Abstract
In 1971, three Duke University professors published a medical school textbook using pinup photographs of naked women as visual aids. In critiquing the rhetorical force of this unusual artifact, we synthesize theories of the male gaze with Foucault’s concept of the medical gaze and Rothfelder and Thornton’s “rhetorics of proximity” to argue that the medical gaze is predicated upon White heteromasculinity. Rhetorics of proximity typically help to manage the inherent connections between the medical gaze and the male gaze: the former requires distance while the latter invites closeness. By inviting its readers to gaze upon the pinups with sexual interestedness, the textbook mismanages rhetorical proximity and thus reveals not only the inherent connections between the male gaze and the medical gaze but also the processes of constructing medical images that often are elided by the shroud of scientific objectivity and transparent representation.
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