Teeth – My second final piece

For my second final piece, I’ve been inspired by the underrated feminist film Teeth (2007). The film has a plot based around a Dawn O’Keefe, a woman with teeth in her vagina, who sets out to take vengeance on all men who have wronged her after being raped.

The film is based around Vagina dentata (Latin for toothed vagina), which is described a folk tale in which a woman’s vagina is said to contain teeth, with the associated implication that sexual intercourse might result in injury, emasculation, or castration for the man involved. The topic of “vagina dentata” may also cover a rare medical condition affecting the vagina, in which case it is more accurately termed a vaginal dermoid cyst.

Such folk stories are frequently told as cautionary tales warning of the dangers of unknown women and to discourage rape. Erich Neumann relays one such myth in which “a fish inhabits the vagina of the Terrible Mother; the hero is the man who overcomes the Terrible Mother, breaks the teeth out of her vagina, and so makes her into a woman”. The legend also appears in the mythology of the Chaco and Guiana tribes of South America. In some versions, the hero leaves one tooth.

My idea is to create a flower piece, most probably a rose, and insert teeth, or something that resembles teeth, in the middle. I’m planning on creating these out of clay or plaster, and then paint it red and try to make it resemble a vagina. I’m planning on presenting it as a sculpture and have people look into it, thus have it around waist level so people can look into it and find the teeth.

The piece will represent women metaphorically biting back against patriarchal ideologies, such as rape culture and body shaming. As the folklore states, the teeth in the vagina myth was supposed to discourage rape, which speaks a lot about our culture and society; a woman has to contain the risk of emasculation to stop getting raped.

I changed my mind on how to create this piece, as I wanted to represent the film and myth in a more ‘realistic’ way, and decided to create a sculpture of a vagina out of clay and insert ‘teeth’ in the middle, very noticeably for people to see. I also decided to put fake blood around the teeth to create an angry look to the piece.