Inheritance (retroverted uteri)

2023 / Silver plated copper, carved stone / 5-7"” x 4” x 4-5.5”

Modern medicine classifies the “normal” uterus as one that bends obediently forward in an anteflexed, anteverted orientation. According to this logic, all other positions - retroflexed or retrovered - are categorically “abnormal” deviations. Yet, one in four uterus-bearing people carry this so-called misalignment within them, their bodies quietly refusing standardization.

For centuries, the medical gaze has focused through a narrow lens of its own making. Shaped by colonialism, racism, sexism, ableism, and capitalism, its focus has been fixed upon the white, male body as the measure of all things. What does not conform becomes invisible, pathologized, or seen as error.

This erasure extends beyond the clinic. In Gray’s Anatomy, the cervix appears rarely, its healthy variations barely imagined. And in the seductive language of early twentieth-century advertising, the body was re-scripted as a site of shame. Lysol© once promised to cure women’s “one neglect” - the natural balance of the vagina itself - turning care into commerce, and health into a discipline of control.

These ideas, like anatomy itself, are inherited. They move silently through generations shaping how we see ourselves and one another. Just as a retroverted uterus may pass from mother to offspring, so too do the myths that define the “proper” body. In this lineage of distortion, we learn to mistrust our own forms and to correct what was never wrong; the critique becomes instinct and the wound hereditary.