Fetal Positions: Individualism, Science, Visuality (Writing Science) - Softcover

Newman, Karen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804726485 ISBN 13: 9780804726481

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 1996

Synopsis

This book uses 103 illustrations from the 16th century onward and the history of obstetrical and embryological knowledge to argue that modes of visualizing science have profoundly determined "fetal politics" and the contemporary abortion debates.

About this title

Synopsis:

This compelling book uses 103 illustrations to argue that modes of visualizing science have profoundly determined fetal politics and the contemporary abortion debates. With its close interplay of visual and verbal texts, it traces both the history of fetal images from the sixteenth century onward (including the classic Life magazine photographs of Lennart Nilsson in 1965) and the consequences of how obstetrical and embryological knowledge was represented over time in Europe to both specialists and the public as medical knowledge came to be produced and understood through anatomical observation. As the abortion debates witness, perhaps no flesh is more overdetermined with cultural meaning than the female reproductive body. Language and rhetoric have had an important role in framing the debates and shaping attitudes: pro-choice versus abortion, anti-abortion rather than pro-life, fetus rather than baby or unborn child, uterus rather than womb.

How visual modes of representing obstetrical and embryological information, which have similar consequences in forming both public and professional opinion, shape the politics of the abortion debates has until recently received very little attention.

About the Author:

Karen Newman is University Professor and Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Brown University. She is the author, most recently, of Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama.

About this edition

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0804726485
• ISBN 13: 9780804726481
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176