During her 1989–1995 touring performance Post-Porn Modernist, Annie Sprinkle transformed a gynecological examination into an audience spectacle. In the piece known as Public Cervix Announcement, Sprinkle invited spectators to look directly at her cervix through a speculum and flashlight. The deliberately clinical setup was also playful and confrontational: it satirized the secrecy surrounding female anatomy, challenged the tendency of mainstream erotic media to present women’s bodies without granting them agency, and recast medical imagery as feminist performance art. Rather than a rumor or an alleged backstage stunt, the act was a documented part of Sprinkle’s one-woman theater work and became one of her signature performances. Its lasting controversy came from the collision of explicit sexual display, participatory theater, and sex education—precisely the boundaries Sprinkle intended to unsettle. She continued using explicit images and medical documentation in later work, including art responding to her 2005 breast-cancer diagnosis, where radiation plans and surgical photographs were juxtaposed with older pin-up imagery.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · New Hollywood
The Public Cervix Announcement: Annie Sprinkle’s Shockingly Literal Anatomy Lecture
Annie Sprinkle / New Hollywood
During her 1989–1995 touring performance Post-Porn Modernist, Annie Sprinkle transformed a gynecological examination into an audience spectacle. In the piece known as Public Cervix Announcement, Sprinkle invited spectators to look directly at her cervix through a speculum and flashlight. The deliberately clinical setup was also playful and confrontational: it satirized the secrecy surrounding female anatomy, challenged the tendency of mainstream erotic media to present women’s bodies without granting them agency, and recast medical imagery as feminist performance art. Rather than a rumor or an alleged backstage stunt, the act was a documented part of Sprinkle’s one-woman theater work and became one of her signature performances. Its lasting controversy came from the collision of explicit sexual display, participatory theater, and sex education—precisely the boundaries Sprinkle intended to unsettle. She continued using explicit images and medical documentation in later work, including art responding to her 2005 breast-cancer diagnosis, where radiation plans and surgical photographs were juxtaposed with older pin-up imagery.
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