Mapping Redesign: Gynecological Neoliberalism and the Spatiality of Project Yona’s Speculum

Abstract

This essay offers a spatial reading of a prototype for a redesigned speculum and pelvic exam by the technology design team Yona. I contend that the speculum is a racialized and gendered technology that must be understood as situated in a history of the body as space. Using the theoretical tools of feminist geographers and rhetoricians of health and medicine, I interpret the redesign of the speculum through the reassembly of social relations and map how the speculum’s redesign alters the relationality of bodily space. Yona’s exigencies for redesign move the speculum from a troubled history of inefficiency and violence toward neoliberal, feminist notions of health and health care. I clarify how Yona’s reimagined device and exam remap patient bodies in the image of empowerment to produce a patient who is responsible for their own health care, effectively reproducing new formations of oppressive power geometries in the space of the body.