Talks

Feminist Ontologies and Affect: Reframing Medical Objectivity with the Callascope – Presenter

May 28, 2021 (VIRTUAL) – The Aleph Festival of Art and Science, UNAM

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, director 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 Markey considers 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.

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The Myth of Post-Racial Avatars

April 16, 2021, MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing Graduate Thesis Presentations

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Art Meets Science: Reimagining medical imagery and health equity – Panelist

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Creating Space for Interdisciplinary Thinking and Doing – Moderator

January 2021

Calla Campaign and the Center for Global Women’s Health Technologies Panel Event

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Ruby Friday | The Calla Campaign: The Art of Self-Exploration – Presenter

Ruby Fridays are casual art talks offered at noon most Fridays during the semester in the Rubenstein Arts Center’s Ruby Lounge. Speakers include Duke faculty and students who are creating or exhibiting work in the Ruby, visiting artists from far and wide, and local creatives. Learn about the amazing art being created on Duke’s campus, the behind-the-scenes aspect of the creative process, careers in the arts, and more. A free lunch is included!

Rubenstein Arts Center at Duke University

The Callascope is a device developed to aid in the visualization of the cervix without the need for a speculum. In addition to its clinical utility screening for diseases such as cervical cancer, the device has become the inspiration for an art project, the Calla Campaign, in which it is being used to empower women through literal self-exploration. The campaign has organized artist-led workshops in which participants utilize creativity and art to explore the self. The workshops, in turn, provide raw material for an art exhibit, which will engage an even broader community on the important conversation of self-exploration for empowerment. For this Ruby Friday presentation, four students involved in the project will tell the story of this unique, interdisciplinary exhibit: how a new medical device became the basis for an exhibit focused on self-exploration, what the primary material for the exhibit was and how it was collected, and how engagement with women in workshops and elsewhere has showed that self-exploration of the reproductive anatomy—both literal and symbolical—can be an empowering experience.

More information: The Rubenstein Arts Center at Duke University