1. |
- Allen, Irma
(author)
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Thinking with a Feminist Political Ecology of Air-and-breathing-bodies
- 2020
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In: Body & Society. - : SAGE Publications. - 1357-034X .- 1460-3632. ; 26:2, s. 79-105
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Social theory has paid little attention to air, despite its centrality to bodily existence and air pollution being named the world’s biggest public health crisis. Where attention to air is found, the body is largely absent. On the other hand, conceptualizing the body without life-sustaining breath fails to highlight breathing as the ongoing metabolic bodily act in which the materiality of human and more-than-human intermingle and transmute one another. Political ecology studies how unequal power structures and knowledge production reproduce human–environment relations, including a nascent focus on the body and air – but as separate issues. This article argues that a political ecology of air would productively fuse with a political ecology of the body to bring the visceral realm into intersectional analysis of air’s contemporary materialities. A feminist political ecology situates explicitly air-and-breathing-bodies, their intimately posthuman, relational, elemental and corpomaterial intra-action, at the heart of such analysis.
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2. |
- Andreasson, Jesper, 1977-, et al.
(author)
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Triathlon Bodies in Motion : Reconceptualizing Feelings of Pain, Nausea and Disgust in the Ironman Triathlon
- 2019
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In: Body & Society. - : Sage Publications. - 1357-034X .- 1460-3632. ; 25:2, s. 119-146
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This study focuses on the physical expressions and intensity of embodiment that occur in the Ironman Triathlon. More specifically, the study investigates the transformational bodily experiences taking place during Ironman competitions. Using an ethnographic approach, a total of 29 Ironman triathletes participated in the study (15 men and 14 women). Theoretically, the article focuses on how triathletes’ bodies ‘move’ between different forms of embodiment. The results show that, in the process of disciplining the body, the athletes reconceptualized feelings of pain, nausea and even disgust, making these emotionally expressive aspects of the corpus into a part of the experience and bending them towards the pleasure of reaching potential divinity. Situated in a long tradition of philosophical and sociological explorations of the transgressing and transcending body, the study interprets and understands the performing body as a site for change and utopian possibilities. Thus the study adds to existing debates on contemporary individuals’ exploration of the existential and corporeal dimensions of modernity.
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3. |
- Ekman, Aimée, 1970-
(author)
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Theorising fatness as an ordering issue : A conceptual framework for analysing the construction of fatness as disorder
- 2023
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In: Body & Society. - : Sage Publications. - 1357-034X .- 1460-3632. ; 29:4, s. 79-104
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Previous research has both implicitly and explicitly discussed, and partly shown, that fatness can be viewed as an ordering issue. In Western countries, fat bodies are constructed as deviant and as disorder, while thin bodies are constructed as normal and in order. In line with Mary Douglas's and Judith Butler's theorisation around separating and purifying/subsuming processes, this article develops previous theorisations around fatness and social order. Two analytical concepts for understanding processes for ordering people based on body size are suggested. Both processes aim at preserving the social order but differ in how this is achieved. The first, maintaining order, refers to the processes that maintain separation between thinness and fatness and preserve social order. The second, putting in order, refers to the processes aiming to subsume fat bodies into social order and covers various activities for weight loss. Together, these concepts allow analysis of fatness as an ordering issue.
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4. |
- Fraser, Suzanne, et al.
(author)
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Drugs, Brains and Other Subalterns : Public Debate and the New Materialist Politics of Addiction
- 2018
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In: Body & Society. - 1357-034X .- 1460-3632. ; 24:4, s. 58-86
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Over the last few decades feminists, science and technology studies scholars and others have grappled with how to take materiality into account in understanding social practices, subjectivity and events. One key area for these debates has been drug use and addiction. At the same time, neuroscientific accounts of drug use and addiction have also arisen. This development has attracted criticism as simplistically reinstating material determinism. In this article we draw on 80 interviews with health professionals directly involved in drug-related public policy and service provision in three countries to identify the main ways the neuroscience of addiction (and thus the agency of the brain) is understood. We analyse these understandings using contemporary posthumanist theory to develop new options for conceptualizing matter in public responses to addiction. We close by calling for a new approach to addiction and the brain based on a process model of materiality and public debate.
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5. |
- Hillgaard Bulow, Morten, et al.
(author)
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Queering 'Successful Ageing', Dementia and Alzheimer's Research
- 2016
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In: Body & Society. - London, England : Sage Publications. - 1357-034X .- 1460-3632. ; 22:3, s. 77-102
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Contributing to both ageing research and queer-feminist scholarship, this article introduces feminist philosopher Margrit Shildricks queer notion of the monstrous to the subject of ageing and the issue of dealing with frailty within ageing research. The monstrous, as a norm-critical notion, takes as its point of departure that we are always already monstrous, meaning that the western ideal of well-ordered, independent, unleaky, rational embodied subjects is impossible to achieve. From this starting point the normalizing and optimizing strategies of ageing research - here exemplified through the concept of successful ageing and the treatment of Alzheimers disease - can be problematized. The notion of the monstrous instead suggests a view on ageing and monstrous embodiment which provides room for other, different ways of being recognized as an embodied subject, and for dealing with difference, vulnerability and frailty.
