{"title":"Megan H. Glick, Infrahumanisms: Science, Culture, and the Making of Modern Non/Personhood","authors":"Maneesha Deckha","doi":"10.3366/soma.2019.0290","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2019.0290","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2019-11-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43002653","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper looks to make a contribution to the critical project of psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff, by elucidating her account of ‘drug-centred’ psychiatry, and its relation to critical and cultural theory. Moncrieff's ‘drug-centred’ approach to psychiatry challenges the dominant view of mental illness, and psychopharmacology, as necessitating a strictly biological ontology. Against the mainstream view that mental illnesses have biological causes, and that medications like ‘anti-depressants’ target specific biological abnormalities, Moncrieff looks to connect pharmacotherapy for mental illness to human experience, and to issues of social justice and emancipation. However, Moncrieff's project is complicated by her framing of psychopharmacological politics in classical Marxist notions of ideology and false consciousness. Accordingly, she articulates a political project that would open up psychiatry to the subjugated knowledge of mental health sufferers, whilst also characterising those sufferers as beholden to ideology, and as being effectively without knowledge. Accordingly, in order to contribute to Moncrieff's project, and to help introduce her work to a broader humanities readership, this paper elucidates her account of ‘drug-centred psychiatry’, whilst also connecting her critique of biopsychiatry to notions of biologism, biopolitics, and bio-citizenship. This is done in order to re-describe the subject of mental health discourse, so as to better reveal their capacities and agency. As a result, this paper contends that, once reframed, Moncrieff's work helps us to see value in attending to human experience when considering pharmacotherapy for mental illness.
{"title":"Prescriptive Power: Biologism, Biopsychiatry and Drug-centred Psychopharmacology","authors":"Francis Russell","doi":"10.3366/soma.2019.0285","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2019.0285","url":null,"abstract":"This paper looks to make a contribution to the critical project of psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff, by elucidating her account of ‘drug-centred’ psychiatry, and its relation to critical and cultural theory. Moncrieff's ‘drug-centred’ approach to psychiatry challenges the dominant view of mental illness, and psychopharmacology, as necessitating a strictly biological ontology. Against the mainstream view that mental illnesses have biological causes, and that medications like ‘anti-depressants’ target specific biological abnormalities, Moncrieff looks to connect pharmacotherapy for mental illness to human experience, and to issues of social justice and emancipation. However, Moncrieff's project is complicated by her framing of psychopharmacological politics in classical Marxist notions of ideology and false consciousness. Accordingly, she articulates a political project that would open up psychiatry to the subjugated knowledge of mental health sufferers, whilst also characterising those sufferers as beholden to ideology, and as being effectively without knowledge. Accordingly, in order to contribute to Moncrieff's project, and to help introduce her work to a broader humanities readership, this paper elucidates her account of ‘drug-centred psychiatry’, whilst also connecting her critique of biopsychiatry to notions of biologism, biopolitics, and bio-citizenship. This is done in order to re-describe the subject of mental health discourse, so as to better reveal their capacities and agency. As a result, this paper contends that, once reframed, Moncrieff's work helps us to see value in attending to human experience when considering pharmacotherapy for mental illness.","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2019-11-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47756123","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Tech companies have eagerly utilised mindfulness techniques in order to increase both creativity and productivity among their managers and employees. However, while a growing number of studies within fields of clinical psychology and psychiatry suggest that mindfulness provides myriad health benefits, such literature does not critically evaluate the societal and affective influences of mindfulness and other wellness practices on working bodies. By focusing on discourses related to mindfulness training, this paper explores the conception of ‘being present’. Drawing on the phenomenology of the body, affect theory, and critical mindfulness studies, we develop a new theoretical framework for analysing mindfulness as a somatic and social force in technology-driven business contexts. Using research material drawn from the online advertising of mindfulness programmes for managers, this paper describes ‘presence’ as a new labour concept associated with the cultivated performance skill of the managerial body in the era of late capitalism. We conclude that mindfulness training – transforming the somatic into an affective investment – has transformed Buddhist meditation into capital that can be bought and consumed.
