Search

This article examines certain historical instances of the gyneco-scopic regime that established the rules and codes of perception, knowledge, and over-codification of the female body as a visible genital body, knowable and reducible to the vagina and the uterus. We then go on to examine a group of contemporary works that challenge this order or, at the very least, de-structure the modern, colonial, and androcentric ways of seeing genitalia. The gyneco-scopic regime of modernity is founded in the synecdochal slicing up of the female body (cuts that are visual, anatomical, and aesthetic), its ultra visibility (exploration, territorialization, and optical penetration), and the paradoxical covering up of the many forms of symbolic, historical, and material violence that have made and continue to make this visual order possible in the first place. A series of works, including installations and performances, by artists such as Frida Kahlo, Ana Mendieta, Enrique Chagoya, Regina José Galindo, Vik Muniz, and Candice Lin, among others, make the violence of this gyneco-scopic regime explicit; moreover, in some cases the art blocks or fractures the gaze set upon the genital body, disrupting the relationship of subordination between the observer and the observed, thereby resisting what Michel Foucault calls the power of the eye.