Abstract
Images objectifying and fetishizing the external female body in mainstream media are so common that writers like Morrison, Mason, Atwood, and Erdrich can rely on readers’ familiarity with these images when engaging issues of visual representation in their texts. However, increasingly, writers can also assume that readers will be familiar with images of the interior female body as these have become ubiquitous in medicine as well as in advertising, television, and film. In the contemporary period, the development of visual technologies that promise to “transparently” represent the interior body has not only revolutionized the practice of medicine but also created new issues with which feminist scholars and writers have had to grapple about the ways women’s bodies become visible via these technologies and how medical images are deployed in medicine and the larger culture.1