A satirical take on gender bias in medical textbooks
What Doctors (Really) Think About Sex, Abortion and Virginity, and delved into the lack of gender sensitisation in medical textbooks. Her research further led her to Dr Suchitra Dalvie, gynaecologist and co-founder of Asia Safe Abortion Partnerships, which works for women’s sexual and reproductive health rights, who also wrote about dated medical textbooks. Suddenly, her experiences as a woman and queer person were beginning to make sense.
Over four years, she developed a satirical, interactive multimedia performance titled The Flabby-Breasted Virgin and Other Sordid Tales on modern and ancient interpretations of the female body through medical text. It started online in 2022 during the covid-19 pandemic. Now, the performance is available for viewing on demand on their website.
The hour-long performance is a tongue-in-cheek look at the absurdity of medical textbooks on virginity and jurisprudence. It is as funny as it is groundbreaking. Women dance in front of magnified textbook pages, the Sushruta Samhita, an ancient Sanskrit text on medicine, is discussed inventively, and a teacher shows up to clear your doubts.
“I picked the student-teacher approach because it is familiar to me. I thought it would be interesting to play on the teacher stereotype. It is also a trope that lends itself to comedy easily," she says.
Susan Thomas wanted to bring that together with discrepancies in medical textbooks and the Indian education system that predisposes students to not question them. Often, she tells us, the result can be bad science. An example of this led her to title the performance The Flabby Breasted Virgin and Other Sordid Tales. “In a chapter on sexual jurisprudence, they talk about virginity in great detail.
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