Margrit Shildrick Research Articles

'These Chicks are Damaged Goods': The Abject Female Body in Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary and Warner's The Sopranos

The female body as a disruptive force was a dominant topic in the popular culture and literature of the 1990s, as well as in debates of the postfeminist theorists of the decade. As culture began to constantly scrutinise women’s bodies and obsessively fixate on unhealthy thinness and perpetual youth, an idealistic model of the female body was conceptualised: self-contained, perfectly smooth, with no biological functions or needs (vide McRobbie 57-8). Due to the impossibility of meeting these voyeuristic standards, the uncomfortable biological reality of womanhood has been perceived as deserving of societal degradation and unyielding control. This essay will examine the nature of Kristevan's abjection of female bodies in Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (1997) and Alan Warner’s The Sopranos (1999). I shall follow the thesis of Margrit Shildrick and Janet Price, which delineates the relationship between the physicality of the female body and the negative perception of women, outlined as such: ‘the body has a propensity to leak, to overflow the proper distinctions between self and other, to contaminate and engulf. Thus, women themselves are, in the conventional masculinist imagination, not simply inferior beings whose civil and social subordination is both inevitable and justified, but objects of fear and repulsion’ (3). I will argue that the female protagonists of these novels are unwilling to reject their corporeality despite its negative connotations; however, due to the all-encompassing nature of their patriarchal environments, they are unable to liberate themselves from the oppressive demarcations of female abjection.

Disability, culture, and erased sexuality: curated raw narratives of disabled women with significant impairments in India

Disabled women with significant impairments (DWSI) are not adequately recognised within feminist disability studies. They face stigma, carnal taboos, and systemic exclusion from economies of desire and sexuality. Their voices are seldom heard, and their stories, when captured, are whitewashed. There is an urgent need for these women to gain voice and visibility as a unique category within the political spectrum of women with disabilities so that their unique challenges can be identified and their rights restored. In-depth research aimed at spotlighting their unique challenges and vulnerabilities using ‘raw narratives’ as a novel method, exposed their tabooed and otherwise censored embodied experiences. This paper presents a candid case study of one such woman in India using narrative inquiry and autoethnography. Carol Thomas’ notion of ‘impairment effects’ and Margrit Shildrick’s concept of ‘embodied precarity’ are used to highlight how impairment effects, coupled with inadequate care infrastructure in India, force disabled women with significant impairments into chronic states of dependency and precarity, leading to an internalised loss of self-worth and agency. The wider use of raw narratives as a lens to probe unspoken elements of human experience and further study of DWSI as a community could enrich feminist disability studies.

An “Experiment” of Anti-Ableistic Equality During the COVID-19 Pandemic

For a short period of time, the COVID-19 pandemic destroyed a “natural” pyramid of ableism: the frequent encounters with the unknown virus and unpredictability of an organism’s reaction revealed the relativity and arbitrariness of the few main notions on which the ableistic practices were conceptually built. At the very beginning of the pandemic period, the frightening message about the unpredictability of a COVID-19 disease was broadly spread. This fear was based on the information that the criteria of the harshness of the individual illness are very strange: even strong and healthy people may experience severe symptoms of this disease. In this article, the similar moods are discussed as a part of posthumanist anxiety, which serves as an impetus to reconceptualize the following notions: the norm, the limit, the form, and the physical health. This brief rehearsal of the possible weakening of ableism was like a social experiment showing what a society that does not celebrate physical power would look like. The pandemic as a period of complete uncertainty and insecurity highlights the revelations of contingency and reminds us of vulnerability of human body and mind. Methodologically, the article is grounded on the intersection between two conceptual fields: the posthuman philosophy of the body (Gilbert Simondon, Elizabeth Grosz, Catherine Malabou, etc.) and a philosophical analysis of ableism and its predispositions (Georges Canguilhem, Margrit Shildrick, etc).

