A Feminist’s Speculum
Responding to Fetus, by Donna Haraway, and The Egg and the Sperm, by Emily Martin
In Fetus, Donna Haraway talks about the speculum as an instrument that represents both a symbol of U.S. feminist politics in the 1970s, as well as an apparatus for seeing. Samaa and I started to discuss the nature of the speculum as a device that is forceful — the device literally pries the vagina open and holds it in an unnatural position for viewing. Therefore, the speculum allows us to see what we are not necessarily supposed to — similar to the visual fetus that we can only see through sonogram technology, or planet earth that is seen only through space telescope photography. So what are the implications of being able to see these things that we are not supposed to see?
From both a psychological and societal perspective, we talked about how being able to see what has traditionally been hidden transforms our expectations. For example, sonograms were traditionally blurry, black and white, and very abstract visuals that doctors used to identify fetal development. However, now they are colourful, three-dimensional, and more detailed than ever, as you can literally see the facial details of your unborn child. These higher quality fetal images are now a commodity for mothers-to-be as they can buy printed photographs of their differentiated fetus’s, engendering the images themselves with meanings, hopes, dreams, genders, etc.
A major implication of this can be illustrated in an example of fetal imaging gone wrong from BabyView sonogram clinic in Ajax, Ontario. Several mothers had gone to the clinic to purchase 3D images of their unborn babies, including one mom who got a teddy bear that simulated her baby’s heart beat. After comparing fetal images in a Facebook group, some of the mom’s realized that their fetus’s looked exactly the same, and that the clinic had (allegedly) given them all the same image. Though it was wrong of the clinic to deceive the moms, the way in which the moms attributed meaning and characteristics to their unborn children is completely subjective and kind of ridiculous. The visual fetus allows the moms to engender them with sociocultural expectations before they’re even a part of society or sentient/conscious. These are the things that happen when we see what we’re not supposed to — we interfere with our own subjectivities and see something beyond the surface image that is not objectively there.
Similarly, in The Sperm and the Egg, Emily Martin talks about personifying biological language when talking about reproduction and menstruation, “endowing cellular entities with personhood” (Martin 501). This is dangerous because we don’t interrogate those linguistic choices nor do we interrogate their implications, allowing them to persist and contribute to gender stereotypes. This is particularly notable in the BabyView example because, had these women never found out that their sonograms were fake, they would have continued believing their interpretation of the fetal image as the indisputable truth (i.e. that their babies are unique and fantastic). This is troublesome we assume that with more technological advancement that we have a better understanding of the truth — but it is not that simple.
Even though we have this technology that allows us to see the unseeable, we still engender those unseeable, abstract things with our own biases. There’s no such thing as scientific objectivity, because even that is framed through someone else’s schema of the world.
In some ways, technology limits what we can see, by presenting us with more defined ideas of objectivity — what before was up for interpretation is now less so. It seems paradoxical, in a way, as technology is presented to us — in media, and through feminist praxis — as a freeing, but perhaps it is more complicated. Thus, what does this mean for us, as feminists, as co-creators of our own subjectivities and experiences, to be limited by technology?
