This article is concerned with the relationship between body, image and affect within consumer culture. Body image is generally understood as a mental image of the body as it appears to others. It is often assumed in consumer culture that people attend to their body image in an instrumental manner, as status and social acceptability depend on how a person looks. This view is based on popular physiognomic assumptions that the body, especially the face, is a reflection of the self: (...) that a person’s inner character or personality will shine through the outer appearance. The modification and cosmetic enhancement of the body through a range of regimes and technologies can be used to construct a beautiful appearance and thereby a beautiful self. The article begins by examining body images in consumer culture and their relation to photography and moving images. This is followed by an examination of the consumer culture transformative process through a discussion of cosmetic surgery. The article then questions the over-simplistic logic that assumes that transformative techniques will automatically result in a more positive and acceptable body image. The new body and face may encourage people to look at the transformed person in a new way. But the moving body, the body without image, which communicates through proprioceptive senses and intensities of affect, can override the perception of the transformed appearance. A discussion of the affective body follows, via a closer examination of the body without image, the opening of the body to greater affect and indeterminacy. The affective body image and its potential greater visibility through new media technologies are then discussed through some examples taken from digital video art. The article concludes by examining some of the implications of these shifts within consumer culture and new media technologies. (shrink)

This article engages critically with issues surrounding the theorization of the self and body relation, where the body is interpreted as material increasingly open to human intervention and choice. It is argued that this theorization rests upon a mind/body split that limits an understanding of embodied identity. The significance for feminism of undermining representational practices that rely upon this dualism are outlined and criticized for reproducing the logic of representation they set out to destabilize. An alternative strategy is examined and (...) the argument is made that to understand embodied identity the question must not be what do bodies mean but what can they do. Here feminist approaches that rely upon a radically different ontological position in order to move beyond the mind/body split are utilized. These theoretical debates are made meaningful through the lens of self narratives produced by young women–a context which demands the development of strategies for theorizing lived bodies. (shrink)

The scope of the essay is limited by the ideas behind the mechanisation of desire as conceptualised in The Large Glass by Marcel Duchamp. This glass-based installation depicts a convoluted mechanism, as the full-title of the work suggests, representing The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even. Using tropes and figures from his earlier studies, the artist designed a machine for the production of desire, rendering the unconscious mechanical and dynamic. The paper aims to present selected aspects of the installation, (...) including mechanical reproduction (1), technological fetishism (2), transparency (3), as well as to discuss its significance with reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the Body without Organs (4). The interpretive force of the machine metaphor in the work of Duchamp is analysed in the context of integrative and non-integrative attitudes to technology. (shrink)

Motivated by discourses that link early child development and health, nurses engage in seemingly benign surveillance of children. These practices are based on knowledge claims and technologies of developmental science, which remain anchored in assumptions of the child body as an incomplete form with a universal developmental trajectory and inherent potentiality. This paper engages in a critical discursive analysis, drawing on Donna Haraway's conceptualizations of technoscience and figuration. Using a contemporary developmental screening tool from nursing practice, this analysis traces the (...) effects of this tool through production, transformation, distribution, and consumption. It reveals how the techniques of imaging, abstraction, and measurement collide to fix the open, transformative child body in a figuration of the developing child. This analysis also demonstrates how technobiopower infuses nurses' understandings of children and structures developmentally appropriate expectations for children, parents, and nurses. Furthermore, it describes how practices that claim to facilitate healthy child development may inversely deprive children of agency and foster the production of normal or ideal children. An alternative ontological perspective is offered as a challenge to the individualism of developmental models and other dominant ideologies of development, as well as practices associated with these ideologies. In summary, this analysis argues that nurses must pay closer attention to how technobiopower infuses practices that monitor and promote child development. Fostering a critical understanding of the harmful implications of these practices is warranted and offers the space to conceive of human development in alternate and exciting ways. (shrink)

