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Article Excerpt
The weakest, by manipulating inscriptions of all sorts obsessively and exclusively, become the strongest.
--Bruno Latour, "Visualization and Cognition"
In "The Folk Song Army," Tom Lehrer sings: "Remember the war against Franco; Thats the kind where each of us belongs; Though he may have won all the baffles; We had all the good songs." (1) Political progressives and counterculture radicals have often scored on the popular-culture front while losing their baffles for greater social justice. Yet, with the public debate over abortion, the situation is the reverse. Although feminists have won the major legal baffles, clinic-protesting "fascists" (2) have the popular songs and folk art pertaining to abortion. For example, talented rap singers, hip-hop artists, and reggae stars have written angry, sad, and admonishing lyrics about the evils of abortion. (3) Grass-root organizations have produced dramatic and compelling films and videos, depicting miniature humans at lifes beginning or brand-new people who are already the victims of our societys ills. (4) Political dissidents have staged emotional street protests, with babes-in-arms cast as "American holocaust s urvivors" (supposedly children born after Roe v Wade), set against poster-sized photos of "American holocaust victims." (5) Painters have composed images that compare womens health centers with death camps and draw the attention of a public increasingly informed about genocide atrocities (fig. 1). On the Internet, voiceover baby cries haunt photo galleries featuring fetal corpses. (6) Exploiting the conventions of horror, tragedy, folk narrative, and guerrilla art, antiabortion productions provide dramas of lives in crisis and societies on the verge of destruction, on a cosmic scale.
By contrast, the primary icon of the "pro-choice" movement has been a coat hanger, an item deployed to remind us that without "choice" desperate women will inflict harm upon themselves. The coat hanger insists that we cannot do away with abortions; we can only determine how they will be performed-back-alley jobs or safe, clinic abortions. The intended message is that the latter are obviously preferable. Unfortunately, the "pro-lifes" popular media campaign equating intentional abortion with infanticide, bad mothering, and even ethnic cleansing and lynching (fig. 2 and 3) (7) makes the need for safe abortions less obvious. Moreover the coat hangers intended meaning is often missed or displaced. A student recently told me that, until he was in college, he was under the impression that the standard way to perform an abortion was with a coat hanger: he thought that the curved end of the coat hanger was used to pull the fetus out. Although this student is strongly prochoice, the image of the coat hanger trigger ed in his mind an image of fetal harm, not harm to women. Indeed, the coat hanger has been appropriated as an image of fetal harm by some pro-life proponents (fig. 4). Although the web site featuring the image in figure 4 does not claim to be either "Pro-Life or Pro-Choice," and to offer "a cross section of ideas rather than a one sided argument," it offers ten anti-abortion images, and two links to sites with more anti-abortion imagery, while featuring only one pro-choice image. (8) This image is a variation of the coat hanger theme with words "Abortion Happens/Make It Safe." After perusing the ten images of babylike fetuses, one can only wonder whose safety we should be concerned about. Was the creator of this web site biased or simply at a loss for pro-choice imagery?
For more than a decade now, feminist scholars have studied the cultural weapons of the anti-abortion movement, although this scholarship has yet to lead to new forms of rhetoric or activism in defense of abortion. In this article, I will provide an overview of feminist scholarship on the "pro-life" movements visual propaganda, which has culminated in the issuing of calls for new cultural interventions. I will analyze why these calls for action have not yet been answered. I then examine some "pro-choice" art produced by feminist artists and activists. I end by exploring several ideas for new images that draw on works by postmodern performance artists, especially the artistic productions of politically active sex workers.
The Invention of Fetal Autonomy
In 1984, Rosalind Petchesky (9) called attention to a significant shift in the justificatory language and conceptual tools of anti-abortion groups in the decade following Roe v Wade. By the mid-1970s, the predominantly Christian "pro-life" movement began to pursue its legal and social agenda by invoking scientific authority to defend an essentially modern Catholic doctrine about the beginning of life. Savvy "pro-life" advocates began to discuss abortion not merely as a failure to understand and obey the will of God but also as a form of ignorance about the workings of nature. They raised objections to abortion not in terms of the proliferation of unbaptized souls but in terms of the human qualities of societys most vulnerable members. (10) To make us see the human qualifies of "the unborn," abortion foes began amassing and circulating pictures of fetuses caught in the gaze of the latest biological and medical science. By aggressively marketing and publicizing the fetus, such as with the television broadcasti ng of The Silent Scream, "the fetus rose to instant stardom," according to Petchesky. (11) Her work showed that anti-abortion groups have succeeded in changing common understandings of pregnancy and abortion, although these groups have so far failed in their ultimate legislative aims. Ultimately she demonstrated that the representation of abortion as a mortal struggle between a fetal individual and a woman has a relatively recent history, although a potentially dangerous future for abortion regulation in the United States.
