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Abstract
This paper is informed by Furse’s practice as a theatre maker in two fields of output that are connected by two factors: first, the presence of the woman patient — hysteric/subfertile respectively — within the clinical gaze; second, the significance of the womb to each pathology. In the treatment of each (explored in Furse’s theatre), lens based technologies play their part, whilst the cultural and medical can be seen to have overlapped to produce specific meaning with regard to Her body and its spectacularity. The article presents an overview of some of the key issues in precisely how the woman’s body becomes spectacular within this prosthetic medical gaze and how the medical — and theatrically designed spaces to represent these — become meaningful and potent proxemics that in turn inform medical/ theatrical spectatorship. Overarching nineteenth-century protocols at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris (where Furse’s Augustine (Big Hysteria) is set) to contemporary imaging technologies used in the treatment of subfertility with Assisted Reproduction Technologies (the topic of her Art of A.R.T. projects), it examines the way in which photography develops through cinema to X-Ray, ultrasound and then 3D/4D ultrasound to ‘capture’ the woman’s body in ways by which she becomes muted and exposed. These occular technologies that extend the gaze, first to an exterior subject and then, eventually, traversing the flesh without knife, lend specific performativity to the ‘patient’ women, within the context of hysterias and reproductive impairments respectively. Finally, issues of suspension of disbelief are addressed. The spectator’s faith in the screen-based image of Her spectacular body is interrupted in Furse’s work, which is also keenly interested in the effect of such imagery on the woman’s sense of Self. The historical and cultural leaps in this article argue that there is indeed a trajectory through the history of medical imaging since the first application of photography to anatomy to the more advanced scoping technologies of medical imaging today, and that in each era, the production of these images remain fraught with cultural implications.
Notes
1 I shall be limiting my reference here to two works (Augustine: Big Hysteria and GlassBody: Reflecting on becoming Transparent).
2 Computerised Tomography, Magnetic Resonance imaging and Positon Emission Tomography.
3 My translation: ‘Ma question serait: quelle est l’inquiétude qu’a portée en elle cette compulsion, chez Charcot, et partout dans la Salpêtrière, a toujours ‘voir du nouveau’?
4 Hereafter abbreviated.
5 Subsequently by the London Arts in Health Forum for Guys and St Thomas’ Hospital.
6 Henceforth referred to as the IPS.
7 I prefer this term from ‘infertility’ since 100% impairment is very rare.
8 A signed lithograph hangs today over Freud’s iconic couch at The Freud Museum in London.
9 See Antonin Artaud (1970).
10 The Visible Human Project (VHP), the first complete digital database of the human cadaver used in medical science, was constructed from a male criminal in the USA, sentenced to death in 1993. Clearly the moral overtones of dissection-as-punishment still lurk in the public psyche. (Cartwright, L, 1998).
11 My translation: ‘le problème de la violence du voir dans sa prétention scientifique à l‘experience sur le corps’.
12 The essayist Sontag has argued persuasively about compassion fatigue as the by-product or consequence of over exposure in the media to real human suffering and how the spectacle of others’ pain has become inscribed into our culture; see: Susan. 2003. Regarding the pain of others. London; New York: Penguin Books.
13 Professor Stuart Campbell admitted to me that the warm ochre colouring of his 3D/4D foetical images were digitally selected as most appealing to the consumer.
14 Assisted Reproduction Technologies.
15 A further worrying fact about high-street ‘souvernir scan’ clinics is that they offer neither diagnosis nor any structures for clinical follow up should the scan reveal any abnormalities. Is this sense they raise both ethical and medical problems.
16 In April 1965 a Life Magazine cover issue published in full-colour Lennart Nilsson’s inter-uterine pictures of an eighteen-week old ‘developing human being’ (Haraway, Kirkup et al., 2000, p. 225). These high-impact images ‘simultaneously high-art, scientific illustration, research tool and mass popular culture’. (p. 226) are in reality — and shockingly so — aborted foetuses, arranged and lit to be presented as consumer sensations.
17 She will receive monitoring and imaging from 48 hours after fertilisation has taken place outside her body until birth, to varying degrees throughout pregnancy.