Episode 18 reading list
Icons and Idols of "Life": Disembodying Women by Barbara Duden
Let me introduce you to a friend of Ivan Illich’s, one who took part in his many “living room conversations” amongst colleagues who sought to question the modern certainties by which we live: Barbara Duden. As a German scholar and emeritus professor at the University of Hannover, Duden is one of the foremost modern historians of the body. She chronicles the history of bodily perceptions—not medicine as a practice, but women’s self-described experiences of their own bodies.
In The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany (1991) and Disembodying Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn (1993), she argues that bodily perceptions aren’t reducible to “a static, discoverable biological fundament” that is universal across time and culture, but rather that bodily perception is historically and culturally epoch-specific.
In Disembodying Women, Duden traces the transformation of women’s bodily experiences of pregnancy within the premodern Western world. What began as primarily sensation-based and interior (making the woman the final interpreter and arbiter of her own experience, and the only one who could verify pregnancy by announcing her sensation of “quickening”), morphed into an experience that is visually-based and reliant on external authorities—from technologies to doctors to media—to both show to the woman and interpret for her the meaning of her own embodiment. No longer is woman the voice of annunciation, the first (and best) witness of the mystery: she has been replaced by the pregnancy test, the heartbeat monitor, the ultrasound, the doctor.
She no longer tells the world her secret: she is told.
Duden portrays the ancient and medieval symbolic depictions of pregnancy which pointed to an invisible iconic presence beyond the horizon of the senses: think of an adult Jesus in miniature, sitting on a throne in the womb of Mary. She contrasts this with the “facsimile” approach of Renaissance and Enlightenment anatomists, who still couldn’t quite grasp that pregnancy was a developmental process (they just drew chubby cherubs and newborn infants in utero). And in the present day, she traces the emergence of “the modern fetus,” floating motherless and alone in its bubble, as a visual sacrum representing the medicalized idol of “Life.” She chronicles this transformation from sensation to sight, from internal to external authority, from a woman’s experience of her own felt “aliveness” to her medicine-and-media-induced belief that she is merely a container for “a life.” It is woman eclipsed by the contents of her womb, as technological “peeping Toms” create what I can only think of as “pro-life porn,” since it is inescapably sexual, objectifying, and anti-intimate.
How did the unborn turn into a billboard image and how did that isolated goblin get into the limelight? How did the female peritoneum acquire transparency? What set of circumstances made the skinning of woman acceptable and inspired public concern for what happens in her innards? And, finally, the embarrassing question: how was it possible to mobilize so many women as uncomplaining agents of this skinning and as willing witnesses to the creation of this haunting symbol of loneliness?
I have tried to write the history of what until recently was felt but never seen. Because I was concentrating on pregnancy, this became the historiography of what women, and only women, can touch.
The further I went into a history of the body—that is, a history of the female body—the more clearly I saw that there are two stories to be told. One is the story of what can be seen by physicians, artists, and women themselves. It deals with woman as her flesh and being is, or can be, exposed to the gaze. More subtly, it is the story of what can be imagined as long as we keep to the sense of image as that which could be seen. The other is the story of touch and vision, which grope in the darkness beneath the skin… The Enlightenment has removed from our bellies, as from our minds, any reality that is not perceived by the eye. Body history, as I have come to recognize, is to a large extent a history of the unseen. Until very recently, the unborn, by definition, was one of these.
The questions Barbara Duden poses are as fascinating as the answers she gives, and are worth the price of admission. What happens to us when we lose our sense of horizon, of a limit beyond which we cannot see? What happens to us when everything is visible and exposed, when the liminal state of pregnancy is no longer just borne by women but is managed by professionals? Do we know more or less than before? What have women in particular lost through our culture’s never-ending quest of medical voyeurism and control? What is happening when a woman passes around (or posts) an ultrasound picture as “my baby”? Why does that seem normal to us rather than incredibly strange?
Pick up a copy of Duden’s Disembodying Women. Do your homework, ponder what she’s talking about, and decide how much you agree with her take.
And afterwards, you might just close your eyes and feel.
(An aside: I hesitated at first to use one of Nilsson’s famous photos of fetuses in the header, because these supposed images of “life before birth,” published in LIFE magazine, were almost all miscarried or aborted, making the enterprise seem like false advertising. To me, these images resonate more with the snuff film than with the modern-day ultrasound. But I decided to post it all the same, because I have come to agree with Duden that such images have become idols, and to “get” that truth, you must see it and feel the impact of it in your gut. My apologies if it was disturbing. Below is a better icon to end with, one that still honors the horizon and Woman.)