{"title":"Becoming Fully Present in Your Body: Analysing Mindfulness as an Affective Investment in Tech Culture","authors":"Jaana Parviainen, Ilmari Kortelainen","doi":"10.3366/soma.2019.0288","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2019.0288","url":null,"abstract":"Tech companies have eagerly utilised mindfulness techniques in order to increase both creativity and productivity among their managers and employees. However, while a growing number of studies within fields of clinical psychology and psychiatry suggest that mindfulness provides myriad health benefits, such literature does not critically evaluate the societal and affective influences of mindfulness and other wellness practices on working bodies. By focusing on discourses related to mindfulness training, this paper explores the conception of ‘being present’. Drawing on the phenomenology of the body, affect theory, and critical mindfulness studies, we develop a new theoretical framework for analysing mindfulness as a somatic and social force in technology-driven business contexts. Using research material drawn from the online advertising of mindfulness programmes for managers, this paper describes ‘presence’ as a new labour concept associated with the cultivated performance skill of the managerial body in the era of late capitalism. We conclude that mindfulness training – transforming the somatic into an affective investment – has transformed Buddhist meditation into capital that can be bought and consumed.","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2019-11-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3366/soma.2019.0288","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44098457","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Cinema provides ‘privileged access’ ( Zubrycki 2011 ) into trans lives, recording and revealing private life experiences and moments that might never be seen, nor heard and after the time had passed, only present in memory and body for the individuals involved. Film, a temporal medium, creates theoretical issues, both in the presentation and representation of the trans body and for audiences in viewing the images. Specific narrative, stylistic and editing techniques including temporal disjunctions, may also give audiences a distorted view of trans bodily narratives that encompass a lifetime. Twenty first century cinema is simultaneously creating and erasing the somatechnical potentialities of trans. This article will explore temporal techniques in relation to recent trans cinema, comparing how three different filmmakers handle trans narratives. Drawing upon recent films including the Trans New Wave ( Ford 2014 , 2016a , 2016b ), such as the experimental animated autoethnographic short film Change Over Time (Ewan Duarte, United States, 2013), in tandem with the feature film 52 Tuesdays (Sophia Hyde, Australia, 2013), I will analyse the films as texts which show how filmmakers utilise temporality as a narrative and stylistic technique in cinematic trans narratives. These are texts where cinematic technologies converge with trans embodiment in ways that are constitutive of participants and audiences' understanding of trans lives. This analysis will be contrasted with the use of temporal displacement as a cinematic trope of negative affect, disembodiment and societal disjunction in the feature film Predestination (The Spierig Brothers, Australia, 2014), providing a further basis for scholarly critique of cinematic somatechnics in relation to the trans body.
{"title":"Duration, Compression, Extension and Distortion of Time in Contemporary Transgender Cinema","authors":"Akkadia Ford","doi":"10.3366/SOMA.2019.0265","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/SOMA.2019.0265","url":null,"abstract":"Cinema provides ‘privileged access’ ( Zubrycki 2011 ) into trans lives, recording and revealing private life experiences and moments that might never be seen, nor heard and after the time had passed, only present in memory and body for the individuals involved. Film, a temporal medium, creates theoretical issues, both in the presentation and representation of the trans body and for audiences in viewing the images. Specific narrative, stylistic and editing techniques including temporal disjunctions, may also give audiences a distorted view of trans bodily narratives that encompass a lifetime. Twenty first century cinema is simultaneously creating and erasing the somatechnical potentialities of trans. This article will explore temporal techniques in relation to recent trans cinema, comparing how three different filmmakers handle trans narratives. Drawing upon recent films including the Trans New Wave ( Ford 2014 , 2016a , 2016b ), such as the experimental animated autoethnographic short film Change Over Time (Ewan Duarte, United States, 2013), in tandem with the feature film 52 Tuesdays (Sophia Hyde, Australia, 2013), I will analyse the films as texts which show how filmmakers utilise temporality as a narrative and stylistic technique in cinematic trans narratives. These are texts where cinematic technologies converge with trans embodiment in ways that are constitutive of participants and audiences' understanding of trans lives. This analysis will be contrasted with the use of temporal displacement as a cinematic trope of negative affect, disembodiment