ABSTRACT
Ultrasound is one of many technologies that have helped propel the foetus to celebrity, shifting the foetus from a medical entity to a trope of popular culture, from an invisible being to an omnipresent public icon. The celebrity foetus is among us now, starring in political documentaries, Hollywood films, commodity advertisements, and home videos. Feminists, recognizing the importance of visual representations of foetuses to reproductive politics, have concerned themselves with critical analysis of public foetal and embryonic images. The public display of wet specimens is no longer common or readily accepted and yet these exhibits trouble the boundaries between wet and dry specimens, between human body parts and models, between art and science. Feminist scholars have so far offered little direct critique of 3/4D ultrasound. Feminist scholarship to date has provided valuable tools and models of analysis which, despite Shrages concerns, continue to have relevance and political utility.
