Transformation Of Body Research Articles

Importance of the pluripotency factor LIN28 in the mammalian nucleolus during early embryonic development

The maternal nucleolus is required for proper activation of the embryonic genome (EGA) and early embryonic development. Nucleologenesis is characterized by the transformation of a nucleolar precursor body (NPB) to a mature nucleolus during preimplantation development. However, the function of NPBs and the involved molecular factors are unknown. We uncover a novel role for the pluripotency factor LIN28, the biological significance of which was previously demonstrated in the reprogramming of human somatic cells to induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. Here, we show that LIN28 accumulates at the NPB and the mature nucleolus in mouse preimplantation embryos and embryonic stem cells (ESCs), where it colocalizes with the nucleolar marker B23 (nucleophosmin 1). LIN28 has nucleolar localization in non-human primate (NHP) preimplantation embryos, but is cytoplasmic in NHP ESCs. Lin28 transcripts show a striking decline before mouse EGA, whereas LIN28 protein localizes to NPBs at the time of EGA. Following knockdown with a Lin28 morpholino, the majority of embryos arrest between the 2- and 4-cell stages and never develop to morula or blastocyst. Lin28 morpholino-injected embryos arrested at the 2-cell stage were not enriched with nucleophosmin at presumptive NPB sites, indicating that functional NPBs were not assembled. Based on these results, we propose that LIN28 is an essential factor of nucleologenesis during early embryonic development.

Performing Exile in Safed School Kabbalah

This article uses a performance studies methodology to examine the transformation of the human body in sixteenth-century Safed School Kabbalah, focusing on practices described in Moshe Cordovero's Tomer Devorah and Sefer Gerushin , and Yosef Caro's Maggid Mesharim . It is argued that the topos of exile is key to the construction and purpose of these rituals: by enacting the conditions of exile that they wished to change, participants enable a ritual transformation of the body which in turn enables amelioration of the condition of exile. The result of these practices is a new theodicy, attributing new meaning to human suffering.

Os corpos da liderança: as tramas da ficção do dispositivo cultural do fitness

O artigo procura os principais vetores que constituem a corporização (embodiment) da liderança como um dos princípios axiológicos mais característicos do novo capitalismo. Para isso, analisam-se, como expoente ideal que condensa esse ethos, as dinâmicas de produção e transformação do corpo do fitness. Abre-se uma série de narrativas que evidenciam os processos pelos quais a performance do fitness vira um conjunto de valores que caracterizam ao empresário de si mesmo como uma figura emblemática do novo capitalismo. Conclui-se que as práticas corporais do fitness, observadas nas diagramáticas sociolaborais pós-fordistas, outorgariam ao praticante um repertório de recursos sobre o corpo e a própria personalidade, que se adequam para navegar nas agitadas águas do mercado capitalista contemporâneo.

Transnational Transformations: A Gender Analysis of Japanese Manga Featuring Unexpected Bodily Transformations

Transnational Transformations: A Gender Analysis of Japanese Manga Featuring Unexpected Bodily Transformations

The Deep Bodily Roots of Emotion

This article explores emotions and their relationship to “somatic responses”, i.e., one’s automatic responses to sensations of pain, cold, warmth, sudden intensity. To this end, it undertakes a Husserlian phenomenological analysis of the first-hand experience of eight basic emotions, briefly exploring their essential aspects: their holistic nature, their identifying dynamic transformation of the lived body, their two-layered intentionality, their involuntary initiation and voluntary espousal. The fact that the involuntary tensional shifts initiating emotions are irreplicatable voluntarily is taken to show that all emotions have an innate core, a conclusion corroborated by their strong similarities to somatic responses in dynamics, hedonic tone, and topology. The fact that emotions may be culturally reworked is shown to be explicable in terms of their complex nature: their dependence on belief, their voluntary espousal, and their ready social transmittability. Finally, it is argued that emotions may plausibly be deemed the evolutionary descendants of somatic responses.

Transformation of Body in Contemporary Art of Posthuman Era

Transformation of Body in Contemporary Art of Posthuman Era

Spectacle, Spectatorship, and Sympathy in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko

This article examines how Aphra Behn employs the language of spectacle and extreme visuality in Oroonoko (1688) as a strategy for conveying exoticism to the reader's gaze. The novella presents the New World landscape, Native American customs, Oroonoko's black body, and his heroism and victimization with a degree of excessive and hyperbolic intensity. I argue that Behn's novella grasps, in a way no other work of its time does, the transformation of the black body into a commodity at the moment of its insertion into circuits of commercial exchange in the Atlantic basin. By focusing on the female narrator's vicarious response to the spectacle of Oroonoko's public execution, I also suggest that the novella formulates fundamental dilemmas intrinsic to scenes of sympathy[&mdash]dilemmas that would continue to shape the English citizens' engagement with Caribbean slaves throughout the long eighteenth century.