In this article I employ Deleuzian theory in an exploration of men’s and women’s experiences of sexuality and sexual relations when encountering erectile difficulties and/or using sexuopharmaceuticals such as Viagra (sildenafil). I analyse the ways in which accounts of the function of Viagra-assisted erections can be seen to restore or re-establish previous sexual conventions or patterns (in Deleuzian terms, to ‘re-territorialize’ desire in ‘molar’ directions), and the ways in which Viagra use may change or challenge such patterns. Also examined are (...) the alternative stories of those for whom Viagra hasn’t ‘worked’; these accounts demonstrate how the persistence of erectile difficulties produces positive opportunities for experimentation, creativity and transformation in the realm of the erotic. (shrink)

Guided by Deleuze's taxonomic theory and practice and his concepts concerning the body, literature, territory and assemblage, this article examines library classification as a technique of discipline and bibliographic control. Locating books written by and about Deleuze reveals processes of discipline formation and the circulation of knowledge, and it troubles the principles upon which the classification is based. A Deleuzian critique presents the Library of Congress Classification as an abstract machine that diagrams knowledge in many academic libraries around the world.

Group sex among men who have sex with men may be understood as a ‘radical’ practice insofar as it transgresses dominant social discourses around appropriate sexual relations—prioritizing heteronormative, monogamous and risk‐averse sex. These practices are generally defined as steeped in risk, most commonly due to the potential for transmitting human immunodeficiency virus and sexually transmitted infections and accompanied by the possibility of legal and social repercussions. Our ethnographic research study explored the desires, practices and contexts of group sex participants (n (...) = 10) within a popular group sex party destination located in the United States. We employ a poststructuralist perspective (utilizing the work of Deleuze and Guattari) to understand group sex events with the pretext that bodies have no inherent ethics, meaning or essence: they are ‘bodies without organs’. We identify group sex as a form of boundary play, in which participants pursue new limits to what their bodies can do but within a carefully constructed environment that establishes norms of interaction meant to secure trust and safety between participants. A variety of risk reduction practices are shown to be promoted and honoured within these eventful sexual(ized) spaces. The application of poststructuralist concepts of ‘boundary play’ and ‘bodies without organs’ helped to depict the construction and navigation of pleasure, safety and risk among group sex participants. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to explore how nurses are enrolled into and take part in programmes of efficiency and effectiveness. Using the philosophical theorizing about desire as a force or power, I focus specifically on what is understood as relations between desire and productivity in current Westernized health‐care systems. Use is made of the idea from Spinoza that human emotions consist only of pleasure, pain, and desire as these act as a motive force. This is then linked with (...) more contemporary work on the politics and discourses of desire. A report on the implementation of a productivity programme in the United Kingdom, The Productive Ward: Releasing time to care™, is explored for the ways its developers set about motivating nurses to endorse and enact the programme. In exploring the mechanics of desire in these processes, a view of desire as productive is promoted. Looking at desire as assembling actions, and an assemblage, moves the analysis to an interrogation of actions and practices used to enable and bring nurses to the process. Moreover, in working through the various modalities and operations of desire, the potential and limits of such projects are abstracted. Such potentials and limits are necessarily set by the intensification of power and desire in the capitalist economy, saturating areas of nursing, and health‐care provision. (shrink)

This excerpt from our collective biography emerges from a dialogue that commenced when Noel interjected the concept of ‘becoming-cyborg’ into our conversations about Annette’s experiences of breast cancer, which initially prompted her to interpret her experiences as a ‘chaos narrative’ of cyborgian and environmental embodiment in education contexts. The materialisation of Donna Haraway’s figuration of the cyborg in Annette’s changing body enabled new appreciations of its interpretive power, and functioned in some ways as a successor project to Noel’s earlier deployment (...) of cyborgs in what he now recognises as a ‘posthumanising’ of curriculum inquiry. Noel’s subsequent experiences with throat cancer drew us towards exploring the possibilities that concepts such as Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic assemblage and Karen Barad’s ontoepistemology offer as a mean of thinking the meetings of bodies and technologies in educational inquiry beyond Haraway’s hybrid cyborg. Through both collective biography and playfully scripted conversations with other theorists we explore what it means to perform diffractive interpretations and analyses in posthumanist educational inquiry. Our essay also contributes to contemporary conversations about the uses of collaborative biographical writing as a method of inquiry in educational research. (shrink)

