Imagined Body Research Articles

Eat me(at): phantom animality and spectral posthumanism in Antiviral (2012)

ABSTRACT Recent scholarship pays increasing attention to human-animal relations and the question of the animal. This article advances these developments by utilizing a cultural materialist perspective within the framework of animal studies to map the traces of a lost animal life embedded within the culture industry of director Brandon Cronenberg’s 2012 dystopian science fiction film Antiviral. Engaging with Akira Lippit’s concept of animetaphor and Nicole Shukin’s subsequent work on animal capital, this paper argues that a phantom animal(ity) pervades Antiviral, highlighting the haunting, ‘absent present’ status of animals in capitalist society. By replacing dead, dying, commodity animals with humans, Cronenberg’s work facilitates a spectral posthumanist perspective that raises awareness about the reality and lived experience of commodified animals. This particular utilization of phantom animality reinforces the idea that technology, far from preserving animal life in virtual form, actually incorporates animals into capitalism. By following the tracks of a phantom animal across a cinematic landscape of imagined bodies, technologies, industries and topographies, this article shows the ways in which the future cannibalism depicted in Antiviral is surrounded and haunted by animal life.

Learning the arrangement of objects in small-scale environment: Influence of viewpoint during learning and imagined body orientation on directional judgments

Learning the arrangement of objects in small-scale environment: Influence of viewpoint during learning and imagined body orientation on directional judgments

Embodied displacements in young German children’s storytelling

This paper is concerned with embodied processes of joint imagination in young children’s narrative interactions. Based on Karl Bühler’s notion of ‘deixis in the imagination’, it examines in detail how a 19-month-old German-speaking child, engaged in picture book reading with his mother, brings about different subtypes of deixis in the imagination by either ‘displacing’ what is absent into the given order of perception (e.g. by using the hand as a token for an object) or displacing his origo to an imagined space (e.g. by kinaesthetically aligning his body with an imagined body and animating his movements). Drawing on multimodal analysis and the concept of layering in interaction, the study analyses the ways in which the picture book as well as deictic, depictive, vocal and lexical resources are coordinated to evoke a narrative space, co-enact the storybook character’s experiences and produce reciprocal affect displays. Findings demonstrate that different types of displacement are in play quite early in childhood; displacements in the dimension of space and person are produced through layerings of spaces, voices and bodies.

Women With Obesity Are Not as Curvy as They Think: Consequences on Their Everyday Life Behavior.

Two studies explore the impact of body size on daily life activities of women with obesity. In the first study, ethnographic techniques (first-person perspective video recordings) and subsequent interviews based on the video recordings were used. Results showed atypical behavior of women with obesity and ex-obese women related to memories of embarrassing experiences regarding personal body size (sitting, passing doors sideways, over-careful navigation in public space, and choosing clothes sizes too large.) Women with obesity seem to behave as if they thought they had a larger body than it actually was. These atypical behaviors are related to memories of embarrassing experiences regarding personal body size and stigma. Overweight women exhibit the same behavior but to a lesser and less systematic degree. In the second study, the represented (imagined) body size was compared to the perceived (in a mirror) body size with digital morphing techniques. In the mirror condition, the perceived image is accurate, while in the absence of a mirror women with obesity overestimate their body size by about 30%. Moreover, overestimation of imagined body size increased according to the weight status. Finally, women who had bariatric surgery had poorer estimates than women who had not. This would result of being continuously reminded of obesity and its stigma by daily embarrassing experiences, by being confronted with an environment designed for normal weight (e.g., narrow seats, turnstiles etc.) that makes obesity salient. We suggest that body size overestimation is a case of accentuation where things that matter are perceived bigger. These results could also been explained by the allocentric lock theory.

