Karen L. Carr

English Department
Colby College
klcarr@colby.edu

 

Since the seer is caught up in what he sees, it is still himself he sees: there is a fundamental narcissism of all vision. And thus, for the same reason, the vision he exercises, he also undergoes from the things, such that, as many painters have said, I feel myself looked at by the things, my activity is equally passivity–which is the second and more profound sense of the narcissism: not to see in the outside, as the others see it, the contour of a body one inhabits, but especially to be seen by the outside, to exist within it, to emigrate into it, to be seduced, captivated, alienated by the phantom so that the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen.¹

 

I am caught, embedded in the footsteps that lead into this moment of time in which I am frozen. There, pushing itself up, out, around, in front of everything else, the large round belly that forces time into position. This is no moment of death; nor is it a moment of life. . . . Caught, transformed, transfixed. . . . A death mask? A memory? A moment in which I will always be living, always be dying. Breath never leaving dust on the glossy surface.

 

Ultrasound uses sound waves to create an image of the fetus on a screen which is viewed by the patient, the ultrasound technician and (later, separately) the doctor. Like Freud, inquiring into the deaf mind, the ultrasound can be seen as an attempt to investigate the deafness of the pregnant body by producing sight. Sight and sound are linked via the medium of the ultrasound machine itself as well as the doctor who must be on hand to interpret its imagery. Like the psychoanalyst, the doctor is the agential figure. The image, like the memory of the hysteric, may come from the body but once it is brought into being and made visual, it has traversed the line between a “raw” visual conglomeration and into a “real” baby. This transformation of fetus to baby via the image cannot happen without the doctor. Fuzzy gray images floating, fragmented on the screen become hands, feet, penis, mouth, eyes, heart as soon as the doctor interprets them.

 

The ultrasound technician is caught between patient and doctor in this configuration. S/he may point out bodily parts and confer gender on the fetus, as long as the fetus looks “healthy.” Often, the pregnant woman can diagnose a “problem” herself just based upon the amount of silence in the room. The technician, then, becomes the person with a secret. The “baby” is in effect hidden in and by the image until the doctor can step in to bring it forth and make it clear and whole. It is in the process of revealing that which the patient cannot see that the doctor becomes the first agent of the developing fetus’ subjectivity. Ultrasound, in its opening of the pregnant body, becomes a marker of reality. Once the doctor constructs the image on the screen, sign and referent are brought together. The pregnant body is no longer concealing a private mysterious event; rather, it is holding a “life” that we can check in on–visit–via our ability to see. In the ideological terrain of modern reproduction, this technology functions so as to change fetuses into babies, possible existence into “life” and private into public.

 

Certainly, the rise of “fetal rights” cannot be separated from the rise in fetal technologies which allow us access to the fetus via images or via the pregnant body itself in uterine pre-partum surgery. Medical technologies which allow sight of the fetus engender a reproductive world in which, much like Foucault’s notion of panopticism, “I am seen therefore I am.” Indeed, Rosalind Petchesky argues that, from the clinician’s standpoint, fetal imaging becomes “a kind of panoptics of the womb.”²

 

The reproductive (pregnant) body exists as spectacle–it is always a profoundly sighted body that doesn’t exist apart from being seen. There is the external sense of people looking, but with technologies such as ultrasound, there is also the internal sense that the fetus itself is, somehow, looking. Representations of the fetus by anti-choice groups focus on this notion of the fetus by accentuating its human qualities–the tiny hands and fingers, organs and sensory apparati–ears, eyes, mouth. When this technique works, it is a means of setting up internal surveillance for the woman who is pregnant. Not only is the state watching but so is the human-like fetus itself. The pregnant body then is circumscribed by a visual line that is both in and out, private and public.

