Nakamura, Digitizing Race, Introduction, chapter 5, Epilogue

156 Avatars and the Visual Culture of Reproduction
miscarried? Would the act of altering or removing that avatar from the
board signify a miscarriage in miniature, a digital reenactment of the offline
state? What are the implications of this participatory digital practice?
In Feminism and the Technological Fix, Carol Stabile describes the defining
paradox of the visual culture of pregnancy as follows: “With the advent of
visual technologies, the contents of the uterus have become demystified
and entirely representable, but pregnant bodies themselves remain concealed.”
31 Hence the paradox: while medical imaging technologies like ultrasounds
and laparoscopy have turned the pregnant female body inside out,
rendering it as transparent as a pane of glass, a vessel containing infinite
visual wonders of procreation and opportunities for witnessing with machineenabled
vision the miracle (or spectacle) of birth, its exterior remains hidden
in plain sight. As Stabile writes: “The pregnant body. . . remains invisible
and undertheorized in feminist theory.” 32 Many other scholars of feminism,
technology, and the visual have noted the pregnant body’s peculiar status in
post-1990s feminist visual culture. As Lisa Cartright writes in “A Cultural
Anatomy of the Visible Human Project,” pregnant bodies have long been
used to stand in for all female bodies in the culture of medical imaging, from
its roots in classically rendered paintings of female pelvises by d’Agoty 33 to
current projects like the Visible Woman, whose cryosectioned body was
digitized and put on a database online for educational purposes. 34 Thus
women’s reproductive organs, and women in reproductive states, are overrepresented
in medical visual culture; the pregnant female body and its
interior in particular is classically overdetermined as it comes to represent
all female bodies. A spate of scholarly books and collections on the topic of
reproductive technologies and feminism have all noted the way that the
medical establishment has worked to make the pregnant female body normative,
and its result, which is to pathologize nonreproductive female bodies—
as Cartright notes, the Visible Woman was criticized as an incomplete and
inadequate model of the female body because, though in perfect health at her
time of death, she is “postmenopausal and presumably therefore unsuited
to demonstrating processes of reproduction.” 35 Ultrasound has taken up the
imaging practice that once belonged to medical painting and engraving and
is valued because it seems to give access to the invisible, the interior, to move
right past the unspeakable and abject pregnant body to its contents, the fetus.
While American culture as a whole is unappeasably eager to see photographic
or “real” images of babies in the womb, pregnancy’s hidden spectacle,
feminists in particular are wary of the way that this desire encourages ways
of seeing that represent the fetus and mother as occupying different visual