The Vagina and the Eye of Power (Essay on Genitalia and Visual Sovereignty)

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“Have there been revolts against the gaze?”

Michel Foucault “The Eye of Power”

What and how a society sees or does not see is historically, technologically, and culturally overdetermined. There is a visual engendering of the world. Every era of every culture witnesses the deployment of a series of visual technologies (lighting, optical instruments, tools of reproduction, etc.) and codes to regulate the gaze, not only making the world visible, but generating its cultural conceptualization, representation, codification and decodification. Martin Jay names these general systems “scopic regimes.”¹

This is not an essay about female genitalia, as the title may suggest; it is about power. Or rather, about the eye of power: a matter of visual sovereignty over certain fragmented bodies engendered through visual regimes. We first present several historical instances of what we call the gyneco-scopic regime that establishes the rules and codes of perception, knowledge, and over-codification of the female body as a visible genital body (reproductive and generative), knowable and reductible to the vagina and the uterus. We then turn to a group of contemporary works that challenge this androcentric visual regime that engenders genitalia and gender. The gyneco-scopic regime, as we define it, is founded in: 1) A synecdochical slice, the product of a gaze that cuts the body into pieces, making visual, anatomical, and aesthetic cuts to produce territories or genital organs. These chunks of the body are recodified as synecdoches (that is, the part represents the whole: woman is represented by a piece of herself, genitals represent gender, etc.).2) Ultra-visibility. As in the case of those who are deemed freaks, genital bodies are over exposed to the gaze and they enter into modern culture “not as agents or subjects but as ultravisible icons [...] whose cultural work is to [...] verify the prevailing sociopolitical arrangements arising from representational systems such as gender.”²

This ultra-visibility is manifested in the exploration, exhibition, optical penetration, and ubiquitous representation of female genitalia in modernity. And 3) The paradoxical covering up of multiple forms of historical, material, and symbolic violence that have made and continue to make this visual order possible. The gyneco-scopic regime is a tautological one that is authorized through violence and justifies multiple kinds of violence; a regime that cuts and allows cutting; that is made out of blood yet appears clean before the eyes.

In this essay, we trace the historical construction of female genitalia in modern culture, examining several paradigmatic instances of the visual representation of the vagina and the genital body by anatomists and artists alike. Following this examination, as it were, we present a series of works of art, installations, and performances that resist the sovereignty of the eye; that is, works that expose the violence of the gyneco-scopic regime, obstruct or fracture such visual sovereignty over the genital body, and/or perturb the relationship of subordination between the observer and the observed. We are talking about certain visual insurrections that challenge “the eye of power,” as theorized by Michel Foucault.³

To better understand the tripartite structure of the gyneco-scopic regime and what we deem an insurrection against the eye of power, let us compare Gustave Courbet’s painting L’Origine du monde (1866), a famous realist nude held in the Musée d’Orsay (Img. 1), vis-à-vis the performance piece Miroir de l’Orig- ine (2014) by Luxembourgian artist Deborah De Robertis (b. 1984) (Img. 2). Courbet’s painting (which centers on the torso from the thighs to the breasts; the head, legs, and arms not visible to the viewer) is representative of the gyneco-scopic regime of modernity: the vagina is an identifiable territory on a body that is sliced up and identified as female). In her performance that claims to mirror (i.e, to replicate and invert) Courbet’s painting, De Robertis poses nude with her own live body in front of the painting, enacting an insurrection against the gyneco-scopic regime privileged by the original. As evidenced in photographs of the performance, the artist placed herself in front of the wall of the museum where the painting hangs, legs spread, between the sublime vagina of L’Origine and the spectators, distracting them and making them uncomfortable, and disrupting the act of contemplation that defines the spectator. That De Robertis was arrested for this confirms that she was exposing not only her own body, but also the disparity between the museum-goers’ desire to contemplate female nudes in art and their horror at being confronted with the flesh-and-blood genitalia of a live woman; genitalia that function as resistance to the I and the eye that look at the object: the “actual” vagina of the performer looks back at the spectators, unsettling their otherwise unproblematized contemplation of the female nude. The performative vagina functions then as a Lacanian “radical object”; that is, the object “which objects” and disturbs, enacting a “point from which the object itself returns the gaze."⁴ De Robertis performs the moment when the genital object gazes back at the subject.