Subverting the Monster

Subverting the Monster

Leaky Bodies and the Stickiness of Testosterone in Women's Athletics

This article argues for a critical re-evaluation of anti-doping testing practices in international athletics, performed by The International Olympic Committee and World Athletics, as overseen by the World Anti-Doping Agency. By carefully analysing anti-doping testing procedures and data taking, the conceptions of the body, with its multiplicity and sticky properties of testosterone become evident, revealing obscured connections between anti-doping and sex testing practices. Using a biopolitical framework, I trace the ways anxieties over gender, athletic ability, and race shape molecular level testing mechanisms, constructing and de-constructing the body in the process. This article draws on New Materialist theories and Feminist Science and Technology Studies scholarship, including: Anne Fausto-Sterling’s history of hormones; Sara Ahmed’s concept of ‘sticking’; Annemarie Mol’s ‘the body multiple’; Rebecca Jordan-Young and Katrina Karkazis’s work on testosterone; and Margrit Shildrick’s theory of ‘leaky bodies’ to argue that the racialised and gendered history of testosterone continue to linger on in the ways this hormone is tested and regulated in women’s athletics. This biopolitical system of surveillance in international sports is founded on an ideal of the body as autonomous, whole, and classifiable within a sexed binary. Yet, there is a distinct tension between this understanding of the body and the ways testing is executed, which relies on leaks, extractions, dissections, and manipulations of the athlete’s bodily substances to in order to discipline it into normalising categories of sex.

Monstrous Women in Comics ed. by Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Rae Coody

Reviewed by: Monstrous Women in Comics ed. by Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Rae Coody Candida Rifkind (bio) Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Rae Coody, eds. Monstrous Women in Comics. University Press of Mississippi, 2020. 296 pp, $99, $30. Why are comics full of monsters? What can these monsters who lurk in the dark and on the margins tell us about a specific moment in history or the particular fears of a culture? Why are so many of the monsters in comics coded as female? In this collection, Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Rae Coody assemble an impressive group of comics scholars working on representations of monstrous women across a range of sources, from US superhero comics to Bolivian Chola comics to snake women in Chinese comics and animation. The fifteen essays are highly readable and richly varied in approach, accompanied by thirty-five illustrations for readers who may not know the comics first-hand. This is a landmark volume in transnational feminist comics studies that needs to be on the shelf of every comics scholar. It will be a touchstone for future comics research thanks to its rigorous discussions of how femininity, sexuality, disability, maternity, ethnicity, race, nationality, and even childhood are potential sites for both monstrous othering and monstrous empowerment in comics. Langsdale and Coody's introduction situates the volume within popular culture studies and feminist theory, explaining that "the authors of this volume are specifically interested in patriarchal cultural contexts, wherein men are assumed to be representative of the normative, universal subject such that women frequently become monsters" (3). Moreover, as the subsequent chapters illustrate, coding the female as monstrous is "overwhelmingly exacerbated by the intersection of gender with other markers of identity like sexuality, race, nationality, and disability" (4). Over the course of the volume, it becomes [End Page 126] clear that monstrosity is often an embodied transgression of sociocultural norms and hierarchies, through which comics artists register specific anxieties about the unregulated, non-normative female body. At the same time, as the editors explain, "it is crucial not to collapse a study of monstrous women into nothing more than a survey of degradation and marginalization" (4). Accordingly, many of the chapters consider characters who reclaim monstrosity as a source of empowerment and thereby challenge the gendered systems that relegate difference to the realm of the monstrous other. While the introduction establishes a broad thematic context for the volume, each chapter delineates specific social, cultural, economic, political, and aesthetic formations of monstrosity in particular comics texts. These detailed discussions, framed by broader critical analyses, work individually to variously reframe familiar texts and introduce less familiar ones, and the shared methodology provides the collection with a welcome unity and coherence. A number of thinkers appear frequently throughout, providing the volume with a conceptual unity: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Barbara Creed, and Margrit Shildrick are referenced by multiple authors to ground the comics analysis in theories of monstrosity, alterity, and femininity. References to Sara Ahmed, Donna Haraway, and Julia Kristeva will also make this volume of interest to feminist scholars working in other fields. Likewise, the chapters draw on comics theory to offer formal as well as thematic readings, such that fans and scholars of the specific works will find a satisfying attention to breakdowns, layouts, caricature, color, characterization and visual rhetoric. The book is divided into five thematic sections of three chapters each, beginning with the origins and types of monstrous representations of women in comics and ending with female characters who take on the role of monster as a form of resistance and retaliation. Part 1, "The Origins, Agency, and Paradoxes of Monstrous Women," sets up the collection's central insight that monstrous women produce fear because they are paradoxical creatures: they "are neither wholly empowered nor entirely disenfranchised, but often they are both" (6). In chapter 1, Elizabeth Rae Coody explores how the multiple origin stories of Harley Quinn, Wonder Woman, and Mary Magdalene refect the various storytellers' anxieties about these characters' subversive powers. As a religious studies scholar, Coody first analyzes the comics characters and then brings her findings about their boundary-crossing monstrosity to the cultural discomfort around Mary Magdalene's origin story, skillfully highlighting how transdisciplinary...

