Many philosophers believe that our ordinary English words man and woman are “gender terms,” and gender is distinct from biological sex. That is, they believe womanhood and manhood are not defined even partly by biological sex. This sex/gender distinction is one of the most influential ideas of the twentieth century on the broader culture, both popular and academic. Less well known are the reasons to think it’s true. My interest in this paper is to show that, upon investigation, the arguments (...) for the sex/gender distinction have feet of clay. In fact, they all fail. We will survey the literature and tour arguments in favor of the sex/gender distinction, and then we’ll critically evaluate those arguments. We’ll consider the argument from resisting biological determinism, the argument from biologically intersex people and vagueness, the argument from the normativity of gender, and some arguments from thought experiments. We’ll see that these arguments are not up to the task of supporting the sex/gender distinction; they simply don’t work. So, philosophers should either develop stronger arguments for the sex/gender distinction, or cultivate a variety of feminism that’s consistent with the traditional, biologically-based definitions of woman and man. (shrink)

We argue that the notion of "mental institutions"-discussed in recent debates about extended cognition-can help better understand the origin and character of social impairments in autism, and also help illuminate the extent to which some mechanisms of autistic dysfunction extend across both internal and external factors (i.e., they do not just reside within an individual's head). After providing some conceptual background, we discuss the connection between mental institutions and embodied habits of mind. We then discuss the significance of our view (...) for understanding autistic habits of mind and consider why these embodied habits are sometimes a poor fit with neurotypical mental institutions. We conclude by considering how these insights highlight the two-way, extended nature of social impairments in autism, and how this extended picture might assist in constructing more inclusive mental institutions and intervention strategies. (shrink)

This article offers the critical concept misfit in an effort to further think through the lived identity and experience of disability as it is situated in place and time. The idea of a misfit and the situation of misfitting that I offer here elaborate a materialist feminist understanding of disability by extending a consideration of how the particularities of embodiment interact with the environment in its broadest sense, to include both its spatial and temporal aspects. The interrelated dynamics of fitting (...) and misfitting constitute a particular aspect of world-making involved in material-discursive becoming. The essay makes three arguments: the concept of misfit emphasizes the particularity of varying lived embodiments and avoids a theoretical generic disabled body; the concept of misfit clarifies the current feminist critical conversation about universal vulnerability and dependence; the concept of misfitting as a shifting spatial and perpetually temporal relationship confers agency and value on disabled subjects. (shrink)

In this paper, we introduce an enactive account of loving as participatory sense-making inspired by the “I love to you” of the feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray. Emancipating from the fusionist concept of romantic love, which understands love as unity, we conceptualise loving as an existential engagement in a dialectic of encounter, in continuous processes of becoming-in-relation. In these processes, desire acquires a certain prominence as the need to know (the other, the relation, oneself) more. We build on Irigaray’s account of (...) love to present a phenomenology of loving interactions and then our enactive account. Finally, we draw some implications for ethics. These concern language, difference, vulnerability, desire, and self-transformation. (shrink)

Feminism is the movement to end women’s oppression. One possible way to understand ‘woman’ in this claim is to take it as a sex term: ‘woman’ picks out human females and being a human female depends on various anatomical features (like genitalia). Historically many feminists have understood ‘woman’ differently: not as a sex term, but as a gender term that depends on social and cultural factors (like social position). In so doing, they distinguished sex (being female or male) from gender (...) (being a woman or a man), although most ordinary language users appear to treat the two interchangeably. More recently this distinction has come under sustained attack and many view it nowadays with (at least some) suspicion. This entry (around 12 000 words in length) outlines and discusses distinctly feminist debates on sex and gender. (shrink)

What does Husserlian phenomenology have to offer feminist theory? More specifically, can we find resources within Husserl’s account of the living body ( Leib ) for the critical feminist project of rethinking embodiment beyond the dichotomies not only of mind/body but also of subject/object and activity/passivity? This essay begins by explicating the reasons for feminist hesitation with respect to Husserlian phenomenology. I then explore the resources that Husserl’s phenomenology of touch and his account of sensings hold for feminist theory. My (...) reading of Husserl proceeds by means of a comparison between his description of touch in Ideas II and Merleau-Ponty’s early appropriation of this account in the Phenomenology of Perception, as well as through an unlikely rapprochement between Husserl and Irigaray on the question of touch. Moreover, by revisiting the limitations in Husserl’s approach to the body—limitations of which any feminist appropriation must remain cognizant—I attempt to take Husserl’s phenomenology of touch beyond its initial methodologically solipsistic frame and to ask whether and how it can contribute to thinking gendered and racialized bodies. The phenomenology of touch, I argue, can allow us to understand the interplay between subjective, felt embodiment and social-historical context. In opening up Husserl’s account of touch to other dimensions—intersubjective and affective—sociality is revealed as residing within, and structuring of, touch. Such touch can allow us to think embodiment anew. (shrink)

