The Great Clit Debate: Exploring the Art and Science of Female Pleasure

Overview

Join science journalist Rachel E. Gross and artist Sophia Wallace, two of the foremost thinkers when it comes to the clitoris and female sexuality, for a wild ride into your own body and intimate self-knowledge. In this variety show, we’ll gently reacquaint you with the clitoris and vulva through an interactive craft activity, clit jeopardy (with edible prizes!), and an onstage debate where we’ll require your help to settle a heated question: who has done more for the clitoris, art or science?

Is it the world of culture, where artists like Sophia have worked to elevate the clitoris as an icon of empowered sexuality and wholeness? Or is it the realm of science, where researchers like the ones Rachel reports on have been filling in medicine’s hazy map of the clitoris, nerve fiber by painstaking nerve fiber? Wallace and Gross will embody the muses of Art and Science, respectively, to finally set the record straight.

Have a clitoris? Know someone who does? Care about your own pleasure, reproductive rights, sexual health, or the right to bodily autonomy? Then this show is for you!

**A special installation with Sophia Wallace’s work will be on view in The Greene Space lobby and windows through June.

Rachel E. Gross

Credit: Photo provided by Guest

Rachel E. Gross is an award-winning science journalist who writes about gender bias and marginalized voices in medicine for The New York Times, Scientific American, BBC, and others. She is the author of “Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage,” a New York Times Editors’ Pick and finalist for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Nonfiction and the PEN/E.O. Wilson Award in Literary Science Writing. Previously, she was a 2018-19 Knight Science Journalism Fellow and the digital science editor of Smithsonian magazine. Her investigation into medicine’s failure to research the clitoris was one of NYT’s most-shared articles of 2023.

Sophia Wallace

Credit: Photo by Jennifer Lima Pais

Sophia Wallace is an artist best known for establishing an iconography of the clitoridian. For eleven years, Wallace has sculpted, sketched, pasted, inflated and spoken this subject into indelible presence. Artwork-by-artwork, she counters a suspicious absence in art history, exhibited widely in the US and internationally including Portugal, Spain, Austria, Mexico, Italy, Nigeria, Australia and the UK. Her TED featured talk, A Case For Cliteracy has been viewed over 2 million times. She can be seen on BBC/Hulu’s Planet Sex with Cara Delevigne and in The Dilemma of Desire by Maria Finitzo, available on most streaming platforms.