Maintaining the healthy body: Blood management and hepatitis C prevention among men who inject performance and image-enhancing drugs

Australia's ambitious aim to ‘eliminate’ hepatitis C as a public health concern by 2030 requires researchers, policy makers and health practitioners to engage with populations rarely identified as a priority. Men who inject performance and image-enhancing drugs (PIEDs) are one such population, yet research suggests they have low rates of knowledge about hepatitis C. Although rates of needle-sharing in this group are thought to be low, other risks of blood-to-blood contact exist due to the use of large-gauge needles, intramuscular injecting, hard-to-reach injection sites, repeated injecting and peer-to-peer injecting. How should health initiatives engage people who might not customarily consider themselves vulnerable to hepatitis C? Drawing on the work of body theorist Margrit Shildrick, this article considers how men who inject PIEDs understand their bodies, with a particular focus on injecting practices, blood awareness and infection control, in order to inform hepatitis C prevention efforts. In our analysis, we draw on qualitative interviews with 60 men who inject PIEDs, which we conducted for an Australian Research Council-funded project focused on better understanding PIED injecting to improve health and minimise hepatitis C transmission. The interviews suggest that men who inject PIEDs closely monitor potential external infection risks, such as dirt and bacteria that might intrude upon the ‘purity and security’ of the body. However, less attention appears to be paid to what might be transferred out of the body and potentially to others, such as blood. Notions of trust and cleanliness, and normative perceptions of intravenous drug use, also shaped injecting practices and cursory attention to blood management. While environmental transmission poses a smaller transmission risk than needle-sharing, educating PIED consumers about it is nevertheless warranted. Focusing targeted health promotion materials on environmental blood as a potential route of hepatitis C transmission may help engage this population in prevention, and encourage more frequent hepatitis C testing.

Body Fluids and Fluid Bodies: Trans-Corporeal Connections in Contemporary German Narratives of Illness

Medicine uses body fluids for the construction of medical knowledge in the laboratory and at the same time considers them as potentially infectious or dirty. In this model, bodies are in constant need of hygienic discipline if they are to adhere to the ideal of the closed and clean organism without leakage of fluids. In contrast, psychoanalytical feminist body theory by Julia Kristeva (1982), Elisabeth Grosz (1989) and Margrit Shildrick (1999) has deconstructed the abject body and its fluids in Western culture and medicine. While postmodern feminism has often focused on discourses about bodies and illness to the neglect of their materiality, more recently, material feminism has drawn particular attention to lived material bodies with fluid boundaries and evolving corporeal practices (Alaimo and Hekman 2007). Stacy Alaimo has developed a model of the trans-corporeal body that is connected with the environment through fluid boundaries and exchanges (2010, 2012). Influenced by these trends in feminist body theory, illness narratives, often based on autobiographical experiences of female patients or their caregivers, have increased in recent decades in the West (Lorde 1980; Mairs 1996; Stefan 2007; Schmidt 2009; Hustvedt 2010). Such narratives often describe explicitly the material and affective aspects of intimate bodily experiences. In this article, I analyze two German quest narratives of illness: Charlotte Roche’s pop novel Feuchtgebiete (2008) and Detlev Buck’s German-Cambodian film Same Same But Different (2010) that is based on the memoir Wohin Du auch gehst by German journalist Benjamin Prüfer (2007). In both narratives, the protagonists and their partners struggle in their search for love and identity with illness or injury in relation to body fluids, including hemorrhoids and HIV. I argue that Feuchtgebiete and Same Same But Different not only critique medical and cultural discourses on body (fluids) and sexuality but also foreground a feminist trans-corporeal concept of the body and of body fluids that is open to fluid identities and material connections with the (global) environment. At the same time, the conventional and sentimental ending of these quest narratives undermines the possibilities of the trans-corporeal body and its fluid exchanges.

