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Terri Kapsalis is a writer, performer, activist and an Adjunct Associate Professor of Visual and Critical Studies; Performance; Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Education
Terri Kapsalis graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1988. She continued her education in Chicago at Northwestern University earning her MA in Performance Studies in 1990 and PhD in 1994.

Career
Terri Kapsalis began her career as an activist focusing on health care access to all.

In 1983 Kapsalis was a founding member of Streetlight Production, a performing group that focused on both the unconventional style as well as more traditional theater while questioning the political aspects of theater and performing. When the group relocated to Chicago in 1988, it was renamed Theater Oobleck. In 1985 the group transitioned to a no director policy which it still adopts to this day. In addition to performing over 30 Theater Oobleck/Spotlight performances, Kapsalis has performed across the continent on the following stages; Renaissance Society, Museum of Contemporary Art, Smart Museum, Chicago; Drawing Center, NY; No Music Festival, Ontario.

In 1991 Kapsalis began her work as a health educator and collective member at the Chicago Women's Health Center (CWHC). Then in 2009 she co-founded the Trans Greater Access Project (TGAP), an agency wide initiative works to increase inclusion and affirm access to all trans-persons who are in need of services at the CWHC. Moreover, while working at the CWHC Kapsalis also worked to establish the Integrated Health Program, which works to provide alternative care, such as acupuncture, massage and body work, which are otherwise typically out of reach to lower income individuals.

Currently, she teaches Visual and Critical Studies; Performance; Art History, Theory, and Criticism in the Department of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in addition to continuing with many of her earlier performing and activism projects.

Research
Kapsalis's teaching and research focuses on the interdisciplinary practices of public health, women's rights and African-American. In her works Kapsalis, "draw[s] upon past and contemporary examples of medical practice as well as popular culture" to examine the common experience ridden with anxiety and conflicting feelings between women and doctors.

In her book chapter, "Mastering the Female Pelvis: Race and the Tools of Reproduction.", Terri Kapsalis uncovers the horrors of the birthplace of essentially modern-day gynecology. Kapsalis tells the long-silenced story of the slave women who suffered under the hand of Dr. J. Marion Sims, a southern white male doctor, who was not the first to exploit Black slave women sexually, but the first to torture Black women in the name of medical science. She traces the narratives of the slave women who suffered from men using their bodies as canvas for a theatrical show. These medical procedures also had economic impacts because as the slave trade ended the value in having a female slave was not only in their ability to work in the fields, but rather in their ability to produce more slaves through reproduction. Moreover, Kapsalis takes this as a case study to highlight the discrepancies between a white women’s chastity and Black women’s chastity – or lack thereof. She argues that Black women’s bodies till this day are not respected in the same way and that no minority bodies are treated. Kapsalis supports this argument with her the modern day example of the distribution of Norplant and other forms of birth control and sterilization methods unjustly targeted at minority groups.

Books

 * Public Privates: Performing Gynecology from Both Ends of the Speculum (1997)
 * Jane Addams' Travel Medicine Kit (2011)
 * The Hysterical Alphabet (2008)
 * Traveling the Spaceways: Sun Ra, the Astro Black and Other Solar Myths (2006)
 * Pathways to the Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn, and Chicago's Afrofutuist Underground, 1954-1968 (2007)
 * "Mastering the Female Pelvis: Race and the Tools of Reproduction." In Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture (2002), ed. Kimberly Wallace-Sanders. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 263-300.

Articles

 * Kapsalis, T. 2018. We Write with Scissors. PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 133''(1), 146–153. https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2018.133.1.146
 * Kapsalis, T. (2002). MAKING BABIES THE AMERICAN GIRL WAY. The Baffler, (15), 29-33. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/43306541
 * Kapsalis, T. (1999). Handless. The Baffler, 13, 25–26. https://doi.org/10.1162/bflr.1999.13.25