Body & SocietyPub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1177/1357034x231189178
Iram Khawaja, Dorthe Staunæs, Mante Vertelyte
{"title":"How Racial Matter Comes to Matter: Memory Work, Animacy and Childhood Dolls","authors":"Iram Khawaja, Dorthe Staunæs, Mante Vertelyte","doi":"10.1177/1357034x231189178","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034x231189178","url":null,"abstract":"Dolls have a long history in psychological and literary scholarship, and in popular culture. Many of these cultural products point to how dolls bring forth imaginaries of race and gender. Dolls, however, are not only figures of representation or identification. Dolls are agential in the ways they bring life to racialised, affective and embodied experiences. In this article, we develop an affective hauntology, applying memory work to explore how memories of childhood dolls can inform us about formations of race, racialisation and Whiteness. Applying Mel Y. Chen’s conceptualisation of animacy as an affective-material construction, we explore how dolls become ‘real and true’, bringing forth how racial matters come to matter as part of gendered subjectivities. Our memories of childhood dolls cut across different geopolitical and historical contexts – Eastern Europe, Western Europe and South-East Asia – revealing interesting differences and similarities in terms of processes of racialisation from the 1970s to 1990s.","PeriodicalId":47568,"journal":{"name":"Body & Society","volume":"88 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134994703","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Body & SocietyPub Date : 2023-08-05DOI: 10.1177/1357034X231185862
David Mwambari, Eric Sibomana
{"title":"Bodily Scars as Lived Memory in Post-Genocide Rwanda","authors":"David Mwambari, Eric Sibomana","doi":"10.1177/1357034X231185862","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X231185862","url":null,"abstract":"Scholarship about politics and the body in conflicts has gained prominence in academic debates. This article advances these conversations by arguing that bodily scars are potent ‘carriers’ of memories of mass atrocities committed during the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. Using both semi-structured interviews and a wide range of secondary sources, this study found that bodily scars – as physical manifestations of wartime torture and pain – evidence past atrocities and survivor resilience. Similarly, they are avenues through which the past is communicated and transformed (in ways that complement and surpass other mediums of memory). Bodily scars play powerful and complex roles in memory conversations; they communicate trauma and keep memories of the mass violence vivid in public and private realms. This article empirically contributes to discussions on the politics of memory in post-genocide Rwanda, and body studies and memory scholarship more broadly.","PeriodicalId":47568,"journal":{"name":"Body & Society","volume":"29 1","pages":"3 - 28"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2023-08-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42515757","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Body & SocietyPub Date : 2023-07-31DOI: 10.1177/1357034X231189458
J. Burr, N. Fox
{"title":"The More-Than-Human Micropolitics of the Dissection Assemblage: What Can a ‘Dead’ Body Do?","authors":"J. Burr, N. Fox","doi":"10.1177/1357034X231189458","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X231189458","url":null,"abstract":"Posthumanism offers a unique opportunity to examine the relationship between dead and living bodies. In this article, we explore one setting in which matter – conventionally considered as ‘dead’, demonstrates its continued vitality: the anatomical dissection room. Using data from interview transcripts, we report on the affect (capacities to affect and be affected) within this space, to reveal the micropolitics of dissection. Analysis of the ‘dissection-assemblage’ reveals how interactions between the living – students, teachers, technicians – and dead bodies not only produce knowledge and understanding of human anatomy but also show how the dead body gains new capacities to affect living bodies psychologically, emotionally and physiologically. While conventional humanist discussions of dissection have addressed how these interactions ‘de-humanise’ and ‘re-humanise’ the cadaver in this particular setting, this analysis discloses a complex micropolitics in which the conventional distinction between ‘living’ and ‘dead’ ignores the multiple ways in which all matter is vitally affective.","PeriodicalId":47568,"journal":{"name":"Body & Society","volume":"29 1","pages":"55 - 80"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2023-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46083374","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Body & SocietyPub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1177/1357034x211068883
Martine Lappé, Robbin Jeffries Hein
