Abstract
Women intimately interact with various medical technologies and prosthetic artifacts in the context of breast cancer. While extensive work has been done on the agency of technological artifacts and how they affect users’ perceptions and experiences, the agency of users is largely taken for granted hitherto. In this article, we explore the agency of four women who engage with breast cancer technologies and artifacts by analyzing their narrative accounts of such engagements. This empirical discussion is framed within the tradition of science and technology studies, philosophy of technological mediation and phenomenology of embodied agency as ‘I can/not’. This approach leads to the conclusions that women’s technologically mediated agencies range from being restricted to extended, take place on different bodily levels, within complex temporal structures, and are determined by certain socio-cultural contexts. Furthermore, it reveals that such agency shaping does not imply a one-way conditioning relationship between technologies and users, but rather involves a reciprocal relationship in which both subject and object are co-constituted. We therefore suggest that the ‘material turn’ in philosophy of technology also needs to take into account technologically mediated, material human beings in order to gain a better understanding of human existence.
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Notes
In this article, we will use the terminology ‘technologies’, ‘technological artifacts’, and ‘technologies and artifacts’ interchangeably. Technologies, after all, are by definition materialized. While commonly understood as the application of knowledge for practical purposes, technology is always in some way or another embodied in artifacts through which we come to engage with and access that technology.
Most women’s diagnosis of breast cancer starts with having a mammogram. Although there are other types of imaging technologies – thermography or elastography –, mammography is standard for breast screening as it offers the most validated and comprehensive information.
Breast reconstructions fall into two general categories. Autologous reconstruction is based upon the usage of own tissue, while alloplastic reconstruction is based upon an artificial implant.
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This research is funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research—NWO (VIDI-Grant 276-20-016).
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de Boer, M., Slatman, J. The Mediated Breast: Technology, Agency, and Breast Cancer. Hum Stud 41, 275–292 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-017-9445-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-017-9445-5