Ataya: HUMA Interdisciplinary Seminar Series
Lisa Godson is a cultural historian with a particular focus on design, material culture and architecture. She is Programme Director of the MA in Design History and Material Culture at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. Her publications include Uniform: Clothing and Discipline in the Modern World (2019); Modern Religious Architecture in Germany, Ireland and Beyond (2019); Making 1916: Visual and Material Culture of the Easter Rising (2015). Her monograph How the Crowd Felt: Public Ritual, Memory and Space in the Irish Free State is forthcoming. She often collaborates with creative practitioners. Her research into Irish architects in West Africa formed the basis of the award-winning feature documentary Build Something Modern (Still Films, 2010). She was a research collaborator with artists Jesse Jones and Sarah Brown for the major Arts Council of Ireland commission In the Shadow of the State (2016), which included the live broadcast The Truncheon and the Speculum from the Liverpool Art Biennale. She is currently working on a material history of the vaginal speculum from the perspective of colonialism, usership and affordance.
Topic: This paper presentation will address how the vaginal speculum suggests ways into histories of visuality and materiality, of the regulation of women and of the limits of user-focused design discourse, taking on board the body as not just a tool affecting the material world, but as modelled itself by materiality. It will explore how the ‘user’ or the active agent of the speculum has been and is configured in discussions about it and how that relates to the specific material forms it takes and has taken. It argues that the material culture of the speculum is best understood as distributed amongst people and objects, as well as regimes of racism, colonialism, policing and inspection. The biopolitics of its use is predicated overwhelmingly on a politics of vision rather than feeling, and discourses and the design of the speculum create a binary between visuality and materiality. As well as key moments in its history, the paper will consider its use in second-wave feminism, the ‘queer’ use of the speculum as a sex toy, the distribution of the 3D-printed speculum and recent developments in more ‘user-centred' versions of the instrument.
Please note: Some of the material presented may be distressing, as it includes description of non-consensual examinations on enslaved women.
Access paper*
*‘Fergusson Type Speculum, 1860s’ for History Workshop Journal (HWJ), ‘Radical Objects’ series; and ‘Usership, Design History and the GynePunk 3D-Printed Speculum’ for Victoria & Albert Museum Research Institute (VARI). Pre-publication paper by Lisa Godson, 2021. | Paper made available with the kind permission of the author.
How Ataya works: One presenter and their work – in exchange with the audience. Each Ataya session engages with selected work by the presenter (a text, artwork, performance, even food). The presenter introduces their work and grounds the subsequent discussion with the participants. For best engagement, we recommend participants to view the work (made available in advance on our website) before the session. More on the Ataya Series