Whilst in recent years sports studies have addressed the calls ‘to bring the body back in’ to theorisations of sport and physical activity, the ‘promise of phenomenology’ remains largely under-realised with regard to sporting embodiment. Relatively few accounts are grounded in the ‘flesh’ of the lived sporting body, and phenomenology offers a powerful framework for such analysis. A wide-ranging, multi-stranded, and interpretatively contested perspective, phenomenology in general has been taken up and utilised in very different ways within different disciplinary fields. (...) The purpose of this article is to consider some selected phenomenological threads, key qualities of the phenomenological method, and the potential for existentialist phenomenology in particular to contribute fresh perspectives to the sociological study of embodiment in sport and exercise. It offers one way to convey the ‘essences’, corporeal immediacy and textured sensuosity of the lived sporting body. The use of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) is also critically addressed. Key words: phenomenology; existentialist phenomenology; interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA); sporting embodiment; the lived-body; Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)

Overview essay of the field of feminist aesthetics updated Winter, 2021.

_Phenomenological insights into health issues relating to bodily self-experience, normality and deviance, self-alienation, and objectification._.

The aim of this paper is to show that Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex has been mistakenly interpreted as a theory of gender, because interpreters have failed adequately to understand Beauvoir's aims. Beauvoir is not trying to explain facts, events, or states of affairs, but to reveal, unveil, or uncover (découvrir) meanings. She explicates the meanings of woman, female, and feminine. Instead of a theory, Beauvoir's book presents a phenomenological description of the sexual difference.

Radical democratic thinking is becoming intrigued by the material situatedness of its political agents and by the role of nonhuman participants in political interaction. At stake here is the displacement of narrow anthropocentrism that currently guides democratic theory and practice, and its repositioning into what we call ‘the nonhuman condition’. This Critical Exchange explores the nonhuman condition. It asks: What are the implications of decentering the human subject via a new materialist reading of radical democracy? Does this reading dilute political (...) agency? Or should this be seen, on the contrary, as an invitation for new voices and demands to enter into democratic assemblages? How might engagement with the more-than-human disrupt or extend theories of radical democracy? Hans Asenbaum and Amanda Machin discuss the human democratic subject both through radical democratic and new materialist lenses. They suggest that a new materialist decentred subject does not lose agency but further gains political responsibility in radical democracy. Jean-Paul Gagnon highlights the possibility of becoming through loss. In losing our anthropocentric arrogance—our understanding of being other and better than animal—we become more connected and discover our place in human-nonhuman assemblages. Melissa Orlie agrees that something can be gained through renouncing dominant human fantasies and presents a ‘radical democratic naturalism’. By renouncing land violence and acknowledging nature’s subjectivity, we can further nonexploitative radical democratic politics. This is where the notion of ‘tidalectic’ processes introduced by James L. Smith is helpful. Focusing on water and the Indigenous knowledges around rivers, he considers how democracy and community can be reimagined as plural, cyclical and attentive to the nonhuman with which the human is inevitably entangled. Diana Leong offers a different approach. Considering the nonhuman from the perspective of Black Studies demands an awareness to how blackness has long been constituted as non- or partially human. (shrink)

This article employs Foucauldian and feminist analytics to advance a critical approach to wearable digital health- and activity-tracking devices. Following Foucault’s insight that the growth of individual capabilities coincides with the intensification of power relations, I argue that digital self-tracking devices (DSTDs) expand individuals’ capacity for self-knowledge and self-care at the same time that they facilitate unprecedented levels of biometric surveillance, extend the regulatory mechanisms of both public health and fashion/beauty authorities, and enable increasingly rigorous body projects devoted to the (...) attainment of normative femininity. These technologies of surveillance, normalization, and discipline thus function to augment, and facilitate the cooperation of, neoliberal-era biopower and post-feminist patriarchal power. My analysis of digital self-tracking devices’ instrumentality to biopower and patriarchy contributes to the emergent field of critical digital health studies and builds new connections between political, social, and feminist theories of embodiment; biopower studies; fat studies; and trans-disciplinary body studies. (shrink)

