Matter Body Research Articles

‘The Emperor of All Maladies, the King of Terrors’: The Violent Somatechnics of Cancer

This article considers the current worldwide cancer epidemic as shaped through complex somatechnical intra-actions between the intimately fleshy suffering of individual bodies and structural violence exerted through carcinogenic necrotechnologies such as pesticides. Additionally, it unpacks the epistemologies of ignorance that characterise contemporary cancer imaginaries in the west by reflecting on how they operate through the widespread deployment of warfare metaphors; metaphors that, in the twenty-first century, have morphed into ‘war against cancer-as-terror(ist)’- images. United States oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee’s bestselling book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (2011) – also the winner of the Guardian’s non-fiction book award – figures as a nodal point for the ways in which mainstream western cancer narratives and biomedical models obscure the links between cancer and what anthropologist-chemist Anastasia Karakasidou calls chemical modernity; that is, the global spread of carcinogens as a consequence of the worldwide racial capitalist transformations of agriculture and production through chemicalisation. Investigating how epistemologies of ignorance work at the levels of cancer biology, cancer treatment, and environmental carcinogenesis, this article at the same time also demonstrates how the somatechnical lens makes it possible to analyse the intertwined operations of violence, power, technologies, and bodies at all of these levels. This analysis is then complemented by a contemplation of the conative vitality of bodily matter that ontologically accounts for the chiasmatic two-way process between techné and soma that is central to a somatechnical understanding of cancerous embodiment. This article also uses autobiographical material to reflect upon the ways in which epistemologies of ignorance and their matching stories of cancer as natural pathology/enemy/doppelgänger/terrorist are nourished at the individual level of experience of cancer patients and their companions and carers.

Prayer for Family and Friends: The Body and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Britain

AbstractThis article explores how writers, predominantly adhering to a variety of different Christian denominations but also including Jewish writers, discussed religion and the body in letters throughout the long eighteenth century. It draws on a corpus of over 2,500 familiar letters written by men and women of different denominations between 1675 and 1820. That these letters were not chosen because of their religious content makes them a good ‘test’ of the role of faith in everyday understandings of the body. This article underscores the continued centrality of religious discourse and devotional practice in eighteenth-century everyday life. Our research finds that religion was a commonplace register deployed when discussing bodily matters throughout the long eighteenth century. Significantly, this was the case for individuals who otherwise made scant reference to their faith. Discussion of the physical body encouraged recourse to providence, a public discussion of doctrine, and the shared expression of devotion. The ongoing force of religion in people’s lives was thus intimately tied to their embodied experiences. Letters not only expressed but actively maintained this widely shared religious framework for understanding the body.

Webs of Self, Webs of Meaning. Three Female Fragmentary Portraits in Post-Digital Print Comics

The present paper analyses the work of three contemporary, independent women artists active in the Portuguese comics scene: Hetamoé, Joana Mosi, and Ana Margarida Matos. It provides a close formal reading of their work by following Peter Wollen's seminal article on counter-cinema. Despite the caveats of adopting whole cloth and in a clearcut manner notions from different media, there are enough commonalities and narratological features that provide stimulating comparisons. As in cinema, comics also have a broadly accepted normative understanding of comics' way of creating meaning, against which these three authors present what one can call, after Wollen, resisting formal strategies. Portuguese comics have had a troubled history, which entails a difficult economic development and the lack of wider social recognition (as a culturally relevant field). However, its most independent realms and sub-cultures have provided ample proof of engaged, informed, and inventive individual creators. Women creators are no exception to this, and this particular group shows three potentialities of opening up the field, both politically and aesthetically. Moreover, these same de/re/constructive strategies broach issues associated with identity, self-portrait, bodily matters, memory, and the very meaning-making processes at the core of their work. The feminist dimensions of their work, albeit quite varied, allow one to detect intense interpretations of the self and the role of womanhood in a broader process of self-actualization and social life. Thus, I will use Sianne Ngai's notions of "cuteness" and "animatedness" to understand the three author's specific manners of doing so, as depicted and constructed within the medium of comics.

