The Vulva Dialogues: The Sexual-Bodily Experience of Cisgender Women

The female body is often subjected to prejudice, stigma, and misconceptions, driving women into genital alienation: they either have never seen their vulva nor can name its parts, or pursue infantile aesthetic ideals of the vulva, even resorting to labiaplasty, a surgery analogous to Female Genital Mutilation according to World Health Organization standards.

There is plenty of misinformation on the vulva and the clitoris, even within the scientific community: several Social Sciences papers use ‘vagina’ in reference to the vulva, and renowned anatomy books used worldwide do not provide the neovascular structure of the clitoris – but do so for the penis – highlighting the gender inequality in medical knowledge and a critical gap in both medical literature and social perceptions. This contributes to women’s unawareness of their own bodies and puts their health at risk in the hands of poorly trained surgeons. The sexual-bodily experience of cisgender women is commonly observed from a phallocentric perspective, which overrides and neglects women’s agency.

My research aims to analyse the most relevant aspects of the sexual-bodily experience of cisgender women, focusing on their relationship with their vulva, their clitoris, and their sexual pleasure, in addition to identifying the role of medicine and health professionals in such relationship, within the Western medicine perspective of the female body. The fieldwork is being carried out by qualitative methods, with semi-structured interviews with health professionals from various specialties, biographical interviews with cisgender women, and a study of the representation of the clitoris in the main anatomy manuals, to discuss how centuries of control over women’s bodies have impacted their sexual-bodily experience, offering an in-depth debate to these subjects in Sociology. By addressing these issues, I aim to challenge existing power dynamics and promote a more equitable understanding of sexual health.