What do you call your private parts, to yourself, to your doctor, in polite company? There are plenty of slang words for the female genitalia—some cute, some raunchy, some silly, some banal—but none of them, not even the scientific-sounding vagina, is quite right.

The term vagina refers to the canal that connects the inner, non-visible organs—cervix, uterus, ovaries—to the visible, outer part, which is the vulva. Often, when we refer to our pussy, hoo-haw, cooter, or vagina, we’re actually talking about is our vulva. Given that “vagina” isn’t —arguably— the prettiest or most exciting word out there, why is that our collective, patriarchal culture insists on using it?

Swedish artist Liv Strömquist wants women to reclaim the word vulva. Or, more specifically, she wants us to—finally—claim it. The illustrator, whose book of graphic nonfiction, Fruit of Knowledge: The Vulva vs the Patriarchy, was released in English last month, aims to destigmatize the female body, especially the vulva, the orgasm, and menstruation.

The 40-year-old feminist activist felt a lot of shame about her body growing up, especially when it came to menstruation. As an adult, she decided to start looking into the taboos associated with the female body. She started asking pointed questions, like, “Where does the taboo around the vulva come from? Has it always looked the same throughout history? How does the taboo around the vulva affect us women psychologically?” she told me via email in early October. “All these things were very interesting for me. I wanted to investigate why there is so much shame surrounding women’s bodies—and in particular the genital parts—in order to change it.”

And then, in 2012, she started turning what she had discovered into Fruit of Knowledge (originally published in Swedish in 2014 as Kunskapens frukt), a cultural history that explores—in edgy, satirical tones and comic-book form—the pathologies, politics, and oft horrifying punishments that female and trans bodies have suffered at the hands of religion, science, and men.    

The meticulously researched Fruit of Knowledge chronicles—toggling between dead serious and drop-dead funny tones—the female body’s mistreatment and mishandling, starting with Eve and winding through history, medicine, pop culture, sex ed, contemporary advertisements, and more.

As graphic nonfiction gains more of a foothold in the literary world, we see more and more serious subjects conveyed in comics form. Here it brings awesome power to a misunderstood and hushed-up topic.

Where does the taboo around the vulva come from? Has it always looked the same throughout history?
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“So much is communicated with a well-drawn side-eye, angry eyebrows, etc.,” translator Melissa Bowers told me via email. “The first time I read [Fruit of Knowledge] I was either giggling, cringing, or both. I was so charmed by Liv’s simple, expressive drawing style.” Charmed is a surprisingly accurate response to the way Strömquist conveys information. When asked why she chose the comics form to write about such thorny material, she said, “I’ve always really liked comics, since I was a child. If you see a comic in a magazine you immediately want to read it—and this is why I really like this art form. It’s very appealing, not difficult or pretentious. It’s folksy. Articles about feminism and left-wing politics often tend to be very heavy, academic and serious, so I like to make my work fun to read.”

Fruit of Knowledge certainly achieves that artistic intention, turning a gallery of “Men Who Have Been Too Interested in the Female Genitalia” into an informative yet humorous hall of shame, and, in “Blood Mountain,” poking fun at the superstitions around menstruation, while also digging into ancient times, when it “appears that menstruation was MORE holy and LESS icky.”

For thousands of years and across cultures, Strömquist relays, the vulva and menstruation had been integral parts of the sacred landscape—vulvas made their appearance in Greek myth, Egyptian lore, European fables, and notably, monasteries, churches, and village gates in Celtic culture. It was once believed that the female orgasm was necessary (and thus highly valued) for procreation. Sounds a bit different than the way we treat the female body today, doesn’t it?

Strömquist explains the disparity this way: “The very overt hatred and fixation that the monotheistic religions have with the female body and sexuality [arose because religions]—in their early stage—were in competition with fertility cults.”

During the Enlightenment, and with the rise of medical science (and male doctors), those in power had to come up with new theories for female inferiority.

For thousands of years and across cultures, Strömquist relays, the vulva and menstruation had been integral parts of the sacred landscape.
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Strömquist continued explaining that:

“Science had to try to find explanations as to why women were different from men and couldn’t have the same access to power and money in society. Before they could say, ‘Women have no power in society because that’s what god wants’—but later they had to come up with scientific reasons. That’s when medical science started to obsess on things like the uterus, menstruation and so on.

“In the debate over if women could enter university in the end of the 1800s, there was a doctor who wrote a book that argued that women couldn’t enter university because of their menstruation. If they studied, their brain would use the blood they needed for menstruation, and become infertile. So if women started to study in the university, it would be the end of the human race.”

This might sound extreme to us now, but considering the contemporary struggle to simply close the gender pay gap or support working mothers—how far have we really come? Society continues to use the female body—and its natural functions—against women.

While much of what Strömquist covers in her work relates to the biologically female body, she also fixes her searing gaze on the binary two-gender system, criticizing the surgeries that intersex babies undergo, often in the first weeks of their life, which only serve to “categorize genitals” and “remove sensitive tissues that the person might miss later in life.”

