Corps Etranger. Riconfigurazione Tecnogena e Decorporeizzazione

Abstract

This thesis proposes an interdisciplinary analysis (Gender Studies, Visual Studies, History of Medicine) of clinical and visual media, particularly medical imaging in a gender perspective. This work is based on a research in iconographic and texual archives, including scientific and medical photography, radiography, ultrasound, and proposes the study of visualization techniques of the women’s body during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To do so, it takes into consideration different authors of visual communication and art history (Metz, Jay Cartwright, Van Dick, Latini, Elkins, Crary, Comar) as well as the feminist critique of science and technology (Duden, Martin, Donini, Gardey, Mulvey, Schiebinger). This work emphasizes how the history of these technical transformations changes the subject's relation to the body and clinical and visual media. It also helps to understand how these changes generate a flow of power between body, medicine and technology. Thus the process of body fragmentation, produced by these thecnologies, emerges as a notion, which is neither general nor abstract, but related to the operative and formal singularity of the image selected and analyzed and, finally, it makes it possible to grasp the movement between the visibility and legibility of the sick body. [edited by author]