Jane Addams' Travel Medicine Kit
Hull-House Museum, 2011
Installed as an "alternative museum label" in Jane Addams' bedroom alongside her small leather medicine kit, this prose poem is a meditation on rest and restlessness, antagonism and peace, domesticity and social justice, and medicine and poison. Part medical mystery, the piece charts the collaboration with a pharmacist and forensic experts to identify the medicines in Addams' kit.
Traveling the Spaceways: Sun Ra, the Astro Black, and Other Solar Myths, 2006
Co-edited with John Corbett and Anthony Elms
WhiteWalls, 2010
The remarkable illustrations and essays of Traveling the Spaceways confront the visual manifestation of Sun Ra’s philosophy and demonstrate how graphics and design were essential to his message of self-determination. The influence of Sun Ra’s openness to new technologies and experimentation, his sense of personal identity as a construct rather than a given, and his playful attitude towards history and mythmaking are all evidenced by the remarkable writers and artists who have contributed to this volume, including Pedro Bell, My Barbarian, Dave Muller, and Charlemagne Palestine. A refreshing reconsideration of the impact of Sun Ra’s life on American history and visual culture, Traveling the Spaceways is an unforgettable look at the Ra persona in the context of contemporary art.
The Hysterical Alphabet
Drawings by Gina Litherland
WhiteWalls, 2008
Hysteria has an under-recognized (and under-appreciated!) four-thousand-year history that deeply inflects our contemporary ideas about women and illness. The ancient Greek myth of the traveling uterus, shrieking Clytemnestra, Freud’s Dora, the French-Victorian electromechanical vibrator, the films of John Waters—one doesn’t have to look far to see the manifestation of female hysteria as a cultural symptom. Terri Kapsalis’s The Hysterical Alphabet is an abecedary offering condensed history of hysteria with levity, playfulness, and critical insight. Drawn from medical writings and images ranging from ancient Egypt to the present, each letter introduces an episode direct from the annals of medical lore. The Hysterical Alphabet tracks centuries of female malady, heartily disproving the theory that time heals all wombs.
The Hysterical Alphabet is also a multimedia performance with film and live soundtrack performed with John Corbett and Danny Thompson, 2006-2012.
Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn, and Chicago’s Afro-futurist Underground, 1954-1968
Co-edited with John Corbett and Anthony Elms
WhiteWalls, 2007
With essays by Adam Abraham, John Corbett, Glenn Ligon, and Camille Norment, Pathways to Unknown Worlds presents a kaleidoscopic range of materials from Sun Ra's formative Chicago years, including original record cover designs and production materials, paper ephemera, and photographs. These materials—most previously unseen—dramatically flesh out the story of Sun Ra’s mystical journey of discovery and his lofty goals for the dissemination of his new knowledge.
Public Privates: Performing Gynecology from Both Ends of the Speculum
Duke University Press, 1997
From J. Marion Sims’s surgical experiments on unanesthetized enslaved women in the mid-nineteenth century, to the use of cadavers and prostitutes to teach medical students gynecological techniques, Kapsalis focuses on the ways in which women and their bodies have been treated by the medical establishment. Removing gynecology from its private cover within clinic walls and medical textbook pages, she decodes the gynecological exam, seizing on its performative dimension. She considers traditional medical practices and the dynamics of "proper" patient performance; non-traditional practices such as cervical self-exam; and incarnations of the pelvic examination outside the bounds of medicine, including its appearance in David Cronenberg’s film Dead Ringers and Annie Sprinkle’s performance piece "Public Cervix Announcement." Confounding the boundaries that separate medicine, art, and pornography, revealing the potent cultural attitudes and anxieties about women, female bodies, and female sexuality that permeate the practice of gynecology, Public Privates concludes by locating a venue from which challenging, alternative performances may be staged.