The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Gender, and Science (review)

The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Gender, and Science edited by Lisa Cartwright, Constance Penley, and Paula A. Treichler. New York: New York University Press, 1998, 304 pp., $19.00 paperback.

Treichler, Cartwright, and Penley have composed a volume representing a wide range of perspectives represented by patients and practitioners, bioscientists, activists, and academic disciplines in the social sciences, sciences and humanities. The editors identify as central the proposition that "visibility is not transparency," highlighting the power of visual representation and rhetoric to create meaning and pointing to what the editors describe as feminism's commitment "to illuminate unseen connections." It seems, then, that feminism and the imaging technologies scientists use have in common the goal of rendering visible what was previously hidden. Much of the pleasure of reading The Visible Woman is in the tension that results from positioning science as the unseen, and feminism as the technology that renders the unseen visible (if not transparent). This is most obvious in articles that focus on medical imaging technologies, such as Ella Shohat's "Lasers for Ladies," which analyzes how current clinical approaches to endometriosis illuminate "the coexistence of an up-to-date endoscopic panopticon . . . with an old, myopic discourse concerning femaleness" (241).

In company with Shohat, articles by Lisa Cartwright, Carol Stabile, and Valerie Hartouni emphasize the facility with which imaging technologies obscure and reveal the object. Hartouni's wonderfully effective "Fetal Exposures," structured around Aline Mare's 1991 art video about abortion, "S'Aline's Solution," produces for the reader a revelatory moment in which the secret of imaging technologies--their ability to delude the viewer--is suddenly illuminated. What Hartouni and Mare reveal is the artfulness of fetal photography, which has been so useful to antiabortion activists. In "Shooting the Mother," Stabile advocates focusing on pregnancy, rather than on the moments of conception or giving birth, to counter the perception that pregnancy is "a passive ontological state" (186). However, while it is true that imaging technologies have been used to erase images of the mother's body, rendering the mother visible does not necessarily mean liberating her, as Stabile's allusions to current efforts to use media coverage and legal strategies to discipline mothers suggest. Lisa Cartwright's essay, "A Cultural Anatomy of the Visible Human Project" examines a massive National Library of Medicine project that produced a Visible Man consisting of "images of over 1,800 1.0-millimeter cross-sectional slices" and a Visible Woman consisting of "5,000 images of .33 millimeter slices" (25). The images are intended to represent "the closest thing to a living body," or the highest degree of (transparent) visibility (25). Cartwright notices the reception of the Visible Man as a universal hero and the Visible Woman as useful for understanding female reproductive anatomy, and relates this predictable phenomenon to the idea that specifying the sex or race of a body can be "used to support arguments about the biological bases of pathology to the exclusion of environmental and social factors" (41).

There remains the question of whether the ultimate feminist purpose is to work toward transparency or continue to explore the gap between the ideal--a longed-for but unachievable transparency--and the mixture of illusion and truth imaging technologies purvey. For instance, Stacie Colwell's "The End of the Road" examines didactic films about venereal disease produced during World War I, describing the results of the collaboration of government agencies and women's reform organizations. The films they produced presented as inevitable the happy destinies of good girls who waited for marriage and the sad destinies of bad or deluded girls who didn't. The demise of the collaboration, which sidelined women's organizations and left "insulated officials" in power, did nothing to improve women's access to useful information, and it would be difficult to argue that the involvement of women made the films more transparent and less ideologically bound (75).

Later "feminists" also helped to...