Investigar narrativamente en educación física con relatos corporales

<p>El cuerpo y todo lo que ello significa en las relaciones humanas está de moda. Sin embargo, la sociedad actual sigue presentándonos lo corporal como una cuestión mecanizada, mercantilizada y cosificada. Los diferentes discursos mediáticos y los modelos corporales hegemónicos, tanto en espacios culturales como educativos, se filtran en nuestra sensorialidad como modelos a reproducir. De ahí que acceder a la experiencia de las personas a través de sus relatos, de sus narraciones y biografías corporales, nos brinden un modo de comprender y entender cómo las personas viven sus cuerpos a través del movimiento. El enfoque y posicionamiento de la investigación narrativa puede darnos claves para incorporar y considerar que investigar, sobre todo en el ámbito de lo corporal en educación, implica un compromiso social, político y ético que no es ajeno a las personas, sobre todo porque atañe a los más íntimo, al cuerpo, ese límite entre lo privado y lo público, entre lo expresado y lo “vivido-sentido”. A través de los relatos accedemos al imaginario que los y las estudiantes construyen acerca de la idea de ser educadores o educadoras del movimiento, ya que en sus historias se pone de manifiesto esquemas prácticos para la toma de decisiones, tanto en su formación como en su futura profesión. Los relatos y performances del alumnado dejan entrever elementos que nos permiten hacer del cuerpo un espacio de convergencia discursiva en torno a lo que hemos denominado “cuerpos dietéticos, cuerpos sufridos, cuerpos imaginados y cuerpos lenguajeados”.</p>

Tactile Crease: The Embodiment of Anti-IVF Discourses in Poland The Embodiment of Anti-IVF Discourses in Poland

In Poland, in vitro fertilization (IVF) is often a contested procedure, as it is not accepted by Catholic bioethics. This rejection mobilizes a wide range of views and arguments about IVF, some of which circulate only in the local discourse. A very potent local concept is the “tactile crease” (bruzda dotykowa) that is said to mark the foreheads of children conceived with IVF. This term, coined in 2013 by a priest who is also a professor of law, represents one way in which the political discourse shapes the imagined body of the Other. In this paper, the analysis of the origins and resonance of the “tactile crease” in the Polish public discourse is confronted with the results of anthropological research among children conceived with IVF and their families.

Optimizing Prediction Model for a Noninvasive Brain-Computer Interface Platform Using Channel Selection, Classification, and Regression.

A brain-computer interface (BCI) platform can be utilized by a user to control an external device without making any overt movements. An EEG-based computer cursor control task is commonly used as a testbed for BCI applications. While traditional computer cursor control schemes are based on sensorimotor rhythm, a new scheme has recently been developed using imagined body kinematics (IBK) to achieve natural cursor movement in a shorter time of training. This article attempts to explore optimal decoding algorithms for an IBK paradigm using EEG signals with application to neural cursor control. The study is based on an offline analysis of 32 healthy subjects' training data. Various machine learning techniques were implemented to predict the kinematics of the computer cursor using EEG signals during the training tasks. Our results showed that a linear regression least squares model yielded the highest goodness-of-fit scores in the cursor kinematics model (70% in horizontal prediction and 40% in vertical prediction using a Theil-Sen regressor). Additionally, the contribution of each EEG channel on the predictability of cursor kinematics was examined for horizontal and vertical directions, separately. A directional classifier was also proposed to classify horizontal versus vertical cursor kinematics using EEG signals. By incorporating features extracted from specific frequency bands, we achieved 80% classification accuracy in differentiating horizontal and vertical cursor movements. The findings of the current study could facilitate a pathway to designing an optimized online neural cursor control.

IMAGES AT WORK: NARRATIVES IN WORDS AND PICTURES

Images are not innocent. Even though they arise from us, and often are made by us, they face and challenge us as if they lived a life of their own. Once they have appeared or have been produced, they acquire separate existence and indisputable reality of independent beings, which populate and shape our outer and inner world. As sensitive or imagined bodies they enter in resonance with our own sentient and imagining body. Human body is indeed the “locus of images” incessantly moving and acting on the ever-changing scene of our memory and imagination (i.e. of our own ‘fluctuating’ Self): thereby images are responsible for what we are as well as for what we wish (or dream) to be. Images are not innocent because they are neither inert nor lifeless. We are never safe in the presence of images: they can be alluring or frightening, reassuring or threatening, familiar or disquieting, lifesaving or harmful; they can impede or elicit action. Such irreducible ontological problematic, yet unmistakably empathic, nature of our relationship with images, is, in this essay, surveyed in the light of the reflections of Aby Warburg and Italo Calvino. Warburg’s theory of Pathosformeln and Calvino’s account of the role of visual images in his own verbal narratives, then provide the theoretical horizon for interpreting the narration by images sculpted by the medieval architect Biduinus on the façade of the XII century church of Saint Casciano of Cascina, near Pisa, and thereby unfolding the symbolical, iconological and metaphysical implications of its powerfully empathic imagery.