An additional example of this contrast between gyneco-scopic sovereignty and visual insurrection against it can be found in, on the one hand, an illustration from a treaty written by the Scottish anatomist William Smellie (1697-1763), showing one of the stages of birth with a still frame of a genital trunk (Img. 3), and, on the other, the same pose as represented in Frida Kahlo’s Mi nacimiento (1932), in which the bloody traces and physical pain suppressed in Smellie’s work are fully visible (Img. 4). The former, like Courbet’s painting, displays the gyneco-scopic sovereignty of the anatomist while the latter con- fronts the gaze of the viewer with the life and pain of childbirth. Kahlo’s paint- ing is not explicitly in dialogue with Smellie’s work per se, in the way that De Robertis engages Courbet, but her work objects to and challenges the cleaned up and asymmetrical representation of the genital body/piece, enacting a “point from which the object itself returns the gaze.”

The gyneco-scopic regime in Courbet and Smellie segments and mutilates, presenting bodies with no face, no extremities. It renders the genitals ultravisible through a territorialized focalization, and it hides the violence that makes these representations possible in the first place (a topic to which we will return). De Robertis and Kahlo, however, disrupt this order. In De Robertis’s performance, artistic exhibitionism perturbs the museum exhibit, and an excess of reality, to borrow the words of Beatriz Jaguaribe, challenges Courbet’s pictoric realism.⁵The vagina with eyes (a gazing organ) interrupts the voyeurism of the spectator, disorganizing the gineco-scopic regime; the vagina itself is turned into an onlooker. Kahlo, on the other hand, lays out a figure in the same pose as that of the Smellie illustration, but with three differences: the entire body is represented, the sheet is bloody, and the mother and fetus are conspicuously dead. Furthermore, the covering up of the face —typical in the gyneco-scopic regime à la Smellie— is explicit in Kahlo’s piece: the sheet covers the face of the dead body, a sort of spectral appearance of the gyneco-scopic cover up.

We would like to offer two additional examples of insurrection against the eye of power to which we are referring: a 19th-century engraving by Hungarian artist Mihály von Zichy (1827-1906) (Img. 5) and the recreation of L’Origine du monde (2015) by US artist Candice Lin (b. 1979) (Img. 6). In Zichy’s engraving, an artist buries his head between the legs of his model, who leans back against the canvas, her feet propped up on the artist’s chair. This is almost a caricature of the scopic focalization that informs Courbet’s nude as well as the eighteenth-century anatomical prints of genitals (the easel stands in as the doctor’s table used for gynecological explorations). More than a representation of the vagina itself, Zichy’s engraving represents the gaze that penetrates and examines, but that is also nearly lost as the observer and the observed, the subject and the object, are mixed up, meshed together in cunilingus and visually undifferentiated. The gynecologist-painter can no longer see the “thing” (and neither can we): the oral overtakes the visual. The viewer witnesses the shipwreck of the gaze in the vagina. As we will discuss, this collapse is carried to an extreme by Lin, who snatches the vaginal trunk and gives it eyes, “all the better to see you with,” as the wolf said to Little Red Riding Hood before devouring her; the vagina looks back at the onlookers. These works challenge the identity of the organ and the gender identity with which it has often been associated (a genital identity), as well as the asymmetry of power in a world divided between those who look and those who are seen. Additionally, they invoke forgotten violences, the horrors and even crimes that are hidden below the achievements of science and great works of art.

