The Empress
I spent the summer of 2019 in Edinburgh, Scotland, making an ethnographic film as part of my MA in Visual Anthropology at Goldsmiths. I went to Edinburgh to explore the ways in which young, self-identifying womxn understood and mitigated contraceptive technologies. Using my own experience as a catalyst, I was aware that for a lot of young womxn contraception is a necessary evil; a liberating medical technology but with negative and unpredictable mental and physical side effects. Cultural and medical narratives seem to emphasise the distinct benefits of pregnancy prevention, menstruation regulation and sexual liberation while simultaneously normalising side effects, thereby forcing women to disassociate from how the technology affects them individually. This sentiment is not uncommon for womxn when interacting with medicine, wherein an overemphasis on androcentric narratives prioritise empiricism, positivism and ocularcentrism within a bifurcated system that ultimately works to negate women’s embodied knowledge and feeling in favour of objective and quantifiable evidence. I was, therefore, interested in documenting these individual, embodied, sensory, and sometimes unseen, experiences of contraception in relation to these larger discourses.
Regardless of random sampling methods and a diverse range of participants, my interviews and ethnographic encounters were overwhelmingly centred around certain types of practices which can most easily be defined as occult or modern witchcraft. Many of the womxn used a mixture of meditative techniques with crystals, intention setting, aromatherapy, tarot card reading, talismans, astrology, herbology and personal rituals in order to gain a sense of autonomy over their mental and physical health when using contraception. Modern witchcraft is increasingly popular, especially amongst young womxn, and I became interested in the embodiment of these practices in relation to contraception.
Many participants explicitly expressed their distrust for the medical institution, citing first hand negative experiences with clinicians, painful encounters, complicated terminology, a lack of empathy, judgmental conversations, and dismissal of experiences that could not easily be communicated either through language or visual evidence. Feeling as though they were unable to rely on the institution, informants found these alternative practices to be more personal, embodied, empowering and overall autonomous. Today, witchcraft and the occult are seen as paradoxical to the rational science of medicine; playing into the dichotomous hierarchy that structures Western thought, whereby witchcraft practices are symbolic, unseen, subjective, transgressive, emotive, and fundamentally associated with women. Many of these practices require alternative epistemologies - for example attending to our undermined sensory and extrasensory perception - otherwise excluded in Western medicine. This is perhaps unsurprising given that contraceptive technologies work from within the body and refuse to succumb to the ocularcentrism of scientific practice.
I was already invested in understanding the historical conditions in which womxn had been excluded from medical and scientific narratives through genealogical analyses (for example, Foucault, 1963), and yet as Federici (2004) has rightly acknowledged, these histories fail to take into account the role of the witch hunts as a concomitant narrative in the acceleration of gendered medical discourses. Reading these two discourses together from the 1600s and the witch trials in Edinburgh revealed a nuanced connection between the birth of modern medicine, associated with men, and the decline of healing, midwifery and witchcraft, and concomitant occult practices, traditionally associated with women. I recognised parallels in the discourses that condemned women for their sexuality during the witch craze and those same narratives that reappeared during the mid 20th century as modern contraceptive pills were first becoming popular in the West; I learnt about the ways in which women were experimented on during the trials and how this legitimised the study of female anatomy, and further how these narratives were reanimated during the invention of gynecology in the 1800s and the inception of modern contraceptive technologies through colonial endeavours which attempted to control indigenous populations portrayed as hypersexual and immoral; I read the first feminist critique of Western or modern science, The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish, a science-fiction novel published in 1666, during the witch trials, which disavows positivist experimentation and a single reality - an argument reiterated in transgressive feminist science fiction today; I excavated the fallacious cyborg-goddess paradox born out of the technofeminist movement in the 1970s and 80s, the same period of the The Feminist Health Movement fought for contraceptive freedom in the US; Finally, I explored the meeting of embodiment and biopolitics through a history of the sensory order in the West to understand how ocularcentrism and reason in medicine established a hierarchy that disempowered touch, taste and smell, considered the witches’ senses (Classen, 2004). The result, The Empress, is a diffractive approach to all of these disparate and yet interconnected realities.
The Empress takes its name from the protagonist in Cavendish’s The Blazing World, but is also a member of the tarot deck used by my informants. The Empress tarot card represents womxns’ place in the mystical realm, the menstrual cycle, fertility, and a connection to the natural world through intuition. All the while, Cavendish’s fictional Empress is explicitly critical of microscopes and telescopes which misrepresent nature. Her claims that “Lenses operate in light not darkness, they can enhance one sense but are of no use to any of the others”, explicitly censures the disembodied pursuit of science through ocularcentrism. The Empress, plays on this by exploring non-representation, refusing realism as a stylistic device in ethnographic film, and thereby undercutting the medical and masculine gaze that demands the objectification and festishization of women. In doing so, it pays tribute to the etymology of ‘occult’, meaning ‘to conceal’; igniting a nocturnal feminism and the darkness, secrecy, mysticism and concealment of witchcraft. It does this primarily through contrasting and comparing medical imagery, animated from gynaecological lab imaging, with the ethnographic images of my informants. In doing so, the piece forces the viewer to consider which makes more sense, which is more affective, and which seems more ‘real’.
The piece began as a sound-scape made using contact microphones placed along my informants bodies during interviews in an attempt to translate the emotive properties of touch and non-visual or non-linguistic communication to further challenge the Western sensory hierarchy and ocularcentrism. Both the audio and the visual aspects take inspiration from science-fiction and magical realism. Moreover, the inherent darkness in the subject matter and the stylistic choices requires that the film be watched in the dark in order to see images and animations hidden when viewed in the light. Whilst referencing Cavendish’s Empress and the occult, this also allows the multisensory and haptic elements of the sound-piece to be more affective. Given that we cannot see contraception within our bodies, the refusal of full clarity forces the viewer to develop an embodied empathy and mobilise senses otherwise forgotten.
You can watch the film at the end of this page, or find the accompanying academic essay here.