A Queer Aesthetic: Identity in Kurosawa Kiyoshi's Horror Films

Judith Butler argues that every category of personal identity, such as gender, the body, nationality, sexuality, or ethnicity, is predicated in part on a crisis between what that identity affirms and what it excludes. How this crisis manifests itself in everyday life is key to understanding how identities are reinforced, negotiated, subverted, or rejected on both social and individual levels. In this paper I consider three films directed by Kurosawa Kiyoshi between 2001 and 2006, arguing that they are especially competent in not only representing ontological tensions of this kind within their narratives, but also in manifesting these tensions so that they are made viscerally available to the viewer as affect. To understand how this is achieved, I draw on the work of Susan Sontag, Judith Butler, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, among others, to articulate how a stylistic system, or aesthetic, is developed across these films, and what techniques contribute to its production. I find that key components of this aesthetic include images of touch and performance, the transgression of bodily boundaries, and what Margrit Shildrick calls an “erotics of connection” between bodies.

Monster Talk: A Virtual Roundtable with Mark Bould, Liv Bugge, Surekha Davies, Margrit Shildrick and Jeffrey Weinstock

This roundtable brings together scholars and artists working with the monster and the monstrous. It took place between December 2017 and June 2018 via email. Participants responded to an initial em ...

Reclaiming the Monster: Abjection and Subversion in the Marital Gothic Novel

This article explores literary representations of women over the centuries, from the witch of children’s fairy tales to the madwoman of the nineteenth century and the sexually voracious vamp of the twentieth century. Within this context, it examines the gothic novels Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier, 1938) and Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys, 1966) in relation to theories of Julia Kristeva and Margrit Shildrick. Both Kristeva and Shildrick explore the perception of the female form as ‘abject’ and relate this concept to the notion of the ‘monstrous feminine’ in cinema and literature. This article will also examine how these novels have taken the traditional tropes of the gothic genre and subverted them to expose the frustrations of mid-twentieth-century women. The gothic literary genre, initially dominated by male authors, has always been a natural home for both monsters and binary depictions of womanhood. According to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, this binary view presented women as either angelic wives and mothers, or threats to family life and society. The gothic genre also explores the blurring of lines between these two elements of the binary female, and the terrifying idea of the monster in the home. Both Rebecca and Wide Sargasso Sea belong to a female gothic genre, and specifically to what Michelle A. Masse defines as the ‘marital gothic’, deploying many of the traditional motifs of the Gothic while striving to subvert depictions of womanhood shaped by patriarchal culture. The marital gothic subgenre exposes the rage of women entrapped in traditional, reductive and confining notions of femaleness, and the uncanny environment of the institution of marriage itself.

Dangerous Discourses of Disability, Subjectivity and Sexuality by Margrit Shildrick

Dangerous Discourses of Disability, Subjectivity and Sexuality by Margrit Shildrick

Other Ethics: Decentering the Human in Weird Horror

Margrit Shildrick has argued that the monster’s ability to disturb and unsettle arises from its position as simultaneously same and different, both self and other at the same time. Through an analysis of Algernon Blackwood’s novella The Willows, this article discusses the challenge posed by the nonhuman Absolute other, the nebulous creatures whose whose difference is total, as they appear in weird fiction. Drawing on posthuman theory, it explores the ethical implications of imagining the crumbling horizons of human subjectivity in the meeting with the absolute and unknowable other. This article argues that by bringing concepts such as the horror of scale, ecophobia, the transformative power of awe, and the strangeness of matter into the monstrous figure, the weird undermines the structures that constructs human, culture, and mind as separate and different from the non-human, nature, and matter. By making us imagine a perspective from which humans are not just insignificant, but irrelevant, weird fiction not only challenges the anthropocentric worldview, but also makes us aware of the limitations and situatedness of human experience.

The New Biologies

This issue is made up of a special collection of articles that have been submitted to the journal, which tackle issues that have primarily been the subject and object of the life and biological sciences; this includes pregnancy, obesity, antibiotic resistance, and immunity within the context of viruses and super-bugs. All of these issues in different ways have increasingly become the subject of theories and methods within the humanities and social sciences. This includes approaches, which work across disciplines and intellectual traditions, in order to open up the complexity of what might count as an object of knowledge within these different contexts. Each paper in this special collection is engaged in productive approaches that cut across disciplines and that enable dialogues and exchanges to take place between the social sciences, life sciences and philosophy. The articles respond to some of the new developments across the life and biological sciences, which include the field of epigenetics, the genome and microbiome and new theorisations of immunity. They engage in different ways with emergent issues, problematics, ontologies, controversies and debates within these fields. These are explored at the intersection of science and technology studies (Landecker), new materialism (Jamieson; Warins et al; Yoshizawa); and critical theorizations of immunity, which draw primarily from cultural studies of immunity, including the writings of Ed Cohen (2009), Robert Esposito (2013) and Margrit Shildrick (2010, 2015) (see Davies et al; Newman et al).