Continental philosophy of science has developed alongside mainstream analytic philosophy of science. But where continental approaches are inclusive, analytic philosophies of science are not–excluding not merely Nietzsche’s philosophy of science but Gödel’s philosophy of physics. As a radicalization of Kant, Nietzsche’s critical philosophy of science puts science in question and Nietzsche’s critique of the methodological foundations of classical philology bears on science, particularly evolution as well as style (in art and science). In addition to the critical (in Mach, Nietzsche, Heidegger (...) but also Husserl just to the extent that continental philosophy of science tends to depart from a reflection on the crisis of foundations), other continental philosophies of science include phenomenology (Husserl, Bachelard, Merleau‐Ponty, etc.) and hermeneutics (Heidegger, Gadamer, Heelan, etc.), especially incorporating history of science (Nietzsche, Mach, Duhem, Butterfield, Feyerabend, etc.). Examples are drawn from the philosophy of sciences (chemistry, geology, and biology) other than physics. (shrink)

In this article, we present an analysis of bodily integrity in hand transplants from a phenomenological narrative perspective, while drawing on two contrasting case stories. We consider bodily integrity as the subjective bodily experience of wholeness which, instead of referring to actual bodily intactness, involves a positive identification with one’s physical body. Bodily mutilations, such as the loss of a hand, may severely affect one’s bodily integrity. A possible restoration of one’s experience of wholeness requires a process of re-identification. Medical (...) interventions, such as a hand transplant, may improve the possibility of a successful re-identification. However, since the experience of wholeness does not refer simply to physical intactness or impairment, the choice for medical intervention should not be based merely upon the degree of physical mutilation. It should also be based upon the degree to which a person fails in re-identifying with his or her mutilated body. We argue that a normalizing operation is only ethically justifiable if the intervention enables the person to be the body he or she has. (shrink)

Today intersectionality has expanded from being primarily a metaphor within structuralist feminist research to an all-encompassing theory. This article discusses this increasing dedication to intersectionality in European feminist research. How come intersectionality has developed into a signifier for ‘good feminist research’ at this particular point in time? Drawing on poststructuralist and postcolonial theory the authors examine key articles on intersectionality as well as special issues devoted to the concept. They interrogate the conflicts and meaning making processes as well as the (...) genealogies of the concept. Thus, the epistemology and ontology behind the ‘intersectional turn’ in feminist theory is the main concern here. The authors argue that the lack of ontological discussions has lead to its very popularity. Intersectionality promises almost everything: to provide complexity, overcome divisions and to serve as a critical tool. However, the expansion of the scope of intersectionality has created a consensus that conceals fruitful and necessary conflicts within feminism. (shrink)

Bourdieu suggested that the habitus contains the ‘genetic information’ which both allows and disposes successive generations to reproduce the world they inherit from their parents’ generation. While his writings on habitus are concerned with embodied dispositions, biological processes are not a feature of the practical reason of habitus. Recent critiques of the separate worlds of biology and culture, and the rise in epigenetics, provide new opportunities for expanding theoretical concepts like habitus. Using obesity science as a case study we attempt (...) to conceptualise the enfolding of biological and social processes (via a Deleuzian metaphor) to develop a concept of biohabitus – reconfiguring how social and biological environments interact across the life course, and may be transmitted and transformed intergenerationally. In conclusion we suggest that the enfolding and reproduction of social life that Bourdieu articulated as habitus is a useful theoretical frame that can be enhanced to critically develop epigenetic understandings of obesity, and vice versa. (shrink)

The article asks how phenomenology, understood as a philosophical method of investigation, can account for gender. Despite the fact that it has provided useful tools for feminist inquiry, the question remains how gender can be studied within the paradigm of a philosophy of a subject. The article explicates four different understandings of phenomenology and assesses their respective potential in terms of theorizing gender: a classical reading, a corporeal reading, an intersubjective reading and a post-phenomenological reading. It concludes by arguing that (...) phenomenology can extend its analysis to the question of gender only if its method is radically revised. (shrink)