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6. |
- Johnson, Ericka, 1973-
(author)
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Simulating Medical Patients and Practices : Bodies and the Construction of Valid Medical Simulators
- 2008
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In: Body & Society. - : Sage Publications. - 1357-034X .- 1460-3632. ; 14:3, s. 105-128
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Why and how can a gynaecological simulator that has been ‘validated’ in one context, that is, accepted by experts as a functional and realistic model of the body on which to teach gynaecological exams, not be considered functional when it changes contexts and is used in another country? 1 To think through this problem, which grew out of reflections upon the ontological basis of the simulator’s different functionality within the US and Swedish contexts, I examine the use of the terms ‘reality’ and ‘validity’ in medical simulator literature, and then apply Karen Barad’s concepts of agential reality and intra-action to the gynaecological simulator’s development. This provides a new way of thinking about how knowledge can be created in and from a simulator.
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7. |
- Palm, Fredrik, 1973-
(author)
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Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Addiction and Enjoyment
- 2023
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In: Body & Society. - : Sage Publications. - 1357-034X .- 1460-3632. ; 29:1, s. 56-78
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This article discusses how decentered understandings of addiction might benefit from ongoing debates in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Departing from recent critiques in critical addiction studies, it claims that psychoanalysis offers a framework that both challenges abstract, essentialist ontologies and recognises addiction as a valid phenomenon. Crucial to this framework is a notion of freedom linked to the symbolic break with bodily enjoyment, which, according to Lacan, lies at the origin of the constitution of subjectivity and which neither presupposes the existence of a conscious will nor rejects freedom as a mere product of abstract bio-political governmentality. The article explores how, in Lacanian psychoanalysis, addiction is seen as a way of denying this freedom through the realisation of an enjoyment independent of the symbolic order. Moreover, the article argues that its definition of addiction allows for both a decentered understanding of addiction and a critical challenging of current societal processes of addictification.
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8. |
- Shildrick, Margrit, 1949-, et al.
(author)
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Estranged Bodies : Shifting paradigms and the biomedical imaginary
- 2015
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In: Body & Society. - : Sage Publications. - 1357-034X .- 1460-3632. ; 21:3
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This introductory article provides a contextual and theoretical overview to this special issue of Body & Society. The special issue presents five selected case studies – focusing on the contexts of transplantation, psychiatry, amputation and war, and a transvalued media ecology of cancer – to offer meditations on a number of interlinked questions. The first of these is the entanglement of biomedical governance – political/economic as well as self-disciplinary – with the nexus of estrangement, which can denote both the distancing of otherness and self-division. Second is the realm of feeling, of phantasmatic projection and of the ways in which the biopolitical becomes reciprocally, discursively, enmeshed in a wider cultural imaginary. Third is the shifting terrain of gender and feminist politics, a key dimension of which is the necessary reworking of feminist thought in the wake of a radically altered biomedical and biotechnological landscape. Under the rubric of Estranged Bodies, the collection considers themes of dissolution and the fragility of the body/subject read through bodily catastrophe, radical body modification and extreme medical intervention. Also considered is the notion of assemblage – the provisional coming together of disparate parts – which encourages a rethinking of questions of reconstituted, displaced and re-placed bodies.
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9. |
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10. |
- Shildrick, Margrit, 1949-
(author)
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Staying Alive: : Affect, identity and anxiety in organ transplantation
- 2015
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In: Body & Society. - : Sage Publications. - 1357-034X .- 1460-3632. ; 21:3, s. 20-41
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The field of human organ transplantation, and most particularly that of heart transplantation where the donor is always deceased, is one in which the rhetoric of hope leaves little room for any exploration or understanding of the more negative emotions and affects that recipients may experience. Where a donated heart is commonly referred to as the ‘gift of life’ both in lay discourse and by those engaged in transplantation procedures, how does this imbricate with the alternative clinical term of a ‘graft’? For recipients of donor organs, the experience of living on in the face of otherwise certain death is fraught with complex emotions not only about the self and the now dead other, but the persistence of the other within the self. In contrast to our expectations of the feel-good narrative of the gift of life, recipients are often significantly troubled by the aftermath of the procedure, which may fundamentally challenge notions of personal identity, as well as having deep implications for our understanding of the relation between death and 'staying alive'. Drawing on recent research into heart transplantation, I theorise the field through a reflection – drawing on both Mauss and Derrida - on the meaning the gift, before moving on to consider whether a Deleuzian approach to both the assemblage and the ‘event’ of death might offer a more productive framework.
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