{"title":"The Temporal Politics of Placenta Epigenetics: Bodies, Environments and Time.","authors":"Martine Lappé, Robbin Jeffries Hein","doi":"10.1177/1357034x211068883","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034x211068883","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article builds on feminist scholarship on new biologies and the body to describe the temporal politics of epigenetic research related to the human placenta. Drawing on interviews with scientists and observations at conferences and in laboratories, we argue that epigenetic research simultaneously positions placenta tissue as a way back into maternal and fetal bodies following birth, as a lens onto children's future well-being, and as a bankable resource for ongoing research. Our findings reflect how developmental models of health have helped recast the placenta as an agential organ that is uniquely responsive to environments during pregnancy and capable of embodying biological evidence about the effects of in utero experiences after birth. We develop the concept of 'recursive embodiment' to describe how placenta epigenetics is reimagining relationships between bodies and environments across developmental, epigenetic, and generational time, and the impacts this has for experiences of pregnancy and responsibilities related to children's health.</p>","PeriodicalId":47568,"journal":{"name":"Body & Society","volume":"29 2","pages":"49-76"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10449375/pdf/nihms-1842410.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10104479","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Body & SocietyPub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1177/1357034X231181100
Branwyn Poleykett, K. Jent
{"title":"Biocircularities: New Formations of Embodied Time","authors":"Branwyn Poleykett, K. Jent","doi":"10.1177/1357034X231181100","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X231181100","url":null,"abstract":"In this introduction to the special section ‘Biocircularities: New Formations of Embodied Time’, we introduce the concept of ‘biocircularity’. Drawing on case studies from Senegal, Australia and the United States, we argue that (bio)circularities provides a new tool to understand transformations of embodiment and embodied time in response to rapid technoscientific, social and environmental change. We situate the potential of biocircularity by distinguishing the approach from cycles and ‘looping’. We lay out why we think biocircularity is an important concept now, when we stand on the brink of ecological crisis and reproductive futures appear deeply precarious and uncertain. Biocircularity, we argue, offers new ways of understanding how people live out embodiment and understand biological time. The concept offers new possibilities for theorising and realising scientific practice and public health interventions.","PeriodicalId":47568,"journal":{"name":"Body & Society","volume":"29 1","pages":"3 - 19"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42434608","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Body & SocietyPub Date : 2023-04-10DOI: 10.1177/1357034X231161312
John Nott
{"title":"Architecture for Anatomy: History, Affect, and the Material Reproduction of the Body in Two Medical School Buildings","authors":"John Nott","doi":"10.1177/1357034X231161312","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X231161312","url":null,"abstract":"Medical schools are among the most important spaces for the history of the body. It is here that students come to know the anatomical bodies of their future patients and, through a process of cognitive and embodied practice, that the knowing bodies of future clinicians are also shaped. Practical and theoretical understandings of medicine are formed in these affective and historied buildings and in collaboration with a broad material culture of education. Medical schools are, however, both under-theorised and under-historicised. This article integrates ‘materialist’ considerations of the body with Henri Lefebvre’s philosophy of space and rhythm in order to compare two markedly different spaces – the 19th-century Anatomy Department at Semmelweis University in Hungary and the mid-20th-century ‘skills laboratory’ at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. This comparison suggests that biomedical bodies are variously shaped by the agential and affective material histories present in the everyday experience of contemporary medical education.","PeriodicalId":47568,"journal":{"name":"Body & Society","volume":"29 1","pages":"99 - 129"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42628609","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Body & SocietyPub Date : 2023-03-23DOI: 10.1177/1357034X231151855
Dan M. Kotliar, Rafi Grosglik
{"title":"On the Contesting Conceptualisation of the Human Body: Between ‘Homo-Microbis’ and ‘Homo-Algorithmicus’","authors":"Dan M. Kotliar, Rafi Grosglik","doi":"10.1177/1357034X231151855","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X231151855","url":null,"abstract":"Microbiome science has highlighted human and microbial interdependency, offering a radical epistemic shift from the individualistic view of the human body and self. Research has accordingly offered to see humans as ‘homo-microbis’ – complex biomolecular networks composed of humans and their associated microbes. While social scientists have begun to address microbiome science, the proliferation and commodification of the homo-microbial episteme have largely been overlooked. Based on an ethnographic account of a research project that offered microbiome-based personalised nutrition and the successful start-up that emerged from it, this article examines the emergence, proliferation, and commodification of the homo-microbial body. We show that this episteme necessarily depends on opaque machine learning algorithms; that the microbiome is paradoxically seen as a data-driven individuating marker; and that homo-microbis is, in fact, also a homo-algorithmicus – a being that can only access its non-human sub-parts by blindly following opaque algorithmic recommendations in an app.","PeriodicalId":47568,"journal":{"name":"Body & Society","volume":"29 1","pages":"81 - 108"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2023-03-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49654650","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Body & SocietyPub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1177/1357034x231161319
