Jennifer Tuttle presents paper at symposium in Greece

Jennifer Tuttle, Ph.D., Dorothy M. Healy Professor of Literature and Health and professor of English, recently presented a paper at the European Association for American Studies Symposium on Feminism and Technoscience.

The event was hosted by Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, Greece.

Tuttle's paper, "Returning the Gaze of Technomedicine: Feminist Vision in Martha A. Hall’s Breast Cancer Pathographies," focused on a genre called the artists' book, where the book itself is a sculptural object fusing form and content.

Hall's books are held by the Maine Women Writers Collection and are familiar to many faculty and students at the University of New England.

The books are frequently used in UNE courses.

As the Healy Professor, Tuttle's job includes disseminating scholarly analysis of and raising awareness about the collection's holdings.

This goal coincided with Tuttle's own research expertise and teaching interests in her presentation.

She focused on how Hall's books function as patient narratives that incorporate myriad medico-visual objects related to Hall's treatment for breast cancer, such as CT scans and X-rays, along with her own productions of visual technology, such as photographs of her body.

Tuttle argued that Hall's books themselves thereby become alternative technologies for visualizing a body with breast cancer, actively seeking to reshape the medical encounter toward a vision of health care that incorporates the patient's perspective and values women’s corporeal self-ownership.