Systematic exploration of the human body was initiated during the Renaissance, but until the eighteenth century, the vagina was, generally speaking, conceived of abstractly, represented only in a speculative way, and most of the time rendered invisible. Of course there are numerous exceptions to this concealing. For instance, there are ceramic pieces from pre-Hispanic cultures that show clear anatomical understanding of the clitoris (Img. 7); medieval carnavalesque representations, such as the little pilgrim vaginas (Img. 8); or the disturbing, ornamental Sheela na gig, watching us from her perch on the cornice of a medieval Romanesque church (Img. 9).⁶ But what we wish to point out here are not the exceptions, but rather the general grammar of invisibility that prevailed until the Enlightenment shed its light on female genitalia. For until then, what pre- dominated were speculative representations founded in readings of Aristotle or Galen of Pergamon. The vagina was considered variously as a deformity of male genitals; as an inverted penis, as in De humani corporis fabrica (1543) by Andreas Vesalius (Img. 10); or as a receptacle for the penis, as explained by Matteo Realdo Colombo, supposed discoverer of the clitoris, in his De Re Anatomica (1559). When it is represented, it is shown as a slit or a hole, as in the work of Jacopo Berengario (1535) (Img. 11) and also Johann Vesling.⁷ Before it is represented, the vagina is closed off by a veil that is both optical and epistemological.⁸ This is evident in images (be they artistic or anatomical) such as Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (1484), the anatomical Venus (1560) drawn by the Spaniard Juan Valverde de Amusco (Img. 12), or the illustration of the flower of pregnancy (1627; published by Adriaan van Spiegel in 1631) by Giulio Casseri (Img. 13).⁹

Even Leonardo da Vinci, who made one of the first anatomical illustrations of female genitalia based on dissections (c. 1508) (Img. 14), seems a little lost when he speaks of the female body he draws as a “grand mystery.”¹⁰The important point here is that Da Vinci represents the female body as a pelvis, with no head and no extremities, focalized on the vagina, just as Smellie and Courbet would later do. The Davincian visual display has a direct connection to the gyneco-scopic regime of anatomical illustrations inaugurated by the Scottish anatomists and “fathers of gynecology,” the aforementioned William Smellie and William Hunter (1718-1783).

Smellie and Hunter make female genitals the object of the prestigious gaze of the anatomist and their luxurious treatises on anatomy. The modern anatomization of female genitalia and the uterus are the result of a collaboration between “great men of science”—authorized by their gender, social class, and academic positions— dedicated to dissecting cadavers of pregnant women and commissioning detailed engravings of the dissections. Smellie published A Sett of Anatomical Tables (1754) (Img. 15) and Hunter authored the famous The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus (1774), illustrated by the Dutch Jan van Rymsdyk (1750-1788).¹¹With these treatises, the focalization is such that the entire body is reduced to a pelvic body, with no arms, legs, or head (and thus obviously with no eyes, which is to say, a body that can be looked upon with apparent impunity, with no risk that it will return the gaze). The relationship between this illustrated anatomization and the pelvic body represented by Da Vinci is historic. Hunter discovered and studied Da Vinci’s drawings of the vagina in the Windsor Library.¹²

Between 1750 and 1754, Smellie and Hunter dissected twenty cadavers of pregnant women. Later, between 1766 and 1774, Hunter, assisted by his brother John (1728-1793), dissected approximately twelve more pregnant women.¹³Hunter’s The Anatomy includes thirty-four high quality illustrations. Furthermore, Hunter commissioned several three-dimensional, life-sized plaster sculptures (Img. 16). Eleven of these are housed today in the Hunterian Museum at the University of Glasgow,¹⁴along with several preserved uteruses, fetuses, and vaginas from his dissections (Img. 17). ¹⁵

Hunter epistemologically privileges what is seen and explored vis-à-vis that which is abstracted, idealized, or “conceived in the imagination”¹⁶ and he alleges a scientific correspondence between that which is observed and those territories that are graphically represented. The image that “represents what is actually seen” is true and “becomes almost as infallible as the object itself,” says Hunter in his preface (2 n.p.).¹⁷ One illustration even includes the reflection, on the viscous head of the fetus, of a window that lets in the light (Img. 18; fig. IV). These limitations on seeing and knowing do not call into question the authority of the anatomist’s visual knowledge; rather, they authorize his “visual epistemology.”¹⁸ Smellie and Hunter dissect, map out, penetrate, and scrutinize the female body in order to produce scientific knowledge about it, a move that is paradoxically authorized by artistic drawings.¹⁹ This visual epistemology organizes the body. When we say organize, we mean that it literally divides the body into organs, slices it up, and produces a naturalized identity of, for example, the vagina and the uterus. The genital organs do not exist prior to their anatomization; that is to say, to the series of visual and epistemological cuts that produces the fiction of their identity and that establishes their supposed limits, their connections to other organs, their function, etc.