‘Getting in and going’: Access to onboard toilets for fat and disabled people on commercial aircraft

In this paper we explore the accessibility of toilets onboard commercial aircraft for passengers who identify as fat or fat and disabled. Drawing on qualitative survey and interview data, we discuss people’s experiences of inaccessible onboard toilet spaces including getting to and into the toilet, managing bodily matter, anticipating a lack of accessible toilets, and the (il)legitimacy of fat and disabled air passengers within commercial aircraft regulations. Our data illustrate that current provision of onboard toilets is wholly inadequate for fat and disabled passengers, requiring strategies to manage bodily matter which are detrimental to health. We further ‘fat geographies’ research and relational understandings of embodiment that attend to spatial and temporal contingency by drawing together insights from disability, crip, gender, queer and trans theory, in particular conceptualisations of ‘misfit(ting)’, crip time, and (il)legitimate lives.

The Materiality of Power and Bodily Matter(ing): Embodied Resistance in Palestine

To resist the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, Palestinian prisoners are smuggling sperm samples out of Israeli prisons to enable their wives to undergo fertility treatment. Bodies and bodily matter figure as central actors in this practice of resistance. In this article, I draw from fieldwork I conducted with Palestinian women and medical staff in the occupied West Bank to examine the tension between carcerality and matter(ing). I argue that bodies and bodily matter are constitutive of the relationship between oppression and resistance. I analyze how Israeli military authorities assign evidentiary status to Palestinian bodies and illustrate how Palestinian families challenge the Israeli carceral system through new modes of embodied resistance. This article demonstrates how intersecting forms of oppression shape and are being shaped by bodies and their materiality. It also suggests that theorizing the materiality of power from Palestine offers new ways of understanding the political work that bodies do.

Etiopathogenic theories of nervous system diseases in Vilnius in the early 19th century: “insanity and epilepsy exacerbate when the moonlight shines”

Neurology as a separate branch of clinical medicine was not yet formed in Europe in the early 19th century. However, in the medical writings of the Vilnius University (VU) authors of that time, the brain was already called the “noblest organ of the human body”, the seat of the soul, the centre of external senses, and the primary beginning of all bodily movements. The aim of the present study is to reveal various etiopathogenic theories of diseases of the nervous system (NS) in Vilnius region, since this knowledge may indicate that there were some beginnings of clinical neurology in the early 19th century in Vilnius. First, we analysed old doctoral dissertations on NS diseases defended at VU in 1803-1832; we then turned to Consessus Caesareae Societatis Medicae Vilnensis (The Protocols of Vilnius Medical Society) and analysed clinical reports recorded in 1806-1842. Our study revealed that although humoralism was the most popular system of medicine, the main causes of NS diseases were believed to be in the solid parts of the human body (influence of solidism theory). It was also assumed that some NS diseases may be inherited or caused by fetal diseases in utero. On the other hand, one of the oldest theories, imaginatio gravidarum, was still prevalent in Vilnius at the time. It was also stated that some NS diseases may be triggered by physical and mechanical causes, concomitant diseases, medications and drinks, strong emotions, or violation of sleep hygiene. “Inflammatory agents” were reported to cause traumatic tetanus as inflammation spread upwards from the nerve endings, tendons, and ligaments to the brain. The authors also described the theory of “poison, specifically acting on the NS” that was transmitted by a rabid animal to a bitten patient. To describe the etiopathogenesis of spinal cord diseases, the concept of “diminishing vital spirits through the loss of bodily matter” was used (it was claimed, e.g., that excessive number of sexual intercourses dried out the spinal cord). In addition, the astrological causes of NS diseases were also believed to be of great importance (“somnambulism, insanity, and epilepsy exacerbate when the moonlight shines”). Finally, cutting off the Polish plait (plica polonica) was considered to be an essential etiological factor of various NS diseases in Vilnius in the early 19th century.

