ALMA Futura: Rebellious Bodies, Self-Managed Gynecology and Feminist Biohacking
- Giovanna Gallace
- 11 minutes ago
- 4 min read
The female body is just a body. The female body is not just a body.
It is the vital matrix of ancestral knowledge. It carries collective and personal memories and embodies struggles, care, desires and resistances. It makes power and vulnerability coexist, trying to breathe in its entirety, between normative discourses that attempt to discipline and standardize it, and gender-based violence that tries to master it and diminish it, failing to see that what happens in the female body can never be governed by laws, dogmas or brute force. Not even the person owning that body has full control over it, in the cycles that run through it.
Here, the female body is not intended as a fixed biological category, but as a situated, political and lived experience that intersects with different identities and embodiments.
The estrangement that science and medicine often practice towards female subjectivity has been denounced for decades. Until the early 1990s, women were routinely excluded from clinical trials, and today conditions such as endometriosis still take on average 7 to 10 years to be diagnosed, revealing a persistent structural gap in medical knowledge. A capitalist medicine, whose task is to fix the broken piece in order to make us produce or reproduce more, is indeed an objectifying medicine.
Care cannot be reduced to a choice that starts and ends in the scientific knowledge of the doctor but must be generated from the understanding of the signs that reside in the personal knowledge that the body has of itself.
In my constant search for more conscious alternatives, I found out about ALMA Futura, a space that gives sovereignty back to people over their own body and their own stories of health, sexuality and reproduction.
Founded in 2018 by Giulia Tomasello, interaction designer and educator and Isabel Farina, medical anthropologist and menstrual consultant, ALMA Futura is the ground where design and anthropology sprout nourished by activism, research and community. Practices are experimented around key themes for those who experience life through a female body: from self-managed gynecology to sexual education, from prevention to reproductive justice.The ALMA Futura team conducts workshops around the world to collect testimonies and better understand cultures, languages and practices of intimate health, highlighting barriers that still separate information and body, and the necessity of inclusive spaces where to share knowledge.
Redefining knowledge on health by giving back sovereignty
In the wake of a feminist tradition which in the 70s finds its political expression in self-managed gynecology, Isabel and Giulia take up and implement practices of self-exploration and self-awareness. They do so by creating spaces of research and understanding, and with tools such as the ALMA Toolkit, a toolbox for a more accessible bodily education and awareness.
The toolkit offers anatomical models of vulvas, speculum, protocols of microscopic observation, a mini laboratory to know one’s vaginal microbiome and an online platform to share experiences, contributing to the democratization and the destigmatization of intimate health, promoting a conscious self-management of the body and a medicine that responds to the real needs of women and other marginalized bodies by challenging the hierarchy between institutional knowledge and embodied experience.
Reproductive health is still conditioned by taboos and does not give space to the importance of communicating, both with the body and between gynecologists, immunologists and biologists. For example, after a gynecological visit, the outcome can also depend on the personal state of the immune system or on the balance of the vaginal microbiome. Conditions like bacterial vaginosis affect up to 1 in 3 people with vaginas globally, yet remain under-researched and stigmatized.Self-exploration allows us to know our body, like the color of our cervix, something that is not usually assessed during gynecological visits, and is an important indicator of health, hormone levels, and any infectious or inflammatory conditions.
Xenopia: rethinking abortion, technology and self-determination
One of the most representative projects of ALMA Futura, Xenopia, uses technology and design to provoke gender policies and give back agency to the female body. The research explores how pregnancy testing technologies can be redesigned as accessible, reusable and self-managed tools.The name recalls the frog Xenopus Laevis, used for decades as a biological pregnancy test and to study the hormone that detects it, the Beta hCG.
Current pregnancy tests are single-use devices, expensive, based on the exploitation of other animals, and do not take into consideration the experience of abortion. In a present in which access to abortion is more and more threatened, the test is a crucial step for the right to termination of pregnancy. The first weeks of gestation are the ground on which the political war against freedom of choice is fought: Xenopia tries to give back to people the possibility to choose by themselves.
The project aims to prototype a domestic test of the Beta hCG hormone, as a tool of self-determination and reproductive justice, using Open Science and Biohacking to investigate gynecological technology. By mapping the technologies controlling reproductive bodies and how abortion is handled, they hack pregnancy tests to create homemade reusable tests to monitor the hormone hCG, translating them into accessible practices.
“In an era in which access to abortion is more and more limited it is urgent to provide ourselves tools of autonomy and self-management. For this reason we hack the technologies that control and repress us and we free the living organic interfaces that are exploited.”
From “Xenopia Libera”, ALMA Futura podcast
The construction of a conscious and inclusive medicine
ALMA Futura is a community project and involves international networks of biohacking, technological feminism and biological art, from Gynepunka Bio to Art Coven, and tries to approach feminist productivity as a tool to shape new knowledge and practices beyond the borders of official institutions.
The claim of female bodies as political spaces, distinguished by experience, care and love, but also by fertile anger and the capacity of transformation is connected to liberation, a collective process that starts from the voice and daily practices of those who decide to take care of themselves and others.The female body in the capitalist system and for nationalist politics is seen as an assembly line, but women authentically create new life, giving birth not only to children (if and how they want) but to visions and thoughts necessary to sustain, comfort and improve human existence.Self-exploration is a practice that belongs exclusively and forever to us, and on which no one can speculate, neither in economic sense, nor advertising, nor institutional.
Data based on reports from ALMA Futura, NIH, WHO and recent gynecological research.