 

The pregnant woman takes on the job of surveillance herself, by “humanizing” and making real the fetus inside, by internalizing the camera eye and pulling the conglomeration of cells that is fetus into the ultrasonically constructed “whole” baby–“not only ‘already a baby,’ but more–a ‘baby-man,’ an autonomous, atomized mini-space hero.”³ This view is supported by medical and social ideologies which encourage women to view their fetuses as children from the moment they know they are there. In an episode of “Murphy Brown,” for instance, Murphy talks about the “little voice inside her” which helped engender her decision to continue her pregnancy. Pregnancy manuals, pamphlets at doctors’ and midwives’ offices frequently refer to the fetus as “your baby,” especially when directing women to refrain from “unhealthy habits which might harm the baby.” An American Cancer Society poster, circulated in the early 80s, depicted a fetus with a cigarette in its mouth to “really show” the ill-effects of smoking during pregnancy. Like ultrasound, the image of the smoking fetus worked by humanizing the fetus, by giving it representation within its womb environment. Once the “secret” of the womb environment is exposed, that environment too must be socially constructed via narrative, much like Dora’s bodily secrets. Once societal forces have gained sight, they must also construct representations which keep the fetus in circulation, in service of the ideology of pregnancy which demands rights for a fetus. This self-surveillance and social surveillance is what enables the legal regulation of the pregnant body. It is as if the woman who takes drugs, smokes or drinks during pregnancy has failed at policing herself, at merging the lines of public and private sight on top of her body. She becomes the ultimate transgressor because she has failed in her task to give the fetus subjectivity–to bestow upon it an identity which, once there, needs to be protected and nurtured at all costs. In other words, the woman who fails to be her own cop fails because she refuses to conflate pregnant body with mother by participating in the social mandate that the fetus become subject well before birth.

 

In the realm of reproductive technologies, sight rather than language becomes the crucial determiner of subjectivity. The fetal “body” that has been constructed by medicine and culture is one that needs no words; indeed, as Peteshky makes clear, it only need have the “Silent Scream” of the movie which anti-choice groups have used so effectively.⁴ If subjectivity is a process that is recognized and mediated by legal discourse and ideology, then the fetus, found in the moving glops of a video screen, is subject. Lacan’s infamous mirror instead becomes a video display screen where looking at and looking out produce images through which subjectivity is granted. It hardly matters that the fetus, unlike the child in the mirror, has no recognition of its own shape, or its mother’s. What matters is that it has been found, caught by the zig-zagging sound waves, caught by the photograph that freezes its “babyhood,” its subjectivity for all the world to see. In her discussion of reproductive discourse, Valerie Hartouni quotes from a physician’s description of ultrasound:

 

Physician Michael R. Harrison puts the issue this way:

 

it was not until the last half of this century that the prying eye of the ultrasound (that is, ultrasound visualization) rendered the once opaque womb transparent, stripping the veil of mystery from the dark inner sanctum, and letting the light of scientific observation fall on the shy and secretive fetus. . . . The sonographic voyeur, spying on the unwary fetus finds him or her a surprisingly active little creature, and not at all the passive parasite we had imagined.”

 

No longer a “medical recluse” or a “parasite,” the fetus has been grasped as an object of scientific observation and medical manipulation, not to mention anthropomorphic imagination.”⁵

 

As I look at my fetus, floating at me from within the sound hollow cavern of my womb, I am, in a sense, re-sutured even as I am being fragmented. My uterus, on display, lit up like some video game is, paradoxically, the means to my fragmentation as well as my access to “wholeness.” It is this very fragmentation that the ultrasound machine attempts to re-absorb into an ideology of wholeness that includes sighting the fetus and granting it subjectivity even as it still resides in the body. Birth, as Kristeva talks about it in “Motherhood According to Bellini,” is no longer the only possible moment of dual subjectivity; rather, the pregnant woman becomes holder of two subjectivities, two gazes out at the moment that her fetus is sighted/sited.⁶ During my own ultrasound, as the fetus careened off the walls of my uterus, its hands over its ears (“Does it hurt the fetus?” I asked. “Oh no; they can’t hear any of this. It has no effect on them.”), it suddenly turned and faced the screen, peering out like some sort of amphibious alien, caught in a screen that can only contain. It was an unsettling moment–one in which my fetus became too real. In looking out at the screen–a random and coincidental movement–the fetus had returned my gaze, somehow. And that changed everything. It is the photograph moving–turning real, taking on eyes and mouth, pressing its face up against the screen like a child pushing/disfiguring his face against a window and leaving fog. Barthes writes, “if the photograph then becomes horrible, it is because it certifies, so to speak, that the corpse is alive as corpse: it is the living image of a dead thing. For the photograph’s immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live.”⁷

 

At the moment that I imagine a gaze for the fetus in side me, I am granting it life in death. The fetus remains as a death, as a mystery, a question until it prods one of the senses. A heartbeat, a kick or a sighting (which can be done long before a heartbeat can be heard or a kick felt) bring it into possibility–into the world of the Live. By looking out from the screen, looking back out, the fetus is both Real and Live; in looking out at me, it becomes real precisely because it is alive–precisely because it is moving through me like some wind up toy in a small box.

 

Fetus. Baby. Baby. Fetus. These terms have become polarized as all positions within the “debate” about the right to choose abortion have relied upon the most far-reaching extremes of opposition in advancing their arguments. The “pro-life” position relies upon the assertion of life at any and all moments while the “pro-choice” position walks right into the argumentative terrain mapped by the anti-choice crusaders by opposing a construction of life with a construction of tissue, of fetus. The pregnant woman is caught in this discursive net, floating somewhere between the terms of scientific technicality and procreative astonishment. To be pregnant and construct a “baby” out of the mass of cells rapidly splintering inside is to move precariously close to a political position in which “life” becomes the operant term for the thing, the stuff of the body’s hidden insides. For a feminist committed to intervention, it is a retracing of the line between public and private as the fantasies of kicking, twirling, suckling babies must be kept “in,” lest they fall into the hands and mouths of the “wrong side,” in this case, the anti-choice marauders. Thus, the personal must be re-inscribed away from the political as the deployment of the transformation of fetus to baby can become quite problematic. Similarly, the pregnant woman who doesn’t want to be pregnant must counter the narrative seduction of life, baby, gurgling, etc. and reconceive “baby” as “fetus.” Pro-choice constructions of pregnancy and abortion make this quite difficult however, by assuming that the choice of abortion must, necessarily, be “difficult,” “painful,” etc. Abortion stories are filled with descriptions of just this sort of abortion and only work to reinforce the boundary between women who have abortions for the “right” reasons and with the proper amount of guilt and suffering and women who “take it lightly,” “do it as a form of birth control,” or have frequent abortions. This moralistic position only reinforces the arguments of those who violently oppose women’s ability to act and move with any agency and autonomy. The construction of “right” and “wrong,” good and bad abortions is similar in effect to early twentieth century eugenecists’ constructions of fit and unfit mothers, and is, at its core, an argument that is still based on a conceptualization of the fetus as life, not tissue and cells. The expectation of, indeed, the demand for suffering and levity, trauma and pain belies any attempt to construct the stuff of pregnancy as cellular matter. If this were the case, then the arguments about abortion by those committed to its continued availability would be radically different, based not on an ethic of “choice,” a false either/or pluralism which only further obscures the issue, and is the continual re-circulation of similar logic, but rather on a construction of pregnancy which works its way out, which accounts for the vast, overwhelming and contradictory constructions of pregnancy that circulate around and on top of anyone who finds herself in that position. Rather than seeing everything as either/or, and expecting women to grieve…or not, to find it hard…or not, it’s important to keep the complexity hanging, to juggle the very multiple and deeply contentious images that construct pregnant subjectivities. The notion of choice is an overly reductive one, one that circulates in such a way that it brings to mind choices like lemonade vs. ice tea, french fries vs. baked potato and quickly reduces anything else in its signifying sphere–abortion, sexuality, etc.–to the same. As so many people arguing against the notion of sexual “choice” show, the concept remains locked in its binaristic prison where all choices are available from a menu of two items. Sexuality? choice or biology. Who would choose such a life? Why aren’t there more? Abortion? choice (i.e., death) or “life.” But the choice is never an easy one. No one is saying that it’s easy, only that the choice be hers.

