Penetrating Women’s Bodies: The Problem of Law and Medical Technology

Women’s bodies are a site of contested meanings. Feminist research has documented the extent to which women’s bodies have been a focus of power struggles, but in this paper I want to build on these insights and ultimately to concentrate more on the question of how meanings are reproduced and sustained. We know, for example, that the medical profession has striven, with some success, to exercise what is now regarded by many as legitimate control over women’s bodies (e.g., hospital rather than home births). We perhaps focus less on the meanings that have been produced in the process of exercising this control. Arguably we have paid less attention than we should to the production of deeply-held views about diseased, contagious and sexualised bodies and malfunctioning reproductive organs, all of which come in part to symbolise women — and even enter into women’s consciousness.