Same Practice, Same Meaning(s)? Vaginal Self-Exam in the 1970s and Today

Vaginal self-examination has been the iconic practice of the feminist self-help movement of the 1970s. Helped by a speculum, a mirror and a flashlight, women got together to observe their vaginas in their materiality: sight, smell and taste were all senses that were part of the experiment. The self-help movement thus placed the female body as the starting point of knowledge production on women’s lives. Along with being a practice of consciousness-raising groups, vaginal self-examination was thus embedded in a larger epistemological project of emancipation. The centrality of the female body in this project led to a paradox: how can a practice based on an essentialist trope of biological differences between the sexes fight oppression? This communication aims at reframing the feminist debates on vaginal self-examination in the context of the contemporary resurgence of gynaecological self-exam in Western Europe. While the self-help movement of the 1970s is said to have both recoded the vagina in a way that made possible to observe it on its own, and refigured the status of patients in the healthcare systems, the question of the meanings associated with the practice today must be asked. If looking “down there” has less consciousness-raising power than it used to, in which ways do contemporary feminists frame their own experiences with the speculum? Based on an ethnographic material of self-exam workshops in France and Belgium, this communication will be an attempt to identify continuities and changes in the ways new generations of feminists engage with the female body.