Michelle Browder’s “Mothers of Gynecology” as Theological Locus: Aesthetic and Activist Engagement as Theological Reflection

Themes: Practices of art engagement in theological writing, and Violence, nonviolence, and the margin 

In Montgomery, Alabama, two monuments are erected about one mile from one another. Through their aesthetic characterization and physical placement in the city of Montgomery, both monuments tell starkly different stories about the lives of Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy, three young, enslaved women who were experimented on sans anesthesia or consent by J. Marion Sims in the 1840s. The first monument, “Mothers of Gynecology,” stands at 15 feet tall and was created by Michelle Browder in 2021 using discarded metals. The artwork aimed to “[shine] a light on ongoing racial disparities in the healthcare industry today” and “[reimagine] the true story of the nation.”[i] Browder’s monument depicts Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy as the Mothers of Gynecology, re-narrating their importance in gynecological history.  The second monument was established by the Medical Association of the State of Alabama in 1939, and stands tall at the sloped hilltop of Montgomery’s capitol, overlooking the city’s streets. The full-body monument displays the so-called Father of Gynecology, Dr. J. Marion Sims, and describes, “he devised cured a then considered hopeless malady–gaining him fame as a benefactor of women.”[ii] While Browder’s monument professes honor and life, Sims’ monument lauds the work of a doctor who experimented on Black women dozens of times without their permission or without any reprieve from the pain. 

What do we learn from encountering “Mothers of Gynecology” as a place of theological insight, where theological writing can emerge? This paper asks how Browder’s “Mothers of Gynecology” monument illustrates the creation and reception of art as an agentive space of radical education and theological formation. This paper proposes that “Mothers of Gynecology” enacts the justice of God and avers the narrative lives of Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy as sacred and free, in contrast to the ways that medical racism treats Black women’s bodies as sites of production. By sitting with Browder’s art and its cultivation of communal engagement, we see the monument as a space where theological engagement and theological writing unfold.

Too often, art is treated as secondary and peripheral, and not as the primary locus of theological writing. Roberto Goizueta protests the “divorce between theological form and content” in Western Christian theological rationalism.[iii] He notes how the artistic and poetic is sometimes seen as void of the conceptual, enforcing the idea of the arts as “unscholarly” and thus as “pure (aesthetic) form without (conceptual) content.”[iv] Instead, Goizueta reminds us that ethics and theology rely on creative imagination.[v] In agreement with voices like Goizueta, Christopher Tirres’s *Aesthetics and Ethics of Faith*, and Nichole Flores’s *Aesthetics of Solidarity*, this paper takes seriously the theology that arises from aesthetic engagement. More specifically, as a method of theological writing, this paper will close-read the aesthetic formation and communal reception of “Mothers of Gynecology.” My chief aim is to demonstrate how Browder’s artistic “Mothers of Gynecology” monument serves as an important locus for theological writing. Overall, I argue that the aesthetic creation and activist reception of Browder’s “Mothers of Gynecology” makes it an important space for theological reflection on the justice of God amid violence.

I plan to analyze the aesthetic elements of “Mothers of Gynecology” alongside liberative voices in theological aesthetics, and with Kelly Brown Douglas’s *Stand Your Ground*. This paper will explore how the Adinkra symbols, aesthetic decisions, and embodied postures of Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy make theological claims about the action and presence of God amid racialized gynecological violence. For example, what does it mean for the monument to inscribe Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy with ancestral kinship through Adinkra symbols? Why is it theologically significant for Browder to etch the names of historical activists like Fannie Lou Hamer across the monument? Through portrayals of scarring, sutures, a speculum, and scissors, the monument symbolizes Sims’s violence, and the larger patterns of medical violence against Black women. Against a context of eugenics, the “Mississippi appendectomy,”[vi] and her own forced sterilization[vii], Hamer’s artistic presence in the monument thus testifies to her radical and religious activism. Through the symbols of life, violence, and social change interwoven in Browder’s monument, we gain much theological insight through contextual engagement with “Mothers of Gynecology.” Throughout, I will bring this aesthetic-theological analysis in conversation with Brown Douglas’s Stand Your Ground, which demonstrates the ways that Anglo-Saxon Christianity’s promulgation of chattel slavery stripped Black women of ownership and agency over their own bodies.[viii] Particularly within a historical context that treated Black women’s bodies as possessions of medical and monetary production, Browder’s aesthetic monument invites theological engagement with God’s justice, presence, and communal activity.

[i] “The Mothers of Gynecology,” Anarcha Lucy Betsey, Faith Crusade Ministries, 2023, https://www.anarchalucybetsey.org/.

[ii]  Quoted from a photograph I took of Sims’s monument placard.

[iii] Roberto Goizueta, “U.S. Hispanic Popular Catholicism as Theopoetics,” in *Hispanic/Latino Theology:

Challenge and Promise*, eds. Ada María Isasi-Díaz and Fernando F. Segovia (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press,

1996), 261.

[iv] Goizueta, “U.S. Hispanic Popular Catholicism as Theopoetics,” 261.

[v] Goizueta, “U.S. Hispanic Popular Catholicism as Theopoetics,” 263.

[vi] Eric Smaw, “Uterus Collectors: The Case for Reproductive Justice for African American, Native

 American, and Hispanic American Female Victims of Eugenics Programs in the United States,” *Bioethics 36*, no. 3 (2021): 320.

[vii] Albert J. Raboteau, *American Prophets: Seven Religious Radicals and Their Struggle for Social

 and Political Justice* (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 167.

[viii] Kelly Brown Douglas, *Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God* (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2015), 52.