10.54103/2036-461X/19083
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2036-461X
19083
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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Image-agency
 Sick and Injured Bodies: Medical Imagery and Media Practices of Care
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie
22
Introduction
2023-01-24
2022-11-22
2023-01-24
2023-01-24
9-20
Cinéma & Cie
Deborah Toschi
2022
10.54103/2036-461X/19083
9
University of Pavia
2036-461X
39
Image-agency
en
20
 Sick and Injured Bodies: Medical Imagery and Media Practices of Care
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/19083/17535
22
                                                                                       Sick and Injured Bodies:
                                                                                       Medical Imagery and Media
                                                                                       Practices of Care1
                                                                                       Silvia Casini, University of Aberdeen
                                                                                       Alice Cati, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore
                                                                                       Deborah Toschi, University of Pavia




                                                                                       RETHINKING THE BODY THROUGH                                                                       Keywords
                                                                                                                                                                                             Body
                                                                                       NEW DISCIPLINARY TRAJECTORIES                                                                          Care
                                                                                                                                                                                Medical Humanities
                                                                                          The recent pandemic has confirmed that images are a powerful and complex                         Trauma
                                                                                                                                                                                     Image-agency
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License




                                                                                       instrument of political and social negotiation, shaping precise forms of
                                                                                                                                                                                               DOI
                                                                                       representation of suffering, medical disorder, and the sick body, taking root in a
                                                                                                                                                                                      https://doi.
                                                                                       particular historical and cultural context. As David Serlin argues, ‘contemporary      org/10.54103/2036-
                                                                                       public health crises would be literally unimaginable without these visual                      461X/19083
                                                                                       representations’.2 Visual and audiovisual production has not simply favoured
                                                                                       phenomena of re-semantization of reality, but has also engendered social
                                                                                       practices and symbolic actions practical to orient the intersubjective process,
                                                                                       self-perception and the perception of the other through physicality or its
                                                                                       simulation. Within this framework, this special issue provides a new reading
                                                                                       of some theoretical concepts and methodologies. The perimeter we construct
                                                                                       deeply intertwines the field of Visual Studies, particularly, the area investigating
                                                                                       the visual culture of medicine,3 assigning images a crucial role, and establishes
                                                                                       a multidisciplinary and open dialogue between two other fields: Trauma Studies
                                                                                       and Medical Humanities. Starting from different methodological positions, both
                                                                                       these traditions have questioned the possibilities of representing trauma and
                                                                                       illness through images and narrations, and they have assigned a therapeutic
                                                                                       potential of media representations and practices. As Elaine Scarry argues,
                                                                                       pain belongs to invisible geography; pain cannot be perceived without the
                                                                                       image of a wound; the body must be visible to others in order to communicate
                                                                                       pain.4 It is precisely towards this invisible and incommunicable dimension
                                                                                       that Medical Humanities has moved, proposing a reconceptualisation of cure/
                                                                                       care, no longer limited to the objective clinical sphere (cure), but conceived in
                                                                                       a nuanced and integrated perspective on the fundamental aspects of illness,
                                                                                       suffering and healing (care). Starting from the assumption that the subjective


