ABSTRACT
Godard reflects in new and unexpected ways on the relationship between translation and embodiment in this previously unpublished essay, in which the translated/translating body reappears as simultaneously an object of diagnostic examination and a site of resistant knowledge production. In resonance with new materialist approaches, she ventures into the field of biosemiotics in order to study translation processes that occur in medical imaging in relation to illness, understood as a social event whose meaning is construed through interpretation of signs and codes. Specifically, she focuses on visual screening and surveillance technologies such as ultrasound that enable and enhance diagnostic constructions of the body as disordered or ill. Inasmuch as she highlights the ethical problems of diagnosis as a technology regulating access to treatment or healing, Godard also raises the issue of epistemological challenges of translating between the biomedical model of body-as-machine and the psychosomatic or ecological model of body-as-process.