 

Appeals to women to have ultrasound tend to construct ultrasound as a harmless diagnostic tool which can help the “mother” personalize the fetus, to make it more “real,” setting it up as a sort of pre-birth bonding tool while at the same time convincing women of its necessity to insure a healthy pregnancy. It’s meant to put women’s minds “at ease” in appeals, again to the unknown terrors of pregnancy–ill health, disabilities, death. As Rosalind Petchesky and Valerie Hartouni have both pointed out, ultrasound also functions as an ideological tool in that its personalizing of the fetus often sways women who might otherwise have wanted abortions.

 

Hartouni describes the “study” (based, as she points out, “on only two, entirely unrelated interviews”) of ultrasound that led to the making of The Silent Scream:

 

Fletcher and Evans noted that ultrasound imaging of the “fetal form” tended to foster among pregnant women a sense of recognition and identification of the fetus as their own, as something belonging to and dependent upon them alone. Constituting the stuff of maternal bonding, “the fundamental element in the later parent-child bond,” such recognition, Fletcher and Evans claimed, was more likely to lead women “to resolve ‘ambivalent’ pregnancies in favor of the fetus.”⁸

 

The rhetoric of ultrasonography clearly bears them out; ultrasonographers use language of personhood when describing the floating fetus, not language of it-hood. Fetuses are often referred to as he/she (indeed, conferred on the screen as he/she), pregnant women are told to notice how cute he/she is, how he/she is sleeping, looking, sucking her/his thumb, etc. The language is active, the fetus made alive and real by the sound screen. The imaging of ultrasound can also work beyond the resolution of “ambivalent” feelings about a particular, specific pregnancy. As a recent article in the Providence Journal, makes clear, the experience of ultrasound can consolidate ambivalent feelings about abortion in general. After finally “seeing” a “live” “daughter” (with “arms, legs, face, beating heart, life”) on the ultrasound screen after two successive miscarriages, the author determines that:

 

I now find the slogan “my body, my choice” amazingly arrogant. If there is one lesson I have learned through this year, it is that I do not create life. Life passes through me. . . . I do not create life, I house it. I did nothing different with any of my four children, but two lived within my womb and two died there. Life-giving is beyond my power, beyond my body, beyond my choice.⁹

 

Rosalind Petchesky discusses the need to see ultrasound and other reproductive technologies as more than simply “an omnivorous male plot to take over their [women’s] reproductive capacities,” because this view assumes a “transhistorical need,” while also denying any possibility of women being “agents of their own reproductive destinies.”¹⁰ This is a crucial point, one that is too quickly and easily overlooked in the discourse on/of reproductive technologies. While ultrasound can be looked at as simply another aid to feminine fragmentation, the fragmentation itself is too often dismissed as automatically problematic. Here it is useful to consider Haraway as she takes a view of fragmentation which encompasses the various technological apparatuses that have become part of the web of interpellative factors. Haraway writes:

 

A cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point.¹¹

 

To dismiss ultrasound, then, as a re-fragmentation of the female body is to insist that fragmentation is something that we should fight against. That we have abandoned the humanist model of “the individual”, nicely rounded and whole, but left in place the desire for a physicality that is somehow free of the variety of cultural signposts that meet at the body, is a mistake. We need to be able to affirm the very fragmentation which we would fight, to welcome the screaming eyes of the fetus glaring/gazing back. The very subjectivity that ultrasound constructs for the fetus in the service of anti-choice, pro-nuclear heterosexual family ideology also operates in such a way that the pregnant woman herself is able to attempt to make sense of a process (pregnancy) which is always already a profoundly fragmenting, disjunct enactment.

