Body writing: practices that include hymenoplasty.
These practices are expanding in response to desires of individuals and groups. A scholarly project in the humanities can draw on historical and philological research to help solve a local and global problem.
Hymen surgeries are occurring in Davis, Cairo, Stockholm and other places. Question of qualitative changes from re-virgination practices in the past is an open one.
Older seeming words legitimate and clean up the physical abuse. OED editors describe the terms as recent in vintage. “Hymenogeny”: creation of hymens. What invented hymenography? This term is in the OED. “A description of the membranes of animal bodies.” For Aristotle the hymen was a membrane surrounding all organs in animal bodies. Not just one.
Modern tendency to reify the hymen can be located in the Tudor and Stuart archive.
Derrida's reflections on the hymen as a sign. There are few skeptical voices out there, however, even though there are problems with considering the hymen as a “separate” body part. And the generalization across time and space about a whole constituency of people and their bodies.
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