In humans, gender is both a concept and performance embodied by females and males, a corporeal technology that is produced dialectically. The process of gendering robots makes especially clear that gender belongs both to the order of the material body and to the social and discursive or semiotic systems within which bodies are embedded. This article explores and interrogates the gendering of humanoid robots manufactured today in Japan for employment in the home and workplace. Gender attribution is a process of (...) reality construction. Roboticists assign gender based on their common-sense assumptions about female and male sex and gender roles. Whereas the relationship between human bodies and genders is a contingent one, I argue that gendered robots render that relationship a necessary one by conflating bodies and genders. Humanoid robots are the vanguard of posthuman sexism, and are being developed within a reactionary rhetorical climate. (shrink)

Neglect of the moral promise of disorientation is a persistent gap in even the most sophisticated philosophies of embodiment. In this article, I begin to correct this neglect by expanding our sense of the range and nature of disoriented experience and proposing new visions of disorientation as benefiting moral agency. Disorientations are experienced through complex interactions of corporeal, affective, and cognitive processes, and are characterized by feelings of shock, surprise, unease, and discomfort; felt disorientations almost always make us unsure of (...) how to go on. I argue that experiences of disorientation can strengthen the moral agency of individuals. I begin by clarifying experiences of felt ease and orientation. I then characterize disoriented embodiment by investigating select experiences that often involve or accompany disorientation, focusing throughout on how disorientation prompts changes in motivation and action. I conclude by charting how disoriented embodiments can help individuals become better moral agents overall, in part by challenging norms that restrict embodiment and undermining dualistic conceptions of the self. (shrink)

Feminist science studies have given scant regard to non-human animals. In this paper, we argue that it is important for feminist theory to address the complex relationships between humans and other animals, and the implications of these for feminism. We use the notion of performativity, particularly as it has been developed by Karen Barad, to explore the intersections of feminism and studies of the human/animal relationship. Performativity, we argue, helps to challenge the persistent dichotomy between human/culture and animals/nature. It emphasizes, (...) moreover, how animality is a doing or becoming, not an essence; so, performativity allows us to think about the complexity of human/animal interrelating as a kind of choreography, a co-creation of behaviour. We illustrate the discussion using the example of the laboratory rat, who can be thought of both in terms of a materialization of specific scientific practices and as active participants in the creation of their own meaning, alongside the human participants in science. There are three, intertwined, senses in which we might think about performativity - that of animality, of humannness, and of the relationship between the two. Bringing animals into discussions about performativity poses questions for both feminist theory and for the study of human/animal relationships, we argue: both human and animal can conjointly be engaged in reconfiguring the world, and our theorizing must reflect that complexity. We are all matter, and we all matter. (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)

By drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy of ontological relationality, this article explores what it means to be a ‘we’ in breast cancer. What are the characteristics—the extent and diversity—of couples’ relationally lived experiences of bodily changes in breast cancer? Through analyzing duo interviews with diagnosed women and their partners, four ways of sharing an embodied life are identified. (1) While ‘being different together’, partners have different, albeit connected kinds of experiences of breast cancer. (2) While ‘being there for you’, partners (...) take care of each other in mutually dependent ways. (3) While ‘being reconnected to you’, partners (re-)relate to each other through intimacy and sexuality. (4) While ‘being like you’, partners synchronize their embodied daily lives to one another, sometimes up to the point that the self cannot be distinguished from the other anymore. These ways reveal that being a ‘we’ involves complex affective, bodily encounters in which the many fault lines that both separate partners into individual selves and join them together as a unity are continuously reshaped and negotiated. Being a ‘we’ may be understood as something we have to do. Therefore, in being true to the legacy of Nancy, we argue at the end of this article for a sensible praxis of sharing a life and body, particularly in breast cancer. (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)

Using two contemporary cases of the global #MeToo movement and UK-based collective Sisters Uncut, this paper argues that a more in-depth and critical concern with gendered difference is necessary for understanding radical democratic ethics, one that advances and develops current understandings of business ethics. It draws on practices of social activism and dissent through the context of Irigaray’s later writing on democratic politics and Ziarek’s analysis of dissensus and democracy that proceeds from an emphasis on alterity as the capacity to (...) transform nonappropriative self-other relations. Therefore, the aims of the paper are: to develop a deeper understanding of a culture of difference and to consider sexual difference as central to the development of a practical democratic ethics and politics of organizations; to explore two key cases of contemporary feminist social movements that demonstrate connected yet contrasting examples of how feminist politics develops through an appreciation of embodied, intercorporeal differences; and to extend insights from Irigaray and Ziarek to examine ways in which a practical democratic politics proceeding from an embodied ethics of difference forms an important advancement to theorising the connection between ethics, dissent and democracy. (shrink)

