Bitter Pills

What “bitter pill” is there to swallow here? Hyenas bare their teeth in the corners of Hannah Cooke's hand-tufted wool rug, with an oversized vulva emblazoned in the middle, in whose opening we see ourselves in the mirror. Although the female body is indispensable to our existence as a birthing body, it, like women's bodies in general, receives little attention in medicine. Beyond gynecology, medical research usually focuses on the male body. For example, new drugs are rarely tested on women because the female body is considered “too complex”. This has far-reaching consequences for medical care for women. The hyenas, whose communication sounds are often described as a kind of “hysterical laughter”, refer to “hysteria”, a term used in medicine and psychoanalysis from antiquity (hystéra = ancient Greek for uterus) until the 20th century. Various diseases and disorders were summarized under this term, all of which were attributed to the female body. Although medicine today knows that dissociative disorders, for example, occur in all people, women who indicate problems of a medical or social nature are still often referred to as “hysterical”, in the sense of “over-excited” or “not to be taken entirely seriously”.

Are the hyenas perhaps spitting out the “bitter pills” they are given instead of swallowing them?

(Statement by Dr. Nicole Grothe, Museum Ostwall)

This work is part of a series dealing with the gender data gap.