Distribution statistique de la taille imaginale de Pterostichus madidus (Fabricius, 1775) dans les plaines de l’est de la France : de la nécessité de rechercher ses composantes géographiques et historiques

Pterostichus madidus (Fabricius, 1775) imaginal body size is defined as the distance between elytron and mandible tips, when mandibles lay in their resting position. Its statistical distribution was estimated from 658 specimens, that had been pitfall-trapped in the 2007-2016 year span along a northward transect across the French lowlands of Côte-d’Or, Meurthe-et-Moselle and Moselle. The sampling targeted exploited, protected and unmanaged woodlands. It involved one national and two regional nature reserves. No response to the deliberately restricted elevational range was detected. Females displayed the more obvious response to the latitudinal shift, which took the form of a steep inversed Bergmann’s cline. The ones, that originated from the transect southernmost end were found to be 0.7 millimeters longer on average. Though males variance turned out to be heterogeneous and their latitudinal cline to be made looser by some important local variation, no significant southward increase of sexual dimorphism could be demonstrated. Specimens pooled from our 2012-2016 collections in Côte-d’Or were compared to an additional museum sample, that gathered beetles obtained from the same or neighboring locations in 1978-1998. It was observed, that the 2012-2016 females had lengthened by an average amount of 0.7 mm, thus yielding a first coleopteran case of a generational shift for a terrestrial species observed within its natural range and under natural conditions. Given the phenomenon spatial scale, the likelihood of it being a response to climate change is discussed considering knowledge gaps about larval trophic network and theoretical models of ectotherm organisms reaction to temperature increase.

The body that can(not) represent us—Tian Chi-Yuan's White Water and modern Taiwanese theatre

ABSTRACTThe denial of Taiwan's status as a nation by international communities has long-served as a catalyst for Taiwanese theatre practitioners’ pursuit of an expressive body that responds to complex national identities. Taking Taiwanese society as the basis for considering the irreducible complexity of postcolonial struggles vis-à-vis the power relations of neoliberal cultural production, in the theoretical framework of this paper, I propose a biopolitical reading of modern Taiwanese theatre. In particular, to reveal the constructedness of the idea of the body, I foreground the embeddedness of theatre in local society and scrutinize the interplay between an imagined body and the theatre through Taiwanese practitioner Tian Chi-Yuan's (1964–1996) White Water (or Baishui, 1993). Using this work as a case study, I focus on his experiment of intercultural bodily gestures through which the fabrication of national identity is both revealed and questioned. I consider Tian's practice of integrating cultural traditions expressive of the dynamics of decolonization with the experiment in reconfiguring the local body—a practice that positions the theatre in Taiwan as an experimental and cathartic site for pursuing an epistemological change in identity formation. Thus, the theatre constitutes a performance of a necessary identity-burdened space between history and memory, struggling to renew itself in distinctive contexts.

Ahmed Khaled Towfik: Days of Rage and Horror in Arabic Science Fiction

ABSTRACTWhen Egyptian author Ahmed Khaled Towfik died unexpectedly in 2018, he left behind a vast and richly imagined body of literature. The following article examines one thread of Towfik’s literary universe: the interconnectivity of moral decadence, information and communication technology, and revolution. Examining in detail Towfik’s major works from the post-2011 period, this article also brings into focus the greater arc of Arabic science fiction and the relationship of the nascent genre to the region’s largely static history of utopic political movements.

Sequence-based manipulation of robotic arm control in brain machine interface

In brain machine interfaces (BMI), the brain activities are recorded by invasive or noninvasive approaches and translated into command signals to control external prosthetic devices such as a computer cursor, a wheelchair, or a robotic arm. Although many studies confirmed the capability of BMI systems in controlling multi degrees-of-freedom (DOF) prosthetic devices using invasive approaches, BMI research using noninvasive paradigms is still in its infancy. In this paper, a new robotic BMI platform has been developed using electroencephalography (EEG) technology to control a 6-DOF robotic arm. EEG signals were collected from the scalp using a wireless headset exploiting a new fast-training paradigm named as “imagined body kinematics”. A regression model was employed to decode the kinematic parameters from the EEG signals. The subjects were instructed to voluntarily control a virtual cursor in multiple trials to hit different pre-programmed targets on a screen in an optimized sequence. The command signals generated from hitting the targets during trials were applied to control sequential movements of the robotic arm in a discrete manner to manipulate an object in a two-dimensional workspace. This approach is derived from a basic shared control strategy where the robotic arm is responsible for carrying out complex maneuvers based on the user’s intention. Our proposed BMI platform yielded a high success rate of 70% in a sequence-based manipulation task after only a short time of training (10 min). The developed platform serves as a proof-of-concept for EEG-based neuro-prosthetic devices.