More and more areas of medicine involve subjects donating tissues to another — blood, organs, bone marrow, sperm, ova and embryos can all be transferred from one person to another. Within the technical frameworks of biomedicine, such fragments are generally treated as detachable things, severed from social identity once they are removed from a particular body. However an abundant anthropological and sociological literature has found that, for donors and patients, human tissues are not impersonal. They retain some of the values (...) of personhood and identity, and their incorporation often has complex effects on embodied identity. This article draws on feminist philosophy of the body to think through the implications of some of these practices. Specifically, it draws on the idea of intercorporeality, wherein the body image is always the effect of embodied social relations. While this approach is highly productive for considering the stakes involved in tissue transfer, it is argued that the concept of body image has been too preoccupied with the register of the visual at the expense of introceptive data and health/illness events. Empirical data around organ transplant and sperm donation are used to demonstrate that the transfer of biological fragments involves a profound kind of intercorporeality, producing identifications and disidentifications between donors and recipients that play out simultaneously at the immunological, psychic and social levels. (shrink)

Research on the status and experience of women in academia in the last 30 years has challenged conventional explanations of persistent gender inequality, bringing into sharp focus the cumulative impact of small scale, often unintentional differences in recognition and response: the patterns of 'post-civil rights era' dis­crimination made famous by the 1999 report on the status of women in the MIT School of Science. I argue that feminist standpoint theory is a useful resource for understanding how this sea change in (...) understanding gender inequity was realized. At the same time, close attention to activist research on workplace environment issues suggests ways in which our understanding of standpoint theory can fruitfully be refined. I focus on the implications of two sets of distinctions: between types of epistemic injustice (and correlative advantage) that may affect marginalized knowers; and between the resources of situated knowledge and those of a critical standpoint on knowledge production. (shrink)

The once animated efforts in medical phenomenology to integrate the art and science of medicine (or to humanize scientific medicine) have fallen out of philosophical fashion. Yet the current competing medical discourses of evidencebased medicine and patient-centered care suggest that this theoretical endeavor requires renewed attention. In this paper, I attempt to enliven the debate by discussing theoretical weaknesses in the way the “lived body” has operated in the medical phenomenology literature—the problem of the absent body—and highlight how evidence-based medicine (...) has refigured medical phenomenology’s historical nemesis, “biomedicine.” What we now need is a phenomenology of the embodied subject in the age of evidence-based medicine. (shrink)

The purpose of professional education programs is to prepare aspiring professionals for the challenges of practice within a particular profession. These programs typically seek to ensure the acquisition of necessary knowledge and skills, as well as providing opportunities for their application. While not denying the importance of knowledge and skills, this paper reconfigures professional education as a process of becoming. Learning to become a professional involves not only what we know and can do, but also who we are (becoming). It (...) involves integration of knowing, acting, and being in the form of professional ways of being that unfold over time. When a professional education program focuses on the acquisition and application of knowledge and skills, it falls short of facilitating their integration into professional ways of being. In addition, through such a focus on epistemology (or theory of knowing), ontology (or theory of being) is overlooked. This paper explores what it means to develop professional ways of being where the focus is becoming, not simply knowing as an end in itself. (shrink)

Contrasting the work of Genevieve Lloyd, Elizabeth Grosz, and Moira Gatens with the poststrueturalist philosophy of Judith Butler, this paper identifies a distinctive “Australian” feminism. It argues that while Butler remains trapped by the matter/representation binary, the Spinozist turn in Lloyd and Gatens, and Grosz's work on Bergson and Deleuze, are attempts to think corporeality.

This paper explores how Deleuze and Guattari's philosophical concepts extend and elaborate discursive and psychoanalytic interpretations of qualitative research findings. Analyzing data from a UK research project exploring young people's engagements with Social Networking Sites (SNSs), Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalytic method is drawn upon to consider complex desire-flows in the social. In particular the notion of ‘affective assemblages’ is developed to explore the relationships between school and online spaces and subjective interfacing with these spaces. The paper suggests online space is (...) heterosexually striated and SNSs create new intensified gendered and sexualized identities and affective relations between young people. Investigating the case study of a teen girl, Louise, who is socially rejected through the affective assemblage of the SNS, then pathologized at school for violently retaliating against being called a ‘fat slag’ online, the paper suggests a Deleuzoguattarian analysis offers new theoretical tools for thinking about discursive subjectification but also for mapping complex desire-flows and micro movements through and against discursive/symbolic norms. (shrink)