Queering ‘Successful Ageing’, Dementia and Alzheimer’s Research

Contributing to both ageing research and queer-feminist scholarship, this article introduces feminist philosopher Margrit Shildrick’s 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 Alzheimer’s 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.

“Shape Carries Story”: Navigating the World as Fat

“Shape Carries Story”: Navigating the World as Fat

Hepatitis C health promotion and the anomalous sexual subject

Research shows that diagnosis with the blood-borne liver disease hepatitis C can lead to significant changes in intimate relationships, including a reduction in sexual contact and avoidance of new relationships. This article examines hepatitis C health promotion materials and their treatment of sexuality and sexual transmission. The article analyses 21 Australian hepatitis C health promotion resources collected as part of research degree project exploring the interrelationships between hepatitis C, injecting drug use, HIV and the body. It uses the work of theorist Margrit Shildrick on the ‘anomalous’ body, and a discourse analysis method, to understand these interrelationships and their metaphorical and symbolic implications. Our analysis shows that health promotion materials regularly present information about sexual transmission in ways likely to add to confusion and uncertainty about risk. Despite regular acknowledgements that hepatitis C is not a sexually transmissible infection, some resources place an inappropriately heavy focus on the possibility of hepatitis C transmission via heterosexual activity. Others contain mixed messages about the possibility for disease transmission through sex, at the same time enjoining hepatitis C positive readers to practise safe sex. We argue that these injunctions are linked to the ways that the resources figure people living with hepatitis C as intrinsically anomalous. In doing so, the resources run the risk of inadvertently naturalising stigma, anxiety and fear surrounding intimate contact. The article concludes by noting that agencies responsible for the delivery of health promotion need to carefully examine the messages they produce if they are to avoid creating uncertainty and anxiety about the implications of hepatitis C for sexuality and intimacy.

Crawford, C. S. Phantom Limb: Amputation, Embodiment, and Prosthetic Technology. New York: New York University Press. 2014. 320pp. £15.99 (pbk) ISBN 978‐0‐8147‐6012‐3