Michal Nahman, C. Weis
{"title":"Redefining Bioavailability through Migrant Egg Donors in Spain","authors":"Michal Nahman, C. Weis","doi":"10.1177/1357034x231161319","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034x231161319","url":null,"abstract":"This article utilises feminist technoscience studies’ notions of bodily ‘materialisation’ and ‘ontological choreographies’, offering a cyborg feminist account of ‘bioavailability’ as embodied becomings, rather than a fixed ontological state of being. Drawn from 2 years’ ethnographic study in in vitro fertilisation clinics in Spain with migrant women who provided eggs to the cross-border in vitro fertilisation industry, this work explores how global understandings of race and inequalities, clinical practices and women’s own emotional and physical labours collectively produce bioavailability. Through examples from observations and interviews in in vitro fertilisation clinics, we examined women’s embodied stories to understand the ways in which bioavailability becomes. The article demonstrates a novel way in which to think about ‘bioavailability’, a concept which has already been of enormous use to the social sciences since its introduction by Lawrence Cohen. We examine recent configurations of bodily extraction in the reproduction–migration nexus that help us rethink the concept of bioavailability.","PeriodicalId":47568,"journal":{"name":"Body & Society","volume":"29 1","pages":"79 - 109"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47251539","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Body & SocietyPub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1177/1357034X231158330
Claire Elizabeth Harris, Susan R. Hemer, A. Chur-Hansen
{"title":"Cochlear Implants: Young Adults’ Embodied Experiences of Deafness and Hearing through Implanted Technology","authors":"Claire Elizabeth Harris, Susan R. Hemer, A. Chur-Hansen","doi":"10.1177/1357034X231158330","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X231158330","url":null,"abstract":"This article ethnographically considers the experiences of Australian young people who were born deaf and who hear and listen through cochlear implants to explore the intersection between the sensory body, lived experience and technology. The article draws on phenomenology to examine how experiences of deafness are productive in analysing articulations of embodiment and the meanings embedded in a body that is valued as both deaf and hearing. Leaving aside binary conceptions of deaf versus hearing, and understandings of the cochlear implant as a remedy for sensory deficits, we instead make a case for nuanced understandings of the device and embodied experiences through technology. This analysis identifies how a cochlear implanted body navigates connections to the world and to others in turning on and off engagement. We contend that the device has an intrinsic value for recipients through enabling their access to hearing while not removing their experiences of deafness.","PeriodicalId":47568,"journal":{"name":"Body & Society","volume":"29 1","pages":"3 - 27"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43035533","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Body & SocietyPub Date : 2023-02-27DOI: 10.1177/1357034X231158322
K. Ryan
{"title":"Programming Plasticity as Embodied in Childhood: A Critical Genealogy of The Biology of Adversity and Resilience","authors":"K. Ryan","doi":"10.1177/1357034X231158322","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X231158322","url":null,"abstract":"The Biology of Adversity and Resilience coheres around the claim that early childhood experiences of stress and adversity get ‘under the skin’ and become ‘biologically embedded’, increasing the risk of negative health and behavioural outcomes later in life. Taking a genealogical approach to biosocial plasticity, this article situates The Biology of Adversity and Resilience within the arc of an apparatus of power/knowledge that emerged in tandem with liberal governmentality and which assumes childhood as a means of programming the future. The argument is that The Biology of Adversity and Resilience is a normative fiction: a socially scripted story that figures the ‘resilient’ child in a way that potentially sustains extant inequalities by prefiguring a future that is in step with the neoliberal present.","PeriodicalId":47568,"journal":{"name":"Body & Society","volume":"29 1","pages":"28 - 55"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2023-02-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41398147","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}