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‘Prorace’ and ‘Racial’ brand cervical caps and condoms associated with Marie Stopes’ Society for Constructive Birth Control (CBC) on display in the Medicine Galleries, Science Museum, London. Photograph by the author.
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Nora Heidorn, research‑collage, 2021.
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Still from Nora Heidorn, Touching Matters of Care (‘Prorace’ cervical cap, 1915–20), digital object, 2022. Courtesy of Birth Rites Collection.
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Touching Matter of Care:
A Visual Approach to the Care and Violence in Dr Marie Stopes’ Birth Control Campaign
In: Violence, Care, Cure. Self-Perceptions within the Medical Encounter
Edited by Clio Nicastro and Marta Cenedese
Routledge, 2025
This volume addresses the notions of violence, care and cure within the medical encounter and seeks to foreground their ambiguity, whether individually or as a triad. Thematically organised, it attends to the complex entanglement of these key terms by way of historical, practical, philosophical, personal, and aesthetic analyses of different medical scenes, objects and concepts. Arguing that a hermeneutic of violence, care, and cure is inseparable from individual and collective perceptions of the medical encounter, it considers both the material and 'immaterial' spaces in which medical encounters occur (whether the consulting room or the biopolitical discourse, for instance), engaging with the most apparent forms of medical violence as well as with hidden forms of aggression that circulate in everyday medical and healthcare settings, and which affect predominantly marginalised and minority groups. It will therefore appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities with interests in the medical humanities, critical theory and gender studies.
Chapter abstract
This chapter discusses an image-making methodology that is central to a research project about a historical contraceptive, the ‘Prorace’ cervical cap. The cap was trademarked by Dr Marie Stopes in the 1920s. Whilst Stopes is primarily known as a feminist birth control pioneer, her campaign was motivated by an eugenic agenda to improve the ‘fitness’ of the population. This aim was literally inscribed on the dome of the cap with the trademark name ‘Prorace’. This article will argue that the ‘Prorace’ cap was a biopolitical consumer object through which Stopes intervened in the demographics of the British population in the first half of the twentieth century. The contraceptive is a necessary cure to the problem of unwanted pregnancy, as well as an object that is imbued with eugenic racism and ableism. It speaks of emancipation and oppression, of care and violence. This transdisciplinary research applies a ‘visual medical humanities’ approach to stage the ambiguity of the ‘Prorace’ cap (Johnstone, 2018). Research collages and an interactive digital work complicate the presentation of the artefact. Touch emerges as both method and metaphor in this project: the visual work is activated by imagery of gloved and naked hands, which highlight and disrupt the notion of hygiene that was central to eugenic ideology. In a wider context, this research introduces an historical perspective on the biopolitics of sexual reproduction via the ‘image world’, discourses, and audiences of the Birth Rites Collection, a British collection of contemporary art about birth and the maternal (Birth Rites Collection, no date). The insertion of the ‘Prorace’ cap and its history of eugenic feminism into the discourses around the ‘art of birth’ effect a critical haunting.
Link to the volume here. My open access chapter is available as a PDF here.
Back to Publications / back to Touching Matters of Care research strand
‘Prorace’ and ‘Racial’ brand cervical caps and condoms associated with Marie Stopes’ Society for Constructive Birth Control (CBC) on display in the Medicine Galleries, Science Museum, London. Photograph by the author.
Nora Heidorn, research‑collage, 2021.
Still from Nora Heidorn, Touching Matters of Care (‘Prorace’ cervical cap, 1915–20), digital object, 2022. Courtesy of Birth Rites Collection.
Touching Matter of Care:
A Visual Approach to the Care and Violence in Dr Marie Stopes’ Birth Control Campaign
In: Violence, Care, Cure. Self-Perceptions within the Medical Encounter
Edited by Clio Nicastro and Marta Cenedese
Routledge, 2025
This volume addresses the notions of violence, care and cure within the medical encounter and seeks to foreground their ambiguity, whether individually or as a triad. Thematically organised, it attends to the complex entanglement of these key terms by way of historical, practical, philosophical, personal, and aesthetic analyses of different medical scenes, objects and concepts. Arguing that a hermeneutic of violence, care, and cure is inseparable from individual and collective perceptions of the medical encounter, it considers both the material and 'immaterial' spaces in which medical encounters occur (whether the consulting room or the biopolitical discourse, for instance), engaging with the most apparent forms of medical violence as well as with hidden forms of aggression that circulate in everyday medical and healthcare settings, and which affect predominantly marginalised and minority groups. It will therefore appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities with interests in the medical humanities, critical theory and gender studies.
Chapter abstract
This chapter discusses an image-making methodology that is central to a research project about a historical contraceptive, the ‘Prorace’ cervical cap. The cap was trademarked by Dr Marie Stopes in the 1920s. Whilst Stopes is primarily known as a feminist birth control pioneer, her campaign was motivated by an eugenic agenda to improve the ‘fitness’ of the population. This aim was literally inscribed on the dome of the cap with the trademark name ‘Prorace’. This article will argue that the ‘Prorace’ cap was a biopolitical consumer object through which Stopes intervened in the demographics of the British population in the first half of the twentieth century. The contraceptive is a necessary cure to the problem of unwanted pregnancy, as well as an object that is imbued with eugenic racism and ableism. It speaks of emancipation and oppression, of care and violence. This transdisciplinary research applies a ‘visual medical humanities’ approach to stage the ambiguity of the ‘Prorace’ cap (Johnstone, 2018). Research collages and an interactive digital work complicate the presentation of the artefact. Touch emerges as both method and metaphor in this project: the visual work is activated by imagery of gloved and naked hands, which highlight and disrupt the notion of hygiene that was central to eugenic ideology. In a wider context, this research introduces an historical perspective on the biopolitics of sexual reproduction via the ‘image world’, discourses, and audiences of the Birth Rites Collection, a British collection of contemporary art about birth and the maternal (Birth Rites Collection, no date). The insertion of the ‘Prorace’ cap and its history of eugenic feminism into the discourses around the ‘art of birth’ effect a critical haunting.
Link to the volume here. My open access chapter is available as a PDF here.
Back to Publications / back to Touching Matters of Care research strand