Midwest Modern Language Association

Review
Author(s): Andrew J. Price
Review by: Andrew J. Price
Source: The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 34, No. 3, Crossroads:
Culture, Pedagogy, and Academic Labor (Autumn, 2001), pp. 97-99
Published by: Midwest Modern Language Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1315488
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This is a project driven more by hope than by certainty, a project which
continually strives "to restage a drama that is behind us for someone who
necessarily encounters that past in the future of its own unfolding" (11).
This also is a project emanating from the arguably utopian goals of
"avoid[ing] the dead-end recitations of 'hail to the chief' that most disci-
plines demand, and perhaps more radically, [of escaping] the conventions
of methodological allegiance to a particular field's system of knowledge"
(4). And this is a project in performance studies compelled to both "cele-
brate and critique the rapid institutionalization of the field" (3) as that
move toward institutionalization calls into question the premises on
which the field is founded. The Ends of Performanceis, in short, an evoca-
tive rendering of criticism as performance, a self-reflexive study in the
desires (to touch, to preserve, to remember) which animate our writing
and in the perilous consequences which those desires exact on the objects
of our affection.

Heath A. Diehl
Bowling Green State University

The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Gender, and Science. Edited by

Paula A. Treichler, Lisa Cartwright, and Constance Penley. New York:
NYU P, 1998. vi + 400 pp.

On June 18, 1990, the Government Accounting Office issued a report

to the United States Congress documenting the failure of the National
Institutes of Health to carry out its promise to enlarge its biomedical and
behavioral research so as to adequately address women's health issues.
Since that report was publicized, as Anne K. Eckman explains in her
important article in The Visible Woman:Imaging Technologies,Gender,and
Science, the issue of "Women's Health" has never been more visible.
Health experts, mobilized by the report's findings, began calling for med-
ical school courses in women's health as well as new areas of medical
specialization that would ensure emphasis on women's specific health
needs. Mainstream media began exposing the biases embedded in med-
ical research (most notoriously, a 1988 study on aspirin and heart disease
which did not include a single woman among its 22,071 volunteer sub-
jects). While editors Paula A. Treichler, Lisa Cartwright, and Constance
Penley admit that it is heartening to "find women's needs so explicitly
acknowledged" (8), they contend that this newfound visibility needs to be
more carefully considered. The thirteen articles compiled in this fine
anthology argue powerfully that "visibility is not transparency" (3), that

AndrewJ. Price 97

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imaging technologies and the medical sciences are "shaped and con-
strained by existing networks of power, cultural values, institutional prac-
tices, and economic priorities" (4).
The contributors to The Visible Womanrepresent a wide variety of disci-
plinary and institutional positions, yet their essays work together to clarify
a series of crises which the new visibility of gender and women's health
paradoxically conceals. The collection is firmly grounded in feminist theo-
ry and should be considered an important contribution to the work of
such theorists as Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Mary Poovey, and
Thomas LaQueur, who have interrogated the profound intersections of the
medical sciences and gender. The essays manage to call into question a
good deal of the faith our culture places in medical authority and the
power of its technologies to diagnose and save us from all bodily ills. In
making their arguments, the contributors take on many familiar oppo-
nents-such as the pro-life movement and the New Right-but the argu-
ments here are by no means predictable. One of the strongest arguments
to emerge in this book, in fact, is that feminism needs to be revived so as
to better respond to the challenging issues of technoscience and the body.
In many ways, The Visible Woman reads as an engaging meditation on
Donna Haraway's argument in "The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies"
that scientific and medical discourses are "'lumpy': they contain and
enact condensed contestations for meaning and practices" (4).1 Ella
Shohat's "Lasers for Ladies" is a case in point. In examining the wide
range of texts and medical practices surrounding endometriosis and
laparoscopy, she uncovers the ideological work carried out by its institu-
tionalized discourse. "Endo discourse" depends heavily not only on mili-
tary metaphors (in which lasers are said to fire at their targets with mis-
sile-like precision) but also on persistent colonial metaphors of
exploration and conquest which inscribe the female body according to a
patriarchal logic. The struggle for feminism is to pursue alternative dis-
courses that would produce a new epistemology. "Medical technologies,"
Shohat argues, "could be alternatively conceived as a collaborative project
in which women participate in scientific investigation and technological
healing" (261). The search for new language and paradigms can be diffi-
cult, however, especially in the era of New Right politics. As Mark Rose
shows in "Mothers and Authors," his insightful examination of the 1993
California court case Johnson v. Calvert, the California court resorted to an
authorship paradigm with roots in the Aristotelian "form and matter" the-
ory of generation in basing its decision in a surrogacy dispute on genetics
rather than gestation (223-4). "Althoughwe may speak vaguely . .. about
the death of the author," Rose suggests, "we don't yet have a really com-
pelling alternative model to propose" (234).
Yet following the contributors as they explore what alternatives might

98 Book Reviews

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be available provides some of the most rewarding moments in reading
The Visible Woman. For many, the task of creating change must begin
close to home, with feminism itself. Following Mary Poovey's call for the
"political resuscitation of feminism," Carol Stabile warns feminists against
retreating from issues of technoscience as well as placing all their faith in
the cyborg. While it may be true that we are headed into a future where
the cyborg will successfully deconstruct the boundaries and borders that
presently oppress, there is still much work for feminism to do in destabi-
lizing those "that continue to exclude, condemn, and execute" (193).
According to Paula Treichler and Catherine A. Warren, though, feminism
has often failed in that very task. In "Maybe Next Year,"they document
the feminist silence in the face of the growing AIDS crisis and its trou-
bling embrace of the stereotype of AIDS as a "gay man's disease" while
neglecting the issues the syndrome poses to women. Yet, even for the
skilled theorist, there comes a moment where all one can do is to hope.
In "Living on Disability," Michael Berube and Janet Lyon, parents of a
child with Down's syndrome, ask whether one can "be Foucauldian
about the past and yet retain any hope for the present, for your own chil-
dren?" (276). For them, the best one can wish for is a delicate hopefulness
admittedly at odds with their theoretical knowledge: "We know that the
mechanisms of social control can subsume any individual agent who
inhabits and tries to redirect them. Nevertheless, we have no choice but
to behave as if our nation's contemporary institutions and discourses can
work in our child's best interest" (276).
I would argue that it is best to read The Visible Womanas a counterar-
gument to the celebrations of the cyborg and the fantasies of disembodi-
ment prevalent in much of the theoretical discourse today (witness the
work of Arthur Kroker, Hans Moravec, and Jean Baudrillard). "One of the
consequences of our high-tech millenarianism," as Vivian Sobchack
warns in "Beating the Meat/Surviving the Text," is that the "moral and
material significance of the lived-body is elided or disavowed " (316). The
Visible Woman shows that arguments that the body has already become
superfluous are premature. It is a passionate argument to recall to our
attention the lived-bodies of all women, and to ensure that they all might
receive the kind of visibility from the medical sciences that would truly
make a difference.

AndrewJ. Price
Mount Union College

Note
1 Donna J. Haraway,"TheBiopolitics of PostmodernBodies: Determinationsof
Self in ImmuneSystemsDiscourse,"Differences9(1989):4.

AndrewJ. Price 99

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