Response

Abstract

Response Gannit Ankori When Emily Culpepper's Period Piece was first screened in Harvard Divinity School's (HDS) Sperry lecture hall thirty-two years ago, I don't believe a single person in the audience could have foreseen that a Museum of Menstruation would be established on the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s.1 Or that by 2006, the visual art included in the museum's virtual collection—for example, Von Taylor's The Star-Tamponed Banner, a composition composed of 286 tampons—would provoke giggles rather than shock or embarrassment.2 [End Page 140] The existence of a Museum of Menstruation and additional related (and more profoundly significant) developments would not have been possible without Emily Culpepper and her peers. Their pathbreaking intellectual and creative work in the early 1970s broke the menstruation taboo and the conspiracy of silence that shrouded the sights and sounds related to so-called bleeding wombs. When I first heard about Period Piece in Ann Braude's inspirational convocation address in fall 2005, I rushed over to Andover Harvard Theological Library to look up Emily Culpepper's Master of Divinity thesis.3 As an art historian, immersed in what I term "visual epistemology," I felt compelled to verify my intuitive understanding that at a certain point in her academic studies, HDS student Emily Culpepper realized that words sometimes simply are not enough. A bold confrontation with menstrual blood required a different medium. Colors were needed, hence her thesis title, "Menstruation Mantra: Red, Crimson, Sienna, Scarlet." In order to break a taboo—you must show the forbidden sight, expose what previously had been covered up in shame. Culpepper's thesis reflected a double movement: a shift from deconstruction to reconstruction, and from the textual to the visual. She began by examining what canonical religious texts had to say about menstruation. However, as Braude cogently observed, "concluding that she could spend the rest of her life analyzing negative attitudes toward menstruation, Culpepper decided to explore the subject from a positive point of view."4 Her effort to re-vision menstruation as a positive experience entailed using visual amalgamations of body language and the language of art. Hence, she created a film, Period Piece, and a series of ten drawings based on the sensations evoked by the sight of her cervix during menstruation, which she called "Menstruation Yantras."5 It seems to me that only visual images had the power to expose and valorize what had previously been deemed unworthy of representation—the "unshowable" vagina, body hair, genitalia, and menstrual blood. In the brief time that has been allotted to me I would like to consider Period Piece as a period piece, that is, to view it within the context of the 1970s women's movement and more specifically to link it to the pioneering phase of feminist art. Know Thyself—nosce te ipsum—was a prevalent motto promoting the study of the human body and its anatomical intricacies by male artists throughout the [End Page 141] centuries.6 From the very beginning, feminist activists understood that to "know thyself" entailed the exploration of their own female bodies. In 1970, here in Boston, the Women's Health Book Collective published the first of numerous editions of the book Our Bodies, Ourselves.7 The cervical self-examination that Culpepper documented in her film became a paradigm for self-knowledge and empowerment. In art historical terms—the female body had been constructed as a passive object following specific conventions.8 These conventions regulated what could or could not be shown, what was worthy or unworthy of representation.9 Thus, breasts were often the focal point of countless artistic compositions; the vagina, in contrast, was a forbidden sight. Hair upon the head was considered alluring, beautiful; pubic hair or hairy legs were a no-no. The blood of Christ or of martyrs was holy; menstrual blood was a strict taboo.10 Period Piece shows the body of a subject viewing herself. The mirror in the film...