Ivy, Nicole N.
Description
"In Materia Medica, Nicole Ivy traces the lives of enslaved women who were the object of medical experimentation by gynecologists J. Marion Sims and t
...
he lesser-known Nathan Bozeman. In considering the lives of the women who passed through the Montgomery, Alabama clinic opened by Sims and later taken over by Bozeman, Ivy marks their centrality to the production and circulation of professional medical knowledge and celebrity. The lives of Sims's and Bozeman's patients have been the subjects of recovery projects by other Black feminist artists and scholars; here, Ivy does not recover their stories but instead theorizes the value they produced as they traveled through the circuit of medical knowledge production as both currency and commodity. Ivy argues that an undertheorized dimension of slavery's extractive work was the force of what she calls representational labor, wherein Black female bodies were deployed as surrogates for patients imagined, ultimately, as white women, to represent the prowess of the white male physician. The book considers the processes by which enslaved persons are denied the rights to their own flesh, and reconstituted as open to interpretation, bridging nineteenth century medical manuals with twenty-first century creative works"-- Provided by publisher.
Read more