ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book talks about ultrasound images like these: the ones that encounter not in the hospital, but while flicking through a magazine, watching television or browsing the Web. It focuses on ultrasound 2d, 3d, and 4d the images it produces and their diffusion beyond the clinic. Three-dimensional technology uses the same sound-wave technology as two-dimensional ultrasound. It aims to contribute to the interdisciplinary literature around obstetric ultrasound through the application of a feminist lens to new cases and to the specificities of 3/4D ultrasound. Drawing primarily on textual analysis, the author examines sonograms in a range of locations, thereby bringing the social mobility of medical images and the complex meaning-making practices surrounding them into relief. Obstetric ultrasound images are hyper-mobile in contemporary culture, having acquired iconic status. They are instantly recognizably and widely appropriated for media messages.
