Telling It Straight? Dictionary Definitions of Women's Genitals

The Journal of Sexual Medicine

postmedieval

This paper uses contemporary clinical research on female sexual dysfunction to analyze the biomedical construction of sexual bodies. The clinical and commercial success of Viagra has intensified the search for a biomedical basis for women's sexual problems, grounded by the assumption that we just need to know more about women's sexual physiology to advance a linear model of scientific progress, resulting in pharmaceutical solutions. Against this, I draw on feminist science studies to demonstrate the cultural embeddedness of heterogender in sexual anatomies. An analysis of research on vascular and hormonal etiologies for female sexual dysfunctions reveals that scientific understandings of sexual bodies reflect socially derived assumptions about how properly heterogendered bodies should function, and this provides a crucial link between feminist critique and science studies.

Under continued, broad, and pervasive conditions of symbolic clitoridectomy—a bracketing of the clitoris by means of linguistic and discursive erasure—the carnal discovery of the clitoris poses circumstances where women often confront and negotiate symbolic purgatory, a situation in which most women discover “it” long before they fully acquire the symbolic knowledge that it, indeed, is a clitoris. Based on the written reports of fifteen women, we provide idiographic descriptions of women’s reported recollections of the clitoris by investigating three related dynamics: (1) how women interpret the meanings of the clitoris in circumstances relatively absent of significant symbols; (2) how the clitoris becomes a significant symbol for women; and (3) how broader discourses inform how women make meaning of the clitoris. This study documents a clitoral somatic career that is marked by three important junctures of discovery, knowledge, and meaning making: discovering the sensations of the clitoris, putting the clitoris into discourse, and negotiating contested uses of pleasure. As we argue, the sensual embodiment of the clitoris is emergent in active and reflective practices in which women both sense and make sense.

This two-day conference proposes to examine the history of conceptions of sexuality and of gender relations that have, explicitly or implicitly, been used in sexological “constructions” since the mid-19th century. The knowledge, theories and practices to which “sexology” refers imply specific conceptions of sexuality. Sexology is a social (and, above all, medical, psychological, psychiatric or even legal) response to the questions people ask about “their sexuality”. Its history has shifted from a “proto-sexology”, centered around perversions and deviancies, to a second phase with a focus on the “function of orgasm” and on sexual behaviors (Béjin 1982). Sexology is evolving with the emergence of “sexual medicine”, “sexual health” and “sexual rights”, trends that weigh on the reformulation of theories of sexuality. Papers will present material from medical, scientific or educational sources or from institutions involved in the medicalization of sexuality. The accepted papers will be grouped by subject, geographical area, historical period or historiographical approach as a function of the two-day program, and each group will be assigned a discussant who will Chair the session and open discussion of the papers presented. Abstracts and papers can be submitted and presented in English or French. There will not be official simultaneous translation during the conference. Participants are expected to understand both languages. Plans are in the works for editing the papers presented at the conference for a book to be published by a French publishing house specialized in multidisciplinary books.

Signs: The Journal of Women in Culture and Society , 2018

Abstract: Researchers in the fields of affective neuroscience, psychology, urology, and physiology attempting to understand some of the conflicting politics around questions of women's sexual pleasure as a context to their own scientific work, much to their credit, are now frequently considering historical accounts of these ideas (O'Connell, Sanjeevan, and Huston 2005; Pfaus et al. 2016). But many of the most accessible humanistic works that discuss the history of ideas about women's genitals and orgasms are plagued by a common historical myth: the notion that repressive views on sex in the Victo-rian era were primarily responsible for the denial of the clitoris and its central role in women's orgasmic response and for the reification of the vagina as the central organ of women's pleasure. Yet any scholar who has studied many nineteenth-century texts about sexuality across French, British, German, Ital-ian, and US cultures cannot help noticing that female sexual pleasure was in fact heavily represented in medical thought throughout this time. The view of the Victorians as sexually repressed was famously mocked by Michel Fou-cault in the first volume of The History of Sexuality as a myth that serves to reassure us that we in the present are now liberated sexually (1976, 1–22). But it seems that Foucault's laughter has had little impact on popular ideas about the origin of the overprivileging of vaginal pleasure and denigration of the clitoris that is understood to be part of the modern Western medical tradition. Hence, the first section of this article proposes a corrective to the historical schema that is widely circulated in popular writing about this question. Nineteenth-century medicine was not unanimously dominated by attempts to deny clitoral pleasure to women, and differing views about female sexual-ity circulated throughout this time, just as they did in the early modern era. Moreover, the notion of vaginal orgasm was strictly a twentieth-century invention , and no corollary of it can be found prior to this time. There never was an era that was or is liberated in its views about female pleasure, for the simple reason that there is never just one view shared by everyone on the matter—our own time is a case in point.

PsyPAG Quarterly, 2012

Bmj, 2014

Effective participation in "vagina dialogues" requires more than health practitioners no longer beating around the bush. According to Berry1, female patients frequently use all sorts of euphemisms to describe their genitalia, implying some sense of shame associated with the anatomically correct terms. The author asserts that

Both the elongation of the vaginal labia minora (Southern Africa) and practices aiming at tightening the vagina (Central and Southern Africa) are under scrutiny due to the need to find possible reasons for the spread of HIV/AIDS in the region. These practices show multivalent resonance between body, society, eroticism and health. They are a "women's secret" and express an area of power that women have been developing and protecting despite many forms of oppression over generations . Resembling the practice of elongating labia minora to close the vaginal orifice, considered "open" following childbirth and frequent coitus, the majority of women use a variety of substances in order to close up, contract, or reduce the vaginal canal. These practices are related to notions of femininity, womanhood, eroticism, pleasure and health. They are an expression of female strategic power. A joint statement by has defined these practices as Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) of Type IV. Although their categorization as FGM has raised many concerns, the new definition of FGM (OHCHR et al 2008) maintains this classification. The article is part of a WHO multi-country research project on Gender, Sexuality and Vaginal Practices and is based on ethnographic data gathered during 2005 in the Tete Province in Mozambique. It studies local notions of femininity that include beauty, sexuality, pleasure, well-being, health, reproduction, fertility and pain. The article discusses the appropriateness of considering these practices as FGM and stresses the need to rethink discourses on sexuality. It raises the issue of developing a clear definition on genital mutilation. It debates why some sexual practices are perceived as female genital mutilation and others are not. Why is the elongation of the labia minora considered a female genital mutilation in Africa while aesthetic vaginal surgery such as labiaplasty, vaginoplasty, vaginal reconstruction, vaginal rejuvenation or tightening are widely publicized in the western world and well known surgeons and clinics allowed to perform definitive modifications on the vagina? Why is the use of sexual play lubricants acquired in the shops in the West not considered as female genital mutilation and the use of products with the same objective and results are considered as such when home produced in Africa or when acquired in the shops in Asia? Who decides what female genital mutilation is and what is not?