Lost in Translation: The Spirit of Rationalism in the Thought of Tkachev

I begin by offering a brief definition of the term “rationalism”, first in its strictly philosophical sense as denoting preference for the use of reason over other means of acquiring knowledge, and then in its broader sense as a term denoting patient reasoning, scepticism and reappraisal of received opinions. In this latter sense rationalism informed the critical movement in seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century European thought which challenged dogmatic theology, weakened ecclesiastical power and secularized culture. Next, I briefly examine the currency and characteristics of Russian rationalism, particularly as the radical intelligentsia of the 1860s understood the concept (which they often described as “realism”). I then turn to the work of Petr Tkachev, who is chiefly remembered as an émigré revolutionary strategist of the 1870s, an advocate of seizure of political power by a conspiratorial minority and therefore a possible forerunner of Lenin, but who was also a prolific writer on social and philosophical matters before he was arrested and imprisoned in 1869 in connection with the Nechaev affair. I focus on an article, “Essays from the History of Rationalism” and associated fragments, which were seized by the police in 1866 and which were not published in Tkachev's lifetime. Tkachev's article describes and discusses the history of religious dogmatism and persecution in medieval and early‐modern Europe. Scholars have often taken it to be a significant original work. In fact, I claim, it is heavily dependent on a contemporaneous book, the History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism written by the Irish historian William Lecky. Tkachev did acknowledge his debt to Lecky, but not the extent or nature of the debt; indeed he distanced himself from Lecky. And yet he not only plagiarized the greater part of his article from Lecky (who wrote far more elegantly than Tkachev himself) but also drew from Lecky, no less than from Marx, his thesis that economic considerations underlie ideas and values, as well as the dense factual information for which he admitted Lecky was his source. In this respect Tkachev's article illustrates the derivative nature of Russian rationalism and also indicates the extent to which British influence was overtaking French and German influence in the radical intelligentsia in the 1860s. At the same time, Tkachev's “rationalism” lacks the broad humanism and toleration that infuses the spirit of rationalism as Lecky conceives of it. His article thus reveals the transformation and impoverishment of a European body of thought when it was transplanted to Russian soil and exemplifies features of the cast of mind of the pre‐revolutionary Russian radical intelligentsia on which Sergei Bulgakov remarked in a passage in his contribution to the Landmarks volume that I have taken as my starting point.

Crucibles of power: Forging copper and forging subjects at the Moche Ceremonial Center of Huaca Colorada, Peru

An analysis of copper production, architectural construction, and feasting rites as interrelated ritual activities at the Late Moche site of Huaca Colorada suggests that power asymmetries were embedded in a distinctive relational ontology and sacrificial worldview. Power was exercised not by alienating communities from their means of production or excluding the majority lower class from the diacritical symbols of power. Rather, the manufacture of copper items enabled subjects to directly contribute to Moche rites of regeneration and social reproduction; the skilled metamorphosis of copper into finished objects paralleled and symbolically reinforced the ritual re-formation of bodies and political subjectivities at Huaca Colorada. Ultimately, an examination of copper production at Huaca Colorada as a ritual of bodily transformation sheds light on the culturally specific structures of power characterizing the greater Jequetepeque region during the Late Moche Period.

Perfil de uso de medicamentos por idosos assistidos pelo Programa de Atenção ao Idoso (P.A.I.) da UNIJUÍ

O processo de envelhecimento é caracterizado por várias modificações no organismo, que podem causar alterações no efeito de certos medicamentos, tornando-os inapropriados para idosos por falta de eficácia terapêutica ou por apresentarem efeitos adversos superiores aos benefícios. O objetivo do estudo foi identificar os medicamentos utilizados pelos idosos assistidos pelo Programa de Atenção ao Idoso (P.A.I.) e investigar o uso de medicamentos potencialmente inapropriados nessa população. Realizou-se estudo quantitativo e descritivo, com coleta de dados secundários, a partir de prontuários/cadastros dos idosos atendidos pelo P.A.I. (Projeto de Extensão Universitária da UNIJUÍ). Entre os idosos cadastrados, 16 receberam e/ou estão recebendo acompanhamento farmacoterapêutico pela equipe da farmácia, sendo 11 mulheres, com idade média de 75,2 ± 7,5 anos. Cada idoso recebe em média 7,3 ± 3,3 medicamentos. A polifarmácia foi verificada em 15 idosos. Entre os 117 medicamentos em uso, considerando-se repetições, 13 são inapropriados para idosos, destacando-se diazepam e fluoxetina, cada um utilizado por três idosos. Verifica-se que é imprescindível reduzir o uso de medicamentos inapropriados para melhorar a qualidade de vida dos idosos. É necessária a colaboração do prescritor e do profissional farmacêutico, que é responsável por avaliar a prescrição, identificar riscos relacionados à terapêutica e intervir através da comunicação com o prescritor responsável, fornecendo informações e sugestões que facilitem a utilização de serviços de saúde.

