Disembodying women

In earlier times, a woman knew she was pregnant when she experienced "quickening"--She felt movement within her. Today a woman relies on what she sees in a test result or a digital sonogram image to confirm her pregnancy. A private experience once mediated by women themselves has become a public experience interpreted and controlled by medical professionals. In Disembodying Women Barbara Duden takes a closer look at this contemporary transformation of women's experience of pregnancy. She suggests that advances in technology and parallel changes in public discourse have reframed pregnancy as a managed process, the mother as an ecosystem, and the fetus as an endangered species. Drawing on extensive historical research, Duden traces the graphic techniques - from anatomists' drawings to woodcuts to X rays and ultrasound - used to "flay" the female body and turn it inside out.^ Emphasizing the iconic power of the visual within twentieth-century culture, Duden follows the process by which the pregnant woman's flesh has been peeled away to uncover scientific data. Lennart Nilsson's now famous photographs of the embryo published in Life magazine in the mid-1960s stand in stark contrast to