Linkalicious: Big Tuesday Edition

A veritable smorgasbord for you!

1. “Intimate Politics: A Roundtable”: a downloadable podcast of a panel of feminist scholars and their reactions (not book reviews, but further musings) to the book Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel, by Bettina Aptheker.

2. “Who hates to hear they look great?”: amandaw on the “But you don’t look sick!” phenomenon and invisible disabilities.

3. “What are we doing here?”: magniloquence muses at length on the femisphere, its characters, and the dynamics of blogwars. Meta upon meta, lots to unpack here.

4. “Students use sex to promote healthy foods”: Two students in Canberra come up with the absolutely ground-breaking new idea of presenting scantily clad women’s bodies in order to promote a food group. Somehow, this is “Innovative!” national news.

Filed under: Meta, Politics, Read 'ems, bigotry, birth, indigenous, interblog, language, racism

“Perhaps the simplest way to begin is to plunge a knife into the male urethra”

“Anatomy is one of the key sites for the production and 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.”

[Lisa Jean Moore and Adele E. Clarke, "Clitoral Conventions and Transgressions: Graphic Representations in Anatomy Texts, c1900-1991", Feminist Studies, Vol. 21, No. 2. (Summer, 1995), pp. 255-301.]

Inspired by ladoctorita’s “sins and virtues in medical education, part 2: pornification”, I’ve been contemplating genital anatomy as it was taught in twentieth-century medical school.

My medical school used Grant’s Method of Anatomy. A relative of mine went to the same school in the mid-twentieth century, so I have a 1989 edition and a 1958 edition to compare.

1958

The 1958 edition describes the male perineum first. For nine pages. This section isn’t labelled “The male perineum”, however – it’s just “The perineum”. The natural, default body is the masculine body. There are segments on the anal triangle, the urogenital triangle, two pages on the penis, the superficial perineal muscles, the deep perineal pouch, the nerves and vessels, and how to expose the prostate.

“The Female Perineum” follows. (Yes, intersex bodies are invisible.) The female genitalia are described not as anatomical structures in their own right, but as simplified, mutilated male genitalia. Homologous parts in the female are rudimentary, simplified, diminutive. You can’t just describe something like this – so I’ll regale you with the author’s words, and some of the accompanying illustrations:

Filed under: Science, birth, medicine

Motherless birthing, and the one-way street of obstetric “choice”

In another case of the disappearing agent, Australian newspapers have been breathlessly reporting the amazing case of an intrepid Australian doctor “performing” the delivery of a healthy baby with nothing but a first aid kit and an oxygen mask – high in the air between Auckland and Santiago.

Aussie doctor delivers baby mid-flight

An Australian obstetrician has taken her professional skills to new heights by helping a Brazilian woman – who didn’t even known she was pregnant – give birth in a plane flying high above the Pacific Ocean during a flight from Auckland to Santiago.
[...]
Luckily for the baby and her mum, Dr Jenny Cook from Adelaide’s Flinders Medical Centre was on board the flight, and managed to deliver the baby girl with only a basic first-aid kit and an emergency oxygen mask on hand.
[...]
Dr Cook, 37, confirmed the baby was in the breech position, which often requires a caesarean delivery.

“I didn’t know what was going to happen – if the baby was going to breathe, if the mother was going to bleed. And if I had to make any cuts to get the baby out, were they going to give me a plastic knife?” Dr Cook told News Limited.

She had to perform the delivery next to the toilets and meal preparation area, where blankets were spread on the ground and the curtains were drawn.

As the other passengers slept, oblivious to what was going on, four stunned crew members watched as Dr Cook guided baby – who Aline named Barbara – into the world in minutes.

The mother is nearly invisible in this story – reduced to a silly stereotype of the oblivious woman who didn’t even know she was pregnant. This stereotype is usually associated with classist disparagement, but I think this time there’s more than a whiff of racism in the mix. After the first paragraph, however, she fades into the background, replaced by the superhero doctor who “performed” the delivery and “guided” the baby into the world single-handed. The papers made much of the doctor being thanked with bottles of French champagne and a smooch from an airline pilot. (Ew.)

Headlines from other papers included these gems:

Filed under: birth, reproductive freedoms