The ultrasound fetal image : the event of birth, female body and medical discourse
Author(s)
Advisor
Mutman, MahmutDate
2008Publisher
Bilkent University
Language
English
Type
ThesisItem Usage Stats
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Abstract
The use of ultrasound fetal image has become common in medical practice. The
ultrasound is a contemporary result of a long medical and technological history, in
which the human body and its pathologies are known and controlled by medical
apparatus. It is a specific form of image produced by what Michel Foucault called
the medical gaze. The thesis offers a genealogy of the ultrasound image and then
turns its attention to its contemporary use. By taking the obstetrical examination
room as a social context, it shows that what is at stake is not merely technological
but actually a social relationship, at the center of which visibility plays a fundamental
role. This new power context controls and administers both women’s body and the
emergent fetal body, which it perceives as an “originary human form.” In the culture
at large, the fetus is even turned into a citizen with its rights, a metaphor which the
anti-abortion movement used and abused extensively. Reading fetology as well as
the fetal image in terms of a social relationship of power, it is demonstrated that the
woman’s body is treated as mere environment. However, although technology is an
important part of this biopolitics, it can also be read as an extension of human body
through which the body knows and complicates itself.
Keywords
fetusphallogocentrism
ocularcentrism
phallomorphism
medical gaze
fetal personhood
fetal image
ultrasound