, 211. 63. See Richard Snell, Clinical Anatomy for Medical Students (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1973); Henry Gray, Gray's Anatomy, 35th ed. (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders, 1973); and MarjorieMiller, Anna Drakontides, and Lutie Leavell, Anatomy and Physiology, 17th ed. (New York:Macmillan, 1977). 64. Alex Comfort,The Joy of Sex (New York:Simon & Schuster, 1972). 65. "No more blank spaces and unlabeled parts," the quotation in the subhead above, is from RebeccaChalker (see n. 34). Sheryl Burt Ruzek, The Women'sHealth Movement: Feminist Alternatives to Medical Control(New York:Praeger, 1978); and Ellen Lewin and Virginia Olesen, eds., Women,Health, and Heaing: Toward a New Perspective(New York:Tavistock, 1985). 66. Downer. 67. See the Boston Women's Health Book Collective's Our Bodies Ourselves (New York:Simon & Schuster, 1971 and 1975); The New Our Bodies, Ourselves:A Book by and for Women(New York:Simon & Schuster, 1984 and 1992); and A New View of a Woman'sBody. 68. Boston Women'sHealth Book Collective, 1975, 26. 69. See Barbara Maria Stafford,Body Criticism:Imaging the Unseen in EnlightenMIT Press, 1991). mentArt and Medicine (Cambridge: 70. Carol Horos, Vaginal Health (New Canaan, Conn.:Tobey Publishing Co., 1975), 18. 71. A New View of a Woman'sBody. Aspects of the history of this book were discussed in an interview with Suzann Gage, the illustrator, and through presentations by and conversations with Carol Downer, Suzann Gage, and Rebecca Chalker. This is not the first elaborated labeling of the clitoris. Kobelt'swork had surfaced in the library research they undertook and was significant in their redefinition of the clitoris (interview, 26 Sept. 1993). Later quotations are from this interview. 72. Downer. 73. Robin Morgan, The Anatomy of Freedom:Feminism, Physics, and Global Politics (New York:Anchor/Doubleday, 1984), 70-71. 74. Naomi Aronson, "Scienceas a Claims-MakingActivity: Implications for Social Problems Research," Studies in the Sociology of Social Problems, ed. Joseph W. Schneider and John I. Kitsuse (Norwood,N.J.: Ablex, 1984), 1-30. 75. Special thanks to MonicaCasper for this term. 76. Rod Seely, Trent Stephens, and Philip Tate, Anatomy and Physiology (St. Louis: Times Mirror/Mosby College Publishing, 1989), 861. 77. Alvin Silverstein, Human Anatomy and Physiology (New York:John Wiley & Sons, 1988), 734, 740, 742. 78. See Koedt; and Susan Lydon, "ThePolitics of Orgasm,"Sisterhood Is Powerful, ed. RobinMorgan(New York:Vintage, 1970), 219-27. 79. Jack Stern, Essentials of GrossAnatomy (Philadelphia:F.A. Davis, Co., 1988). 80. We are not asserting that more cultured images cannot be producedby computer graphic methods, merely that there were not any in the texts we found produced
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up to 1991. 81. N. Katherine Hayles, "TheMateriality of Informatics,"Configurations1 (winter 1992): 147-70. 82. See Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, "Fetal Images: The Power of Visual Culture in Feminist Studies 13 (summer 1987): 263-92; Barbara the Politics of Reproduction," Duden, Disembodying Women:Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); and Monica Casper, "Fetal Cyborgs and in Technomomson the ReproductiveFrontier:Or, Which Way to the Carnival?" The CyborgHandbook, ed. Chris Hables Gray, Steven Mentor, and Heidi Figueroa Sarriera (New York:Routledge, 1994). 83. Alexander Spence and Elliott Mason, Human Anatomy and Physiology (Menlo Park, Calif.:Benjamin/CummingsPublishing Co., 1978), 840. 84. Laqueur,Making Sex. 85. Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women(New York:CrownPublishers, 1991). 86. Irvine. 87. Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex; Laqueur,Making Sex. 88. Blum. 89. Bennett, 256-57. 90. Aronson. 91. Clarke,Disciplining Reproduction. 92. Latour, "Visualizationand Social Reproduction." 93. A superb deconstruction of women's "positions"in recent dioramas of "Early Man" by Gifford-Gonzalesprovides a vivid account of the contradictions between textual conclusions based on research and pictorial representational conventions regarding gender which must be (re)asserted constantly to be maintained. The title is based on women being allowed to squat or kneel and bend while tanning hides, almost their exclusive activity other than cooking in the dioramas, but never being portrayed as running. See Diane Gifford-Gonzales,"YouCan Hide but You Can't Run: Representations of Women'sWork in Illustrations of Paleolithic Life,"Visual AnthropologyReview 9 (spring 1993): 22-41. 94. See Troelsm Kardel, Sister Emmanuel Collins, and Paul Maquet, "Steno on Muscles: Introduction,Texts, and Translation,"pt. 1, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 84 (1994). 95. Dickinson; Lowry and Lowry; Our Bodies, Ourselves, 1971, 1976, 1985, 1992 editions; and A New View of a Woman'sBody. 96. Bennett, 255. 97. West and Zimmerman;and Butler, GenderTrouble. 98. Moira Gatens, "Power, Bodies, and Difference," in Destabilizing Theory: ContemporaryFeminist Debates, ed. Michele Barrett and Anne Phillips (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), 132. 99. Casper and Moore.

Clitoral Conventions

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Clitoral Conventions and Transgressions: Graphic Representations in Anatomy Texts, c19001991 Author(s): Lisa Jean Moore and Adele

CLITORALCONVENTIONSAND TRANSGRESSIONS: GRAPHICREPRESENTATIONSIN ANATOMY TEXTS,C1900-1991

LISA JEAN MOOREand ADELE E. CLARKE

Lisa Jean Mooreand Adele E. Clarke

Lisa Jean Mooreand Adele E. Clarke

Lisa Jean Mooreand Adele E. Clarke

Lisa Jean Mooreand Adele E. Clarke

Lisa Jean Mooreand Adele E. Clarke

Lisa Jean Mooreand Adele E. Clarke

Lisa Jean Mooreand Adele E. Clarke

Lisa Jean Mooreand Adele E. Clarke

SOURCE 1850-1900 1900-1950 1950-1980 1980-present .

UNIVERSE 68 199 344 255

Lisa Jean Mooreand Adele E. Clarke

Lisa Jean Moore and Adele E. Clarke

surprise that more anatomists had

Lisa Jean Mooreand Adele E. Clarke

not addressed the question of clitoral erection:

Lisa Jean Mooreand Adele E. Clarke

skinned young women. The

males as pregnant was con-

sistent in all the anatomy

texts examined. All but two of

text by Cleveland Pendleton

Lisa Jean Moore and Adele E. Clarke

Lisa Jean Moore and Adele E. Clarke

Fig. 5. Female Pelvic Organs.Western Publishing House Physician'sAnatomicalAid

Lisa Jean Mooreand Adele E. Clarke

Gray'sAnatomy (1901) Gray's Anatomy(1901)

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Gardner,Gray, and O'Rahilly(1963), 609

Lisa Jean Mooreand Adele E. Clarke

fundamentally contesting the

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ways in which biomedicine had been naturalized.67

Health BookCollective(1976),27 BostonWomen's

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clitoris Frenulumiof theclitoris Inner of lip theclitoris .. i.k.

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Pubicbone Suspensory ligament and Artery vein

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Lisa Jean Moore and Adele E. Clarke

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Federation of Feminist Women'sHealth Centers (1981), 128