Judy Chicago: Smiling Through Gritted Teeth
Smiling Through Gritted Teeth
Discussion Questions
Smiling is usually an expression of a positive emotion, and gritting teeth is often an expression of negative feelings or stress. How does Judy Chicago's combination of the two expressions relate to the tendency or expectation to "grin and bear it" when faced with pain?
Judy Chicago's painting "Smiling through Gritted Teeth" looks like an image from a textbook or a layered image from an encyclopedia entry on the human body. How does using the medicalized image affect our understanding of smiling and gritting teeth as both physical and emotional actions?
What can this painting and Sonya Huber’s poem teach us about supporting and caring for individuals in pain? How can a person's individual experiences of pain in day-to-day life be taken into account in their care?
Reflections from #MedHumChat
“We often smile for ourselves and for others, just to get through a day of pain. It's often not from a visible source, so it can be helpful to ourselves to mask the suffering, but also so that we don't have to deal w other people who don't understand.”—@mcshannon17
“They are so so similar, yet represent such vastly different experiences. I think the image with the smile and the grimace reminds us what a thin line divides our pleasure from pain, and how in some circumstances they can be mixed.”—@Ndouthit
“I think this shows the limitations of medicalized images. Human feelings are not visible on this image.”—@sleotin
“The medicalization this way to me presents this image in the art as a representation of a generalizable truth. In textbooks it isn't just one person's arm anatomy, it's meant to represent a schema for arms. It probably makes it harder to empathize with images/cases/situations that don't match the schema, much like how we miss heart disease in women because it doesn't match the ostensibly generalizable truth we are taught of what heart disease looks like”—@MGraceOliver
About this #MedHumChat
"Smiling through Gritted Teeth" was paired with “What Pain Wants," a poem by Sonya Huber for a #MedHumChat discussion September 18, 2019 exploring The Emotion of Pain.
The pieces for this chat, along with the discussion questions, were selected by Anna Leahy.
About the Artist
Judy Chicago is an artist, author, feminist, educator, and intellectual whose work has appeared in hundreds of publications throughout the world. You can learn more about her here.