Feminist analyses have made important contributions to the sociocultural experiences of pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding. This article draws upon recent theorizing within science studies to focus on the mattering of these processes. Specifically, the article expands upon Mauss's notion of the ‘gift’, which Diprose develops through the idea of ‘corporeal generosity’. I am interested in corporeal generosity insofar as it circumvents descriptions of relationships in terms of a closed economy in which resources are exchanged without excess or remainder. Corporeal generosity (...) refers to the often missed but nevertheless inescapable debt that a body owes to other bodies. At the same time, this embodied ‘gifting’ is both unpredictable and intrusive – there is as much possibility of threatening the integrity of bodies as there is of opening new possibilities. (shrink)

Challenges the accepted model, and builds a politically sensitive notion of generosity.

This book contains the unfinished manuscript and working notes of the book Merleau-Ponty was writing when he died.

In The Bodies of Women , Rosalyn Diprose argues that traditional approaches to ethics both perpetuate and remain blind to the mechanisms of the subordination of women. She shows that injustice against women begins in the ways that social discourses and practices place women's embodied existence as improper and secondary to men. She intervenes into debates about sexual difference, ethics, philosophies of the body and theories of self in order to develop a new ethics which places sexual difference at the (...) very center of meaning. Diprose analyzes attempts in both feminist and non-feminist ethics to recognize the role of sexual difference. She critiques biomedical discourses whose descriptions mask a constitution and regulation of "the body." Drawing on insights from continental philosophy and feminist theory, The Bodies of Women includes critical readings of Hegel, Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida and Foucault as well as productive engagementwith contemporary feminist scholars such as Irigaray, Cornell and Young. What emerges is a unique approach to the ethics of sexual difference which both locates and subverts mechanisms of sexual discrimination. (shrink)

In At the Will of the Body , Arthur Frank told the story of his own illnesses, heart attack and cancer. That book ended by describing the existence of a "remission society," whose members all live with some form of illness or disability. The Wounded Storyteller is their collective portrait. Ill people are more than victims of disease or patients of medicine they are wounded storytellers. People tell stories to make sense of their suffering when they turn their diseases into (...) stories, they find healing. Drawing on the work of authors such as Oliver Sacks, Anatole Broyard, Norman Cousins, and Audre Lorde, as well as from people he met during the years he spent among different illness groups, Frank recounts a stirring collection of illness stories, ranging from the well-known--Gilda Radner's battle with ovarian cancer--to the private testimonials of people with cancer, chronic fatigue syndrome, and disabilties. Their stories are more than accounts of personal suffering: they abound with moral choices and point to a social ethic. Frank identifies three basic narratives of illness in restitution, chaos, and quest. Restitution narratives anticipate getting well again and give prominence to the technology of cure. In chaos narratives, illness seems to stretch on forever, with no respite or redeeming insights. Quest narratives are about finding that insight as illness is transformed into a means for the ill person to become someone new. (shrink)

In this article, the author uses his recent experience of organ transplantation as the basis for reflection on phenomenologically-derived notions of lived experience, temporality, selfhood and medical ethics.

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)

Challenging and rewarding in equal measure, _Phenomenology of Perception_ is Merleau-Ponty's most famous work. Impressive in both scope and imagination, it uses the example of perception to return the body to the forefront of philosophy for the first time since Plato. Drawing on case studies such as brain-damaged patients from the First World War, Merleau-Ponty brilliantly shows how the body plays a crucial role not only in perception but in speech, sexuality and our relation to others.

We are even less aware of our internal organs and the physiological processes that keep us alive. In this fascinating work, Drew Leder examines all the ways in which the body is absent—forgotten, alien, uncontrollable, obscured.

In this essay, I examine the question of whether it is possible that the encounter with the other could be mediated such that the interval of distance would lose its determining power. I reflect on some instances of extraordinary corporeality, most particularly the phenomenon of conjoined twins, in order to problematize the relation between subjects as they are embodied. Where the normative body is supposedly marked out by the closed boundaries of the skin, the figuration of the anomalous body as (...) potentially leaky and contaminatory positions it as being of prime concern to both medical and cultural discourse. Within those paradigms there are of course many pressing bioethical issues to debate, but my intention is to draw back from a problem-based scenario in order to consider the threshold of ethics in the self/other relation itself. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: The Meaning of Illness. By S. Kay Toombs.

Objective: During my illness and transplant I experienced an overwhelming existential crisis involving a complex intertwining of meaning and body which was often ignored, rejected, or misunderstood by others and at times by myself, which led to painful feelings of alienation. My treatment and my own conceptualizations seemed founded on assumptions of a separation of body and mind that were not true to what I was experiencing. I searched for a more accurate understanding, which I eventually found in the writings (...) of the French existential philosopher Merleau-Ponty. -/- Conclusions: Merleau-Ponty's extensive elaboration of the deep ambiguity of our existence as body-subjects provides an alternative model to those of the mind/body dichotomy currently in vogue in medicine and psychiatry. I found his writings a useful framework within which to comprehend my experiences. I wanted to write about these experiences and how they relate to Merleau-Ponty's insights because I found that those individuals who were able to relate to me at this level of existential ambiguity were invaluable to my recovery. (shrink)