Emilia Sanabria (Research Fellow, École des hautes études en sciences
sociales / CNRS, Paris, France)
The Body Inside Out: menstruation and gynaecological practice
Drawing on ethnographic work on menstruation and gynaecological examinations and surgeries in Salvador (Brazil), the paper explores the way bodily boundaries are constituted in and through medical practices. I argue that there is nothing fixed or given about bodily boundaries and examine ethnographically the ways in which these are made and remade through biomedical interventions. The paper focuses specifically on the re-enactment of the boundary between the inside and the outside of bodies with a focus on what is detached from bodies and which, by falling away from them, contributes to their constitution. The management of menstrual blood suggests that the distinction between inside/outside is more fragile than is commonly recognised. Menstrual bleeding continually re-attest to the porous nature of bodily boundaries, problematising not just the boundary between inside and outside but the very distinction between them. I then consider how the gynaecological examination – epitomised by the insertion of the speculum – and vaginal plastic surgery can be used to speak of the problematic and contingent act of delimiting the inside from the outside of bodies. The vagina emerges as an ambiguous boundary, a problematic threshold. Reconstructive vaginal plastic surgery is widely available in the public health sector where it functions as a kind of proxy for the highly desirable caesarean-section which accounts for 80-100% of births in the private sector. The discourses of tightness, virginity, and sexual morality which surround the plástica vaginal attest to the impossibility of the sexual imperatives placed on women (sexual availability and concomitant chastity).
Emilia Sanabria (emilia.sanabria@ehess.fr) is a Fyssen Foundation Research Fellow at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS/CNRS) in Paris and a member of the Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale (LAS). She received her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge in 2008. Her doctoral dissertation was based on fieldwork conducted in Salvador (Bahia, Brazil) on contemporary bodily practices, with a specific focus on practices of menstrual management and asks what makes the body, in Brazil, so readily open to intervention? She recently completed a short project entitled “Humanising biomedicine: citizenship, modernity and biopolitics in Brazil” and is currently embarking on a project which extends her work on the body with a deepened focus on the Bahian notion of “open body” and the question of medical pluralism. In parallel, she has been working on the material dimension of pharmaceuticals through an analysis of medicines as evanescent objects. Her publications include “Alleviative bleeding: bloodletting, menstruation and the politics of ignorance in a Brazilian blood donation centre” in Body & Society: Blood Donation, Bioeconomy, Culture: Ethnographic Approaches. 15(2), June 2009 and “Evanescent objecthood. Pharmaceutical drugs – between packaging and absorption” in Techniques & Culture 52-53 (forthcoming).
Drawing on ethnographic work on menstruation and gynaecological examinations and surgeries in Salvador (Brazil), the paper explores the way bodily boundaries are constituted in and through medical practices. I argue that there is nothing fixed or given about bodily boundaries and examine ethnographically the ways in which these are made and remade through biomedical interventions. The paper focuses specifically on the re-enactment of the boundary between the inside and the outside of bodies with a focus on what is detached from bodies and which, by falling away from them, contributes to their constitution. The management of menstrual blood suggests that the distinction between inside/outside is more fragile than is commonly recognised. Menstrual bleeding continually re-attest to the porous nature of bodily boundaries, problematising not just the boundary between inside and outside but the very distinction between them. I then consider how the gynaecological examination – epitomised by the insertion of the speculum – and vaginal plastic surgery can be used to speak of the problematic and contingent act of delimiting the inside from the outside of bodies. The vagina emerges as an ambiguous boundary, a problematic threshold. Reconstructive vaginal plastic surgery is widely available in the public health sector where it functions as a kind of proxy for the highly desirable caesarean-section which accounts for 80-100% of births in the private sector. The discourses of tightness, virginity, and sexual morality which surround the plástica vaginal attest to the impossibility of the sexual imperatives placed on women (sexual availability and concomitant chastity).
Emilia Sanabria (emilia.sanabria@ehess.fr) is a Fyssen Foundation Research Fellow at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS/CNRS) in Paris and a member of the Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale (LAS). She received her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge in 2008. Her doctoral dissertation was based on fieldwork conducted in Salvador (Bahia, Brazil) on contemporary bodily practices, with a specific focus on practices of menstrual management and asks what makes the body, in Brazil, so readily open to intervention? She recently completed a short project entitled “Humanising biomedicine: citizenship, modernity and biopolitics in Brazil” and is currently embarking on a project which extends her work on the body with a deepened focus on the Bahian notion of “open body” and the question of medical pluralism. In parallel, she has been working on the material dimension of pharmaceuticals through an analysis of medicines as evanescent objects. Her publications include “Alleviative bleeding: bloodletting, menstruation and the politics of ignorance in a Brazilian blood donation centre” in Body & Society: Blood Donation, Bioeconomy, Culture: Ethnographic Approaches. 15(2), June 2009 and “Evanescent objecthood. Pharmaceutical drugs – between packaging and absorption” in Techniques & Culture 52-53 (forthcoming).