Choosing Threat, Embodying the Viral

Choosing Threat, Embodying the Viral

Influence of Natural and Creative Elements in the Intel-lectual Development of the Children and Youths and its Impact on Human Society

Nature is a composite phenomenon of all the physically identifiable and visible objects. However, there is an invisible nature which exists in human mind. The reflection of bodily existent things or matters or images appear in the mind which finally work as principle sources of basic knowledge in human thought processes. The mental state here is to be considered as the sky in a natural atmosphere. Thus, the human mind acts not only as a reservoir of memory function rather it also works like a camera which takes the picture of seen or perceived objects and stimulates the person to think, to contemplate or to enjoy or feel sorrow - confounding the criteria of the natural objects or images. This is why the types of elements or the shape of nature is important to form a child’s mind. Creative elements such as games, TV serials, books or other study materials, have more impact than the natural one which might divert a child from natural mental growth to a synthetic or superficial manifestation. In most of the cases these creative elements are designed and motivated by the subjective notion of the politicians - government officials or state organs to try to model their citizens.
 The paper, providing with the definition of natural and phenomenal objects, analyses the issues related to nature, mind, self, perception, individuals, society, and more specifically relations between the acquisition of child perception and the effect of creative and natural elements using primary and secondary sources of materials. Finally it will make a proposition for the responsible authorities in order to enable them to understand how to help the children and the youths to get appropriate atmosphere of achieving perfect knowledge.

Un]Muffled Histories

This article focuses on the translating practices of people of African descent and Amerindians in the early modern Caribbean. The history of translation processes in the interconnected constellation of islands and shorelines that constituted the early modern Caribbean provides a framework for thinking about translation that exists outside analytical models based on notions of subalterities, center-periphery, or “contact zones.” Narratives about translation based on imperial and colonial dynamics, or those that depend on the divides between nature and culture Europeans ideated in the seventeenth century, are not apposite for uncovering the history of medical translation in the Caribbean. By stepping outside of these narratives, this article shows how, in the early modern Caribbean, a multitude of people—Caribbean Amerindians, and migrants, mostly kidnapped people from Africa and their descendants—developed rich communal processes of translation around bodily matters.

Experiencing textures: the materiality of illegitimacy in Wilkie Collins’s No Name

ABSTRACT This article introduces texture as a key category of material analysis in Victorian literature and culture. Challenging distinctions between inside and outside structures, texture offers not only a complex, multi-layered understanding of material surfaces but also provides aesthetic and interpretive tools for rendering and analysing matter in literary and cultural representations. Drawing on Wilkie Collins’s No Name, this article argues that the novel presents the protagonist’s illegitimacy as a material condition by foregrounding the textural qualities of her bodily surface. Textural principles serve as a central technique of characterisation in No Name and are a crucial device through which the characters shape themselves and assess each other. As a means of interrogating Victorian laws and norms, the novel uses textures to show how normative conceptions of (il)legitimacy inform the characters’ and the narrator’s perception of (bodily) matter. The article shows how the novel’s textural construction of bodily materiality undermines comfortable distinctions between inside and outside, subject and object, as well as legitimate and illegitimate.

On the matter of essence

A large literature suggests that people attribute the inborn properties of living things to their essence. Here, I explore the possibility that the essence of living things must be further embodied, and that this presumption guides intuitive reasoning about all of an organism's inherited properties, physical and psychological. Accordingly, when people reason about agentive living things (animals and humans), they presume that (a) Their essence must exhibit the properties of bodily matter— it must occupy a certain location in space, and it must be comprised of some appropriate organic substance that is anchored in the body; (b) Inborn (essentialized) traits must be embodied, and conversely, embodied traits are likely innate; and (c) The identity of biological kinds and by extension, one's psychological core, are defined by the material properties of their essence. I show that the embodiment hypothesis can capture numerous phenomena, ranging from laypeople's intuitions about which psychological traits are plausibly innate to their perception of the self and its capacity to migrate to humanoids and reemerge after death.