                                                                                       Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                                       9
     experience of illness is something distinct from the biomedical attribution of
     disease, the Medical Humanities have embraced a new concept of care and, in
     the contemporary debate, of self-care, which is empathic and person-centred,
     but at the same time, collective and relational. Additional space for dialogue
     with Trauma Studies opens up in the individual and collective fold of care.
        In this perspective, the body is a very fertile theoretical object. If the
     ‘represented body’ becomes a crossroads where the cultural and aesthetic
     question and the biological and medical discourse meet, the ‘embodied body’
     helps one to reflect on the subjectivity of the patient and her/his specific way
     of experiencing illness, disability and suffering. The body becomes a terrain
     of exploration that connects the construction of visual imaginaries related to
     particular medical issues (disfiguration — Suzannah Biernoff, eating disorders
     - Clio Nicastro, autism - Anna Chiara Sabatino) to the impact, discursiveness
     and collective assumption of responsibility that such imaginaries provoke. In
     this first line, more adherent to the Medical Humanities, the essays focus on
     the reincorporation of lived experiences and the ‘acting’ capacity of images.
     The second perspective of analysis, the contributions of Nicole Miglio-
     Giulio Galimberti and Lorenzo Donghi-Simona Pezzano, pertains to the data
     visualisation of the body through medical imaging processes. Widespread
     beyond the narrow clinical perimeter, images pose various questions about their
     epistemological status and the combination of the indexical, iconic and symbolic
     modes of signification. Reflections on imaging, particularly on the role of the
     thermal camera, feed on the recent experience of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak,
     which is explored in the essays by Samuel Antichi and Aleksander Sedzielarz.
     These essays address the iconography of pandemic imagery, attempting to
     relate Medical Humanities and Trauma Studies, and focusing on the experience
     and memory of individual and collective trauma.
        Images of the body have played an essential role in medical discourse and
     practice since the illustration of anatomical texts. Still, it is thanks to the
     advent of photography that they become inextricably linked to the definition
     of the physiological and pathological body.5 They then move through the new
     frontiers of medical imaging, towards the conquest of human interiority and
     new forms of visualisation.6 The human body is grasped about the connection
     between the representation and the epistemological plane of the construction
     of knowledge and forms of control in the trajectory already noted by Michel
     Foucault. The depiction of illness, of the pathological body, of the wound, firstly,
     draws iconographic connections with the historical-artistic context of reference;
     Secondly, it literally acts, identifying and structuring specific biomedical practices.
     In this perspective, Suzannah Biernoff’s essay is illuminating because, on the
     one hand, she can read Vicky Knight’s (Dirty God, S. Polka 2019) body in the
     light of the iconographic theme of the disfigured female face. On the other, the
     scholar can reason about how the film constructs a process of subjectification
     of physical and emotional pain on this truly scarred body. The authenticity of
     this disfigured face explodes the film representation by posing the problem of
     communicating (and listening to) the pain of the other and reclaiming the value



10                                            Casini, Cati, Toschi, Sick and Injured Bodies
of vulnerability, difference, and subjectivity, all crucial elements to access the
space of self-care.
   Images of the body are the starting point for establishing a bridge with the
Medical Humanities. This theoretical paradigm is recognisable but still elusive
in its definition, which not surprisingly oscillates between ‘Health Humanities’7
and ‘Critical Medical Humanities’,8 etc. Medical Humanities have urged the
paradigm of cultural history, disability studies, and gender studies to share a
critical approach to clinical gaze, afflicted body and social pathologies. In the
Manifesto for a Visual Medical Humanities at Interdisciplinary Entanglements:
Towards a Visual Medical Humanities (Edinburgh 2018), Fiona Johnstone
emphasised the need to pay more attention to the visual dimension. A first
trajectory is an intersection between medical practice and the visual arts,
which can take many configurations. The development of narrative medicine,
a tool that can give voice to the patient, explore the embodied experience of
illness, and understand the uniqueness of each clinical course, has received
particular emphasis in the form of somatic narratives and, to a lesser extent,
graphic medicine. The focus of Medical Humanities on autobiographical writing
and illness narratives has naturally extended to the forms of portraiture/
self-portraiture that are widespread in social media and the current media
landscape. These portraiture practices can be placed side by side with other
practices that more explicitly resort to art and the use of visual/audiovisual
media within psychotherapeutic pathways that aim at re-elaborating the
experience of illness or the acquisition of greater self-awareness in the role of
the patient.9 The paper of Clio Nicastro has the merit of capturing the ability of
images both to shape the body according to specific cultural expectations and
to translate the fragmentation, alienation, and objectification that the patient
makes of her/his own body affected by a disease into a very personal and
unconventional language. Our lived bodily experience shapes our self-image
and, thus also, our narrative identity. In this logic, visual narratives become a
powerful tool for approaching and understanding the patient’s experience and
reconfiguring their identity.10 Anna Chiara Sabatino’s contribution focuses on
the ability of audiovisual language to redefine the image of ourselves and our
self-awareness. This essay leans more decisively into dialogue with therapeutic
practices and, not by chance, is obligatorily in conversation with doctors and
psychologists. Sabatino’ deviates from the path of cinematherapy as much as
from that of film therapy, and structures a theoretical reflection on the use of
the cinematographic device in a therapeutic context, updating an original Italian
experimental pathway started between 2007 and 2012 with the Memofilm
project. Therapeutic filmmaking helps the young patient get involved in a visual
representation balanced between self-portraiture and participatory narrative.
Images literally act in the representation of the body, trauma, and illness.
   Furthermore, there are images that, precisely because of their close connection
to the medical field, deserve special attention. That is, the visualisations of the
body produced by scientific/medical imaging technologies. The theme of vision
devices in medical practice and how they objectify disease in instrument-based


Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                     11
     evidence, how they change the narrative, and how they alter the doctor-patient
     relationship, is grasped by Stanley Reiser with the advent of the stethoscope,
     and widely revived with the spread of medical imaging and a ‘total optical
     system’.11



     MOVING BEYOND A REPRESENTATIONAL
     FRAMEWORK: THE TRANSFORMATIVE
     POWER OF MEDICAL IMAGES
       As the historian of science Lorraine Daston puts it ‘The time is ripe to think about
     images beyond representation’,12 that is to move beyond the correspondence
     theory of truth paradigm and regard images as productive agents in the
     epistemic process. The performative character of images might be valid for
     images tout court, but it is especially applicable to scientific images. Namely,
     in science and medicine the ‘technical image’13 has become an autonomous
     tool of thought independent from its referent: it is often the image or data-
     visualisation itself which become the working object of science and medicine.14
     The field of visual science and technology studies (STS) has long preferred to
     talk about practices of making visible that mediate, enact, and visualise.15 If we
     leave the representational framework behind, what is at stake, then, in these
     types of images is not only a question of ontology (what an image is) but also
     of epistemology (what type of knowledge an image enables or prevents), and
     ethics (what kind of uses/actions are encouraged or prevented by a certain
     image).
       Authors such as Miglio-Galimberti and Donghi-Pezzano seek to conceptually
     clarify not only what scientific/medical images are — biomedical imaging and
     thermography, respectively — but also what they do and how they can be used
     beyond their immediate context of production. In this respect, the wider cultural
     and socio-political context comes to the foreground as the kaleidoscopic prism
     through which one can look at the visual event and its multiple facets. Images do
     things, because they present rather than represent a phenomenon, they enact
     reality that, therefore, becomes tractable. Attention, however, cannot be paid to
     images as if they were isolated from the practices and technologies/techniques
     that enable their production, use and circulation. As the literary historian
     Sander Gilman argues ‘To study “medical technology”, without understanding
     how its generation of representations is the key to its understanding, is limited
     […]; to study the representations without understanding the technology and the
     knowledge it generates is equally one-sided’.16 Implicitly responding to Gilman’s
     call, Donghi-Pezzano and Miglio-Galimberti keep the detailed analysis of the
     technology and its representational output side by side.
       Contemporary medicine trades in images: anatomical atlases, radiographic
     X-rays, MRI and CT scans, foetal sonograms, and endoscopic exploration of the
     human viscera, to name just a few. The changing role of diagnostic visuality in



12                                            Casini, Cati, Toschi, Sick and Injured Bodies
contemporary medical practices has been boosted by the advent of computer-
assisted imaging technology17, inaugurating a new era in the investigation of
the body at both molar and molecular level, that is the one composed of organs,
muscles, blood, and tissues (the molar scale) and the body composed of neurons,
cells, and molecules invisible to the naked eye (the molecular scale).18 Imaging
is a central feature of diagnostic and treatment procedures, and of the patient
experience. To be a patient is increasingly to become an image. The pervasive
role of digital technologies does not imply, however, that humans have been
side-lined. After all, science and medicine like any other human practice are still
very much a matter of ‘thinking with eyes and hands’.19
  Visual STS and the turn to matter embraced by humanities and social sciences
disciplines have prompted scholars to focus on the material aspects of the
visible, pointing out at the networked character of contemporary biomedical
vision even when it is increasingly accompanied by non-optical forms of
computational imaging.20 Using the framework of materialist philosophy,
Miglio-Galimberti theorise the performative network among bodies (at molar
and molecular scale), imaging technologies, data and the visual outputs
obtained from them. The authors explain how sense-making is the often-
neglected qualitative dimension proper to biomedical imaging: human subjects
attempt to make sense of medical images when they see them even without
possessing the knowledge required to read them. Sense-making takes on a
phenomenological rather than semiotic nuance since it relies on the subject’s
own experience of undergoing a certain procedure. Miglio-Galimberti illustrate
and put to work the concepts of agential realism and intra-action coined by the
feminist theorist Karen Barad who is one of the most influential representatives
of contemporary feminist materialist scholarship.21 To summarise an elaborate
argument, agential realism contends that wide-ranging apparatuses (including
medical imaging technologies) do not measure but produce material realities.
This relational ontology, the ability to engage with the body-image-technology
ensemble is key to challenging further the myth and ideology of the transparent
body,22 making us aware that scientific/medical images and data-visualisations
not only mediate knowledge of the body, but also obstructs and fragments that
knowledge.
  Rather than the body understood in generic terms, current literature in
materialist scholarship engages with the incarnate and material dimension
of corporeality. First elaborated by Foucault (1995) and articulated in its
dependency on historically bound discursive and social practices, corporeality
can be put at work to better grasp the relationship between bodies and medical
imaging technologies.23 The challenge is to move beyond the dichotomy between
the fragmentation of the body operated by medical imaging practices and the
body as a totality to be reified and essentialised. The body, then, should be
theorised as the ‘body multiple’, always intertwined with the technologies and
practices that sustain it.24 This is where the passage from ontology to politics
starts to become thinkable.
  Keeping these planes together — the ontological and the political — and


Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                     13
     embracing a Foucauldian and an Agambian theoretical framework, Donghi-
     Pezzano coin the concept of thermo-power as a form of new biopolitical
     management, exposing the biopolitical power of thermal cameras beyond
     their immediate function of body contagion prophylactic. They too embrace a
     relational ontology by considering the body as a medium contiguous to thermal
     imaging and bodily heat. Their analysis is enriched by a close reading of the
     work Virus created with a thermal camera by the photographer Antoine D’Agata
     who roamed through the streets of Paris as a witness during the time of the
     COVID-19 global pandemic. Private spaces (bodies) and public ones (parks,
     hospitals, etc.) are sensed through a thermal camera that, in the hands of
     D’Agata, becomes a prosthetic device able to capture traces of humanity and
     care. The unexpected result of an artist’s practice is to make us understand that
     care should not necessarily be other than technology, that care includes both
     technologies and embodied practices.25
       The practice of photographers, filmmakers and other artists is well represented
     in this special issue which creates intellectual space for the objects and methods
     proper to the arts and humanities, putting them on equal epistemic terms with
     the scholarly debates animating the field of the critical medical humanities.
     According to Fitzgerald and Callard, who have been engaged in collaborative
     work with artists, those working in the medical humanities either as scholars or
     practitioners should ask

              what a more critical medical humanities would look like: how might
              the methodological and intellectual legacies of the humanities
              intervene more consequentially in the clinical research practices of
              biomedicine – situating accounts of illness, suffering, intervention
              and cure in a much thicker attention to the social, human and
              cultural contexts in which those accounts, as well as the bodies to
              which they attend, become both thinkable and visible? 26

        This special issue shows how to start taking this call seriously.
        It is encouraging to see that articles using a variety of critical approaches
     from disparate fields (film and media studies, philosophy, visual and cultural
     studies, to name just a few) ultimately ask readers: why keep making images,
     still and moving? What purpose do they serve? The answers to these questions,
     albeit not explicitly formulated, are a recurring motif in many authors’
     contributions. Borrowing Biernoff’s own words, film (the film in question is Dirty
     God) is ‘a way of figuring things out, a way of coping’.27 One could say that
     still and moving images are transformative, sometimes even therapeutic and
     lifesaving. This power of images seems to depend more on their emancipatory
     potential rather than on their indexicality. Sabatino discusses the potential of
     patient’s empowerment when given the opportunity to move from being passive
     consumers of images they do not control to become image-makers. In her essay
     on the visual narratives of eating disorders, Nicastro credits moving images
     with the possibility of interrupting a chain of self-harming repetitive gestures;
     Miglio-Galimberti recognise how the interaction with medical visualisations



14                                          Casini, Cati, Toschi, Sick and Injured Bodies
possesses a self-reflexive power in so far as it prompts us to explore ways in
which our bodies can be reconfigured and thought anew.