You never reach the Body without Organs, you can't reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit. People ask, So what is this BwO? - But you're already on it, scurrying like vermin, grouping like a blind person, or running like a lunatic: desert traveller and nomad of the steppes. On it we sleep, live our waking lives, fight - fight and are fought - seek our place, experience untold happiness and fabulous defeats; on it we penetrate (...) and are penetrated; on it we love. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 150). (shrink)

In recent years, a number of cultural theorists have made important contributions to the study of the body’s surface. Despite their importance, however, none of these contributions provides us with a systematic framework for understanding why the body’s surface — its skin — matters to the extent that it does. In this article, I seek to provide such a framework and, in doing so, to shed light on why the skin and the self seem to share a special and sometimes (...) strained relationship. To this end, I will present a critical introduction to the work of two contemporary Anglo-American psychoanalysts: Esther Bick and Thomas Ogden. Throughout this introduction, I will show how both Bick and Ogden — despite the fact that they are almost completely unknown outside clinical circles — offer up a host of conceptual tools that could prove useful to cultural theorists interested in making sense of the relationship between the skin and the self. (shrink)

Using a new materialist line of questioning that looks at the agential potentialities of water and its entanglements with Big Data and surveillance, this article explores how the recent Snowden revelations about the National Security Agency have reignited media scholars to engage with the infrastructures that enable intercepting, hosting, and processing immeasurable amounts of data. Focusing on the expansive architecture, location, and resource dependence of the NSA’s Utah Data Center, I demonstrate how surveillance and privacy can never be disconnected from (...) the material infrastructures that allow and render natural the epistemological state of mass surveillance. Specifically, I explore the NSA’s infrastructure and the million of gallons of water it requires daily to cool its servers, while located in one of the driest states in the US. Complicating surveillance beyond the NSA, as also already imbricated with various social media companies, this article questions the emplacement and impact of corporate data centers more generally, and the changes they are causing to the landscape and local economies. I look at how water is an intriguing and politically relevant part of the surveillance infrastructure and how it has been constructed as the main tool for activism in this case, and how it may eventually help transform the public’s conceptualization of Big Data, as deeply material. (shrink)

This article argues that greater theoretical attention should be paid to the figure of the zombie in the fields of law, cultural studies and philosophy. Using The Walking Dead as a point of critical departure concepts of legal personhood are interrogated in relation to permanent vegetative states, bare life and the notion of the third person. Ultimately, the paper recommends a rejection of personhood; instead favouring a legal and philosophical engagement with humanity and embodiment. Personhood, it is suggested, creates a (...) barrier in law allowing individuals in certain contexts to be rendered non-persons and thus outside the scope of legal rights. An approach that rejects personhood in favour of embodiment would allow individuals to enjoy their rights without being subject to such discrimination. It is also suggested that the concept of the human, itself complicated by the figure of the zombie, allows for legal engagement with a greater number of putative rights claimants including admixed embryos, cyborgs and the zombie. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the meaning of bodily integrity in disfiguring breast cancer. Bodily integrity is a normative principle precisely because it does not simply refer to actual physical or functional intactness. It rather indicates what should be regarded and respected as inviolable in vulnerable and damageable bodies. I will argue that this normative inviolability or wholeness can be based upon a person's embodied experience of wholeness. This phenomenological stance differs from the liberal view that identifies respect for integrity (...) with respect for autonomy (resulting in an invalidation of bodily integrity's proper normative meaning), as well as from the view that bodily integrity is based upon ideologies of wholeness (which runs the risk of being disadvantageous to women). I propose that bodily integrity involves a process of identification between the experience of one's body as “Leib” and the experience of one's body as “Körper.” If identification fails or is not possible, one's integrity is threatened. This idea of bodily integrity can support breast cancer patients and survivors in making decisions about possible corrective interventions. To implement this idea in oncology care, empirical-phenomenological research needs to establish how breast cancer patients express their embodied self-experiences. (shrink)

Modern phenomenology, with its roots in Husserlian philosophy, has been taken up and utilised in a myriad of ways within different disciplines, but until recently has remained relatively underused within sports studies. A corpus of sociological-phenomenological work is now beginning to develop in this domain, alongside a longer-standing literature in feminist phenomenology. These specific social-phenomenological forms explore the situatedness of lived-body experience within a particular social structure. After providing a brief overview of key strands of phenomenology, this article considers some (...) of the ways in which sociological, and particularly feminist, phenomenology might be used to analyse female sporting embodiment. For illustrative purposes, data from an autophenomenographic project on female distance running are also included, in order briefly to demonstrate the application of phenomenology within sociology, as both theoretical framework and methodological approach. (shrink)