From Scent Projection to Respiratory Protection: Designing Digital Olfactory Interactions for Fashion Wearables

ABSTRACT In recent times, environmental and psychological threats revive protective dress forms, specifically the mask. Threats such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and technological infrastructures of surveillance capitalism, materially shape social realities. This paper explores current doctoral research, the AURA case study, which accounts for the cultural, contextual undercurrents and hidden operations of these threats, and how they refashion wearables practice. AURA is a series of Internet of Things (IoT) connected, olfactory wearables that render sensor-captured data into digital scent display. The author argues that bodies, as the subject of and venue for data extraction, are invested in, and fashioned by, bio-political power structures of systemic surveillance. A critical approach examines how bodies are materially re-crafted by physiological and psychological hazards—proposing an expanded understanding of technology as a bodily matter of the social practice of dress. The focus is to lend the notion of bodily matters as an analytical filter for reading important insights from fashion, and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) studies through one another while proposing a subversive reworking of olfactory interfaces for wearables. This research employs critical fashion practice to embed wireless communication technologies and digital olfactory data visualisation for a spectrum of purposes, from wearable scent displays to protective forms that shield the body from airborne contaminants. Thoughtful dialogue in temporary public forums and workshops gathers specific issues of automated olfactory display where capitalised technology applications and a global pandemic converge. Community-defined perceived harms and external threats warrant personal protection. The olfactory sense is a way to access emotion-based, ecological and ethical connections across spatial and temporal scales in speculative wearables design. This paper outlines changing roles and practices for multi-sensory wearables innovation, working to suggest new modes beyond current technology development paradigms, for empowered and meaningful interactions in networked data infrastructures.

Muck, Mummies and Medicine: Disgust in Early Modern Science

Abstract This essay shows that early modern practices that used human bodily matter cannot be – as hitherto – explained by the absence of the emotion of disgust nor as being conducted in spite of disgust. Instead, it proposes to read those practices’ changing history as part of the history of the ‘paradox of disgust’. Four case studies (on anatomy, excrement, mummies and skulls) demonstrate that disgust was highly productive: it attracted fascination, allowed physicians to fashion themselves, and was even believed capable of healing. Over time and for complex reasons, however, the productive side of disgust declined. Combining current approaches in the history of emotions and material culture studies, this essay sets out not only to propose a new narrative for the changing role of disgust in early modern science and societies, but also to explore how variations in settings and human intervention changed the way emotions were used and perceived.

The Power of Necropolitics: Affect Theory and Violence in Perspective

This article offers an overview of the central arguments and theoretical contributions of affect theory insofar as they are interrelated to and connected with feminist thought. Necropolitics or the right to kill or to destroy is the theme of this two-part essay. This first section points to how the affective turn presents a return of critical theory to bodily matter. Of special importance is the argument regarding the specific manner in which affective studies enable a strong grounding for social action and change by centering its theorizations on interpersonal and relational issues. Whereas the first part of this essay traces a panorama of how the affective proposes a new methodology for thinking about sentience and responsibility, the second section pays special attention to the entanglement of violence and heteronormative affections. The focus is on political violence, with particular attention paid to the Basque situation, on the inadmissible "right to kill" claimed by the warrior that involves a peculiar destructive (mis)understanding of community and of the self. Contrary to the necropolitical logic, the authors propose a feminist ethos linked to an understanding of the affective interstices that open up when emphasis is redirected from the anchors of social bonds/affects to those of direct interpersonal negotiation. In order to outline some of the affective movement entailed in the rethinking of identity in feminist terms needed for an undoing of the necropolitical energy in political violence—what Roland Barthes, terms "the neutral" (2005)—we focus on restorative justice and its affective universe

Embodiment is Ecological: The Metabolic Lives of Whey Protein Powder

This article explores the metabolic lives of whey powder, the most popular form of protein supplement in what has become a multibillion-dollar industry during the past two decades. Faced with the slippery and elusive properties latent to this multiplicitous substance, our approach is to follow whey powder from its mid-20th century emergence as a noxious byproduct of industrial dairy production, through the human and animal bodies unevenly tasked with its processing, and out into waterways, where its nitrogen density rematerializes as a pollutant. We show how whey powder emerged as a solution to the environmental damage posed by whey pollution, how such damage is an effect of the systematic overproduction endemic to agrofood industries and how whey’s toxicity persists through processes of metabolism and consumption, despite attempts to process and profit from its vital capacities. Throughout, we argue that whey exemplifies ecological embodiment, understood as the co-constitutive relations between bodily matter and ecological life, and their entanglement with processes of commodification.

