Re-visioning ultrasound through women's accounts of pre-abortion care in England

Feminist scholarship has demonstrated the importance of sustained critical engagement with ultrasound visualizations of pregnant women’s bodies. In response to portrayals of these images as “objective” forms of knowledge about the fetus, it has drawn attention to the social practices through which the meanings of ultrasound are produced. This article makes a novel contribution to this project by addressing an empirical context that has been neglected in the existing feminist literature concerning ultrasound, namely, its use during pregnancies that women decide to terminate. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with women concerning their experiences of abortion in England, I explore how the meanings of having an ultrasound prior to terminating a pregnancy are discursively constructed. I argue that women’s accounts complicate dominant representations of ultrasound and that in so doing, they multiply the subject positions available to pregnant women

The Cerebral Subject in Popular Culture and the ‘End of Life’

Cultural Figures of Self and Brain In autumn of 2010, MIT’s Media Lab attracted public attention in the United States when the opera it produced in collaboration with the American Repertory Theater, Death and the Powers, opened to critical acclaim in Monaco. What incited the attention and excitement of commentators was in part the opera’s elaborate technical set, which expressed, through light and sound, the digitized voices and bodily movements of offstage actors to tell its story. Robots, s..

The Cerebral Subject in Popular Culture and the ‘End of Life’

Cultural Figures of Self and Brain In autumn of 2010, MIT’s Media Lab attracted public attention in the United States when the opera it produced in collaboration with the American Repertory Theater, Death and the Powers, opened to critical acclaim in Monaco. What incited the attention and excitement of commentators was in part the opera’s elaborate technical set, which expressed, through light and sound, the digitized voices and bodily movements of offstage actors to tell its story. Robots, s..

Activist Media and Biopolitics

After tactical media became less important, many media activist projects repositioned themselves: in the context of biopolitics they challenge the hegemony of biopower. This volume contains theoretical and empirical contributions to a conference on issues of media activism and biopolitics which has been organized by Innsbruck Media Studies in 2010. Theorists and activists describe and analyze media, whose goal is to enable resistance against regimes of biopower. The control of mobility and visibility, the biopolitics of death, the creation of virtual subjects and chimeras as well as biopolitical production are areas in which activists have intervened and gave rise to a theoretical discourse to which this volume contributes.Nachdem die taktischen Medien mit Web 2.0 an Bedeutung verloren haben, positionierten sich viele medienaktivistische Projekte neu: im Kontext der Biopolitik fordern sie die Hegemonie der Biomacht heraus. Dieser Band enthält theoretische und empirische Beiträge einer Tagung, die von Innsbruck Media Studies 2010 zum Thema Medienaktivismus und Biopolitik veranstaltet wurde. TheoretikerInnen und AktivistInnen beschreiben und analysieren darin Medien, deren Ziel es ist, Widerstand gegen Regime der Biomacht möglich zu machen. Die Kontrolle von Mobilität und Sichtbarkeit, die Biopolitik des Todes, die Erzeugung von virtuellen Subjekten und Chimären sowie die biopolitische Produktion sind Bereiche, in denen AktivistInnen interveniert haben und die Anlass zu einem Theoriediskurs gaben, zu dem dieser Band beiträgt