 

(IMAGE)

 

Both of my children were dressed in their names the day we saw them on the ultrasound screen. Like clothing on a naked body, their names, gendered and “personal,” reached over and marked the quickly moving forms that swam across the screen. The siting of my sons, in the names we had picked for them, changed the way I perceived myself as a pregnant woman. No longer floating polymorphous possibilities–BOYS stared out at me from behind a screen which had suddenly granted them gender. No matter how much I thought that I had thought and theorized my way out of gender, when my boys were called into shape by the sight and language of the ultrasound technician, they existed, from that moment on, both separate and apart from me. Boys in my body. My body in boys. The fragmentation was no more complete or incomplete than it had been before I was allowed the sight of my two male fetuses; it was only more real.

 

(IMAGE)

 

In the infamous pregnant nude and glamour photographs of Demi Moore in Vanity Fair, a highly erotic, decorated pregnant body stares at the viewer.¹² Moore is neither apologetic nor shy, reluctant or removed from her sensuality; indeed the photographs are informed by the genre of glamour movie star photos. The pictures of Moore provoked enough controversy for the magazine to wrap that particular issue before it went out to stores and newsstands.

 

The attempts, on the part of the magazine, to keep the pregnant body (especially the naked pregnant body) out of view is part of a cultural history in which the pregnant female body is a sight of both idolization and embarrassment. The pregnant body is perhaps the most visible marker of heterosexual sexuality–the X was here grade school desk graffiti transferred to the body of women. At the same time that the pregnant body can exist so as to re-establish, or disrupt the ideology of the heterosexual nuclear family, it is also meant to exist in a de-sexualized zone, as though all women were the Virgin Mary of Christianity. On the one hand, pregnant bodies are patted and stroked by random strangers on buses, on streets, in classrooms, yet on the other hand, their sexuality is a contained one–sexuality with a reason. For the pregnant woman to stand as a sexualized body even while she’s pregnant (presumably, the reason to be sexual/have sex is already inside her, so why would she want more?) is to transgress the boundary not only of sexuality and desire, but also of inside and outside. Sexuality occurs even as the fetus is in the body; the sexuality continues, around, on top of, next to the fetus. The pregnant woman who is represented as erotic is crossing the boundaries, even as they exist inside her.

 

There is a looking at that photographs of Demi Moore engender. She is pregnant woman as spectacle without being specimen. She is a pregnant body that exists firmly outside of medical representation; her luxurious green gown, her diamonds, her sophisticated, cutting edge haircut all push her further away from the image of pregnant woman as medical subject who needs to be helped, medicated or somehow pathologized. Indeed, these are the very features of pregnant representation which allow it in the first place. Moore’s huge diamond wedding ring glares off her finger and the fashion that her pregnant body exudes and performs is that of completely “right” pregnancy: her body is not excessive beyond its pregnant status, and her status within society is firmly entrenched in and reiterated by the poses she strikes. Moore, then, can resist pathologization because she has already been granted that power by her acquiescences to other normalized expectations: heterosexuality, marriage, wealth, status and beauty. Still, within the rather tight frame of acquiescences which the particularity of Moore’s body reasserts, there is a space being made for an alternate representation of the pregnant body. The photographs of Moore work against pathologization by instead constructing Moore in the discourse of eroticization which works directly against the aims of medical constructions of pregnancy which seek to de-eroticize the pregnant woman’s body by various means, from dictates that women not eat too much when they’re pregnant so they don’t “gain too much weight” (wouldn’t want to mix excesses) to lack of adequate information about various sexual practices/positions as pregnancy progresses. Pregnant women are supposed to “glow” with the flush and excitement of impending motherhood and the subsumation of self into other; clearly, against this ideology, the glow of orgasm, of sexuality in progress, poses enormous resistance which leads, as in the case of Vanity Fair, to a reduction of sight–ironically, a move that only transferred the locus of sight from public to private.

