Chicana Ways - Aletta

AnyBody's Concerns 6(2003)
Germaine Greer (in The Female
Eunuch) urged women to taste
our menstrual blood, take
possession of our pleasure, and
buck the system that was
oppressing us. Our bodies, as
the American self-help book
claimed were Our Selves4 and we
needed, urgently, to get in to
them. We squatted on mirrors, we taught each other to use the
speculum as a tool for empowering self-knowledge. To look at
our genitalia, this taboo-ridden mysterious unknown part of
our anatomy constituted an act of dis-covery, of revelation
and reclamation. It was also, and importantly a flagrant
protest against the way in which society and the medical
establishment had alienated us from ourselves, made us hate
ourselves.
8 Today's medical technology has taken us beyond the
vestibule (sic) and deep inside our insides. Cordless
ultrasound equipment (designed inevitably, and for anatomical
convenience, on a phallic principle) can be inserted into the
vagina for the highest quality imaging, better than the normal
scanner passed over the surface of the body part being
surveyed (the womb). In the UK this remains a privilege for
the fertility patient in a clinic which can afford it. The
simple procedure is generally performed by fertility experts
and in certain cases with the woman not lying down but half
http://www.genderforum.uni-koeln.de/anybody/furse.html (6 van 35)31-3-2005 18:21:46