This paper discusses the nature and limits of player embodiment within digital games. We identify a convergence between everyday bodily actions and activity within digital environments, and a trend towards incorporating natural forms of movement into gaming worlds through mimetic control devices. We examine recent literature in the area of immersion and presence in digital gaming; Calleja’s (2011) recent Player Involvement Model of gaming is discussed and found to rely on a probematic notion of embodiment as 'incorporation'. We go on (...) to further reflect on the nature of player involvement in digital gaming environments by applying insights from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. It is argued that digital embodiment differs so significantly from primordial embodiment that any idea of total immersion is simply fantasy. We subsequently argue that digital game media nonetheless provide us with unique opportunities for exploring the nature of distinctively human forms of embodiment, and so we need more complete and more reliable phenomenological descriptions of the experiences associated with computer games. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty's reference to "a past which has never been present" at the end of "Le sentir" challenges the typical framework of the Phenomenology of Perception, with its primacy of perception and bodily field of presence. In light of this "original past," I propose a re-reading of the prepersonal as ground of perception that precedes the dichotomies of subject-object and activity-passivity. Merleau-Ponty searches in the Phenomenology for language to describe this ground, borrowing from multiple registers (notably Bergson, but also Husserl). This (...) "sensory life" is a coexistence of sensing and sensible—bodily and worldly—rhythms. Perception is, then, not a natural given, but a temporal process of synchronization between rhythms. By drawing on Bergson, this can be described as a process in which virtual life is actualized into perceiving subject and object perceived. Significantly, this process involves non-coincidence or delay whereby sensory life is always already past for perception. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty's claim in Phenomenology of Perception (1962) that the anonymous body guarantees an intersubjective world is problematic because it omits the particularities of bodies. This omission produces an account of "dialogue" with another in which I solipsistically hear only myself and dominate others with my intentionality. This essay develops an alternative to projective intentionality called "hypothetical construction," in which meaning is socially constructed through an appreciation of the differences of others.

The body image with respect to physical disability has long been a woefully under-theorized area of scholarship. The literature that does attend to the body image in cases of physical abnormality or functional impairment regularly offer poorly articulated or problematic definitions of the concept, effectively undermining its historic analytic scope and depth. Here, I revisit the epistemic roots of the body image while also engaging the rich contemporary literature from a body studies perspective in order to situate the narratives of (...) amputees about the relationship between dismemberment, prosthetization, phantom limb syndrome, and body image. Stories about living with artificial, fleshy, phantomed, and residual limbs unquestionably reveal a number of peculiarities unique to amputees. However, they also offer a distinctively productive ingress into the analytic utility of a ‘re-visioned’ conceptualization of the body image more broadly speaking. Indeed, the body image can function as a robust investigative tool for exploring the intersubjective, processual, and relational features of embodiment and corporeality. (shrink)

This article is a phenomenological exploration and description of certain selected aspects of living the specificities and conundrums posed by what is usually, if problematically, called a ‘phantom limb’. Using my own body as an ‘intimate laboratory’, I attend to the dynamics and mutability of the supposed ‘phantom’, both during the post-operative period of the above-the-knee amputation of my left leg as well as after I began to use and incorporate my prosthetic leg. Throughout, I explore the reversible aspects of (...) my two legs as ‘phantom’ and ‘real’, present and absent, and visible and invisible — paying attention, as well, to the lived and linguistic sense we make of our bodies in ‘parts’ and our bodies as ‘whole’. (shrink)

This article explores the possibilities of considering how ‘matter and meaning are mutually constituted’ in the production of knowledge (Barad, 2007: 152) through presenting a diffractive analysis of a piece of interview data with a six-year-old boy in a preschool class. Inspired by Donna Haraway’s (1997) and Karen Barad’s (2007) theorising, I understand diffractive analysis as an embodied engagement with the materiality of research data: a becoming-with the data as researcher. Understanding the body as a space of transit, a series (...) of open-ended systems in interaction with the material-discursive ‘environment’, diffractive analyses constitute transcorporeal engagements with data. Stacy Alaimo’s (2010) theorisation of the transcorporeal is put to work diffractively with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (1987) thinking on the process of becoming minor or minoritarian. This implies a reconceptualisation of the very act of thinking as a transcorporeal process of engagement, going beyond the idea of reflexivity and interpretation as inner mental activities taking place in the mind of the researcher understood as separated from the data. Through my example, I argue that diffractive analysis can make visible new kinds of material-discursive realities that can have transformative and political consequences. (shrink)