The nature, function, and destiny of the human body—Origen’s interpretation of 1 Cor 15

Abstract In this article, I will investigate Origen’s use of two metaphors: The seed metaphor and the clothing metaphor. Both metaphors are found in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, which Origen uses as his biblical foundation in the passage from On First Principles that will be analyzed in this article. My focus will be on how Origen understands the nature, the function, and the destiny of human beings and especially of human bodies. According to Origen, the nature of the human body is changeable and unstable. This is because the bodily matter has merely been added to the rational beings at a certain time and will disappear again when its function is fulfilled. The function of the human body is to clothe the rational being on its way through fall and spiritual progress towards perfection. Thus, the body allows the rational being to be punished and educated. The destiny of the human body is eventually to disappear, but this will only happen when the body has gone through many stages of fall and progress in its service of the rational being.

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ARE ALL WOMEN HERMAPHRODITES? ON PENIS DUMMIES, CLITORISES AND SEX DIFFERENCES IN EARLY MODERN ANATOMY
 This article shows how the clitoris as an anatomical discovery throughout the early modern period was debated, represented and conceptualized in the life sciences both as an anatomical object and as an emblem of (digressing) sex difference, linking theories on generation and the parts of generation. The anatomical explorations of the body and the parts of generation were paramount for answering the questions of generation, but also for procuring the empirical foundations for theories on bodily matter. As well as showcasing corporeal ontologies different from our contemporary ones, the goal is to convey the scientific explanations for the clitoris as a bodily structure and the significances it carried within the early modern life sciences. My reading is preoccupied with the importance of the natural philosophical answers to some of the corporeal questions that the clitoris raised. In a way, this runs counter to sociopolitical readings of the history of the body that sometimes fail to sufficiently account for the engagement with the warm, wet and born characteristics of the body.

Introduction: Bodies/Objects/Agents

Introduction:Bodies/Objects/Agents Holly Dugan (bio) and Melissa J. Jones (bio) We began brainstorming for this special issue in June 2016, when the threat of Donald Trump's election as president was looming but was not yet a certainty. We recognized the structures of white nationalism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism that buoyed his campaign, and we wanted to think critically about them, especially about their intersections with the work we do in the academy. We were worried: taken aback by the sight of a presidential candidate openly mocking a disabled journalist onstage; sickened and angered by relentless images of police violence against black men and women; ashamed at witnessing white supremacists taunting immigrant individuals and families seeking asylum. We knew that we, too, were vulnerable, as states lined up to roll back reproductive rights, anti-discrimination laws, and workers' protections. Bodies that we loved, inhabited, and communed with were under attack. What value did literature hold in such a moment, we wondered, especially when so many canonical authors and their works felt reiterative of those same structures of oppression? What use was our archival study of oppression when faced with physical and emotional challenges in real time? And what tools were we equipped to offer our students that might help them to survive these times? Three years later, here we are. The structures of oppression that culminated in the 2016 election were not new. What does feel new, however, is an emboldening of white male power across the globe, a kind of narrative of normalcy around issues and ideas that were once interpreted as radical and extreme. Teaching in the humanities has also gotten much harder. Institutional [End Page 289] pressures have stretched departmental budgets, degraded our labor, and intruded in our classrooms. Many of our colleagues are working without the protection of tenure, in non-renewable, temporary appointments. Some have been targeted by hate groups for simply teaching about black lives in classical and premodern eras. And the work in our classrooms has changed, as our students collectively process, analyze, and confront the violent effects of this rise in white power on our campuses and in our communities. At the same time, new narrative modes of embodiment, history, and materialism have transformed the humanities and its objects of analysis. In this journal issue, we want to explore the activist potential for such critical work, focusing particularly on posthumanist trends as both historical products of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century neoliberalism (vis-à-vis N. Katherine Hayles's 1999 How We Became Posthuman) and as philosophical provocations that challenge bodily boundaries (vis-à-vis crip, queer, feminist, and trans theory). How do these new theories of bodily matter engage with and support the political work of pro-choice and Black Lives Matter movements, for instance? Or the activism of disability justice and transgender rights groups? Posthumanist theory categorically protests the 'human' embedded in the humanities, explicitly naming the problem of bias built into western philosophical traditions, and it lays bare the terms by which some individuals and groups benefit from the liberal arts while others do not. Rooted in feminist theories about agency and stemming from crip, queer, and trans challenges to embodiment norms, the posthuman demands new narratives about being and becoming. Object-oriented ontologies (OOO) further blur the boundaries of 'subject/object/agent,' questioning what constitutes matter at all: are discursive objects more or less real than physical ones? Following the logic of Bruno Latour's theory of actor-networks as social fields in which everything both can act and be acted upon, OOO-inflected analyses flatten ontologies of difference, rendering all matter equally agentic. Karen Barad's theory of "mattering," a term that describes not only visceral experiences of embodiment but also the frameworks that ascribe meaning and value to these experiences, further argues that discursive matter impacts physical matter. "Accountability and responsibility," Barad chides, "must be thought in terms of what matters and what is excluded from mattering" (357). [End Page 290] What does this mean for activism? What new stakes are raised for the stories we tell about the future and the past? This issue aims to explore what happens when we...