In Hunter’s illustrations, we notice a series of successive cuts that first suppress the head, the extremities, and the upper part of the torso, leaving the pelvic body with legs spread open (Img. 19). From there, this pelvic body is cut into several deeper layers: the belly is opened by the scalpel and by the anatomist’s eye, and the uterus, fetus, placenta, and even the ovaries and the vaginal tissues are extracted and illustrated (Img. 18). The anatomist is like a butcher (which we suggest with all due respect to professional butchers). Donna Haraway, noting that “[v]ision is always a question of the power to see— and perhaps of the violence implicit in our visualizing practices,” poses the question: “With whose blood were my eyes crafted?.”²⁰In the images that appear so “cleanly” laid out on the pages of Hunter’s book and on his anatomical models, we can glimpse the blood with which the anatomist’s eyes were crafted. But we need to read them historically “against the grain” as Walter Benjamin proposed.²¹

Hunter represents not only a new type of vision cast upon the genitals, but a whole new optics that supposes and at the same time effects —both literally and figuratively— his slicing and dicing of the body into exhibition pieces. In addition to producing a detailed illustration and a three-dimensional reproduction (the plaster models) (Img. 16) as well preserving and collecting organic specimens (Img. 17), Hunter produces knowledge about the “thing” he is representing. That is to say, we are faced with a superposition, an accumulation of ultravisible bodily fragments that is saturated, redundant, and hyperbolic.

In his treatise, Hunter explains that very few doctors have had access to a sufficient number of bodies to carry out their studies, and that in fact the opportunity to dissect a woman’s uterus occurs only one or two times in the life of an anatomist, if indeed it occurs at all.²² Hunter, however, manages to acquire not just one or two, but twelve cadavers of pregnant women; thirty-two if one counts the dissections he did with Smellie. This abundance is suspicious. All anatomists either hired people to ransack cemeteries, known as resurrectionists (Hunter himself was a famous exhumer, Img. 20), or they were able to attain the bodies of executed criminals.²³Yet it is doubtful that these sources would have been able to provide fresh corpses of pregnant women in different months of gestation, much less thirty-two. Keep in mind too that pregnant women were not executed, and that when they died of natural causes this was much more typical during childbirth or miscarriage, not before. Even in the case of the death of a pregnant woman, one would have to have an effective and efficient network of communication to get to the body before it began to decay. In an article published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Don Shelton examines the relevant statistics and argues that the “father of gynecology” obtained the bodies of prostitutes by hiring murderers.²⁴The aptly named Dr. Hunter hunted pregnant women. The abundance of fresh, untraumatized corpses that Hunter had at his disposal is difficult to explain in any other way. The gynecological gaze rests on the corpus delicti; i.e., the anatomical specimen is the body of a crime (Img. 21).

But even if we give Hunter the benefit of the doubt, the point about the violent slicing and symbolic butchering remains. Courbet’s L’Origine du monde is to visual art what Hunter’s atlas and three-dimensional models are to anatomy: a gyneco-scopic paradigm; that is, a visual regime that structures the androcentric invention, representation, and subordination of the female body through synecdochal slicing, the ultravisibility of the genitals, and the erasure of the historical conditions of this asymmetry. What we have are paradigms in the Foucauldian sense: orphan examples of a totality that constitute and make intelligible certain historical contexts.²⁵

Setting aside the famous and much studied history of Courbet’s painting —which was commissioned by a Turkish diplomat for a private voyeurist display of female nudes, copied by René Magritte (1940), and purchased by Jacques Lacan, who hung it in his office and covered it with a sliding mechanism behind an abstract drawing by André Masson that paid homage to Courbet’s original— let us concentrate instead on the sinister dimension of the painting, which is to say its Hunterian dimension.²⁶ For the majority of critics, the body displayed in Courbet’s L’Origine du monde is not, at least not explicitly, a cadaver. In fact, critics often underscore the erotic vitality of the image, which, according to British artist Tracey Emin (b. 1963) invites men —let us assume she means to say men and women— to bury their heads “right in there.”²⁷ However, early observers of the painting, such as writer and photographer Maxime du Camp (1822-1894), were scandalized by the absence of a head and extremities.²⁸More recently, historian Jean-Jacques Fernier entertained the notion that Courbet may have originally painted the whole body, but that the painting was mutilated after the fact; that is to say, the work of art was the object and victim of a Hunterian quartering (Img. 22). This hypothesis was based on the appearance of Tête de femme, Courbet’s painting of a head that supposedly corresponds to the torso of L’Origine.²⁹ In any case, L’Origine does not represent a full female body but rather a slice of one, cut off by the frame at the same place as the bodies in several of Hunter’s illustrations (Img. 23). The pallidness of the skin and the mortuary gauze surrounding the body suggest death. This body, like the bodies in Hunter’s works, cannot see us and never will. Whosoever buries their head “there” is implicated in a game of necrophiliac orality that ignores the violence and the optical objectification laid out in the painting. Sophie Matisse’s painting Origin of the World (2013) in fact reproduces the nude as a (spectral) body covered entirely by a sheet over a black background, emphasizing the morbidity we identify in the Courbet piece.³⁰

