Learning to Perceive the Body: Entanglements of Embodied Perception in Pelvic Exam Simulations

• In Event: 420 - Section on Body and Embodiment Paper Session. Embodied Encounters: Beauty, Pap Smears, Citizenship and Bodily Capital

Abstract

Despite the rapid rise of diagnostic and imagining technologies in biomedicine, the physical exam remains a fundamental, routinized element of the basic clinical encounter. In a sense, learning the clinical exam is very much about literally learning how to feel; it is about developing the tactical perception to identify and diagnose disease in organs hidden from visual perception by skin. This paper is an exploration of how it is that scientists-in-training learn to develop their own bodily habit as part of learning to perceive their objects of knowledge. I do so through the case of how medical students learn to perform the pelvic examination for the first time on specially trained laypeople called gynecological teaching associates (GTAs). Learning the pelvic exam is particularly interesting because it requires not only the merging of scientific anatomical knowledge with experiential knowledge, but because it requires both participants to develop embodied perception. The objects of the medical students' attention—cervix, ovaries, and uterus—are enclosed on the inside of the whole, fleshy body of another person, and learning to discern organs, healthy or diseased, relies on learning to "read" one's one bodily sensations appropriately. I draw from Merleau-Ponty’s work on embodied perception, Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus, and Barad’s theorization of the intra-action between subjects and objects to argue that the reflexive action of developing habitus/habit—learning to feel—requires an affective entanglement in which the scientist's body is iteratively bound up with its object of study.

Author

• Kelly Underman, University of Illinois-Chicago