Drawing Infertility: Visual Resistance, Dark Humor, and the Subversion of the ‘Baby Machine’ in Rohini S. Rajagopal’s What’s a Lemon Squeezer Doing in My Vagina?

Page No. : 1-16

Abstract

In the contemporary socio-cultural landscape of India, infertility is heavily stigmatised, often transforming the female body into a site of intensive medical surveillance and societal pressure. Whilst existing scholarship in Medical Humanities critically examines the institutional medicalisation of infertile bodies, reducing them to living laboratories or baby machines, the specific role of visual narratives as a mode of agency remains largely under-explored. This paper scrutinises Rohini S. Rajagopal’s graphic memoir, What’s a Lemon Squeezer Doing in My Vagina? (2021), through the lens of Graphic Medicine to explore how visual text and literary prose intersect to reclaim the maternal body. Drawing upon feminist critiques of medicalisation and the framework of Visual Rhetoric, this study argues that Rajagopal utilises dark humour and satirical metaphors as vital coping mechanisms and tools of resistance against the clinical coldness of Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART). By analysing how the trauma of invasive procedures and the cyclic despair of IVF failures are articulated, the paper demonstrates how the text subverts the eighteenth-century biomedical metaphor of the body as a mechanical object. Grounded in recent scholarship up to 2026, the study further engages with contemporary debates surrounding digital medicalisation, social-media infertility communities, and legislative developments in Indian ART regulation. Ultimately, this study contributes a fresh perspective to Indian Medical Humanities, illustrating how patient-authored narratives can disrupt institutional medical hegemony and foster empathy by restoring subjective human experience to the discourse of reproductive failure.