Allow us now to briefly comment Etánt donnés (1946-1966) by Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), an installation that can itself be considered a metacritical work of gyneco-scopic voyeurism. Etánt donnés is an installation with several layers: first there is a wall with a gate; through two holes in the gate, the viewer can see a small space; at the back of that space, there is a wall with a hole in it, and behind that, a landscape in which a nude woman lies amidst the grass, holding up a lamp that illuminates the composition (Img. 24). The woman’s head is blocked from the viewer’s line of sight; the smooth body reclines with legs splayed open, revealing a hairless vagina that appears less like a genital organ and more like a wound or a fissure in the alabaster surface of her skin.

Etánt donné makes the spectator’s voyeurism explicit at the same time that it produces an ocular-vaginal mise en abyme. The work visually materializes what María Elena Úbeda has called “the crisis of the scopic regime,” in the sense that it both influences and denounces the spectator-voyeur.³¹The rigor of the pose and the appearance of the vagina-wound could validate the perspective of those critics who suggest that Duchamp based his nude on photographs of the scene of a famous crime known as “the Black Dahlia murder”. But not only does the work of art cite the crime, the crime itself seems to be the staging of several surrealist motifs of the mutilation of female bodies. Take, for example, the work of Hans Bellmer, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, or Man Ray, where the female body is “composed” in pieces or lifeless, and is always a thing; a disarticulated mannequin or a reclining cadaver (Img. 25).

Mark Nelson and Sarah Hudson Bayliss suggest that the homicide, mutilation, and disposition of the body of Elizabeth Short (the victim) were part of a surrealist installation by the painter Man Ray (1890-1976), a friend of Duchamp.³² So although Etánt donnés can be read as critical of the gyneco-scopic regime, we must uphold our suspicions of it and perhaps even consider it a sinister voyeuristic machine, as Candice Lin does.

Lin takes on the three historical moments we have referred to here (Hunter, Courbet and Duchamp) with an audiovisual sculptural installation that brings the gyneco-scopic regime into focus. Lin’s Hunter Moon / Inside Out (2015) (Img. 26) reproduces the three-dimensional model made by William Hunter (our “serial gynecologist”) (Img. 16). Hunter Moon / Inside Out is not an exact replica of the anatomical model; it lacks detail, it has a silvery metallic surface, and it looks unreal, artificial. The flesh of Lin’s sculpture is not flesh; it resists being consumed as an object and the sense of estrangement it produces refers back to the ominous eye of the doctor and of the voyeuristic viewer. Through Hunter Moon / Inside Out we do not see the anatomical body so much as we become aware of the anatomist who cut up the body and left us the inedible scraps. In other words, Lin makes visible what the Hunterian model hides: the violent scopic territorialization and the syndechocal subordination of the female body; the relation between the consumption of art and the consumption of the body; and, in the end, the multiple forms of misogynist violence, both material and symbolic, that founds androcentric modernity.

