The virtual speculum in the New World Order1

Abstract

Beginning by reading a 1992 feminist appropriation of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam - in a cartoon in which the finger of a nude Adamic woman touches a computer keyboard, while the god-like VDT screen shows a disembodied fetus -‘Virtual Speculum’ argues for a broader conception of ‘new reproductive technologies’ in order to foreground justice and freedom projects for differently situated women in the New World Order. Broadly conceptualized reproductivepractices must be central to social theory in general, and to technoscience studiesin particular. Tying together the politics of self help and women’s health movementsin the United States in the 1970s with positions on reproductive freedom articulated within the Legal Defense and Educational Fund of the NAACP in the 1990s, the paper examines recent work in feminist science studies in several disciplinaryand activist locations. Statistical analysis and ethnography emerge as critical feminist technologies for producing convincing representations of the reproduction ofinequality. Untangling the semiotic and political-economic dialectics of invisibilityand hypervisibility, ‘Virtual Speculum’ concludes by linking the well-surveyedamniotic fluid of on-screen fetuses and the off-frame diarrhea of uncounted andunderfed infants in regimes of flexible accumulation and structural adjustment. © 1997, Feminist Review. All Rights Reserved.