Mobility Reports: Artistic Representations of Mobility Experiences

Abstract The new mobility paradigm has expanded from geographically related mobility to various forms of sociocultural and intercultural mobility, which are studied through multidisciplinary approaches. This article focuses on the individual experiences of mobility and various embodied border crossings represented in artistic genres and performances in the context of Finland. The theoretical background of the article draws on literature research and cultural anthropology, which both include the discussions initiated by the affective and iconic turn in cultural studies. The affective turn promotes the move from constructionism to the broad framework of new materialism that links critical theory and cultural criticism to bodily matter and matter in general. The iconic turn seeks to acknowledge that artistic and visual cognition of reality is to be understood as equal to scientific forms of representation. People's understanding of the world is based on experiences that have a bodily and material foundation and consist of both individually formed and culturally learned elements. Because artistic genres constitute a specific form of knowledge that has its foundation in (bodily) experiences, this article claims that studying artistic genres in the context of mobility can provide a new understanding and ways of conceptualizing of a mobile subject and mobility experience.

Man’s animality in the light of st. Augustine’s philosophical works

As a corporeal being, man is part of the material world, he lives and is subject to processes similar to those which prevail in the world of animals and exceeds them only owing to the fact that he possesses a rational soul. Thus, although a body makes animality possible for a man to exist and function, its nature, meaning man’s similarity to animals, is defined mainly by the relationship between the soul and body. Since animals do not have minds, animality understood on the ontological level is something man and animals share in common. St. Augustine describes this as experiencing bodily sensations by the sensual being, which, because of their turning towards material things, lives in the world of bodily sensations and finds their place in it. Therefore, this is irrational delectation in bodily matters. This animality in humans is also considered as a possible lifestyle, which means it is an object of the will’s choice and assumes the form of the process of becoming similar to animals in the moral sense. It consists in the fact that man, who is created in the image and likeness of God, being turned to Him by nature, yet due to the sin of pride turns away from Him and from contemplation of eternal truths, and because of covetousness goes towards the carnal world. Being pleased with worldly possessions and directing his desires towards them, man becomes accustomed to existing among corporeal matters, forgetting about God and his own nature, and aspires to sensual pleasures. Therefore, the consequence of turn­ing away from the Creator and lustfully turning to worldly possessions is blind­ness that leads him or her into slavery of corporeality and idolatry.