[P]etrified specters of limbs … denial-based misbehaving ghosts … limb facsimiles that waved good-bye in earnest, or … grotesque and painfully distorted “memories” (p. 179) Crawford's captivating and enlightening monograph offers a critical perspective on the phenomena of phantom limbs, prostheses, and the relationship(s) between the so-called ghost and the machine. Drawing on 805 texts published between 1870 and 2011 from fields including biomedicine, technoscience, and psychology, as well as ethnographic observations and interviews with clinicians and researchers, Crawford demonstrates how a changing medical and socio-technical landscape has influenced the perceptions and experiences of amputee embodiment. In addition to anyone with specific interests in the sociology or history of phantom limbs, amputation, or prosthetics, this book will be of great use to sociologists of medicine, disability, and the body, particularly those with an interest in biopolitics. Embodiment, rather than selfhood or psyche, is the book's primary focus, although there is interesting discussion throughout on the theorised relationships between self, body image, and phantoms. The thematically-organised chapters present and deconstruct the ‘ghost story’ of phantom limbs, once seen as the ghastly evidence of a fractured psyche, and now seen to be the vital ghosts that animate the prosthetic machine, even as they are tamed by it. In engaging, personal, and at times wryly humorous style, the book covers historical and contemporary medical debates about the perceived ontology and ‘appearance’ of phantoms; the influence of emerging medical technologies such as the McGill Pain Questionnaire on the representation and experience of phantoms; the perceived cause(s) of phantoms, from psychogenic processes in the mind to neurological processes in the brain; phantom-prosthetic relations; and the future of phantoms. With regards the latter, Crawford suggests – with a note of regret, it seems – that the phantom limb may eventually be driven to ‘theoretical extinction’ as it is tamed by increasingly sophisticated prostheses, and addresses other forms of embodiment to which the discourses of the phantom have ‘spread’ (e.g. transsexualism). In one particular highlight, and balancing the book's emphasis on professional voices, Chapter 2 offers many and varied examples of amputees' own perceptions of phantoms, via accounts from medical texts and through Alexa Wright's stunning photographic portraits, which use photo manipulation to present visual images of phantoms as described by the people who embody them. Focusing as it does on Western (primarily American) thought and practices, the book cannot be said to address phantom limbs in a totally comprehensive way; however, while attention to other cultures' ‘ghost stories’ would have been a welcome addition, the author would surely have had to sacrifice the book's tremendous depth in order to offer that breadth. Throughout the book, and accentuated in the final chapter, Crawford presents a persuasive critical argument in addition to an extremely detailed history. Drawing on theories of social constructionism, phenomenology, and biopolitics, she argues that addressing differing social and biomedical understandings about the ontology of phantoms – particularly the quest for phantom ‘authenticity’ – reveals as much about the moralities and corporeal ideologies of the time as it does about the phantom itself. In this sense, phantom limbs are a lens through which she shows us how (and whose) particular knowledge claims are (de)legitimated, how (and whose) particular bodies are privileged, and the consequent effects on real people's embodied lives. Crawford is sharply critical of the techno-fetishism and androcentrism that she demonstrates can be endemic in biomedicine and prosthetic science, and of the hegemonic masculinity that the latter can promote, and she astutely argues that the changing theories of phantom sensation are as much based on what was beneficial to clinicians and researchers as to patients themselves. Phantom Limb is a timely work, joining texts by scholars like Margrit Shildrick, Arthur Frank, and Chris Shilling in what Sparkes and Smith (2011: 357) have called the ‘somatic turn in the social sciences’. Indeed, in exposing the ‘biomedical territorialization’ (p.74) of the phantom, Crawford does for ghostly bodies what the likes of Frank and Audre Lorde before him did for fleshy ones. The book's data represent a departure from much of the recent work within the somatic turn, which has tended to have a stronger focus on patients' voices as found in autobiographies or generated through interviews. However, Crawford explains her decision not to interview amputees, and instead to focus on clinicians and researchers, as an attempt ‘to undermine knowledge claims based on the supposition of rigor, expertise, and scientific-ness’ (p. 252). This, she achieves.

Things always leak out of everything else – the sham of ‘masculinity’ and the dissolving of ‘subjectivities’

abstractIn this perspective I use memory work, inspiration, frustration, conversation and theorising to poke holes in the traditional concept of ‘masculinity’ (and ‘femininity’). I aim to show, through a combination of theorising on ‘leakiness’ (through Margrit Shildrick), ‘subjectivity’ (through Shildrick, Lacan, Ahmed, Irigaray, Deleuze and Guattari) and ‘masculinity’ (and ‘femininity’) through Butler and Freud, that the latter are self-perpetuating illusions or shams. The article starts off with an alternative feminist version of The Lord's Prayer – a source of strength and inspiration. It then goes on to describe ‘leakiness of bodies – sensations and connections’ and theories around ‘subjectivity’. Here I combine a review of theories with poetry and memory work, and question people's sense of individuality and ‘subjectivity’ through examples of fleeting connectedness. Thereafter I analyse a short excerpt of a conversation on ‘masculinity’. Finally I posit that in order that we may free ourselves of the cages that are ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’, we need to consciously accept and expose them for what they are: shams.

When death enables life: incorporation of organs from deceased donors in Finnish kidney recipients

Anthropological and sociological studies of organ transplantation practices have pointed to the ambiguities that are created by the use of deceased donors for organ procurement purposes. It raises questions of bodily incorporation, ownership of bodily resources and the commodification of the ‘as good as dead’ body. For organ recipients, it is sometimes difficult to incorporate these objects derived through death, this ‘otherness’ for the sake of extending life in their own bodies. Although the transplantation process is clothed in very objective, biological terms by medical professionals, the presence of death as both a biological phenomenon and one replete with social meanings is a concern voiced by some recipients. Alienation, guilt, normalisation strategies and notions of mixed selves feature in their accounts of living with the transplant. The aim of the article is to contribute to the discussion initiated by philosopher Margrit Shildrick on the transformative nature of an embodied self by looking at how Finnish kidney recipients deal with incorporating a transplant from a deceased donor. The article is based on qualitative interviews with 18 Finnish kidney transplant recipients narrating the trajectory of their kidney failure, where one of the themes related to their self-perception following transplantation surgery.