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

This paper explores how the engagement of art influences theological research through Michelle Browder’s “Mothers of Gynecology” monument in Montgomery, Alabama. One mile away from Browder’s work, Montgomery’s capitol commemorates Dr. J. Marion Sims as the Father of Gynecology, even as his discoveries were made by operating on enslaved women without their consent or anesthesia. In contrast to Sims’s monument, “Mothers of Gynecology” enacts the sacred space to remember the true Mothers of Gynecology: Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy. In conversation with theological aesthetics and Kelly Brown Douglas’s Stand Your Ground, this paper will: 1) closely analyze the aesthetics of “Mothers of Gynecology” as a primary source for theological writing and 2) demonstrate how the monument created the space for ongoing activist engagement. Ultimately, I argue that Browder’s “Mothers of Gynecology” evinces the power of art to act as radical re-education, and thus as a space of necessary theological reflection.