SLSA, 10

Society of Literature, Science, and the Arts annual conference, "Ends of Life" 

Jen Boyle

Animating the Ends of Life: the simulacra of choice in the fetal image

Oklahoma’s newly proposed “ultrasound bill” is one in a cluster of new legislative initiatives across the US requiring women to obtain an ultrasound image before an abortion is performed.  Several of these new bills (Texas, Nebraska, and Indiana) insist that the woman “not look away from the image”: the woman must see the image; and the attending doctor must offer an informed description of the image to the woman.   What type of animation of life and death, as “made” and “born” (Sarah Franklin; Judith Halberstam), is anticipated in these mediated performances? 

This paper and multimedia performance plays with two potential models of the simulacra at play in the mediated image of “life.”  Moving between animated sequences of fetal ultrasounds and excerpts from the Brother’s Quay stop-motion animation short, Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies (1988), I investigate how affective temporality informs the imparting of life in the animated image.  A comparison of Quay’s art and the aesthetic of the “scene of conversion” in the ultrasound animations illuminate how the fetal ultrasound inadvertently embraces mediated time as a form of bio-reproduction.  Ultimately, I want to point to how such a model of bio-reproduction creates an opening for a creative re-imagining of the ends (fits and starts) of life. Finally, I draw on two theoretical possibilities for reading duration, animation, and life in these images: the simulacra of life as “capture” (Foucaultian control) and as “swerve” (epicurean materiality: Bergson and Spinoza).