This paper develops the concept of _bioheritage_. It does so by considering the work of a local and distinct breed of sheep, the Sambucana, detailing how this sheep has enabled the integration of otherwise centrifugal relations between markets for the meat, cheese, and wool derived from the many other sheep that have traversed the same locality over the past three centuries. Such integration binds bodies, memory, and consumption in a manner that illustrates the distinctiveness of bioheritage and advances understanding of (...) wider social and cultural processes. (shrink)

The figure of Donna Haraway’s cyborg continues to loom large over contemporary feminist engagements with questions of technology. Across a range of analytical projects ranging from cosmetic surgery to employment practices it has come to be one of the defining figurations through which the social and discursive construction of bodies in a technological age are theorized. Indeed, it has become a widely accepted and largely unquestioned orthodoxy of postmodern feminist thinking. Not only has the cyborg offered a theoretical framework for (...) exploring the feminist possibilities of technologies, it has provided a focus for situating questions of technology and bodies into broader feminist theoretical considerations of the structures of knowledge, particularly those of binary oppositions and the logic of identity. While a productive and influential intervention into feminist theorizing, the cyborg is not without limitations. One of these is pointed out by Kirby (1997) as a failure to break convincingly with the logic ofidentity in the way Haraway theorizes the intersection of bodies and technologies in the fabrication of the cyborg. This article examines that criticism and then explores the possibilities which Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblageoffers as a mean of thinking the meetings of bodies and technologies beyond binary oppositions. (shrink)

On the basis of extensive research on the relationship between physical activity, exercise and health, as well as strong support from policymakers and practitioners, the “Exercise is Medicine” initiative has become something of a linchpin in the agenda for modern healthcare reform and reflects a broader acceptance that the philosophy of health politics must shift from social engineering to performativity. However, in spite of the avowed commitment to encouraging individuals to take on a more reflexive relation to their health, it (...) remains unclear as to whether an initiative such as this is, unambiguously, a good thing. In this paper, a number of cautionary remarks are made with respect to “Exercise is Medicine” in principle as well as in practice. Firstly, it is argued that equating exercise with medicine is to equate it with a definition of and relation to the body to which it is not entirely akin. And secondly, it is argued that any proposed alignment of the fitness and healthcare industries needs further critical examination, a realigning of interests, and a thorough reconsideration of their suitability of fit. (shrink)

One would have to be too “simple” to believe that thought is a simple act, clear unto itself, and not putting into play all the powers of the unconscious, or all the powers of nonsense in the unconscious.1As someone who has taken out the time to study Deleuze|Guattari’s oeuvre,2 rather than targeting just one book, A Thousand Plateaus in such a superficial way, reading Estelle Jorgensen and Iris M. Yob’s “deconstruction” of this particular work has been a very painful experience, (...) “painful” in the sense the way their text “screams” at them for their outright poetic mystifications, which many scholars have relished but which certainly has caused them great consternation.3 Deleuze|Guattari’s philosophy is discordant... (shrink)

When addressing the Muslim women question, one of the problematic issues is the centrality of a religious tradition or a political ideology as a primary subject of inquiry. Muslim women are seen as the embodiment of a singular tradition or ideology, as in the case of Turkey, where the contemporary headscarf-wearing women are represented as ‘Islamist’. In this project, I aim to problematise this stereotyping categorisation through ontological conceptualisations, inspired by the French thinker Gilles Deleuze. To implement the relational ontology (...) of Deleuze, I examine headscarf contestations in Turkey through interviews conducted in two women’s organisations in Turkey: Capital City Women’s Platform (Baskent Kadin Platformu) and Hazar. I argue that the world constantly ‘becomes’ through flows of relations between multiple elements; therefore, it is a multiplicity, an intensity and fractured. With this Deleuzian ontology in mind, I consider the quotidian physical, material and social resources of my interviews with the aim of elucidating relations between a female body and the commodities produced by multiple socio-economic and political factors in Turkey. Then I address a Deleuzian understanding of categorisations such as class, gender, race and ideology. These categorisations, for Deleuze, are aggregations of multiplicities and fluidities forming specific fixations according to a range of ascribed characteristics, such as income, education, employment or dress codes. In this regard, I conclude that the label ‘Islamist’ restrains the relational and multiple characters of headscarf practices within a unifying category by attributing certain features to particular embodiments and materials. (shrink)