PANDEMIC TRAUMAS
   A large frame encloses, sometimes explicitly, sometimes latently, the
contributions in this special issue: the fracture generated by the Sars Covid-19
pandemic, still perceived at a social level as an experience without historical
precedent. In fact, the memory of past experiences could have provided the
keys to interpreting the viral contagion, as well as tools to repair collective
grief. This phenomenon has also made clear the manifestation of an actual
transcultural trauma. For the first time, the whole world found itself, to a large
extent, simultaneously on the side of those suffering and on the side of those
who were observing the suffering of others.
   As well known, the subject of individual and collective suffering, the different
ways of recounting and representing it, and trauma of various kinds and scales,
has always been the prerogative of Trauma Studies.28 By taking its etymology
from ancient Greek, the concept of trauma itself draws on the figure of the
wound, a laceration produced by a collision between outside and inside not
always understood in the event, but experienced with time as a psychological
and physical violation. The body is, in fact, the object of interest where Medical
Humanities and Trauma Studies converge, with different but complementary
attitudes. It will come as no surprise that, just recently, to explain the symbolic
processing of trauma, Nick Hodgin and Amit Thakkar contrasted the concept
of the wound with the scar, clarifying the difference in strictly medical terms.29
While the wound refers to the tearing of tissue due to the traumatic event, the
scar ‘is not identical to the original tissue but a simulacrum of it’.30 Furthermore,
the mark possesses a plastic-visual nature that differs in colour, elasticity and
shape, even changing over time. This does not mean that all scars are visible
to the naked eye; rather, the idea is to conceive of the traces of trauma not as
the reproduction of the wound itself, but as the sign of having been wounded.
   Over the years, the visibility of breaches has changed with the use of different
technologies capable of passing through tissues and detecting multiple layers
of organic matter, sometimes even showing traces of psychiatric trauma at
the neurological level (e.g. PTSD). Medical tropes or motifs applied to trauma
discourses thus raise the need for a deeper understanding of the agent
instances that shape cultures of remembrance and representations of the
individual and collective traumatised body.31 As Amit Pinchevski states, ‘the
concept of trauma might then be regarded against the cultural techniques of
its making: the alignment and interrelation of bodies, knowledge, technologies
and practices — from the clinic to the lab, from the “talking cure” to the MRI
scan — that have given rise and sustained the traumatised condition’.32 In this
sense, each historical epoch and culture constructs its own narrative of trauma
not only in line with institutional rhetoric, but also about medical insights into


Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                       15
     the injured body and mind, as well as the technologies to treat them, including
     visual devices.
        The visual representation of the COVID-19 pandemic and its iconography, as
     it has been constructed and conveyed by the media (television, newspapers,
     web, etc.), has been consolidated, on the one hand, through the popularisation
     of medical-scientific imagery. The collective exposure to the traumatic event, in
     its twofold dimension of exhibiting and undergoing, was in fact often played out
     through the global proliferation of images dedicated to the isolation of the virus,
     the tracing of bodies, and the representation of the disease effects on the bodies
     affected by the contagion. On the other hand, the hypertrophic production of
     visualised scientific data has attempted to compensate for the blind spots of this
     traumatic event. The thresholds of the unrepresentable have been redefined
     not so much by the assumption of an ethics of the gaze towards the sick, but
     rather by the impossibility of accessing the spaces of the cure, in the most tragic
     situations condemning the bodies overwhelmed by the virus to disappearance.
     For this reason, borders between visible and unseen, between scientific and
     non-scientific imagery, have been constantly challenged and traversed.
        Within this volume, the contributions by Alexander Sedzielarz and Samuel
     Antichi, together with the essay mentioned above by Donghi-Pezzano,
     specifically address the figures of suffering and the experiences of care
     related to the recent trauma caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular,
     Sedzielarz and Antichi identify the filmic form and, specifically, documentary
     production as the privileged place to observe the representability of traumatic
     facts and the discourse of the traumatised body as the object of care. Alexander
     Sedzielarz focuses on the analysis of two documentaries — Wang Nanfu’s In
     the Same Breath (2021) and Waad Al-Kateab’s For Sama (2021) — to show the
     complexity of a biopolitical apparatus capable of determining and shaping the
     life and death of vulnerable subjectivities in different geopolitical and cultural
     contexts affected by a state of crisis. On the one hand, the author explains how,
     in documenting the realities and effects of catastrophe, the films work on the
     traumatic scene not only in spatial, but also in temporal terms: by creating
     interconnections between heterogeneous temporal levels, the filmmakers
     propose an act of resistance to that perpetual repetition, both symbolic and
     concrete, of the original event that prevents the wound from healing. On the
     other, these cinematic works show how trauma is subjected to the dominant
     discourse elaborated by the state in order to manage emergency. Indeed, the
     spaces of care (i.e., hospitals), technologies and representations become the
     cogs in an institutional system in which the visible order of trauma is regulated
     and distributed.
        By questioning documentary realism in the pandemic age, Samuel Antichi
     reflects on pandemic imagery, considering the function assumed by data
     visualisations and infographic material in representing and rendering the
     devastating effects of viral propagation intelligibly. As the author points out, a
     large part of the Trauma Studies debate takes on a visual-aesthetic view, as it
     questions the ways and possibilities to represent trauma through images and



