Shildrick, Margrit and Steinberg, Deborah Lynn (2015) Estranged bodies : shifting paradigms and the biomedical imaginary. Body & Society, 21 (3). pp. 3-19. doi:10.1177/1357034X15586242

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Abstract

This introductory article provides a contextual and theoretical overview to this special issue of Body & Society. The special issue presents five selected case studies – focusing on the contexts of transplantation, psychiatry, amputation and war, and a transvalued media ecology of cancer – to offer meditations on a number of interlinked questions. The first of these is the entanglement of biomedical governance – political/economic as well as self-disciplinary – with the nexus of estrangement, which can denote both the distancing of otherness and self-division. Second is the realm of feeling, of phantasmatic projection and of the ways in which the biopolitical becomes reciprocally, discursively, enmeshed in a wider cultural imaginary. Third is the shifting terrain of gender and feminist politics, a key dimension of which is the necessary reworking of feminist thought in the wake of a radically altered biomedical and biotechnological landscape. Under the rubric of Estranged Bodies, the collection considers themes of dissolution and the fragility of the body/subject read through bodily catastrophe, radical body modification and extreme medical intervention. Also considered is the notion of assemblage – the provisional coming together of disparate parts – which encourages a rethinking of questions of reconstituted, displaced and re-placed bodies.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Subjects:	J Political Science > JC Political theory
Divisions:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Sociology
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Biopolitics, Human body, Body marking
Journal or Publication Title:	Body & Society
Publisher:	Sage Publications Ltd.
ISSN:	1357-034X
Official Date:	7 January 2015
Dates:	Date Event 7 January 2015 Available
Volume:	21
Number:	3
Number of Pages:	16
Page Range:	pp. 3-19
DOI:	10.1177/1357034X15586242
Status:	Peer Reviewed
Publication Status:	Published
Access rights to Published version:	Restricted or Subscription Access
Description:	This article is from the Body & Society Special Issue 'Estranged Bodies : Shifting Paradigms and the Biomedical Imaginary', edited by Margrit Shildrick and Deborah Lynn Steinberg.
Funder:	Economic and Social Research Council (Great Britain) (ESRC)
Related URLs:	Publisher

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