Panic! Humanity's Cis-Heteronormative Fear of the Transgender Android

Androids occupy a position of fascination within US pop culture and science fiction television, yet they rarely acknowledge their own experiences of gender. Reading Wendy the entertainment android from Syfy Channel's Dark Matter (2015–2017) as trans*, this article analyzes the material, cultural, and imagined bodies of the android through an intersectional lens of gender, sex, and race. At times, the article slips between different versions of the transgender android, wading through their cinematic representation, theoretical conceptualization, socio-cultural construction, and material reality, striving always to relate these overlapping categories to the android's trans* and technological body. First, the article delves into gender, race, and David Huebert's ‘species panic’, arguing that the triply othered transgender android would inspire a triple panic with direct ramifications for trans* bodies, especially trans women of color. The article then addresses the role of the multilayered cinematic, scientific, raced, cis-heteronormative gaze in the biopolitical ordering of life. Using Susan Stryker's theorization of passing and micha cárdenas's practice of the shift, the article then views sexual encounters as creating both the potential for and then panic of transgender otherness. This potential and potentially real panic then directly impacts the bodies of trans women of color and transgender androids through a reliance on sex work narratives and the commodification of sex.

Gender Policies and Amateur Sports in Early Yugoslav Socialism

This article examines particularities of the communist gender policies towards sportswomen and men in early Yugoslav socialism. By situating Yugoslav gender history of sport in transnational perspective, it points to Soviet influences on the formation of sport policies in the early Yugoslav socialism. The article sheds a new light on how gender policies towards sports were articulated, and domesticated in Yugoslav practice. By paying close attention to how the Yugoslav communists imagined appropriate gender roles, whilst analysing the notions of gender they ascribed to sport activities, this article demonstrates that the Party not only excluded women from participating in certain sports, but that reproductive policies, the notions of gender, and the production of imagined bodies in which socialist masculinity was the key construct, crucially contributed to the gender regime in sports. The article emphasizes gender power relations ingrained into sport activities offered to young people, despite the fact that a large number of young women participated in sports for the first time.

Imagined bodies: architects and their constructions of later life

ABSTRACTThis article comprises a sociological analysis of how architects imagine the ageing body when designing residential care homes for later life and the extent to which they engage empathetically with users. Drawing on interviews with architectural professionals based in the United Kingdom, we offer insight into the ways in which architects envisage the bodies of those who they anticipate will populate their buildings. Deploying the notions of ‘body work’ and ‘the body multiple’, our analysis reveals how architects imagined a variety of bodies in nuanced ways. These imagined bodies emerge as they talked through the practicalities of the design process. Moreover, their conceptions of bodies were also permeated by prevailing ideologies of caring: although we found that they sought to resist dominant discourses of ageing, they nevertheless reproduced these discourses. Architects’ constructions of bodies are complicated by the collaborative nature of the design process, where we find an incessant juggling between the competing demands of multiple stakeholders, each of whom anticipate other imagined bodies and seek to shape the design of buildings to meet their requirements. Our findings extend a nascent sociological literature on architecture and social care by revealing how architects participate in the shaping of care for later life as ‘body workers’, but also how their empathic aspirations can be muted by other imperatives driving the marketisation of care.

Use Your Imagination: College Women's Responses to a Social-Evaluative Body Image Threat

This study examined psychological and heart rate responses to an imagined social-evaluative body image threat in women (N = 97). Participants were randomly assigned to picture themselves trying on swimsuits in a store with a group of friends (social-evaluative threat) or alone (non-social-evaluative threat). Measures of state body image and heart rate recordings were completed prior to and following the scenario. A significant group-by-time interaction was found for state body image, F(2, 93) = 3.69, p = .03, with the highest body shame and social physique anxiety reported in the social-evaluative group. No differences were found for heart rate. The findings highlight the usefulness of imagined scenarios when examining psychological responses and the challenges of capturing changes in physiological outcomes.

