Annie Sprinkle – “Public Cervix Announcement”

In this performance piece, Sprinkle invites the audience to “celebrate the female body” by viewing her cervix with a speculum and flashlight, proving her to be a sex-positive feminist, as she once described herself. She wanted to do this because people know next to nothing about female genitalia, therefore used herself as an example for people to learn. This attitude towards sex, to me, is an extremely positive one. She shows sexual confidence and created an iconic change in the way many people viewed women’s bodies by using humour during the Post-Porn Modernist era. In the words of actor, performer, and researcher Igor Leal, post-porn is “a movement based on sexual expression, in which the sensations and possibilities of the body are expanded”. This expansion is realized mainly by shifting away from pleasure focused on the genitals and toward full bodily pleasure, taking the fluidity of pleasure into account.

I find this piece extremely interesting – her sexual confidence and trust in her audience is inspiring, and I’m aiming for the same response. This also links to my site venue locker exhibition where I made it so that the audience had to open up lace curtains to enter the inside of a vagina-type instillation of a sex worker’s room. However, I’m especially interested in how and why she used herself, leaving herself open to being objectified. We see that because she was the one leading the performance, she was the one in control the entire time, making this a powerful statement against the male gaze by making it and educational piece. I think that her fetish clothing either reflects her being a pornstar in the past, which would be empowering, as I believe that sex work is work. It could also be seen as ironic using sexually provocative clothing for a performance that was for educational purposes only adds to her humorous personality, especially knowing it’s an alter-ego she’s made up that makes her more sexually confident.