Tra testo e corpo l'esperienza fisica della Prima guerra mondiale negli scritti dei soldati

In discussions of combat experience too narrow a focus on soldiers’ psychological experiences and the cultural and social issues surrounding them risks obscuring the vital role of the body and of physical experience. In letters and diaries, Italian soldiers frequently describe their bodily experiences and transformations, enabling them to express their emotions obliquely through the use of the body as a metaphorical representation of the spirit. Building on international comparisons, this paper emphasises the centrality of the physical in our understanding of combatants’ experience. Soldiers’ bodies, which were transformed by changes in diet, fitness and health, acted as the primary vector through which military life was experienced. The paper analyses both the emotional impact of bodily transformations and the ways in which Italian soldiers represented these experiences in their writings.

Converting the Spirit Spouse: The Violent Transformation of the Pentecostal Female Body in Maputo, Mozambique

This article discusses the forceful transformation of the female body in Brazilian Pentecostalism in urban Mozambique and argues for an understanding of Pentecostal conversion as embodying spiritual warfare. Presenting the case of avenging spirits, such as the spirit spouse, it explores how spirits interfere in women's new socio-economic positions and intimate relationships. Pentecostal women learn to stay in control of their body under guidance of the Holy Spirit and a ‘violent’ war against the spirit spouse unfolds. The prevalence of ‘violence’ implies that we should critically question a perception of conversion as bringing healing and harmony.

Robert Browning's Necropoetics

I. Introduction: The Limits of Reanimation When Robert Browning published his 1868-89 book-length murder poem, The Ring and Book, his reputation as poet special gifts of intellect and originality that were at same time put in service of poetics of great crudity and jolting violence seemed once again confirmed. (1) I felt ... like creature with one leg and one wing, half hopping, half flying, Browning's friend William Allingham said after reading poem's first volume, while others characterized poem as incongruous materials incapable of forming harmonious or as simultaneously life-like and morbid anatomy. (2) These friends and reviewers, torn as they were between awe at poem's intellectual ambition and disgust at its aesthetic execution, envisioned their ambivalence as states of bodily transformation and incomplete states at that: halfway from legs to wings, from parts to whole, from life to death. Without acknowledging directly grotesque corporeality so prevalent in many of Browning's most well-known dramatic monologues, these readers nonetheless see almost-changed body as metaphor for Browning's poetic strangeness: strangeness characterized by formal tension, as historian Thomas Carlyle would have it, between Old Bailey story that might have been told in ten lines and long dramatic monologue, or, as Browning himself wrote in his Essay on Shelley, between poetry that reproduces things external and poetry that is radiance and aroma of [the poet's] personality. (3) In Browning's dramatic monologues, as in responses above, changing body--specifically, in monologues, once-dead body, almost-alive-again body--is locus for aesthetic experimentation that both critiques poetry's inevitably subjective relation to facts--historical facts, observable facts, and facts of literary influence--and uses that relationship as basis for generic innovation. The reanimated body, whether appearing in poems like The Ring and Book or in shorter dramatic monologues like Porphyria's Lover and My Last Duchess, becomes figure through which Browning considers fraught relation between unassailable historical materiality and original aesthetic practice--between dictates of what has come before and desire to create something new out of it. The dramatic monologue, in its dual capacity functioning as critical and always-ironic foil to multiple projects of aesthetic so in vogue during nineteenth century--the Arthurian revival in art and literature, vogue for museum exhibitions that recreated ancient tombs, and phenomena like magic lantern shows and spirit photography--as form becomes both self- conscious vehicle for poems of reanimation and mode of reanimation itself. While critics have argued that we can see dramatic monologue as a form of verbal resuscitation of dead, quasi-Spiritualist voicing of dead men and women, (4) and Victorian reviewers especially found in Tennyson's dramatic monologues the secret of transmigration of soul, dramatic monologues in which dead come to life in turn call our attention to limits of poet's reanimating power by exposing inherent subjectivity of any resuscitative poetic project. (5) These monologues embody fictive and necessarily inventive nature of aesthetic resuscitation: nothing can come back from dead unless poet reanimates it. Browning uses his dramatic monologues to draw an analogy between corporeal reanimation and poetic practice, and in doing so probes, critiques, and reinvents process by which new, living poetry can emerge from intransigent bodies of past. His necropoetics bring long-dead voices back to life, but not with expectation that his monologists will speak truth. Rather, inalterable fact of their deaths creates condition necessary for Browning to scrutinize and to relish imaginative truths his own poetics of aesthetic resurrection could reveal. …

