Feminist Ontologies and Affect: Reframing Medical Objectivity with the Callascope

May 28, 2021 – El Aleph Festival de Arte y Ciencia (The Aleph Festival of Art and Science)

How does medical imagery and the cinematic image both serve as aesthetic technologies for change? In a visual culture dominated by corporeal realism, how can more embodied, sensorial ways of knowing transform the relationship we have to our bodies? The Callascope (featured in The (In)visible Organ documentary) is a medical device that attaches to a phone that enables individuals to view their own cervix without the use of a speculum. Drawing from Donna Haraway’s notions of a “cyborg” feminist consciousness, Andrea Shinyoung Kim critiques the phallocentrism of Western visual culture through the cervical image in The (In)visible Organ. This discussion with scholar and Latin American film critic Tae Catalina Markeyconsiders how affective relationships to the medical image (from ultrasounds to the cervical image) can reveal and challenge gender-stigmatized perceptions about the inner reproductive anatomy.