 

Sighting, then, always depends upon who is being looked at. In the case of ultrasound technology, the thing being sighted is the fetus–the raison d’être for the entire field of obstetrics, and, it is presumed, for the woman lying on the table. In a photograph of Demi Moore, pregnant, it is not her baby we see; we don’t have access to the inside; all we see is the swollen belly poking out–the maternal body that is entirely absent from the ultrasound picture. The ultrasound picture, as Petchesky has pointed out, becomes part of the family record, part of the evidential world of the family photo album; it exists as an “origin” for the fetus floating in its bit of outer space.¹³ As Rosalind Kraus observes: “The photographic record . . . is an agent in the collective fantasy of family cohesion, and in that sense the camera is a projective tool, part of the theater that the family constructs to convince itself that it is together and whole.”¹⁴ In my own photo albums, the ultrasound photos start my sons’ pictorial record; photographs of me pregnant exist in another album entirely, one that ostensibly traces “me.”

 

Within the representational space that ultrasound constructs, women are, for a moment, suspended from their bodies–caught in the impossible “elsewhere” between self and other, organism and machine. The machine itself becomes the very instrument of recognition, through the ability of the woman to “site” her own body, and, like the hysteric, enact it. The woman’s body becomes the very means to link public and private, inside and outside via its performative fragmentation. For it is the machine itself–standing in the room, hooked to the belly of the woman by its long thick tangled cords–that represents, finally, the impossible fusion of those boundaries even as it tries to enact them. Thus, she is left fragmented by the very blurring of boundaries which ultrasound enables. The female body traversed by ultrasound, rummaged through via cesarean sections, is one through which the location of boundaries has been effected. It is, then, a sited body–one that can no longer exist merely as the “natural” pregnant body which so inexplicably holds and contains contradictions. The ultrasound screen shows us that containment is no longer possible–that private and public, inside and outside have all merged at the site of the fragmented pregnant body. There are no longer any clear lines of corporeal representation which we can depend upon; nothing makes this more clear than the process of ultrasound in which the pregnant body is left suspended somewhere between memory and its performance, presence and lack, transgression and suture.

 

I lay on the cool slab of padded stretcher watching as she moves the instrument across me. She tilts the screen towards me, but not enough so that I can really see. What can I see anyway? Is there anyway to see in those blurs of shadows and light bouncing across the screen without her there? She becomes the eyes that this technology takes from me. Yet I am the one who is asked to fashion the gaze that she produces–to turn and twist and interpret until I have called the fetus in from its shadows, from its blurry frozen lines and taken it, like the picture book snapshot I hold in my hand, and made it real. Yet I have no sight here. I am blind as my seeing sees nothing but light moving and pulsing. Skull/baby, skullbaby, skull…baby. She moves the instrument and as she pushes buttons on the screen the fetus turns from baby to skull, from human to skeletal monster–all sunken sockets and splintered silence. Each time the face of the baby retreats, I long for its return as I so much want to participate in this drama of creation. Here, in the ultrasound room, is where the “life” is created. Here is where I know there is no turning back. Here is where the howling ghostly possibility becomes real. Here is where the sewing begins, and the aural images of feet, head, heart, spine, bone are all taken and pieced together and handed back to me like the fuzzy snapshots I clutch so carefully. Here is where the notion of wholeness becomes reified through a collection of the pieces of the phantom fetal body. No longer just part of the mother, a dreamlike possibility hovering somewhere in still fluids. The very wholeness of the maternal/fetal body is made possible, if not complete, by this ultrasonically induced act of interpellation. Pieces identified. Fragments made whole until a body has been made within a body which is then expected to be nothing more or less than self-sacrificing vessel for the remaining months of occupation. Mother and child are called forth there in the darkened screen blazing room, made whole by the relief of separation healed, fragmentation sited, sighted and repaired.