It's All Life History

It's All Life History

Imagined paralysis impairs embodied spatial transformations

Recent studies showed that motor deficits and limb amputations selectively impair mental rotation of respective body parts. This is due to modifications in the body schema, which plays a pivotal role in bodily related mental spatial transformations. In the present study, we investigated whether imagined paralysis could affect mental transformations in healthy participants. Participants were required to make leg laterality judgments of imitable and non-imitable body postures that were presented at different orientations. Mental spatial transformation of imitable body posture relies on emulation processes, a mechanism through which the posture is covertly imitated by the observer. Imagined paralysis selectively impaired mental transformation of imitable body postures. These results reflect an inability to fully emulate stimulus postures, suggesting a modulation in the body schema. Our results show that the body schema incorporates top-down information about motoric constraints which can influence embodied cognition in healthy participants.

Introduction: Medical Migrations

This special issue of Body & Society brings together articles that describe contemporary forms of bio-medical travel. The conjuncture of mobility and bodily states occurs at a particular epistemic moment: the first decades of the 21st century, when medical travels and travelers are participating in border crossings as self-consciously biological beings, and when biological life, health and sickness, survival and death, are central to subject formation, ethical practice, political struggle, regulation and governance. In the last several decades, increasing numbers of people have crossed national borders and traversed great distances for bio-medical, experimental or alternative (complementary) medical, surgical or cosmetic interventions and/or bodily transformations. Some of these travelers – often described by the mass media as ‘medical tourists’ (a term we subject to a pointed critique) – journey to foreign lands in search of cures and therapies for a variety of conditions. The elderly and well-insured are searching for cures to the maladies that commonly accompany aging: chronic, noncontagious illnesses and afflictions, from heart disease to end-stage kidney failure, from obesity to diabetes to congestive heart disease to dental care and depression. Women and their partners travel in search of solutions to infertility; men in search of cures for sexual dysfunction. Both men and women, young and old, search for cures to addictions and psychiatric illnesses. And many people travel across borders to purchase much sought-after and expensive

Fat Chance Getting an Obstetrician in South Florida? Ethics and Discrimination in Obstetrics and Gynecology

The practice of obstetrics and gynecology is uniquely rewarding. Even an ‘uneventful’ pregnancy engages the Ob/Gyn in the transformation of the human body and mind, in the relationship between sexu...

Bodies in Mutation: Understanding Lipodystrophy Among Women Living With HIV/AIDS

Over the past decade, the lipodystrophy syndrome has become one of the biggest challenges in the field dof HIV/AIDS. However, few qualitative studies have examined how lipodystrophy affects the lives of people living with HIV/AIDS by reconfiguring their bodies in unexpected ways. The main objective of this qualitative study was to explore and describe the transformation process that women experience following the onset of lipodystrophy. The data was collected using semistructured interviews and was then analyzed following the principles of grounded theory. The purpose of this article is to synthesize our research findings with a particular emphasis on the basis social process (BSP) that emerged during the data analysis, namely, the bodily transformation process. Our objective is to highlight the experiences shared by women who go through this bodily transformation process and the challenges they face as they move progressively from one bodily state to another. Following the presentation of the bodily transformation process, we will discuss the implications of our findings for the advancement of nursing knowledge as well as the development of theories specific to the situations of people who suffer from chronic conditions and undergo a physical transformation as a result of medical treatment. Lastly, we will address the implications of our findings for nursing research and nursing practice.

Review: Women living with HIV/AIDS and the bodily transformation process known as lipodystrophy: a grounded theory study

Review: Women living with HIV/AIDS and the bodily transformation process known as lipodystrophy: a grounded theory study

Women living with HIV/AIDS and the bodily transformation process known as the lipodystrophy syndrome: a grounded theory study

Over the past decade, the lipodystrophy syndrome has become one of the biggest challenges in the field of HIV/AIDS. Yet, few qualitative studies have examined how lipodystrophy affects the lives of people living with HIV/AIDS by reconfiguring their bodies in unexpected ways. The main objective of this qualitative study was to explore and describe the transformation process that women experience following the onset of lipodystrophy. The data were collected using semi-structured interviews and were then analysed following the principles of grounded theory. Overall, the research participants explained how lipodystrophy had transformed their bodies, disrupted their identities and confined them to a fragile social trajectory. In this sense, the experience of lipodystrophy was described as a profoundly disruptive transformation that includes three distinct stages: normalisation, problematisation and pathologisation. This process was characterised by the progression of lipodystrophy, as well as an intensification of the efforts to regain control over the body. At last, this study provides health care providers with a better understanding of the psychosocial impact of lipodystrophy and the needs of women who suffer from this condition.