In “Blood Mountain,” the chapter which covers menstruation, Strömquist explores the fallacy of PMS being linked to a particular gender, illustrating her point with a male figure skater lifting a leg to expose bloody panties, accompanied by the captioned thought that if we didn’t live in a binary two-gender society, “I could have drawn the first page of this chapter like this → Or in some completely different way!! Which I am too socially conditioned to even think of!!!”

Social conditioning plays a strong role throughout Strömquist’s work, and she’s keen to exploit that awareness, not allowing how we culturally perceive biology and gender to dominate her art.  

In all areas of her work, Strömquist explores “provocative” subject matter. Last year, her art came under fire last year when Stockholm’s metro commuters found her subway illustrations of women menstruating “disgusting,” while others insisted it was awkward explaining the red stains to their children.

“There was a big debate over my pictures when they were displayed in the Stockholm Metro-station,” Strömquist says.

“They were vandalized twice so they had to be replaced with new prints. There was a political debate, where the populist right-wing party in Sweden wrote an article criticizing the use of tax money to support this kind of art and promised that if they got in power they would replace this kind of art with pre-modern oil painting. People still have quite strong feelings about [menstruation], which I find interesting.”

Despite the controversy over her artwork, she also “received a lot of support and positive reactions” for depicting menstruation—something that happens to millions of bodies every day—in a celebratory public forum.

Strömquist currently lives in Malmö, where she works for a youth radio station and hosts a political podcast. She has two new books in the works. One, a comic titled “Rise and Fall,” covers “climate change and problems of world capitalism.” The other is “a book about the social construction of romantic love,” which she hopes to see published in English as well.

In her chapter, “Upside Down Rooster Comb,” where she quotes Sartre and The Latin Kings, Strömquist also cites psychologist Harriet Lerner, who has been writing about the consequences of mislabeling the vulva as the vagina for decades. Lerner “likens this misuse of language to ‘psychic genital mutilation.’”

Whereas the vagina is often described in terms of absence, “a ‘hole’ waiting to be filled with a cock,” the vulva is very rarely mentioned—in conversation, and even in biology textbooks.

We are literally discouraged from properly naming the vulva. “If we don’t have the words,” Stromquist says, “we cannot understand what the organ is or how it looks and works. Words are really important. In many languages there isn’t even a proper word for the [female] sexual organ—one that isn’t an insult.”

Imagine being encouraged to call your arm your hand, or being told your entire life that your toes are your leg. This kind of senseless mislabeling encourages confusion, avoidance, and embarrassment, all of which prevent many people from treating the vulva with the respect and veneration it deserves.

If we don’t have the words we cannot understand what the vulva is or how it looks and works.
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Given the current political climate in the United States, Strömquist’s vibrant, excoriating work is more necessary than ever. Fruit of Knowledge is the kind of self-care Western culture needs—accessible, intelligent, and engaging renderings of culture and history—that provide the encouragement to help us finally name and reclaim the female body.

In 2011, RuPaul’s Drag Race season 3 saw need enough to include definitions for slang terms like “fishy” across the bottom of the screen. Watching this season for the first time in 2018, I almost burst out laughing. The thought that a viewer wouldn’t know what “fishy” meant seemed absurd.  But that’s what Drag Race, and other touchstones of queer culture, do: introduce its viewers to a slew of slang terms that quickly become ubiquitous. In 2016, Bernie Sanders accused the DNC of throwing shade, and the phrase “Yass, queen” has permeated from Broad City gifs to Target merchandise. Queer slang has never been more visible in, and interactive with, mainstream Western culture.

Slang used in gay and queer spaces, while yet to be officially named, is considered an “anti-language”—the vernacular used by an “anti-society,” or a marginalized group within a society. Anti-languages generally aren’t full languages of their own, but “provide… a new and different reality in which [members] can construct and portray alternative (i.e., non-normative) identities without fear of censure or reproach” (Levon, 2010).

Queer anti-language in particular is hard to pin down, because slang terms are generally learned from exposure to queer communities, rather than being inherent to them (like a native language). But what we’re here to talk about is when an anti-language like this comes into contact with the mainstream it initially branched away from. Let’s watch the sauce, shall we?

It May Die Out

If you’ve ever looked into the history of queer vernacular English, you’ve probably stumbled across Polari. It was a British vernacular used by performers, thieves, people of color, and, in particular, gay men. It’s also the darling of Lavender linguistics, as one of the best-known instances of queer anti-language. Adapting words from romance languages, Yiddish, and London slang, certain phrases could signal your place in an anti-society, while straight people who overheard you would remain none the wiser.

Polari was necessary because being openly gay was a crime. But the rising homophile movement of post-WWII British civil rights exerted pressure on queer people to abandon identifiably gay characteristics like the use of Polari. Homosexual sex between men was decriminalized in 1967, ostensibly removing the need for covert language among gay men. (So often a chance at legal recognition comes with increasingly conservative politics—what of arguments to segregate trans people from the queer community after the legalization of same-sex marriage?) But the final blow came with the radio show Round the Home, where millions of listeners were treated to an education in Polari that evaporated both the vernacular’s secrecy, and the use of Polari itself.

