END NOTES 1 I want to note here that the vaginal speculum design has not been updated since 1870 and is ‘inextricably linked to extreme racism and misogyny’. The ‘father of American gynecology’ James Marion Sims invented the speculum and would experiment his design on slave women. See: Rose Eveleth, ‘Why No One Can Design a Better Speculum’, The Atlantic, (2014), <https:// www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/11/why-no-one-can-design-a-better-speculum/382534/> [accessed 12 June 2020]. 2 Rajshree Dayanand Katke, Sivanandini Acharya, Soni Mourya, ‘Uterus didelphys with pregnancy and its different maternal and perinatal outcomes’, International Journal of Reproduction, Contraception, Obstetrics and Gynecology, 6 (2017), 4690-4693 (p.4690) <http:// dx.doi.org/10.18203/2320-1770.ijrcog20174465> [accessed 19 July 2020]. 3 Woman is presented here in quotations because having female sexual characteristics and reproductive function does not necessarily determine gender. Many women are tran-gendered and some are intersex and have bodies which comprise of various sexual characteristics. In addition, some trans-men and non-binary people have female reproductive systems and sexual characteristics. In my personal experience as a cis-gendered person, my female reproductive system and sexual characteristics inform my identity as a woman. This being said I reject an essentialist approach to gender as it is limiting and reductive to one’s identity and self expression. 4 Cecilia Tasca with Mariangela Rapetti and others, ‘Women And Hysteria In The History Of Mental Health’, Clinical Practice and Epidemiology in Mental Health, 8 (2012), 110–119. <10.2174/1745017901208010110> [accessed 06 July 2020]. 5 Marina Warner, Fantastic Metamorphosis, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 163. 6 Luce Irigaray, ‘When Our Lips Speak Together’, in The Sex Which is Not One, trans. by Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 205-218 (p.210). 7 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, trans. by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 1. 8 Laura Mulvey, ‘Phantasmagoria’, cited in Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide, (New York: Zone Books, 1997), p. 244. 9 Adriel M. Trott, ‘The Feminine and the Elemental in Greek Myth, Medicine and Early Philosophy’, in Aristotle on the Matter of Form: Α Feminist Metaphysics of Generation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019). 10 Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), p. 81-82. 11 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism, (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 203. 12 Ibid., p. 197. 13 Kristeva, Powers of Horror. 14 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, (New York: Taylor & Francis e-library, 2001), ebook. 15 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, (Oxon: Routledge, 2003), pp. 620-37. 16 Candice Lin, A White Hard Body, ed. by Lotte Arndt and Yesomi Umolu, (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2019). p. 22. Here, Lin refers to liquid states as ‘caretaking’, ‘tender’ and ‘supple’. 17 Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. by Richard A. Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 9.
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