and societal disjunction in the feature film Predestination (The Spierig Brothers, Australia, 2014), providing a further basis for scholarly critique of cinematic somatechnics in relation to the trans body.","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2019-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48551404","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this article, I identify how the Amazon television series Transparent deploys narrative thematics of home, belonging and importantly, a journey to becoming, to stage a limited representation of transgender lives within a heterosexual economy. Transgender studies has long been preoccupied with the transition narrative as a primary tool of representation, it is a vehicle through which the disjointedness of gender transition can be reformed into a narrative that enables intelligibility and fosters a sense of belonging. I argue however that the transition narrative, which aims to make transgender lives visible (and consumable) to an audience of trans and non-trans folk, is limiting in its representational scope and may impede, rather than mobilise, this agenda. The transition narrative constructs transgender lives within normative frames of time and place, and in the codes of textual conventions that compulsively render transgender transition into narrative. In Transparent, the themes of home and belonging are used to lend a sense of cohesion to the experience of transition in ways that implicate the representation of its trans characters in a ‘universalising narrative of liberal democratic progress’ ( Keegan 2013 ). I will examine the various ways this text employs the conventions of narrative and in doing so, fails to confront its audience with the daily cultural and social transgressions that make up the lived experiences of transition.
{"title":"Representing Transgender Embodiment in Film and Culture: Looking beyond the Transition Narrative in Amazon's Transparent","authors":"Natasha Seymour","doi":"10.3366/SOMA.2019.0266","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/SOMA.2019.0266","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I identify how the Amazon television series Transparent deploys narrative thematics of home, belonging and importantly, a journey to becoming, to stage a limited representation of transgender lives within a heterosexual economy. Transgender studies has long been preoccupied with the transition narrative as a primary tool of representation, it is a vehicle through which the disjointedness of gender transition can be reformed into a narrative that enables intelligibility and fosters a sense of belonging. I argue however that the transition narrative, which aims to make transgender lives visible (and consumable) to an audience of trans and non-trans folk, is limiting in its representational scope and may impede, rather than mobilise, this agenda. The transition narrative constructs transgender lives within normative frames of time and place, and in the codes of textual conventions that compulsively render transgender transition into narrative. In Transparent, the themes of home and belonging are used to lend a sense of cohesion to the experience of transition in ways that implicate the representation of its trans characters in a ‘universalising narrative of liberal democratic progress’ ( Keegan 2013 ). I will examine the various ways this text employs the conventions of narrative and in doing so, fails to confront its audience with the daily cultural and social transgressions that make up the lived experiences of transition.","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2019-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48839581","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Quinn Eades, AñA Wojak, Quinn de Rosa Pontello, Akkadia Ford
{"title":"TRANS∼SCRIPT: Bliss and the Disfiguration of Language in the Writing of Transqueer Embodied PerformanceA conversation/reflection on the Conference closing night performance Trans∼Formation by AñA Wojak and Quinn de Rosa Pontello","authors":"Quinn Eades, AñA Wojak, Quinn de Rosa Pontello, Akkadia Ford","doi":"10.3366/SOMA.2019.0268","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/SOMA.2019.0268","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2019-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46344400","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Debra Gimlin, Cosmetic Surgery Narratives: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Women's Accounts","authors":"Ella Houston","doi":"10.3366/SOMA.2019.0269","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/SOMA.2019.0269","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2019-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45327059","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Marcia C. Inhorn, Cosmopolitan Conceptions: IVF Sojourns in Global Dubai","authors":"E. Kenny","doi":"10.3366/SOMA.2019.0270","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/SOMA.2019.0270","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43420,"journal":{"name":"Somatechnics","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2019-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41757388","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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