The Speculum as A Symbol of Female Empowerment: Responding to Donna Haraway’s “Fetus”
After discussing Donna Haraway’s Fetus: The Virtual Speculum in the New World Order in class, I found myself questioning the notion of the gynaecological speculum as a symbol and tool for female empowerment. As Haraway explains, the speculum became a symbol in US feminist politics in the early 1970s, as many feminists — largely young, white, and middle-class — were finally able to open their bodies to their own view (Haraway 193). However, prior our class discussion, Samaa and I had a preliminary discussion where we interpreted this “repossession” of the “master’s tool” in a less empowering way.
Samaa and I agreed on the fact that the literal function of the speculum is forceful, as it pries the vagina open and quite uncomfortably holds it open in an unnatural position. This forceful — verging on violent — use of the speculum signalled to us that the speculum perhaps was not a tool for empowerment but for taking power away: though it once allowed women to practice self care and control over their own bodies, how does that power dynamic drastically change when a doctor is administering the device?
I question the empowering qualities of the speculum likely because of my personal experiences with the object. Speculums have only been administered to me in doctor’s offices, and while pap tests and vaginal exams are a standard and very important medical practice, it has always been a strange experience to have my white, male, cis gender doctor use the device to look into my vagina. This power dynamic facilitated by the speculum actually strips away the empowerment, self-control, and self-awareness of the woman and her body that Haraway speaks of, reinforcing the medical professional as, once again, the authority on a body — a female body — that does not belong to them.
My doctor is just doing his job, but feeling vulnerable is what I often associate with having vaginal exams in doctor’s offices. Lying exposed on a table, I cannot help but feel like a faceless object instead of a differentiated person, undergoing a procedure that is for “women” but yet, administered by a man? This reminds me of a point Louie brought up in our class discussion: biological language has been personified — given gendered, human characteristics to specifically describe the reproductive process, but the patients themselves are treated as objects and not differentiated individuals. Instead of addressing the patient’s needs that are specific to them, this subversion problematically reduces all patients to their biology; the doctor views the patient as either a female or male object with no agency.
While the speculum may have been a symbol and tool for female empowerment in the 1970s, I do not think it has retained that symbolic significance today. What about non-cis gender women who perhaps have no use for a speculum? It should be acknowledged that the speculum is a tool of — as Haraway mentions — white, middle-class women (cis gender) and therefore, is a symbol of empowerment only for some women, and not all women. I wonder what symbols of empowerment we can come up with today that do not limit a woman to a specific kind of biology.
