Immaculate Forms
In Immaculate Forms, Helen King presents a rich history of the study and understanding of women’s bodies, from 5th century Greece to the present day.
The book deep dives into medical and religious contexts and the frightening influence that each had on the other.
King divides the book into four main chapters—breasts, clitoris, hymen, and womb. This is not as reductive as it first sounds—she arranges her evidence into these four categories.
Beginning with breasts, King explores the impossible expectation that women be both desirable and pure, sexual and maternal. But of course never at the same time.
In Christianity the Virgin Mary is considered to be the ultimate mother figure. The great lengths taken to protect her innocent image even led to artistic depictions of her conceiving Jesus through her ear.
We also learn about the commodification of breast milk.
This happened through the use of wet nurses in a business model managed by men and the exploitation of poorer women, often black slaves, at the expense of their own children.
In her chapter on the hymen, King unveils the dangerous world of classifying women as “virgins and non-virgins”. She highlights that it was considered more important to conserve the hymen than it was to actually treat women’s health issues.
In one example, a female doctor who did a proper examination of a vagina. She was condemned by male practitioners as having wrongfully “intervened” with the patient’s virginity.
Not only women suffered—King also describes a torturous routine for a man who was suspected to be impotent.
Next, we search for the clitoris and learn about the extent to which gynaecology was a competitive and lucrative male-led industry.
The size of this body part was regarded as a sign that women was partaking in “excessive” sexual activity, or as an indication of sexual orientation.
Again we are forced to choose between personal pleasure and reproductive function.
I found myself thinking of Camille Rainville’s poem, Be a Lady—”Be sexual, be innocent, be dirty, be virginal, be sexy.” King rejects this binary and asks why the two are exclusive—a theme that floods through the whole book.
It is impossible to read the chapter on the womb—and indeed most of this book—without thinking of the power the Trump administration currently holds over women’s bodies.
Medical texts from the 5th and 4th centuries considered pregnancy as a sign of a healthy woman. If pregnancy and menstruation are considered signs of being healthy, King asks, why are they still treated as negative and inconvenient in the workplace?
Helen King writes inclusively and without bias. She repeatedly asks the following question—when we have so much evidence that binaries do not work, why are humans so hellbent on classifying their bodies?
Throughout history, the male body is repeatedly regarded as the medical “normal”. The infuriating fact is that much study of the female body was male-dominated, and women themselves didn’t get much of a say in any of it.
Under this framework nobody is winning—not trans women, nor cis women. As King writes, “no binary can hold”.
King maintains that to understand our bodies, we must know the vast history that surrounds them.
Immaculate Bodies is thorough, thoughtful and thought provoking, and the volume of research put into this book is astounding.
