BODY-IMAGES AND THE PORNOGRAPHY OF REPRESENTATION

Abstract

The paper examines some issues in the medicalization of the female body as they impinge upon contemporary feminist theories of subjectivity. The biological sciences operate by making the embodied subject visible and intelligible according to the principles of scientific representation. However, the bio-technological universe merely manifests and intensifies the tendencies that had been evident since the beginning of modern technology and science. Science in the modern world is an exultation of the scopic drive as a gesture of epistemological domination and control by rendering the invisible visible and visualizing the secrets of nature. The merrygo- round of bodily parts, or cells, or tissues that do not belong anywhere encourages the fantasy that one does not really come from anywhere specific, from any one bodily point. This visualization ends in medical pornography, a system of representation that reinforces the commercial logic of a market economy. The whole body turns into a visual surface of interchangeable parts. This new medical pornography, which is ultimately grounded in detachment of the fetus from the mother’s body, dismemberment of bodily unity, and swapping its parts, has enormous social and political consequences. The article reviews the thinking of contemporary women and feminist scholars — Donna Haraway, Luce Irigaray, Evelyn Fox Keller and others — and argues that feminist critiques have quick and successful in counteracting the perverse effects of new technologies. The author stresses that productive feminist interventions in biomedical power structures will require paying close attention to the politics of visual culture and the pervasiveness of pornography as the dominant structure of representation in both scientific and popular discourse.