Seeing Her Sex: Medical Archives and the Female Body

Abstract

Through a detailed analysis of exterior and interior images of the female body, this book questions how the visual representation of women has been used to remove women's bodies from varying discourses, especially in relation to the matter of generation and reproduction. Roberta McGrath examines the relationship between human reproduction and cultural representation from 1750-1910, taking examples from medical archives, covering engraving, photography, radiography and microscopy. The book is interdisciplinary in approach, ranging across feminist theory, history of medicine and philosophy of science, as well as the history of photography. It argues that these historical images - shocking, erroneous, provocative - are absolutely crucial in understanding how the subject of human generation has now become the corporate and government-funded science of reproductive biotechnology.

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