Anti-languages like Polari fulfill two purposes: creating a community of people in the know, and keeping out people who threaten that community. Once the threat wanes, so does its use, though Polari echoes in both queer spaces (“trade,” for example, was one of its gifts dating back to the 1600s) and beyond (in words like “scarper” and “naff”). Given that shows like Drag Race and Queer Eye are being renewed into infinity, however, the likelihood of this slang dying out altogether is “nada to vada.”

Anti-languages like Polari fulfill two purposes: creating a community of people in the know, and keeping out people who threaten that community.
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Its Meanings May Change

As a niche vernacular becomes accessible to more people, its definitions tend to the general. Where “trade” under Polari meant “sex,” I first encountered it to mean “a straight-presenting man who may have (possibly paid) sex with a man or with a trans woman.” The associations with “macho” presentation were on display in the Drag Race’s Trade challenge (where we learned that some of these girls simply do not know the meaning of the word). A drag queen would seem to be the antithesis of all that is trade, yet during the same season Kameron Michaels is identified as “the trade of Season 10.” All of these meanings have to do with sex, and often with masculinity, but the flexibility for a single syllable to indicate anything from “the sexual act” to “an attractive man” indicates that the ongoing process of meaning expansion. More people are exposed to queer slang means more meaning expansion.

On the other hand, the interaction of queer slang with mainstream English may multiply the meanings available to them both. As Milani (2015) found, when an anti-language (in this case, Tsotsitaal, associated mainly with black South Africans) is exposed to the mainstream, their coexistence can yield new and “highly hybridized linguistic combinations” that didn’t previously exist, or weren’t previously possible. (Think of how “realness,” handed down from ballroom queens of yore, can now be comprehensibly appended to just about any word) Just like connections via the internet have engendered a proliferation of queer slang and in-jokes, the bigger the number of people using the language, the more different uses of it there will be.

Sometimes, an anti-language becomes so absorbed by a mainstream one that it’s almost impossible to tell them apart. Just like (probably British) people use “scarper” and “naff,” unaware of their origins in Polari, the incorporation of queer slang terms into mainstream English language obscures their origins. Even innocuous terms like “hot” and “hunk” came to us via the Harlem club scene—the ordinariness of a word seemingly inverse to our familiarity with its history.

In Indonesia, this phenomenon is occurring without the corresponding visibility of queer folk that we see in the West. There is limited understanding or presence of queer people in mainstream Indonesian society, possibly as a result of the lack of legal protection for them and anti-LGBT+ rhetoric among politicians and religious conservatives.

However, a vernacular known as bahasa gay is much more widely known, especially in Indonesian popular culture (Boellstorff, 2004). This is partly attributed to television personality Debby Sahertian, who gave the public an education in the anti-language when she published Kamus Bahasa Gaul, a dictionary of terms that doesn’t hide their roots in bahasa gay. On the one hand, it’s said that she once apologized to queer Indonesians for popularising bahasa gay and destroying the secrecy of the anti-language. On the other, it means that queer people’s uses of language aren’t a potentially dangerous give-away, because they’re common linguistic currency.

The phenomenon of queer anti-languages being ‘outed’ via the media is hardly unique. As soon as Drag Race ceased to define its own terms, the internet stepped in for anyone out of the loop. In the Philippines, the incredibly complex vernacular known as Swardspeak gained wider recognition after a series of instructional videos by (straight-identifying) YouTuber Wil Dasovich. Queer slang has never been better-documented, or more accessible, though whether it will keep in touch with its roots remains to be seen.

As soon as Drag Race ceased to define its own terms, the internet stepped in for anyone out of the loop.
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It Will Probably (Continue To) Be Used To Sell Us Stuff

It’s an ancient cliché that the entertainment industry is especially influenced by queer culture, and it follows that its slang would become the media’s lingua franca. In the Philippines, it’s almost a requirement that people working in entertainment be versed in Swardspeak (Hart & Hart, 1990). Drag Race incorporated the slang of queer nightclubs because that’s where its contestants work. Performers from Katy Perry, to Morrissey, to David Bowie have woven queer slang terms into their work—it was inevitable that the language of the people working in entertainment would bleed into what they produce. Especially with the new forum of social media, like Dasovich’s instructional videos, slang is able to move faster and further than ever before.

This exposure has its perks. Drag queens, once reviled as everything undesirable about gay men, have risen to a point of cultural reverence—and they’re making a mint off of it. Queer media (independent and non-) is able to attract bigger audiences and more lucrative advertisers—can you imagine Nanette or them existing in the days of Drag Race’s infamous season 1 filter? But corporations and non-LGBTQIA+ individuals, too, want a piece of the pink dollar, and speaking the right language is a proven way to get it. Enter the Target shirts.

Being absorbed into the mainstream means being brought into everything Western society represents—including capitalism. When queer slang’s associations shift from the queer simply to the fashionable, those in the know (and those who stand to gain) suddenly and infinitely expand, and as any linguist will tell you, the changes that come with this will be almost impossible to hinder. But don’t mourn what may or may not be lost to history—enjoy this unprecedented chance to write (and speak) it.