In recent years, the concept of debility has gained a lot of attention. In critical theory and in the critical medical humanities, the concept has come to refer specifically to the general ill-health of ordinary lives under neoliberal capitalism; as such, it has triggered a surge of interest in large-scale affective assemblages that incapacitate multitudes of bodies. This article proposes _neoliberal misfit_ as a conceptual tool to remedy the dissolution of subjectivity in these discussions. Pushing back against Jasbir Puar specifically, (...) it argues that processes of debilitation produce a particular type of subject formation often ignored in this body of work. The article does so by distinguishing this subject formation in three contemporary illness narratives that dramatize encounters between ill bodies and accelerating rhythms, competitive atmospheres, and mobile attachments, respectively. Ultimately, the aim is to help the critical medical humanities capture how neoliberal environments affect the self-perception of people suffering from ill-health. (shrink)

The disposal of limbs remains absent from our understandings of amputation, with ‘estranged limbs’ occupying a liminal position. Despite acceptance that the appropriate disposal of human tissue matters on moral, ethical and legal grounds, limbs and their disposal is estranged from these discourses, mirroring the experience of the limbs themselves. This article then examines this absence around disposal, considering both the options which exist for the disposal of limbs after amputation, as well as why disposal itself remains sidelined from our (...) broader understandings of the body. Practices for disposal that encompass both traditional clinical approaches and more unusual patient choices will be discussed – through the discussion of these as potential ‘disposalscapes’. Utilising concepts from the work of Crawford, Shildrick and Steinberg and Slatman and Widdershoven, the potential importance of the disposal of limbs to patients and the role of disposalscapes within this are considered. (shrink)

The recent “turn to matter” evident in material feminist theories of the more‐than‐human world offers distinct posthuman understandings of the world as continuously relationally entangled, emergent or materializing. In this paper, I consider how these premises both trouble conventional understandings of matter and/or materials, but likewise potentially revise and revitalize understandings of the political for health and inequalities, and for nursing. This is both timely and much needed given contemporary contexts of austerity‐driven neoliberalism in health care and the unprecedented growth (...) in disparities of wealth and well‐being. I wish to explore whether material feminisms allow us to retheorize connections between abstract theory and material concerns like health and inequalities, differently. This is not theory in opposition to practice or activism, but theory conceptualized as sets of entangled emergent practices, but also what constitutes the political, as more fully relational to and in praxis with health‐related activism. I will argue these theories further justify how practitioners can visibly care for and care more about social and health inequalities. Drawing mainly on the work of material feminist, Karen Barad, and her bringing together of queer and feminist theory, as well as feminist new materialisms and understandings of posthumanism, I discuss how this turn to matter together with meaning might transform understandings of health and inequalities. (shrink)