 

(IMAGE)

 

Skull. Baby. Skull. Baby. Where are we left then? I carry both fetus and baby inside me. I carry a political fetus, insofar as I challenge anyone refusing or restricting me based upon my increasingly public body. People stare at my abdomen before they meet my eyes. They have expectations, demands, desires for that abdomen as it juts out beyond the usual circumference of private space. Oh, you’re not due until then? Hmm…maybe it’s twins. You’re not drinking are you? Smoking? Eating junk food? Lifting, straining, pulling, sniffing, breathing or otherwise exposing the baby…. So my public baby is a fetus, one that must remain my body, one that must enlarge the circumference of the spaces of the private rather than those of the public. But my private fetus is a baby. Late at night when it starts its musical tumbling through the air of me, it is a baby in me. Late in pregnancy when I am tilted large, my breath overtaking me with each small step, my bladder lost in the organ crush inside me, my ligaments stretching in all directions each time I move, it is only the baby in me, not the fetus, that keeps me distanced from my body in a necessary recognition of a temporary state. Not me. Later still, pushing and screaming with sweat, pains erasing all consciousness of time, space and motion, it is only the thought of a baby–slippery and soft, fingers curled in tiny sharp-nailed fists–that even begins to justify this pain. My public fetus remains a secret to my private baby just as my private baby remains a secret to my public identification as a pro-choice feminist. Fragments. Splintery pieces which will never meet. There is no outside. Only complicated and complicitous circulations–motions, movements.

 

A postmodern positics (politics and positionality) of pregnancy recognizes and retains that complicated, twisted and contradictory experiences of pregnant subjectivity without expecting pregnant women to fall into either of the waiting binaries of sad silence or eerie effusiveness. Narrative air tunnels, blowing and pulling wait on either side of the pregnant woman as she must filter her experience into one wholesale ideological adoption or another. Rather than watch, if not assist, in the propulsion of women into one side or another, in the easy sewing up of experience into neat and tidy bundles, we need to return to the fragmented subject and not expect that, when it comes to things like pregnancy, a de-centered, atomized subjectivity will suddenly be rendered whole. This expectation is itself a retreat to a body-based subjectivity rather than an embodied one, as it takes the fact of bodily transformation (pregnancy) and reads it as constitutive of the resulting re-sutured subjectivity. Pregnancy becomes the thing which must provoke action to one side or another rather than a site of conflictedness itself. The pregnant subject is called to beat a hasty retreat from the field of fluid, partial and provisional identity and race to a position from which her body will not define her, yet the very necessity of the race is engendered by the change of her somatic status.

 

We are left then, with images–images floating, bending, bursting–that themselves constitute pregnant bodies, pregnant subjectivities. Fragmented, dispersed, disjunct–they reach in all directions simultaneously, and threaten to rip apart ideologies like jagged lines of lightning severing the sky.

 

Notes

 

1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1968), 139.

 

2. Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, “Foetal Images: the Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction,” Reproductive Technologies: Gender, Motherhood and Medicine, Michele Stanworth, ed. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1987), 69.

 

3.Petchesky, 64.

 

4.Petchesky, 64.

 

5.Valerie Hartouni, “Containing Women: Reproductive Discourse in the 1980s,” Technoculture, Constance Penley and Andrew Ross, eds. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1991), 38.

 

6.Julia Kristeva, “Motherhood According to Bellini,” Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Art and Literature, Leon Roudiez, ed. (New York, Columbia UP, 1980). While Kristeva’s essay is an intersting look at the fragmentation that occurs in and out of the maternal body, it ultimately reinforces the romanticized view of the semiotic, in which the privileged route of access is through a pregnant body, thus reinforcing naturalistic and restrictive ideas about women and pregnancy.

 

7.Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 79.

 

8.Hartouni, 37.

 

9.Lori Stanley Roeleveld, “My Turn” (weekly column), Providence Journal, Sun., June 27 1993: E-3.

 

10.Petchesky, 72.

 

11.Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” Feminism/Postmodernism, Linda Nicholson and Nancy Fraser, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1990), 196.

 

12.Vanity Fair, August 1991: Cover, 96-101, 142-150; August 1992: Cover, 112-119, 188-192.

 

13.Petchesky, 70.

 

14.Rosalind Kraus, “A Note on Photography and the Simulacral” The Critical Image Carol Squiers, ed. (Seattle: Bay Press, 1990), 19.