The interior of the sculpture contains a video titled Inside Out.³³ To see it, the spectator-voyeur must bend down, put their head between the legs of the sculpture, and peek through a small hole in order to penetrate the unknown territory of this vagina / camera obscura. Inside, other vaginas taken from Courbet and Duchamp threaten to devour the vulnerable eye, submitting it to a monstrous, indeed cannibalistic optic. We cannot fully capture in words the complexity of the video; we can merely draw attention to some of its more striking aspects. The first image is from Duchamp’s Étant donnés. The spectator, looking through the vagina of Lin’s sculpture, sees Duchamp’s door with its two holes, but through those holes two eyes gaze back, preventing the viewer from seeing the Étant donnés nude. Furthermore, the peepholes on the Duchamp door look vaguely like eyes thanks to what looks like a natural discoloration of the wood, but in Lin’s piece, the smudged wood is a fully formed witch (a naked teratological witch) whose eyes impede any replication of the voyeuristic experience found in the Duchamp installation (Img. 27). Then Lin opens Duchamp’s door and there is no landscape but rather a cartoonish version of Courbet's L'Origine du monde (Img. 28) in which the vagina of the famous painting has eyes. Whereas Duchamp’s installation obliges the viewer to recognize his/her nosy voyeurism, Lin’s video-sculpture rejects the voyeuristic eye/I: the spectator peers through a small hole, but instead of the body-object on passive display, the viewer is faced with a vagina that looks back.

Lin’s sculpture is not the only work of art to destructure the sovereignty of the eye over the female genitals and expose the violence of this voyeurism, disrupting the relation of subordination between the observer and the observed, and even producing a disidentification of the vagina as a sexual and reproductive organ. Allow us to explore a few additional examples.

In the performance Esperando al príncipe azul (Awaiting Prince Charming) (1999), by Regina José Galindo (Guatemala b. 1974), the artist lies naked under a bridal sheet with a small embroidered hole that serves as an irregular decentered framing of the vagina (Img. 29). In its social and religious context, this sheet would function as a mechanism to prevent the obscenity of intercourse, ensuring minimal contact between husband and wife and a type of intercourse defined by a generative teleology (after all, genital, from gignō, give birth or engender, refers to reproduction). In the performance, however, the sheet exposes the obscenity of the mechanism itself. Whereas Galindo’s performance exhibits a body destined for reproduction, the title Esperando al príncipe azul suggests a body awaiting a romantic amorous encounter. The inverse occurs in Courbet’s L’origine du monde, where the title suggests reproduction while the painting represents an eroticized body. Galindo, through a visual segmentation and genital ultravisibility critiques domestic(ated) sexuality.

Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta (1948-1985) offers an intense visual exploration of the vagina, both as a sign of androcentric violence and as utopian and affirmative retrospection of a “primordial” femininity. An example of the former, in the performance Body Tracks (1974), Mendieta explores genital violence by tracing a “V” down a white wall with bloodied hands. In her series of carved limestone Esculturas Rupestres (Rupestrian Sculptures 1981) and El laberinto de Venus (Labyrinth of Venus 1982), Mendieta reinvents the symbolic power of genitals vis-à-vis phallic power with a series of “prehistoric” sculptures, retrospectively anterior to modern gyneco-aesthetic discourses and images (Img. 30). The artist subverts the gyneco-scopic focalization and representation of the pelvic body and proposes disembodied vaginas, vaginas that are the entire body: “vulvocentric” bodies³⁴that circumscribe the eye.

Brazilian artist Vik Muniz (b. 1961) creates two (sub)versions of the famous painting by Courbet. The first is a photograph made of dust or dirt, which plays with the common moralist association between female genitalia and filth (Img. 31). In the second piece, Muniz remakes L’Origine from an assemblage of journal clippings (Img. 32) that are reminiscent of the anatomic and artistic procedure of cutting that produced the genital organization of the female body. Muniz’s vagina-collage is both a mimetic representation and a distortion of Courbet: as the eye gets closer, the image disintegrates into tiny pieces of paper (Img. 33). As we have seen, the vagina-synecdoque only exists through a scopic focalization and a series of visual, anatomical, and aesthetic cuts. Muniz offers a cultural artefact that, by drawing near and focusing, allows for the deterritorialization of the vagina.

Two Origins of the World (2000) by Mexican artist Enrique Chagoya (b. 1953) recycles L’Origine du monde as a spectral backdrop behind three solid black, blue and white squares of canvas in three of the corners of the painting (Img. 34). In the foreground of the bottom right corner, an indigenous man sits at a fourth canvas, this one on an easel, apparently “interpreting” the Courbet painting. The indigenous painter does not offer a genital genesis like Courbet’s, but rather a chromatic genesis that is superimposed over the Eurocentric origin of the world: the work takes the náhuatl cosmogony that privileges four fundamental colors corresponding to the four cardinal points, which are associated with the creation of the universe and the gods Tezcatlipoca (black), Huitzilopochtli (blue), Quetzalcoatl (white), and Xipe Totec (red). Over the Eurocentric backdrop of Courbet’s cosmogonic pubis, Chagoya reorients the world with a counter-colonial gesture, revindicating the indigenous cultural signs erased by colonialism. Furthermore, Chagoya superposes the “sensual” and “maternal” Courbetian vagina with a canvas covered in blood red, evoking menstrual bleeding-in itself a sign of non-pregnancy.

