Pub Date : 2020-03-31DOI: 10.1177/1357034X19898259
J. Hamper
Smartphones are increasingly entangled with the most intimate areas of everyday life, providing possibilities for the continued expansion of digital self-tracking technologies. Within this context, the development of smartphone applications targeted at female reproductive health are offering novel forms and practices of knowledge production about reproductive bodies and processes. This article presents empirical research from the United Kingdom on women’s use of fertility tracking applications, known more generally as fertility apps, while trying to conceive. Drawing on material from interviews with women who had experience of using fertility apps, I demonstrate the significance of this particular form of fertility tracking for the embodied shift from pregnancy prevention to actively facilitating pregnancy, participants’ sense of self and identity and how they perceived the reproductive potentiality of their bodies. I argue that fertility apps are significantly involved in making fertility cycles known and thus configuring the pre-pregnant reproductive body.
{"title":"‘Catching Ovulation’: Exploring Women’s Use of Fertility Tracking Apps as a Reproductive Technology","authors":"J. Hamper","doi":"10.1177/1357034X19898259","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X19898259","url":null,"abstract":"Smartphones are increasingly entangled with the most intimate areas of everyday life, providing possibilities for the continued expansion of digital self-tracking technologies. Within this context, the development of smartphone applications targeted at female reproductive health are offering novel forms and practices of knowledge production about reproductive bodies and processes. This article presents empirical research from the United Kingdom on women’s use of fertility tracking applications, known more generally as fertility apps, while trying to conceive. Drawing on material from interviews with women who had experience of using fertility apps, I demonstrate the significance of this particular form of fertility tracking for the embodied shift from pregnancy prevention to actively facilitating pregnancy, participants’ sense of self and identity and how they perceived the reproductive potentiality of their bodies. I argue that fertility apps are significantly involved in making fertility cycles known and thus configuring the pre-pregnant reproductive body.","PeriodicalId":47568,"journal":{"name":"Body & Society","volume":"26 1","pages":"3 - 30"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2020-03-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1357034X19898259","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42733511","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 : 2020-03-01DOI: 10.1177/1357034X19876967
Nicolas Le Dévédec
Human enhancement or the use of technoscientific and biomedical advances to improve human performance is a social phenomenon that has become increasingly significant in Western societies over the last 15 years or so, notably in the workplace. By focusing on the non-medical use of psychostimulants, and from a perspective that is both critical and exploratory, this article aims to show that human enhancement practices prefigure new forms of embodiment and interiorization of work that are contributing to a significant reconfiguration of biopower. By allowing individuals to technically push back their physical and mental limits, beyond what is considered ‘normal’, human enhancement is enabling a form of biopower that is focused on the individual and on the possibility of reconfiguring biological norms in themselves. Far from participating in workers’ emancipation, this biopolitical model of enhancement markedly points to the issues of intensifying work conditions and increased employee self-discipline.
{"title":"The Biopolitical Embodiment of Work in the Era of Human Enhancement","authors":"Nicolas Le Dévédec","doi":"10.1177/1357034X19876967","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X19876967","url":null,"abstract":"Human enhancement or the use of technoscientific and biomedical advances to improve human performance is a social phenomenon that has become increasingly significant in Western societies over the last 15 years or so, notably in the workplace. By focusing on the non-medical use of psychostimulants, and from a perspective that is both critical and exploratory, this article aims to show that human enhancement practices prefigure new forms of embodiment and interiorization of work that are contributing to a significant reconfiguration of biopower. By allowing individuals to technically push back their physical and mental limits, beyond what is considered ‘normal’, human enhancement is enabling a form of biopower that is focused on the individual and on the possibility of reconfiguring biological norms in themselves. Far from participating in workers’ emancipation, this biopolitical model of enhancement markedly points to the issues of intensifying work conditions and increased employee self-discipline.","PeriodicalId":47568,"journal":{"name":"Body & Society","volume":"26 1","pages":"55 - 81"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1357034X19876967","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44456844","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 : 2020-03-01DOI: 10.1177/1357034X19886925
Nadav Even Chorev
This article explores the ways in which predictive information technologies are used in the field of personalized medicine and the relations between this use and how patients and disease are perceived. This is examined in a qualitative case study of a personalized cancer clinical trial, where oncologists made clinical decisions for each patient based on drug matchings and efficacy predictions produced by bioinformatic technologies and algorithms. I focus on personalized practice itself, as a postgenomic phenomenon, rather than on epistemic, ethical and institutional critiques. Personalized medicine aims to process molecular, clinical, environmental and social data into individually tailored decisions. In this case, however, the engagement of clinicians with data and digital artefacts that processed multiple information sources resulted in treatment choices that were paradoxically both immutable and uncertain. In contrast to the situatedness of the body in postgenomics, this practice subverted the personalized medical approach while decontextualizing both cancer and patients.
