As Bettina Judd says, “Gynecology was built on the backs of Black women anyway” (Feelin 166). The traumatic past regarding how Black female bodies were initially exploited and dehumanized as objects of medical research and voyeuristic curiosity in the nineteenth century is thus evoked by the speculum in Judd’s 2014 Patient, a collection of poems triggered by anger. Registering not only scientific achievement but also medical racism, the speculum is re-appropriated by Judd as a medium that unfolds the physical and emotional experience of those previously unknown Black women patients, whose treatment as non-humans can still be unequivocally felt in their descendants of contemporary America. Thus said, this paper wants to examine the unheard voices and the affective knowledge derived from the reflections on Black women’s physical and mental exploitation in Judd’s Patient and its interrogation of an intersectional suppression that aligns the ghosts of nineteenth-century Black women patients with those of contemporary Black women patients received in the hospital.

Authors:
Han Sheng Wang, National Pingtung University of Science and Technology, Taiwan

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Han-sheng Wang is currently an Associate Professor of National Pingtung University of Science and Technology, Taiwan.

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