ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Imaging timescapes: pregnancy and the creative emotions of technology

• In Event: Representing Pregnancy: Science and Culture in the 20th Century 3

English Abstract

From Nuria Pompeia cartoon on pregnancy published in 1967 in Barcelona, to recent young writers’ self-fiction in Spanish, a long trajectory of experiencing ultrasound scanning suggests a socio-emotional shift of technology. This symbolic move is attached, embodied by a feminist generational shift (van der Tuin 2015). The baby-boom generation (those born during the 1960s) experienced the erasure of pregnant bodies, fully focused on well-known Lennart Nilsson’s photographs of dead fetuses from the late 1960s on. This visual culture of the public fetus (Duden 1990) as a culture of pregnancy was challenged precisely by Pompeia’s critical drawings. By the early 2000s ultrasound scanning techniques have been fully incorporated into an emotional visual culture of pregnancy as a certainty –a pregnancy test. For those who carried desired, or accepted, pregnancies, such eye-witnessing (Burke 2001) embodied the emotional entanglement of a pregnancy technology. This presentation will offer a trajectory of images and texts as accounts of the symbolic construction of pregnancy from the early days of ultrasound scanning to pregnancy “antimanuals” of recent self-fictional literature.

Author

• Maria J Santesmases, CSIC, Spain