Returning to Hunter Moon, Lin’s sculpture, as we have said, subverts Hunter’s plaster model and, upon further examination (as it were), turns out to be exhibiting the violence of the anatomist himself and also the spectator (Img. 35). Hunter is of course the last name of the famous anatomist, but also the noun for one who hunts and kills. The title Hunter Moon also evokes agricultural reproduction and the matter of seeing, as a Hunter’s Moon, also known as Harvest Moon or Blood Moon, is the full moon nearest the beginning of the fall or the autumnal equinox, which because it comes up right after sunset helps harvesters and hunters with its light. This supplemental though murky light of a “blood red” moon enables the eye of the hunter, marks the reproductive harvest, but also sheds light on the violence of Hunter’s hunting, gutting, and cutting up of the female “reproductive” organs (i.e., genitals).

We can also read Hunter Moon as an “obscene exhibit,” for to moon in English refers to the exhibitionist gesture of dropping one’s pants and showing one’s backside as a vulgar prank. In this perverse sense, the piece in effect “moons” the museum, the anatomist and his gynecological figures, and finally the inclined spectator (who is placed in a position to moon everybody else in the gallery). The second part of the title, the oxymoron Inside Out, means just that: what is supposed to be hidden from sight on the inside is exposed; it also means topsy turvy or the reverse of the usual. Thus the title proposes an exploration and an inversion of Hunter’s anatomical figure. The very artifact is pregnant with an amorphous creature, made from bits and pieces continuously disassem- bled and reassembled. The creature does not suggest the kind of generation that defines gender; rather, it is formed from the degeneration or teratological-genesis that questions the generation of gender and that denies the spectator any relief through its constant audiovisual flow of a body becoming: vagina with eyes, vagina-face, anthropomorphous vagina, headless woman, two-headed woman, castrating vagina, vagina dentata, vagi-penis, arm-foot, wolf-penis, the body becoming vagina; bodies in a state of destruction, regeneration, amidst discontinuous sounds, heterogeneous music, and messages devoid of syntax (Img. 36). The female body, organized and normalized by the anatomical and aestheticizing eye/I, becomes a gyneco-scopic monster, an anomalous body in the Deleuzian sense; that is, “the unequal, the coarse, the rough, the cutting edge of deterritorialization.”³⁵We do not mean to suggest that the images represent “abnormality,” but rather a “de-normalization.” There is no border crossing: there is instead an undoing of borders, a de-organization of the genital realm.³⁶

In conclusion, we posit that Lin’s sculpture represents one of those “insurrections” against the eye (Foucault calls it “the gaze”) that the French philosopher puts forth³⁷: a radical disordering or a coup against the gyneco-scopic regime; its epistemic violences, exclusions, and asymmetries. Hunter Moon / Inside Out Lacanianly materializes the subjection of the subject and the resistance, the gaze of the object.³⁸ Or, amounting to the same thing, in this work of art, the vagina resists being an object and challenges the observer by looking back with the perturbing, discomfiting gaze of the Other. Lin’s work not only produces what Paul Preciado calls an inversion-investment of the body,³⁹ but also a semiotic de-territorialization of the genital organ and a serious aesthetic challenge to the visual sovereignty that engenders gender as a genital thing.⁴⁰

The genitalia engendered by the sovereign eye/I defies such engendering by looking back, unsettling the naturalized visual order that organized the body. We must embrace the degeneration of the gineco-scopic regime; that is, the radical disorganization of the body; a body without organs that becomes the rhizome that triggers a “liberation of sexuality not only from reproduction but also from genitality.”⁴¹ The territorialized vagina can indeed become the line of flight where we can begin to see an insurrection against a tyrannical sovereignty that has ruled for too long over our bodies, our sexualities, and ultimately over our lives.