Petchesky was one of the first feminist scholars to call attention to "the cultural guerrilla warfare against abortions" (12) and the need to oppose it. In 1987, she argued, "we have to restore women to a central place in the pregnancy scene. To do this, we must create new images that recontextualize the fetus, that place it back into the uterus, and the uterus back into the womans body, and her body back into its social space." (13) Yet, feminist activists and artists have been slow to develop new reproductive images that displace the powerful fetus. In 1995, feminist art critic Lucy Lippard observed that "no new icons have emerged. The fetus still reigns. We have to get the little bugger on our side, transform its unborn bathos into the misery of the unwanted child as well as the horrors of the exploited womans body." (14) Like Petchesky, Lippard notes both the relative impoverishment of "pro-choice" imagery and the need to revisualize reproduction. Yet, whereas Lippard favors images of miserable childre n or exploited female bodies, Petchesky is proposing less negative images. Petchesky states: "The strategy of antiabortionists to make fetal personhood a self-fulfilling prophecy by making the fetus a public presence addresses a visually oriented culture. Meanwhile, finding positive images and symbols of abortion hard to imagine, feminists and other prochoice advocates have all too readily ceded the visual terrain." (15) Petchesky suggests visually placing Lippards "little bugger" inside womens bodies in order to create women-centered images of pregnancy that will challenge the fetus-centered ones wielded by "prolife" advocates.
Following Petchesky, a working group at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, England, called the Science and Technology Subgroup, documented the use of scientific fetal imagery in the propaganda of "pro-life" groups in England. In the late 1980s, there was an unsuccessful campaign to approve a bill in the British Parliament prohibiting abortions after eighteen weeks of pregnancy. In introducing their analysis of the public and legislative debate over this bill, the members of the Science and Technology Subgroup comment that their project "was undertaken because of our conviction that, although feminists have won short-term gains, we fear we may be losing the larger struggle over commonsense assumptions about abortion." Noting some of the ways feminist strategies have failed, the subgroup states that "[i]n pitting the right to choose against the right to life, feminists run the risk of losing public sympathies, and being constructed as self-indulgent and irresponsible." (16) The reflect ions of this group highlight the need to examine why the ideals of choice and individual freedom are proving inadequate to defend abortion against the tactics of abortion opponents. (17)
In her contribution to the Science and Technology Subgroup project, Sarah Franklin examines what she calls the "biologization of anti-abortion rhetoric." In particular, Franklin examines how supporters of the parliamentary bill constructed "the fetus as separate, as an individual in its own right, deserving of state protection and medical attention" by appealing to the fetuss "bio-genetic uniqueness and its potential for biological growth." Franklin points out that these biological criteria have come to take precedence not only over religious criteria of personhood but also over social criteria as well (e.g., a persons place in a kinship network or its potential for social growth and support). Franklin ends her essay with a call for "a new language of reproductive politics." She states: "In order to develop terms that are woman-centred and responsive to the realities of womens lives as mothers, workers and persons in society, reproduction must be reclaimed as a social process involving social persons wh o are interdependent and whose right to exist is not bound up with notions of radical separateness." Another contributor to the subgroup, Deborah Steinberg, argues that "we must challenge the construction of pregnant women as two (hostile) persons.... Is it not also possible to understand a pregnant woman as one person, or as Sarah Franklin has put it, one who becomes two, but is still one in that becoming?" (18)
What kinds of images, then, will visually reintegrate the fetus with a womans body in order to challenge the prenatal "baby" pictures that construct pregnancy primarily as a story about a new person? Pictures that "place [the fetus] back into the uterus, and the uterus back into the womans body," as Petchesky suggests, may challenge fetal-centered notions of pregnancy, but will they challenge the equally problematic "two-hostile persons" view? For these more complete images may suggest not one body in the process of division, but one discrete body inside another. And how might visual images present pregnancy as both a social and biological process, when they seem to focus our attention on concrete and visible bodies rather than on intangible social phenomena? Supposing we cannot fashion appropriate images, does the Petchesky/subgroup approach suggest any catchy campaign blurbs-ones which can contest the logic of the anti-abortion slogans "Everyone Deserves a Birthday" or "Abortion Stops a Beating Heart"? These questions are difficult to answer. Yet, Im not entirely skeptical about the Petchesky/subgroup proposal, for certainly abortion foes have shown how images can assist our imaginations. I do think, however, that we need to see more concrete and practical proposals before we can take action.
Whereas others note the use of ultrasound fetal images to influence cultural conceptions of reproduction, Valerie Hartouni examines the cultural concepts available to interpret the fetus image given to us by science and circulated by the mass media. (19) Hartouni recognizes that images--whether of fetuses alone or attached to women-do not necessitate particular readings, and thus examines how particular meanings become obvious. Using language to defamilarize now-familiar images and to detach their usual meanings, Hartouni describes
the appearance of strange and fantastic images of fetuses in bus terminals and public restrooms, as well as on billboards, magazine covers, and the evening news. These images present a prenatal...
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