{"title":"Personalized Medicine in Practice: Postgenomics from Multiplicity to Immutability","authors":"Nadav Even Chorev","doi":"10.1177/1357034X19886925","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X19886925","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the ways in which predictive information technologies are used in the field of personalized medicine and the relations between this use and how patients and disease are perceived. This is examined in a qualitative case study of a personalized cancer clinical trial, where oncologists made clinical decisions for each patient based on drug matchings and efficacy predictions produced by bioinformatic technologies and algorithms. I focus on personalized practice itself, as a postgenomic phenomenon, rather than on epistemic, ethical and institutional critiques. Personalized medicine aims to process molecular, clinical, environmental and social data into individually tailored decisions. In this case, however, the engagement of clinicians with data and digital artefacts that processed multiple information sources resulted in treatment choices that were paradoxically both immutable and uncertain. In contrast to the situatedness of the body in postgenomics, this practice subverted the personalized medical approach while decontextualizing both cancer and patients.","PeriodicalId":47568,"journal":{"name":"Body & Society","volume":"26 1","pages":"26 - 54"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1357034X19886925","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48801143","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 : 2020-03-01DOI: 10.1177/1357034X19882762
R. Kelz
Gene editing tools are ‘revolutionizing’ microbiological research. Much of the public debate focuses on the possibility of human germ line applications. The use of genome editing to alter non-human animals, however, will have more immediate impacts on our daily lives. Genome edited animals are used for basic biological and biomedical research and could soon play a role in the livestock industry and ecosystem management. Genome editing thus provides an occasion to rethink societal narratives about the relationships between humans and other animals. Even though the technique can be easily incorporated as an example into a conventional storyline about the development of the modern life sciences as striving for control over nature, it can also help to highlight the anthropocentric biases expressed in these narratives and demonstrate the continuities between humans and other animals.
{"title":"Genome Editing Animals and the Promise of Control in a (Post-) Anthropocentric World","authors":"R. Kelz","doi":"10.1177/1357034X19882762","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X19882762","url":null,"abstract":"Gene editing tools are ‘revolutionizing’ microbiological research. Much of the public debate focuses on the possibility of human germ line applications. The use of genome editing to alter non-human animals, however, will have more immediate impacts on our daily lives. Genome edited animals are used for basic biological and biomedical research and could soon play a role in the livestock industry and ecosystem management. Genome editing thus provides an occasion to rethink societal narratives about the relationships between humans and other animals. Even though the technique can be easily incorporated as an example into a conventional storyline about the development of the modern life sciences as striving for control over nature, it can also help to highlight the anthropocentric biases expressed in these narratives and demonstrate the continuities between humans and other animals.","PeriodicalId":47568,"journal":{"name":"Body & Society","volume":"26 1","pages":"25 - 3"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1357034X19882762","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49533039","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 : 2020-03-01DOI: 10.1177/1357034X19878775
S. King, Gavin Weedon
This article explores the metabolic lives of whey powder, the most popular form of protein supplement in what has become a multibillion-dollar industry during the past two decades. Faced with the slippery and elusive properties latent to this multiplicitous substance, our approach is to follow whey powder from its mid-20th century emergence as a noxious byproduct of industrial dairy production, through the human and animal bodies unevenly tasked with its processing, and out into waterways, where its nitrogen density rematerializes as a pollutant. We show how whey powder emerged as a solution to the environmental damage posed by whey pollution, how such damage is an effect of the systematic overproduction endemic to agrofood industries and how whey’s toxicity persists through processes of metabolism and consumption, despite attempts to process and profit from its vital capacities. Throughout, we argue that whey exemplifies ecological embodiment, understood as the co-constitutive relations between bodily matter and ecological life, and their entanglement with processes of commodification.
{"title":"Embodiment is Ecological: The Metabolic Lives of Whey Protein Powder","authors":"S. King, Gavin Weedon","doi":"10.1177/1357034X19878775","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X19878775","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the metabolic lives of whey powder, the most popular form of protein supplement in what has become a multibillion-dollar industry during the past two decades. Faced with the slippery and elusive properties latent to this multiplicitous substance, our approach is to follow whey powder from its mid-20th century emergence as a noxious byproduct of industrial dairy production, through the human and animal bodies unevenly tasked with its processing, and out into waterways, where its nitrogen density rematerializes as a pollutant. We show how whey powder emerged as a solution to the environmental damage posed by whey pollution, how such damage is an effect of the systematic overproduction endemic to agrofood industries and how whey’s toxicity persists through processes of metabolism and consumption, despite attempts to process and profit from its vital capacities. Throughout, we argue that whey exemplifies ecological embodiment, understood as the co-constitutive relations between bodily matter and ecological life, and their entanglement with processes of commodification.","PeriodicalId":47568,"journal":{"name":"Body & Society","volume":"26 1","pages":"106 - 82"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1357034X19878775","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43657163","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 : 2019-10-23DOI: 10.1177/1357034X19882750
Andrew Lapworth
Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in the field of ‘art-science’ collaborations for their perceived capacity to develop new cultural understandings of technology and science. In this article, and through an engagement with the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon, I argue that if art-science represents an important site for the formation of an alternate technical culture today, then it is because of the new technical mentalities that such practices might cultivate. Here, creating a new technical mentality is more than just a representational concern with enhancing ‘public awareness’ of technology, instead referring to more material transformations in our embodied capacities for perceiving and affectively engaging with technologies. I flesh this potential out through an encounter with work of Art Orienté objet, whose art-science collaborations challenge the anthropocentric and utilitarian mentalities of contemporary bioscience through explorations of the transindividual conditions of human embodiment and its material immersion within nonhuman ecologies.
