The Male Gaze in the Medical Classroom: Proximity, Objectivity, and Objectification in “The Pornographic Anatomy Book”

Abstract

In 1971, three Duke University professors published a medical school textbook using pinup photographs of naked women as visual aids. In critiquing the rhetorical force of this unusual artifact, we synthesize theories of the male gaze with Foucault’s concept of the medical gaze and Rothfelder and Thornton’s “rhetorics of proximity” to argue that the medical gaze is predicated upon White heteromasculinity. Rhetorics of proximity typically help to manage the inherent connections between the medical gaze and the male gaze: the former requires distance while the latter invites closeness. By inviting its readers to gaze upon the pinups with sexual interestedness, the textbook mismanages rhetorical proximity and thus reveals not only the inherent connections between the male gaze and the medical gaze but also the processes of constructing medical images that often are elided by the shroud of scientific objectivity and transparent representation.

Keywords:

• Medical anatomy
• medical gaze
• rhetorics of proximity
• visual rhetoric

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this essay was presented to the Organization for Research on Women and Communication at the 89th annual convention of the Western States Communication Association. The authors wish to thank Micaela Sullivan-Fowler, the Ebling Library for the Health Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the two anonymous reviewers, and Dr. Claire Sisco King. Images are reprinted courtesy of Ebling Library’s Rare Books & Special Collections and Peter Gowland, photographer.

Notes

1 Mulvey’s analytic has been critiqued for not attending to the subjectivity of female spectators (see Foss and Foss, 1994; Williams, 1984), for assuming heterosexual desire from both (male) subjects and (female) objects (e.g., see Lewis, 1997; Foss and Foss, 1994; Mayne, 1981), and for her reliance on and interpretation of psychoanalytic theory (e.g., McGowen, 2003).

2 For a thorough discussion of the dehumanization wrought by medical scientists maintaining too much distance between themselves and their patients, see Solomon (1985).

3 Amid a physician shortage in 1961, a male professor penned the editorial “The Case against the Female M.D.” in Medical Economics, arguing, “I get sick and tired of ridiculous statements about helping solve the alleged physician shortage by having more women physicians. . . . Why not solve the problem at hand more efficiently by having more men physicians?” (qtd. in More, 1999, p. 193).

4 The passage of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the successful class action suit filed by the National Organization for Women in 1970 to enforce medical schools’ compliance with the act, and the 1972 passage of Title IX of the Education Amendments all helped this increase, as did the highly visible activism and organizing of the women’s liberation movement (More, 1999).

5 Sometimes referred to as the “silent curriculum,” the hidden curriculum in medical education transmits racialized beliefs and assumptions from White doctors to White students, perpetuating stereotypes, normalizing misinformation (such as Black patients being less sensitive to pain), and contributing to the relationships of distrust between patients of color and their doctors (see Hafferty, 1998; Hoberman, 2012).

6 It is worth noting the history of racist violence that has been articulated to alleged “improper looking” directed at White women by men of color, in particular Black men. The use of lynching as a visual spectacle to terrorize Black men, frequently and erroneously cited as punishment for the rapes of White women, has been well studied by scholars of race, U.S. history, and visual rhetoric (see Harold & DeLuca, 2005; hooks, 1992; JanMohamed, 1995; Somerville, 1994).