A sonogram project

18 weeks pregnant

Idea was to take the images of my ultrasound and compile a video that incorporates heartbeat, images of the techno baby and trees or some kind of forest, since that will be the name of my child. Black boxing the sex of the baby, the “manchild” written on the ultrasound image. The arrow pointing to parts of the body that we know as FACE, SPINE, LEGS, ect.. Why these parts are important distinguish the normality of the child to be human being. In the womb, the emphasis is on making sure the foetus inside has all the nutrients it needs to be born “normal.” What is a leg? An arm? A PENIS? In this case, the sex of the child, determined in advance of the actual birth, the reliance upon science and technology to reveal the sex of the child.

I was going to do a performance against the backdrop of the video, drawing a US flag on my belly and singing the American anthem, but I might drop that idea since I think it might distract from the drone like trance of the video, the confusion of trying to figure out the images. We KNOW it’s a sonogram of a baby but trying to wrap your brain around the image and the actual thing its supposed to be isn’t always easy. We have to create some pattern in our minds to let us know that the image is what the text on the page says it is. Like language, like symbols, like signs.

From Feminist Perspectives on the Body (1999)

Technology has created a transparency of the pregnant body, erasure of the woman and an emphasis on the foetus inside. “. . .[T]he sonogram as the significant break in perceptions of pregnancy that, by privileging sight over other senses, bring about the disempowering of the pregnant woman” (40). Many feminist discourses on the body “centre on the ways in which modern technologies and their context within an increasingly cultural privileging of sight, conventionally associated with ‘the male gaze’, create new discourses for pregnant women. . .”(41).