The Medical Gaze: Art, Corporeality, and Technology

This panel welcomes papers from a wide range of academic disciplines to examine both medical imaging technologies as photographic production and the artists using these technologies as a means of questioning their role in healthcare, politics, and the production of cultural norms.

The quest for objectivity in Western medicine has historically employed techniques that undermine phenomenological knowledge in favor of a mechanically enhanced gaze. Since optical devices contain within them prescriptions for the “right” way to see, professionals working with these images have been regarded as having more of a claim on truth than others. A culturally pervasive belief in technology’s superiority over human perception can account for the readiness with which medical images have been accepted as truthful and necessary. These claims rely on renderings of the human body—from X-rays to ultrasounds to fMRIs—that can be used as a means of policing normality. The scientific knowledge produced by such technologies is socially embedded, frequently replicating structural inequities present in society at large.

This session explores the intersection of medical imaging tools with contemporary art, focusing on how these technologies trouble the boundaries of the human body, claiming to reveal the invisible and represent truth—with personal and political consequences. How have artists encountered and countered the medical gaze in their work? How can we apply visual analysis to images made by medical imaging technologies—what biases are implicit, what perspectives are hidden? What questions can art pose about industrial images that may otherwise seem inscrutable?