Our bodies extend to Petri dishes handled by medical staff trained to enhance our reproductive abilities. Our bodies extend to seringues used to test us, detect pathologies, confirm or refute a diagnosis. Our bodies are manipulated, palpated. Our bodies are collectively examined and eagerly debated, our organs visualised via sophisticated imaging technologies. Routinely, our bodies are read and revealed to us (“this is what you have”) in carefully scripted conversations where the doctor and the patient perform their assigned roles, one anxiously awaiting information authoritatively delivered by the other.
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To be a female patient is to enter a brutal history of subjection: forced and non-consensual procedures, abortions, hysterectomies, surgeries performed without anaesthesia, overlooked symptoms. The list is long. Between female bodies and Western medicine there are deep-seated historical suspicions, traumas inscribed in our psyches that persist to this day. Our bodies, while utterly exposed, remain radically unseen.
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In Claire Simon’s documentary NOTRE CORPS (Our Body), women, trans men, and non-binary individuals of all ages and walks of life are filmed as they seek care at the Tenon Hospital in Paris, in a wing dedicated to gynaecological and other female body-related health conditions. Patients are filmed seeking abortions, receiving IVF, undergoing cancer treatment, submitting to operations, giving birth. Each is undertaken free of charge, regardless of a person’s economic or immigration status. Repeatedly, women are treated by other women, and this shared condition softens the power differential between doctor and patient. I watch NOTRE CORPS from the couch of my Brooklyn apartment as I recover from a recent appendectomy. From the privatised dystopia of the American healthcare system, the care these patients receive shimmers with utopian hope. Does it get any better than this under capitalism? Is there a sadder question?
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Health and illness are experienced within specific architectures: dimly lit hallways, a generic waiting area, an aseptic examination room. Before entering the premises, Claire Simon pauses. She hesitates. She hopes she won’t “catch cancer” (“m’y chopper un cancer”), the way one would catch a cold. No one really wants to enter a hospital. The healthy would rather set themselves apart from the ill, keep spaces separate to avoid contamination. To enter the architecture of a medical institution is to learn a new language, a set of practices designed to preserve these divisions, these binaries of patient/doctor, or illness/health. Medical institutions mark our bodies discursively, architecturally, they choreograph our movements and modes of address, delineate a lexicon, assign specific roles and narratives played out by those who enter its spaces.
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I have been living with chronic pain since my mid-thirties, to this day vaguely diagnosed as Lyme disease. My parents were both ill for long stretches of time before they passed away. I am an anxious patient. I despise getting tested yet seek testing when I want reassurance. Illness, in my family, was the language of care, the means by which to get attention and be seen. My father was a notorious hypochondriac. Every week, he would schedule an appointment with a doctor, any doctor. He was a dignified patient until the end, kind and caring towards those who took care of him in turn, reading the newspaper up to his last days to keep abreast of the world he was leaving. Western medicine saved my mother’s life several times. From her I learned that to have a body is hard work and that healing can’t be divorced from an internal journey that reckons with what it means to be alive. Like Simon, whose father spent 28 years in a hospital room, I am familiar with the medical world, its conventions, shared practices, the mix of fear and deference one feels towards its practitioners, the mythologies surrounding our pathologies, which, albeit factual, primarily exists within culturally determined narratives.
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Outside the hospital a group of women protest the patriarchy inherent to the medical profession. They refer to the knowledge differential between doctors and patients, and the mistreatment and violations this inequity leads to. They demand other conditions of care; the established hospital culture whereby doctors perform tests on women or touch their bodies non-consensually must end. A nurse joins them to denounce a culture of impunity and ongoing abuse rooted in the historical supremacy of the white, male doctor.
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Our bodies aren't opposed to Petri dishes, robotic operations, IVFs. Our bodies aren’t opposed to science. They are opposed to patriarchal applications of scientific technologies.
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Claire Simon sits in a waiting room, before being let in by a doctor who informs her that she has breast cancer. Although shocked, Simon shares that had she not been filming the hospital and its patients, receiving the news would have felt very different, that there is a strange convergence between the production of her film and her diagnosis. The convergence implies a reversal of roles. Simon is now being filmed; she no longer holds the camera. She becomes a subject, the way a doctor may also become ill.
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I wondered about the solicitation to write a text on Simon’s work. I have written about illness and the hold it has on my psychic structure. This hold has prevented me from demystifying it, or connecting it to my anxieties,produced by a larger system that starkly separates health and illness. The camera allows Simon to demystify her own fears by connecting them to other patients, understanding herself as part of a shared body. Writing about Simon enables me to consider the ethical implications of the relationship between an artist and their creation, a writer and their subject, and the tenuousness of the conventions that set them apart.
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A patient with severe endometriosis is advised to get on birth control but she refuses. After years of pain management, she knows her body. She says would rather be in pain than not feel any desire. To be a female-bodied patient is to walk a line between acquiescence and autonomy, handing over our physical selves to the medical apparatus—and its long history of objectification, manipulation, extraction—while retaining our agency. (“Je préfère avoir mal que de ne pas avoir envie”).
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Our bodies receive treatments when ill. In the materiality of these treatments, we negotiate forms of care, healing, autonomy, and dependency. The women protesting outside the hospital in Simon’s documentary remind us that we deserve more. Alongside its destructive effects on the body and the environment, capitalism’s most fatal weapon is the impoverishment of our imagination, which is so utterly depleted that non-dehumanizing care is presented as the only desirable goal. With NOTRE CORPS, Simon documents stories that can widen the kind of care we expect to receive or dare to desire. She troubles the script by challenging the roles we have been assigned, even if temporarily. As she becomes sick herself, she is no longer a distant witness of illness. In a late scene a doctor holds the hand of her dying patient with a mix of deep concern and admiration for the life she has lived. As we watch Simon’s documentary, we grow aware, as viewers, of the way the bodies on screen are present in our own bodies, and that it is only through the recognition of our shared conditions that we can demand a complete reconfiguration of health and its relationship to illness.
Mirene Arsanios is a writer and teacher based in Brooklyn. She is the author of “The Autobiography of a Language” (Futurepoem, 2022), and “Notes on Mother Tongues” (UDP, 2019).