16                                          Casini, Cati, Toschi, Sick and Injured Bodies
narrations, which are considered the primary mediators for historical knowledge,
private and cultural memory and human healing.33 However, central within
pandemic mediation processes of trauma is a shift in the indexical paradigm, in
which the contours of reality are reworked through testimonial strategies that
oscillate between the storytelling of experienced dramas and the progressive
replacement of photographic representation, that is, images of quantitative and
biological digital renderings. These media artefacts are created without visual
reference to give evidence and credibility to invisible and elusive objects such
as the SARS-CoV-2 particle.
  In consolidating the discourse of the body as an object of care, contemporary
media culture shapes its narratives around certain key concepts, now recurrently
used to understand and respond to the collective state of suffering and traumatic
experiences, namely the idea of resilience, of regaining good health, and well-
being. Not by chance, the articles in this issue recall these recent traumatic
events, reflecting on how they tested the resilience of community formations.
  In following this prompt, visual culture and media scholars can also question
this renewed connection between the representation of illness and the horizon
of resilience. Susan Sontag, Donna Haraway, and more recently Jeffrey Olick,
all argued that in the face of disease and the experience of trauma, we need to
reflect on the ideological substratum that aims to promote positive thinking at
all costs, as the outcome of a neo-liberal logic in which the individual and society
must strive to overcome difficulties by demonstrating strength, a vocation for
struggle and a commitment to overcoming one’s vulnerabilities.34
  The pandemic has forced global society to look at the vulnerabilities of the
body and mind with greater awareness, recalling the duty not to impose a
closure of the experience of trauma in the illusion of a definitive cure. However,
other difficult experiences, such as those analysed, for instance, in Biernoff and
Nicastro’s essays, also testify to the capacity of images to foster processes of
healing, through which the relationship with the original trauma is continuously
developed, thanks to the recovery of other representations, both scientific and
non-scientific, documentary and fictional.
  To conclude, this special issue of Cinema & Cie traces a novel cross-disciplinary
framework to conceptualise care work in relation to the sick and injured body.
Ultimately, the aim is to foreground the healing potential of art and media
practices capable of emancipating the body vulnerable to illnesses, as well as
to forms of visual scrutiny and intervention. Scholars in the critical medical
humanities have invited to widen the scale and sites of the ‘primal scene’, that
is of the doctor-patient encounter.35 Distributing care work across a network of
humans, images, and technologies means inscribing care into the materiality of
these circuits instead of side-lining care to the doctor-patient encounter.




Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                      17
Notes
 1
    The three authors shared their contents, methodological approaches and the entire editorial work through
a constant exchange of ideas. For the introduction to the volume, Deborah Toschi wrote the paragraph
Rethinking the body through new disciplinary trajectories, Silvia Casini Moving Beyond a Representational
Framework: The Transformative Power of Medical Images, and Alice Cati Pandemic Traumas.
  2
     Imagining Illness. Public Health and Visual Culture, ed. by David Serlin, (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2011), XIII.
  3
     Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body. Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1995). In this trajectory but closer to Cultural Studies, see: Wild Science. Reading Feminism,
Medicine and the Media, ed. by Janine Marchessault and Kim Sawchuk (London, New York: Routledge 2000);
Catherine Waldby, The Visible Human Body. Informatic Bodies and the Posthuman Medicine (London, New
York: Routledge, 2000).
  4
     Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain. The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1985).
  5
   The Face of Madness. Hugh W. Diamond and the Origin of Psychiatric Photography, ed. by Sander L. Gilman
(New York: Brunner-Mazel, 1976); John Tagg, The Burden of Representatuion. Essays on Photographies
and Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); Allan Sekula, ‘The Body and the Archive’,
October, 39 (1986), 3-64; Martin Kemp, ‘“A Perfect and Faithful Record”: Mind and Body in Medical Photography
Before 1900’, in Beauty of Another Order: Photography in Science, ed. by Ann Thomas, (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1997), 120-49; Tom Gunning, ‘In Your Face: Physiognomy, Photography, and the Gnostic
Mission of Early Film’, Modernism/Modernity, 4.1 (1997), 1-29.
  6
     Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles, Naked to the Bone. Medical Imaging in the Twentieth Century (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997); Jose van Dijck, The Transparent Body. A Cultural Analysis of
Medical Imaging (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015); Silvia Casini, Giving Bodies Back to Data.
Image Makers, Bricolage, and Reinvention in Magnetic Resonance Technology (Cambridge, MA: The MIT
Press, 2021).
  7
     Paul Crawford, Brian Brown, and Victoria Tischler, Charley Baker, ‘Health humanities: the future of
medical humanities?’, Mental Health Review Journal, 15.3 (2010), 4-10.
  8
    William Viney, Callard Felicity and Angela Woods, ‘Critical medical humanities: embracing entanglement,
taking risk’, Medical Humanities, 41.1 (2015), 2-7; The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical
Humanities, ed. by Anne Whitehead, Angela Woods (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016).
  9
     Ludmilla Jordanova, ‘Medicine and Visual Arts’, in Medicine, Health and the Arts. Approaches to the
medical humanities, ed. by Victoria Bates and Alan Bleakley, Sam Goodman (London, New York: Routledge,
2014), 41-64.
  10
      Deborah Toschi, ‘Prenatal Portraits. Ultrasound imagery in expectant mothers’ autobiographical
narrative’, in Body Images in the Post-Cinematic Scenario. The Digitization of Bodies, ed. by Alberto Brodesco
and Federico Giordano (Milano: Mimesis International, 2017), 63-72.
  11
      Sarah Kember, ‘Medical diagnostic imaging: the geometry of caos’, New Formations, 15 (1991), 55-66
(59).
  12
      Lorraine Daston, ‘Beyond Representation’, in Representation in Scientific Practice Revisited, ed. by
Catelijne Coopmans and others (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014), 319–323 (320).
  13
      Technical images are either based on instruments or obtained through image-making procedures or
they are themselves tools. Although the locution is used to describe images that originate in the field of
science, technology and medicine, it can also encompass images from the arts. See The Technical Image. A
History of Styles in Scientific Imagery, ed. by Horst Bredekamp, Vera Dünkel, and Birgit Schneider (Chicago,
London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015).
  14
      For an analysis of images (artistic and scientific) that work at the limits of representation see James
Elkins, Six Stories from the End of Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).
  15
     The literature in STS and visual culture is rich. See Bernike Pasveer, ‘Representing or Mediating. A History
and Philosophy of X-Ray Images in Medicine’, in Visual Cultures of Science. Rethinking Representational
Practices in Knowledge Building and Science Communiation, ed. by Luc Pauwels (Lebanon, New Hampshire:
University Press of New England, 2006), 41-62; Steve Woolgar and Javier Lezaun, ‘Missing the (Question)



