Pub Date : 2023-10-14DOI: 10.1177/1357034x231201941
Charlotte Branchu
Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores amateur rugby women’s reflexive negotiation of the bruises they earn as a result of the physicality of the game. On one hand, participants take pride in body marks that confirm their athletic strength and rugby identity and which grants them respect and belonging. On the other hand, these body marks can be anchors of stigma, signalling women’s rugby bodies as ‘deviant’ to non-initiated audiences. The article unpacks this tension between bruises as empowering or disempowering artefacts by demonstrating the situational and interactional nature of gendered dispositions and expectations. I show that the moral and symbolic order of entrenched gendered expectations is perpetuated in the flesh, but that it must be understood as being produced and reproduced in situ through intercorporeal processes. Through the analysis of bruises, I argue that to study bodies is to study (social) space.
{"title":"Legitimacy and Respectability on the Skin: Bruises, Women’s Rugby and Situational Meaning","authors":"Charlotte Branchu","doi":"10.1177/1357034x231201941","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034x231201941","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores amateur rugby women’s reflexive negotiation of the bruises they earn as a result of the physicality of the game. On one hand, participants take pride in body marks that confirm their athletic strength and rugby identity and which grants them respect and belonging. On the other hand, these body marks can be anchors of stigma, signalling women’s rugby bodies as ‘deviant’ to non-initiated audiences. The article unpacks this tension between bruises as empowering or disempowering artefacts by demonstrating the situational and interactional nature of gendered dispositions and expectations. I show that the moral and symbolic order of entrenched gendered expectations is perpetuated in the flesh, but that it must be understood as being produced and reproduced in situ through intercorporeal processes. Through the analysis of bruises, I argue that to study bodies is to study (social) space.","PeriodicalId":47568,"journal":{"name":"Body & Society","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135804325","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}
Pub Date : 2023-10-12DOI: 10.1177/1357034x231201950
Gala Rexer
To resist the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, Palestinian prisoners are smuggling sperm samples out of Israeli prisons to enable their wives to undergo fertility treatment. Bodies and bodily matter figure as central actors in this practice of resistance. In this article, I draw from fieldwork I conducted with Palestinian women and medical staff in the occupied West Bank to examine the tension between carcerality and matter(ing). I argue that bodies and bodily matter are constitutive of the relationship between oppression and resistance. I analyze how Israeli military authorities assign evidentiary status to Palestinian bodies and illustrate how Palestinian families challenge the Israeli carceral system through new modes of embodied resistance. This article demonstrates how intersecting forms of oppression shape and are being shaped by bodies and their materiality. It also suggests that theorizing the materiality of power from Palestine offers new ways of understanding the political work that bodies do.
{"title":"The Materiality of Power and Bodily Matter(ing): Embodied Resistance in Palestine","authors":"Gala Rexer","doi":"10.1177/1357034x231201950","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034x231201950","url":null,"abstract":"To resist the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, Palestinian prisoners are smuggling sperm samples out of Israeli prisons to enable their wives to undergo fertility treatment. Bodies and bodily matter figure as central actors in this practice of resistance. In this article, I draw from fieldwork I conducted with Palestinian women and medical staff in the occupied West Bank to examine the tension between carcerality and matter(ing). I argue that bodies and bodily matter are constitutive of the relationship between oppression and resistance. I analyze how Israeli military authorities assign evidentiary status to Palestinian bodies and illustrate how Palestinian families challenge the Israeli carceral system through new modes of embodied resistance. This article demonstrates how intersecting forms of oppression shape and are being shaped by bodies and their materiality. It also suggests that theorizing the materiality of power from Palestine offers new ways of understanding the political work that bodies do.","PeriodicalId":47568,"journal":{"name":"Body & Society","volume":"73 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135969408","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}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1177/1357034x231189178
Iram Khawaja, Dorthe Staunæs, Mante Vertelyte
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.
玩偶在心理学和文学学术以及流行文化中有着悠久的历史。这些文化产品中的许多都指出，玩偶是如何带来对种族和性别的想象的。然而，娃娃不仅仅是代表或身份的人物。娃娃是能动的，因为它们给种族化、情感化和具体化的体验带来了生命。在这篇文章中，我们发展了一种情感鬼魂学，运用记忆工作来探索童年玩偶的记忆如何告诉我们种族、种族化和白人的形成。我们运用陈美尔(Mel Y. Chen)的动画概念作为一种情感物质建构，探索娃娃如何变得“真实”，并提出种族问题如何成为性别主体性的一部分。我们对童年玩偶的记忆跨越了不同的地缘政治和历史背景——东欧、西欧和东南亚——揭示了从20世纪70年代到90年代种族化过程中有趣的差异和相似之处。
{"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}
Pub Date : 2023-08-05DOI: 10.1177/1357034X231185862
David Mwambari, Eric Sibomana
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.
{"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}
Pub Date : 2023-07-31DOI: 10.1177/1357034X231189458
J. Burr, N. Fox
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.
{"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}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1177/1357034x211068883
Martine Lappé, Robbin Jeffries Hein
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.
{"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}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1177/1357034X231181100
Branwyn Poleykett, K. Jent
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.
{"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}
Pub Date : 2023-04-10DOI: 10.1177/1357034X231161312
John Nott
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.
{"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}
Pub Date : 2023-03-23DOI: 10.1177/1357034X231151855
Dan M. Kotliar, Rafi Grosglik
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.
{"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}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1177/1357034x231161319
Michal Nahman, C. Weis
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.
{"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}
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