{"title":"Gilbert Simondon and the Technical Mentalities and Transindividual Affects of Art-science","authors":"Andrew Lapworth","doi":"10.1177/1357034X19882750","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X19882750","url":null,"abstract":"Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in the field of ‘art-science’ collaborations for their perceived capacity to develop new cultural understandings of technology and science. In this article, and through an engagement with the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon, I argue that if art-science represents an important site for the formation of an alternate technical culture today, then it is because of the new technical mentalities that such practices might cultivate. Here, creating a new technical mentality is more than just a representational concern with enhancing ‘public awareness’ of technology, instead referring to more material transformations in our embodied capacities for perceiving and affectively engaging with technologies. I flesh this potential out through an encounter with work of Art Orienté objet, whose art-science collaborations challenge the anthropocentric and utilitarian mentalities of contemporary bioscience through explorations of the transindividual conditions of human embodiment and its material immersion within nonhuman ecologies.","PeriodicalId":47568,"journal":{"name":"Body & Society","volume":"26 1","pages":"107 - 134"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2019-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1357034X19882750","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41839043","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 : 2019-08-13DOI: 10.1177/1357034X19857133
Leila Dawney, Timothy J. Huzar
Since its publication in 1985, Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain has become a seminal text in the study of embodiment. In its foregrounding of the body in war and torture, it critiques the minimising of the body in questions of politics, offering a compelling account of the structure and phenomenology of violent domination. However, at the same time the text can be seen to shore up a mind/body dualism that has been associated with oppressive forms of gendering, racialisation and disablement. Divisive, powerful and elegant, the text has been central in the shaping of approaches to embodiment over the past 30 years. This special issue revisits Scarry's text in the light of 30 years of scholarship on embodiment and the body. Its legacies and limits are exemplified through a series of articles that mobilise the arguments of The Body in Pain even as they push at the limits of the text.
{"title":"Introduction: The Legacies and Limits of The Body in Pain","authors":"Leila Dawney, Timothy J. Huzar","doi":"10.1177/1357034X19857133","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X19857133","url":null,"abstract":"Since its publication in 1985, Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain has become a seminal text in the study of embodiment. In its foregrounding of the body in war and torture, it critiques the minimising of the body in questions of politics, offering a compelling account of the structure and phenomenology of violent domination. However, at the same time the text can be seen to shore up a mind/body dualism that has been associated with oppressive forms of gendering, racialisation and disablement. Divisive, powerful and elegant, the text has been central in the shaping of approaches to embodiment over the past 30 years. This special issue revisits Scarry's text in the light of 30 years of scholarship on embodiment and the body. Its legacies and limits are exemplified through a series of articles that mobilise the arguments of The Body in Pain even as they push at the limits of the text.","PeriodicalId":47568,"journal":{"name":"Body & Society","volume":"25 1","pages":"21 - 3"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2019-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1357034X19857133","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47865797","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 : 2019-08-01DOI: 10.1177/1357034X19865941
Andrea Mubi Brighenti
This piece sets out an exploration of the relations between the city, the body and the face, seeking to understand in particular how the city and the face could be articulated with reference to an image of the body. It is suggested that the face and the city entertain a kind of privileged affinity. Just as the face unsettles the head and the bodily system to which it belongs, projecting the latter into an intersubjective social system of interaction and signification, so the city unsettles the land where it is located, projecting it into long-distance connections with similar entities scattered across the continent, and beyond. The piece evolves into the twin exploration of, on the one hand, ‘the city of the face’ and, on the other, ‘the face of the city’.
{"title":"Face and the City","authors":"Andrea Mubi Brighenti","doi":"10.1177/1357034X19865941","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X19865941","url":null,"abstract":"This piece sets out an exploration of the relations between the city, the body and the face, seeking to understand in particular how the city and the face could be articulated with reference to an image of the body. It is suggested that the face and the city entertain a kind of privileged affinity. Just as the face unsettles the head and the bodily system to which it belongs, projecting the latter into an intersubjective social system of interaction and signification, so the city unsettles the land where it is located, projecting it into long-distance connections with similar entities scattered across the continent, and beyond. The piece evolves into the twin exploration of, on the one hand, ‘the city of the face’ and, on the other, ‘the face of the city’.","PeriodicalId":47568,"journal":{"name":"Body & Society","volume":"25 1","pages":"102 - 76"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2019-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/1357034X19865941","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44884005","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}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：