This October, the Vagina Museum and the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Race and Racialisation present...
(Re)producing Justice: a month long programme of workshops, panels, film screenings, and more exploring how community organisers are building reproductive justice from the ground up.
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The history of medical racism, and in particular the anti-blackness on which the field of gynaecology is based, is long and bloody. This is not something we at the Vagina Museum have ever shied away from. When addressing vulva diversity, our permanent exhibition explores the racist histories that inform the standards to which vulvas are held and the pernicious ways these standards inform our lives to this day. More recently, we renamed our galleries after the Mothers of Gynaecology: Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy. It is on these three Black women that early experiments in modern gynaecology were performed, and on which a number of modern gynaecological procedures are based. Simply put, without them, modern gynaecology – flawed and incomplete as it is – would not be where it is today.
In these ways, the Museum acknowledges a fraught history, foregrounds marginalised narratives, and fosters an environment of reflection and reconciliation. Nevertheless, there is so much more work to be done.
Our next big priority is championing and platforming community organisations working on reproductive justice, obstetric racism, medical misogynoir and other expressions of anti-Blackness in the gynaecological space. The purpose of this programme, then, is to turn our space and our audience over to organisations already doing vital work, educating, building connections and strengthening community. Further, we hope it will lay the groundwork for a more thorough and long-term engagement with racism in health, eugenics, and reproductive justice.