18                                                                   Casini, Cati, Toschi, Sick and Injured Bodies
Mark? What Is a Turn to Ontology?’, Social Studies of Science, 45.3 (2015), 462–67. Two comprehensive
edited collections on scientific images beyond representation that combine STS with anthropology and
philosophy are: Visualization in the Age of Computerization, ed. by Annamaria Carusi and others (New York:
Routledge, 2015); Representation in Scientific Practice Revisited, ed. by Catelijne Coopmans and others
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014). For a visual culture study that introduces some of the terminologies
and debates see Andrea Pinotti and Antonio Somaini, Cultura Visuale. Immagini, Sguardi, Media, Dispositivi
(Torino: Einaudi, 2016).
  16
     Sander Gilman, ‘Representing Health and Illness: Thoughts for the Twenty-First Century’, Medical
History, 55.3 (2011), 295–300 (299).
  17
     See Ilana Löwy, ‘Historiography of Biomedicine “Bio”, “Medicine” and In Between’, Isis, 102 (2011), 116–
122; Anneke Smelik and Nina Lykke, Bits of Life: Feminism at the Intersections of Media, Bioscience, and
Technology (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008).
  18
     The shift from the molar to the molecular body is theorised in Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself:
Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twentieth-First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2006).
  19
     Bruno Latour, ‘Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands’, in Knowledge and Society:
Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present, ed. by Elizabeth Long and Henrika Kuklick, (Greenwich,
CT: JAI Press, 1986), 1-40.
  20
     See, for example, Anne Beaulieu, ‘A Space for Measuring Mind and Brain: Interdisciplinarity and Digital
Tools in the Development of Brain Mapping and Functional Imaging, 1980–1990’, Brain and Cognition, 49.1
(2002), 13–33.
  21
     See Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and
Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). The work of Wilson is also relevant to new materialism.
See Elizabeth A Wilson, Gut feminism (Duke University Press, 2015). Both Barad and Wilson contribute to
feminist theory and science studies by calling for feminist materialist scholarship to engage more directly
with physics (Barad) and biology (Wilson).
  22
     van Dijck, The Transparent Body.
  23
     See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison 2nd edition, trans. by Alan Sheridan
(New York: Vintage Books, 1995). For a phenomenological reading of corporeality using a Foucauldian
framework see Francisco Ortega, Corporeality, Medical Technologies and Contemporary Culture (London,
New York: Routledge, 2014). Moving beyond a Foucauldian framework, Wilson reads recent developments in
biology through a new feminist materialist approach. See Elizabeth A. Wilson, ‘Organic empathy: Feminism,
psychopharmaceuticals, and the embodiment of depression’, in Material Feminisms, ed. by Stacy Alaimo
and Susan Hekman (Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008), 373-399.
  24
     Annemarie Mol, The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2002), 6.
  25
     See Care in Practice. On Tinkering in Clinics, Homes and Farms, ed. by Annemarie Mol, Ingunn Moser,
and Jeannette Pols (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010).
  26
     Des Fitzgerald and Felicity Callard, ‘Entangling the Medical Humanities’, in The Edinburgh Companion
to the Critical Medical Humanities, ed. by Anne Whitehead and others (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2016), 35-49 (35).
  27
     Susannah Biernoff, Sacha Polak’s Dirty God and the Politics of Authenticity , infra, 32.
  28
     Since the Eighties, by harmonizing humanistic, psychological and cultural approaches, this field of
research helped to formulate a series/corpus of theories concerning an analysis of trauma as an interpretative
model. Accordingly, trauma studies have internally developed various perspectives of research, as a
confirmation of an intrinsic multidisciplinary vocation: critic-cultural approach [Jeffrey C. Alexander and
others, Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Critical
Trauma Studies. Understanding Violence, Conflict and, Memory in Everyday Life, ed. by Monica J. Casper
and Eric Wertheimer (New York: New York University Press, 2016)]; affect theory [Ruth Leys, Trauma: A
Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Ruth Leys, ‘The Turn to Affect: A Critique’, Critical
Inquiry, 37.3 (2011), 434-472], neuro-cognitive approach [The act of remembering: Toward an understanding
of how we recall the past, ed. by John H. Mace (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell, 2010)]; post-colonial approach
[Decolonizing Trauma Studies: Trauma and Postcolonialism, ed. by Sonya Andermahr (Basel: MDPI, 2016)].
Moreover, the transcultural turn has been crucial in explaining in a more systematic way how contemporary



Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                                       19
culture is increasingly characterised by cultural practices that transcend national borders and foster the
action of cultures of remembrance at a multidirectional level, i.e. across both space (geo-political contexts)
and time (historical periods). See Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust
in the Age of Decolonization (Standford: Standford University Press, 2009) and Transcultural Memory, ed.
by Rick Crownshaw (London, New York: Routledge, 2014).
  29
      Scars and Wounds. Film and Legacies of Trauma, ed. by Nick Hodgin and Amit Thakkar (London:
Palgrave-Macmillan, 2017).
  30
     Ibidem, 16.
  31
     Mediation processes of trauma are usually associated to therapeutic models (working through, acting
out, replacement, re-enacting) in order to demonstrate the reparative potential of media representations
and practices. See Trauma. Explorations in Memory, ed. by Cathy Caruth, (Baltimore: The John Hopkins
University Press, 1995), Trauma and Cinema. Cross-Cultural Explorations, ed. by E. Ann Kaplan and Ban
Wang (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004), Alice Cati, Immagini della memoria. Teorie e pratiche
del ricordo tra testimonianza, genealogia, documentari (Udine, Milano: Mimesis Edizioni, 2013).
  32
     Amit Pinchevski, ‘Screen Trauma: Visual Media and Post-traumatic Stress Disorder’, Theory, Culture
& Society, 33.4 (2016), 51–75 (53). See also the recent volume by the same author, reviewed here: Amit
Pinchevski, Transmitted Wounds. Media and the Mediation of Trauma (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2021).
  33
     On this aspect, the following volumes are fundamental: Interrogating Trauma. Collective Suffering in
Global Arts and Media ed. by Mick Broderick and Antonio Traverso (London, New York: Routledge, 2011) and
Trauma Theory, ed. by Susannah Radstone, Janet Walker, Noah Shenker (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2013).
  34
     Jeffrey K. Olick, ‘The poverty of resilience: On memory, meaning, and well-being’, Memory Studies, 9.3
(2016), 315–324.
  35
     Viney, Callard, and Woods, 2




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