My essay is framed by Hypatia's first special issue on Motherhood and Sexuality at one end, and by the most recent special issue (as of this writing) on the work of Iris Young, whose work on pregnant embodiment has become canonical, at the other. The questions driving this essay are: When we look back over the last twenty-five years, what has changed in our conceptions of pregnancy and maternity, both in feminist theory and in popular culture? What aspects of feminist (...) debates from the 1970s and 1980s are still relevant today? And, how might what appear to be radical shifts in popular perceptions of pregnancy actually continue traditional values that objectify and “abjectify” the maternal body?Here, I will focus on three central elements of the revaluation of pregnancy and maternity as they show up in feminist philosophy and in popular culture: 1. The relationship between pregnancy and sexuality, both in terms of pregnant sexuality and in terms of the pregnant body as sexual object; 2. The “choice” to become a mother as a “feminist choice”; 3. The temporality of pregnancy and birth as marking something like “women's time.”. (shrink)

New pharmacological therapies, often dubbed `lifestyle drugs', demonstrate the enactment of yet another interface between technologies and bodies that promises a re-fashioning of the body with transformative, life-enhancing results. This article analyzes the emergence of one lifestyle drug, Viagra, from a technoscience studies perspective, conceptualizing Viagra as a new medical technology of the body. Through an analysis of promotional materials for Viagra, we argue that this pharmaceutical device performs ideological work through its discursive scripts that serves to reinforce and augment (...) dominant cultural narratives in relation to material bodies, particularly those of hegemonic masculinity and male (and female) sexuality. We conclude that Viagra carries the potential to reify and reinforce these dominant and hegemonic narratives, while at the same time, through ensuring an open market for heterogeneous users, it provides spaces for alternatives to these normative ideals and assumptions. (shrink)

Socially extended knowledge has recently received much attention in mainstream epistemology. Knowledge here is not to be understood as wholly realised within a single individual who manipulates artefacts or tools but as collaboratively realised across plural agents. Because of its focus on the interpersonal dimension, socially extended epistemology appears to be a promising approach for investigating the deeply social nature of epistemic practices. I believe, however, that this line of inquiry could be made more fruitful if it is connected with (...) the critical notion of epistemic responsibility, as developed in feminist responsibilism. According to feminist responsibilists, at the core of epistemic responsibility is a critical disposition toward correcting epistemic injustice. This epistemic idea is highly relevant to the epistemological context of illness, where patient testimony is often disregarded. Hence, though restricted to the epistemological context of the experience of illness, this chapter delves into epistemic injustice and its robust mechanisms. I thus explore what responsible epistemic practices should involve in order to redress that injustice and how epistemic responsibility should be socially extended. The discussion proceeds as follows. First, by relying on Arthur Frank’s innovative work on illness narratives, I focus on chaotic bodily messages from patients overwhelmed by suffering and then explain why these messages should count as genuine narratives or testimonies despite their inarticulateness. Second, I elaborate on how epistemic injustice concerning such narratives (i.e., chaos narratives) is produced and reproduced, in particular how both a dominant sociocultural norm and our inherent vulnerability can contribute to its production and reproduction. Finally, I propose an extended form of epistemic responsibility that ameliorates this aspect. Laying particular emphasis on the epistemic role of mature empathy, I characterise the extended epistemic responsibility in terms of extended empathic knowledge. (shrink)

In everyday life, we usually go by theone-body-one-person rule: one person has one body. This social belief builds on two assumptions: bodies are individual units and they are the same in different situations. This is also the conceptual resource for social theories that build on the notion of individuals. In this article, we turn it into a sociological topic. We develop a vocabulary for reconstructing bodily one-ness and bodily sameness as practically achieved social order, asbody boundary work: what belongs to (...) a body is a matter of local practices that define its situational contours, limits and margins. Practices of identification and personification draw on social memories and enact bodies as trans-situational entities. Persons and bodies, we argue, evolve in co-individuation. Personal corporality, then, can be conceptualized as abody of workthat encompasses these practical efforts of boundary-making. (shrink)