ABSTRACT
Visual science studies of the 1990s coincided with the mass introduction of digital technologies, including digital imaging technologies, in science, clinical medicine and academic publishing. In 1987 Feminist Studies published Fetal Images: The Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction, an essay about obstetrical ultrasound by the political scientist Rosalind Pollack Petchesky. Whereas objectivity and knowledge would emerge as dominant concerns in science studies work about visuality, subjectivity, situated knowledge and the phenomenology of experience were consistently a stronger presence in both feminist science studies and the sociology and anthropology of medicine. Feminist epistemology of science, though focused on knowledge, drew considerable attention to the matter of embodied standpoint and to subjugated knowledge. The visual turn of the 1980s and 1990s prompted visual studies to emerge, like science studies before it, as a field in its own right. During the decades that spanned the centuries, visual studies gained a journal, university programs and professional societies.
