In Public Privates, a book about looking and being looked at, about speculums, spectacles, and spectators, about display,
illumination, and reflection, Terri Kapsalis makes visible the practices and representations of gynecology. The quintessential examination of women, gynecology is not simply the study of women's bodies, but also serves to define and constitute them. Any
critical analysis of gynecology is therefore, as Kapsalis affirms, an investigation of what it means to be female. In this respect she considers the public exposure of female "privates" in the performance of the pelvic exam. From J. Marion Sims's surgical experiments on unanesthetized slave women in the mid-nineteenth…
As the manager of several websites dealing with the fascination that many people - both men and women - have with gynecology, I was very much
looking forward to reading this book, and I was not…
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