I Need Your Full Cooperation is a feminist videotape that looks at the medical institution and the relationship women patients have with their doctors. Using an untraditional cinematic treatment intercutting narrative and documentary elements with historical film footage, this work constructs a critical examination of Western medical handling of "unruly" women.
I Need Your Full Cooperation fluidly justaposes interviews (Barbara Ehrenreich, activist, and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, historian) with dramatic selections from Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" (a classic feminist text), archival footage of the medical establishment's teaching films with Hollywood's depictions of the fragile, sickly female patient - horizontal in the frame. Each element informs the reading of the other and questions abound around gender readings of scientific practice and women's need to control their own health care. This tape points out the necessity for patient awareness of the subtle (or not so subtle) manipulations that occur in medical relationships.
Part of Women and Medicine / Voices in My Head series.