Dogstar
A short essay film exploring the embodied afterlife of sexual trauma through medical imaging, microscopy, archival footage, and personal narration.
Enter the gynecologic archive: when the body is rendered as a series of “unremarkable” findings, what histories and systems remain unseen? Through personal microscopy, ultrasound, archival footage, and personal narration, Dogstar constructs a visual and sonic landscape that resists the clinical gaze, translating trauma across micro and macrocosmic scales.
Artist
Ayden Seanna Massey (2026)
Artist Lens
At twenty years old, I was told I needed a hysterectomy. In the aftermath of sexual violence, I was confronted with one of the most difficult decisions of my life: continue living with severe pelvic pain or sacrifice my uterus. Rooted in this encounter, Dogstar examines the enduring costs of sexual violence and medical sexual abuse, tracing the physical, economic, relational, and systemic reverberations of sexual trauma.
The rationale behind my creative capstone is largely grounded in Laura Rascaroli’s theoretical framework, which understands essay film as a mechanism that literally thinks. According to Rascaroli, the disjunction through which experimental essay films operate produces an epistemological intervention, functioning at the level of knowledge production. Working through the tension between images, sounds, words, and spaces, my essay film seeks to reconfigure the medical gaze through the subversion of medical imaging, reimagining biosocial ways of understanding sexual violence and sexual trauma beyond trauma-blind institutional logics of classification and legitimacy.
In the making of this film, I both produced my own medical imaging and volunteered my body as a site of research. By performing these opposing identities: subject and researcher, narrator and witness, I positioned myself as an agent of my own seeing, transforming my “unremarkable” findings into knowledge and meaning. Rejecting the myth of sexual violence as a catalyst for transformation, Dogstar speaks to a slower violence: one in which harm is cumulative, embodied, and systemic rather than spectacular.
Media
Video