“Gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power” (Joan Wallach Scott)

Anatomical knowledge via dissection is “a way to think about the self” (Katherine Park)

• Schema: learned mental patterns which are projected on nature

• Social constructivism: truth is constructed by social processes, is historically and culturally specific, and is in part shaped through the power struggles within a community

• Positivism: truth exclusively derives from information derived from sensory experience and the logical and mathematical treatments of such data

• Scientific Realism: scientific truth represents the real world as it really is (often modified to think through progressive accounts of science

A Visual Vocabulary of Difference

Cosme Viardel, 1673

Giulio Cesare Casseri, 1626

Andreas Vesalius, 1543

Charles Nicolas Jenty, 1757 Anatomical “Venus” (18th c)

• Insert modern image here

Chestnut’s 4th edition 2009

Both drawings 19th c

The “Spaceman”

Violent Occlusion of Women’s Bodies and Their Roles

Superfluity of Detail

Jules Talrich, late 19th century,

Fetishization of woman’s gendered and dissected body

Gendered pleasure of knowledge/power

Connecting Photographic/Graphic

‘Like an astronaut in his capsule the fetus floats in its amniotic sac with the villi of the placenta around it like a radiant wreath. The nebulae and constellations in this firmament are formed by cells from the maternal blood and salt crystals in the fetal waters”

“social work of consensus building”