Aesthetics and Impossible Embodiment: Stevens, Imagery, and Disorientation

HAT MIGHT READERS do with imagery of Wallace Ste- vens' poetry? What kind of imaginative and aesthetic experi- ences might his poems enable? Such questions have wide im- plications, not just because they may influence our understanding of ways readers encounter poems, but because of role Stevens has played in story of lyric poetry and role concepts of aesthetic experi- ence have played in that story, too. His nearly constant foregrounding of imagery, sensation, and imagination, and their relation to a special kind of aesthetic experience, make questions about enacting imagery—that is, about one's own creation of representations of sensation and movement in mind as one reads—central. canonical criticism of Stevens' poetry has thus emphasized not just importance of imagery, but also that Ste- vens orchestrates a delicate play with felt experience of art, insisting that the naked poem is the imagination manifesting itself in its domi- nation of words (CPP 639). 1 If domination of imagination pro- duces particular aesthetic ends, however, what are they, and how might they come to be? In this essay, I argue that Stevens gives readers opportunity, as they engage imagery of sight, sound, and motion, to experience a form of oth- erwise impossible embodiment: an alteration or disruption of physical ex- perience that carries a distinct aesthetic signature of felt disorientation. As I will explain in detail below, one key way in which we actively engage with arts is by way of physical changes that are mediated both by artwork itself and by our own sensory architectures. Poems come to be embodied as we read them, and they affect our bodily experience in real time: they tend to disrupt status quo, altering it in ways that are otherwise generally unavailable in conscious life. Such manipulations or disruptions might come in form of a palimpsest of impressions from multiple viewpoints (e.g., Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird); seeming slowing down or speeding up of time (as with moment of light's vanishing in The Idea of Order at Key West); access to imagined bodies and minds radically different from our own (as with The Snow Man, watery back of Paltry Nude (CPP 5), or air of The

_____ While Black

Millennials are defined by their savvy integration of digital communication technologies and by their seamless incorporation of difference that has been communicated through formal policies and multicultural representations. Although diverse media platforms and people appear commonplace within the millennial milieu, this generation still faces what Amiri Baraka describes as the changing same. The changing cultural landscape has not drastically shifted power relations nor has it dramatically transformed how we mediate blackness under postrace. This article will examine the real and imagined body of the slain Florida teen Trayvon Martin, particularly how his body has animated White racial humor and rage, and has activated a new civil rights movement informed by hip hop. The Florida-based author will situate Martin within the post-hip-hop generation and address state policies policing Martin and other Black youth. Vaudevillian blackface minstrelsy as a form of race play will provide a historical backdrop for a discussion about new media blackness, such as mobile gaming, and social media postcards of theme parties and race-planking called trayvoning. The author not only will address Martin as a specific site to project of collective racial longing but will also point to ways minoritized Y’ers are a part of the collective new dream defenders to challenge racial terror today.

Multiple Perspectives on Body Image Research

Representation of the body is a nuclear aspect of self-image. Body representation includes both subjective and intersubjective experiences. The importance of visual body representation in our social life is demonstrated by the time we spend to take care of our physical appearance, including use of plastic surgery, as well as by the severe mental disorders associated to its alteration, including eating disorders (EDs) and body dysmorphic disorders. In spite of these issues, (neuro)psychological research on body representation has so far mainly focused on the body as a motor device, devoted to the perception of and interaction with objects. The complexity of factors involved in the development, maintenance, and plasticity of body image representations requires an integrated approach that facilitates the evaluation and treatment of EDs with novel, evidence-based, and more efficacious protocols. This special issue of European Psychologist aims to advance such an integrative approach, with a collection of papers that gather different perspectives on the phenomenological, cognitive, (neuro)psychological, and cultural aspects of body representation disorders.

Perilous Patches and Pitstaches

Although some research has examined men and women’s general attitudes toward women growing body hair, little research has engaged in a side-by-side examination of women’s imagined experiences of growing body hair with an experiential component of growing their own body hair. In the first of two studies, I asked a diverse community sample of women aged 18 to 59 to assess their impressions of women who grew body hair and to imagine their own, and others’, reactions to their hypothetical body hair growth. For the second study, I utilized response papers from 62 women from diverse backgrounds in an undergraduate women’s studies course, who grew their body hair for an assignment. Results showed overwhelming negativity toward women growing body hair in both studies, but they differed in perceptions of social control and individual agency. Women in Study 1, who merely imagined body hair growth, described it more nonchalantly and individualistically, citing personal choice and rarely acknowledging social pressures placed upon women even disgusted by other women’s body hair. Women in Study 2 regularly discussed unanticipated social pressures and norms, rarely discussed personal choice, and reported a constellation of difficulties, including homophobia, family and partner anger, and internalized disgust and “dirtiness.” These results on a seemingly “trivial” subject nuance the “rhetoric of choice” debate within feminist theories of the body while also illustrating a vivid experiential assignment that delves into women’s personal values, relationships, and social norms. Implications for assessing and changing attitudes about women’s bodies—particularly “abject” or “othered” bodies—are discussed.