Vaginas, Vulvas, and Container Theory

• In Event: Opening up Containment: Spaces, Trajectories, and Forms of Life - III

Abstract

Holding powers are key dimensions of technology and material culture but remain relatively under-examined. Zoë Sofia’s STS feminist theory of Container Technologies explains how containment is what defines both the tool or object and its function – the kind of space it is but also what it holds. Basic containers can function unaided, as stand-alone holding devices or conduits. As such they readily retreat to the background of our awareness.

Similarly invisible and under-appreciated are vulvas and vaginas. Historically, medical discourse depicted women’s bodies as untrustworthy containers: nurturing and pleasure-giving but also diseased and ‘hysterical’. No wonder then that vulvas and vaginas have labyrinthine and troubled histories. As spaces, they are quintessentially liminal: leaky and openable even as they hold. Vaginas and vulvae problematize inside/outside and confound two-dimensional surface and three-dimensional depth.

This paper builds on these knowledges by bringing together STS feminist articulations of containment with feminist phenomenological theories of gender and the body. Interviews with people who have actively chosen their vaginal/vulval modes of being (via bottom surgery or ‘designer vagina’ surgery), as well as with those who have experienced vaginas and vulvas since birth, are presented and analysed in order to interrogate ways that we experience and articulate vulval/vaginal being-in-space.

Authors

• Meredith Jones, Brunel University London

• Meredith Jones, Brunel University London