Take your vagina into your own hands. Health-wise, I mean. Stick your hands down your pants all you want, but I’m going to tell you about DIY gynecology. GynePunk, a Catalan collective from Calafou, is working to develop an emergency gynecological medicine tool kit. Like a risk-reduction kit, but for your lady bits. This toolkit would let you take samples from yourself and test them without having to pay for a doctor or be subjected to the “bureaucratic, statistical forms that perform a role of judgement of your practices, capacities or choices,” as described by GynePunk. Patriarchal prodding aside, this kit would be fantastic for immigrants without health coverage, refugee camps, sex works, and even GynePunk members themselves. Yeast infections, UTIs, all of the gunk that doesn’t belong in your junk.. you could test it yourself! Discreet, cheap, and DIY. Crafts for your crotch!
GynePunk has already developed a biolab emergency box. They’ve designed three DIY biohackable tools to analyze body fluids: a centrifuge (to separate solids from liquids and decant contents to be examined under the microscope), a microscope (to identify urinary and genital fungal infections), and an incubator (to grow bacteria in a petri dish to reveal their presence). Pretty cool stuff, right? You can play doctor with yourself (it’s just not as fun, maybe).
They call themselves Cyborg Witches because they bypass the public medical system. Think alternative medicine/ancestral knowledge/Chinese medicine/witchcraft/grandma’s recipes meets technology. Modern magic!
And while I’m pretty sure there was a bit of a mixup in translating from Spanish to English, this is what GynePunk wants: “I want glandular heretics, witchcraft GynePunks, DIY abortive pots, midwife gangs, glitter abortions, spill placenta in every corner, hack analytic technics, ephemeral biolabs, DIY labs, hi-tech nursery secret meetings, black coats, chess coats. Self blood donations & extract our own blood, and trough it like a furious volcanic river of our anger in the door of the fucking parlament!! GynePunk is an extreme and accurate gesture to detach our body of the compulsive dependency of the fossil structures of the hegemonic health system machine.” Glitter abortions, man.
Images via Makery
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