Women intimately interact with various medical technologies and prosthetic artifacts in the context of breast cancer. While extensive work has been done on the agency of technological artifacts and how they affect users’ perceptions and experiences, the agency of users is largely taken for granted hitherto. In this article, we explore the agency of four women who engage with breast cancer technologies and artifacts by analyzing their narrative accounts of such engagements. This empirical discussion is framed within the tradition of (...) science and technology studies, philosophy of technological mediation and phenomenology of embodied agency as ‘I can/not’. This approach leads to the conclusions that women’s technologically mediated agencies range from being restricted to extended, take place on different bodily levels, within complex temporal structures, and are determined by certain socio-cultural contexts. Furthermore, it reveals that such agency shaping does not imply a one-way conditioning relationship between technologies and users, but rather involves a reciprocal relationship in which both subject and object are co-constituted. We therefore suggest that the ‘material turn’ in philosophy of technology also needs to take into account technologically mediated, material human beings in order to gain a better understanding of human existence. (shrink)

Cancer patienthood and survivorship are often narrated as stories about hair and wigs. The following article examines cultural representations of cancer in mainstream memoirs, films, and on TV across Western European and American contexts. These representations are both the ideological substrate and a subtly subversive staging of a newly globalized cancer culture that expresses itself as an embodied discourse of individual experience. Wigs have become staples of an alternative story of especially women’s cancer experience, one that contrasts with the advertising (...) slogans of what has been termed ‘Cancer Inc.’ But wigs are also a prop for consumerist self-(re)invention and can be appropriated stereotypically, with regard to stock gendered expectations – despite and alongside their subversive potential. (shrink)

Cet article analyse les vécus quotidiens des personnes amputées des membres inférieurs avec leur prothèse, au cours des dix-huit premiers mois post-rééducation. L’étude se base sur une enquête ethnographique et longitudinale réalisée auprès de quatorze personnes nouvellement amputées d’un ou des deux membres inférieurs. Elle porte spécifiquement sur l’analyse croisée des discours et retours d’expérience des personnes amputées vis-à-vis de leur vécu quotidien et de leur accommodement avec la prothèse, recueillis lors d’entretiens semi-directifs menés un an et demi après la (...) fin de leur séjour de rééducation. Dans cet article, au prisme du handicap, le vécu quotidien avec la prothèse est analysé sous deux angles. Le premier se concentre sur les usages au quotidien de la prothèse et de ses retentissements sur les situations de handicap. Le second porte sur les diverses stratégies sociales mises en place par les personnes amputées lors des interactions sociales vis-à-vis de la visibilité et/ou invisibilité de la prothèse venant réinterroger les normes et les enjeux en lien avec le validisme. (shrink)

This article analyses the everyday experiences of lower limb amputees with prosthesis during the first eighteen months after rehabilitation. It is based on an ethnographic and longitudinal research carried out with fourteen patients whose lower limb(s) has or have been recently amputated. Grounded in semi-directive interviews conducted one year and a half after the end of their rehabilitation ended, this study specifically focuses on the cross-analysis of the amputees’ discourses and feedback regarding their daily experiences of, and accommodation to, a (...) prosthesis. In this article, daily life with a prosthesis is analysed from two different points of view. The first one concentrates on the everyday uses of the prosthesis and its repercussions in relation to experiences of disability. The second one deals with the various strategies that amputees use in social interactions, particularly the strategies they use to manage the visibility and/or invisibility of the prosthesis to deal with the pressure of normalcy. (shrink)

Women intimately interact with various medical technologies and prosthetic artifacts in the context of breast cancer. While extensive work has been done on the agency of technological artifacts and how they affect users’ perceptions and experiences, the agency of users is largely taken for granted hitherto. In this article, we explore the agency of four women who engage with breast cancer technologies and artifacts by analyzing their narrative accounts of such engagements. This empirical discussion is framed within the tradition of (...) science and technology studies, philosophy of technological mediation and phenomenology of embodied agency as ‘I can/not’. This approach leads to the conclusions that women’s technologically mediated agencies range from being restricted to extended, take place on different bodily levels, within complex temporal structures, and are determined by certain socio-cultural contexts. Furthermore, it reveals that such agency shaping does not imply a one-way conditioning relationship between technologies and users, but rather involves a reciprocal relationship in which both subject and object are co-constituted. We therefore suggest that the ‘material turn’ in philosophy of technology also needs to take into account technologically mediated, material human beings in order to gain a better understanding of human existence. (shrink)

Remote monitoring of implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) patients links patients wirelessly to the clinic via a box in their bedroom. The box transmits data from the ICD to a remote database accessible to clinicians without patient involvement. Data travel across time and space; clinicians can monitor patients from a distance and instantly know about cardiac events. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in two Danish hospitals, this article explores the configuration of the wireless ICD patient by following a number of patients through (...) hospitalisation, implantation, in-clinic follow-up, and remote monitoring. Wireless therapy, we argue, scripts the patient as data. In high-tech clinical encounters, data are enacted as extensions and copies of the patient, and even proxies that, in patients’ experiences, may turn into identity thieves. In illuminating the multiple positions that data take in such clinical encounters and in patients’ experiences we discuss the ambiguities that arise when patients go wireless. (shrink)