Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T07:13:36.505Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“Why Should Our Bodies End at the Skin?”: Embodiment, Boundaries, and Somatechnics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 September 2014

Margrit Shildrick
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Donna Haraway's enduring question—“Why should our bodies end at the skin?” (Haraway 1990, 220)—is ever more relevant in the postmodern era, where issues of bodies, boundaries, and technologies increasingly challenge not only the normative performance of the human subject, but also the very understanding of what counts as human. Critical Disability Studies has taken up the problematic of technology, particularly in relation to the deployment of prostheses by people with disabilities. Yet rehabilitation to normative practice or appearance is no longer the point; instead, the lived experience of disability generates its own specific possibilities that both limit and extend the performativity of the embodied self. I look at what is at stake in the challenge to the Western logos that comes specifically from the capacities of the disabled body, understood not as a less than perfect form of the normative, but as figuring difference in a nonbinary sense. Feminist theory has long contested the isomorphism of the logos, but I go beyond simply setting out the grounds for revaluing multiple variant forms. The feminist turn to Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze opens up the problematic to a celebratory positioning of difference and transcorporeality as the very conditions of life.

Type
Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 30 , Issue 1: Special Issue: New Conversations in Feminist Disability Studies , Winter 2015 , pp. 13 - 29
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bambra, Clare, and Smith, Katherine. 2010. No longer deserving? Sickness benefit reform and the politics of ill health. Critical Public Health 20 (1): 71–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barad, Karen. 2003. Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs 28 (3): 801–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barad, Karen. 2011. Erasers and erasures: Pinch's unfortunate ‘uncertainty principle’. Social Studies of Science. http://sss.sagepub.com/content/early/2011/04/20/0306312711406317.citation (accessed April 25 2014).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Braidotti, Rosi. 2006. Transpositions: On nomadic ethics. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The posthuman. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Campbell, Fiona Kumari. 2009. Contours of ableism: The production of disability and abledness. London: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crampton, Caroline. 2012. Tanni Grey‐Thompson and welfare reform. Total Politics, January 18. http://www.totalpolitics.com/blog/289852/tanni-greythompson-and-welfare-reform.thtml (accessed April 22, 2014).Google Scholar
Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix. 1984. Anti‐Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Trans. R. Hurley. London: Athlone Press.Google Scholar
Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix. 1987. A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Trans B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix. 1994. What is philosophy?. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. 1973. Speech and phenomenon. Trans. D. Allison. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. 1974. Of grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. 1987. The truth in painting. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. 1995. Points… interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Weber, Elisabeth. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Evans, Fred, and Lawlor, Leonard eds. 2000. Chiasms: Merleau‐Ponty's notion of flesh. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Feely, Michael. 2013. Intellectual disability and the sexual surveillance assemblage. “Missing Links: The Somatechnics of Decolonisation” conference, Linköping University, June 17‐19. http://tinyurl.com/k8trvgv (accessed April 22, 2014).Google Scholar
Garthwaite, Kayleigh. 2011. “The language of shirkers and scroungers?” Talking about illness, disability and coalition welfare reform. Disability & Society 26 (3): 369–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gibson, Barbara. 2006. Disability, connectivity and transgressing the autonomous body. Journal of Medical Humanities 27 (3): 187–96.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gibson, Barbara, Carnevale, Franco, and King, Gillian. 2012. “This is my way”: Reimagining disability, in/dependence and interconnectedness of persons and assistive technologies. Disability & Rehabilitation 34 (22): 1894–99.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Goodley, Dan. 2007. Becoming rhizomatic parents: Deleuze, Guattari and disabled babies. Disability & Society 2 (2): 145–60.Google Scholar
Goodley, Dan, and Runswick‐Cole, Katherine. 2011. Celebrating cyborgs: Photovoice and disabled children. Occasional paper for ESRC project: Does every child matter, post‐Blair? The interconnections of disabled childhoods. http://www.strath.ac.uk/media/faculties/hass/appliedsocialsciences/socialwork/esrcseminar/Celebrating_Cyborgs_photovoice_and_disabled_children_Runswick_Cole.pdf (accessed April 25, 2014).Google Scholar
Grosz, Elizabeth. 2005. Time travels. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Guattari, Félix. 1996. Soft subversions, ed. Lotringer, S. New York: Semiotext(e).Google Scholar
Haraway, Donna. 1990. A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist‐feminism in the 1980s. In Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Nicholson, Linda. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, cyborgs and women: The reinvention of nature. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Haraway, Donna. 2007. The companion species manifesto: Dogs, people, and significant otherness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Haraway, Donna. 2008. When species meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Hickey‐Moody, Anna, and Wood, Denise. 2008. Imagining otherwise: Deleuze, disability & Second Life. Proceedings of ANZCA08 Conference: Power and Place. Wellington, New Zealand.Google Scholar
Ihde, Don. 2002. Bodies in technology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Jackson, Alecia Youngblood. 2010. Deleuze and the girl. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 23 (5): 579–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jackson, Alecia Youngblood, and Mazzei, Lisa. 2012. Thinking with theory in qualitative research. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.Google Scholar
Jain, Sarah S. 1999. The prosthetic imagination: Enabling and disabling the prosthesis trope. Science, Technology and Human Values 24 (1): 31–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Massumi, Brian. 1987. Notes on the translation. In Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, A thousand plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Merleau‐Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of perception. Trans. C. Smith. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Merleau‐Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The visible and the invisible. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.Google Scholar
Mitchell, David, and Snyder, Sharon. 2000. Narrative prosthesis: Disability and the dependencies of discourse. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Nansen, Bjorn. 2007. Machine breaths: assembling the mechanical ventilator body. Transformations 14 (Accidental Environments). http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_14/article_02.shtml (accessed April 22, 2014).Google Scholar
Puar, Jasbir. 2012. “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess”: Becoming‐intersectional in assemblage theory. Philosophia 2 (1): 49–66.Google Scholar
Reeve, Donna. 2012. Cyborgs, cripples and iCrip: Reflections on the contribution of Haraway to disability studies. In Disability and social theory: New developments and directions, ed. Goodley, Dan, Hughes, Bill and Davis, Lennard. London: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Shildrick, Margrit. 2002. Embodying the monster: Encounters with the vulnerable self. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Shildrick, Margrit. 2009a. Prosthetic performativity: Deleuzian connections and queer corporealities. In Deleuze and queer theory, ed. Nigianni, C. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Shildrick, Margrit. 2009b. Dangerous discourses: Subjectivity, sexuality and disability. London: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shildrick, Margrit. 2013. Re‐imagining embodiment: Prostheses, supplements and boundaries. Somatechnics 3 (2): 270–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Soldatic, Karen, and Meekosha, Helen. 2012. The place of disgust: Disability, class and gender in spaces of workfare. Societies 2: 139–56. http://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/2/3/139 (accessed April 22, 2014).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Youdell, Deborah, and Armstrong, Felicity. 2011. A politics beyond subjects: The affective choreographies and smooth spaces of schooling. Emotion, Space and Society 4 (3): 144–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Throwing like a girl. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Weiss, Gail. 1999. Body images: Embodiment as intercorporeality. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Wills, David. 1995. Prosthesis. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar