Abstract
This paper comprises a feminist phenomenological exploration of women’s experiences with breast augmentation and breast reduction. Situating the results of semi-structured interviews in the context of body schema, this study discloses how women perceive, think, feel and respond to bodily change created by elective breast surgery. Women’s narratives express that breast augmentation and reduction shifted their conception of the lived body and its possibilities by provoking bodily reorientations and adjustments as well as changes in bodily sensations. In contrast with body image studies that emphasize elective breast surgery as transforming attitudes towards the body, this phenomenological investigation reveals that elective breast surgery also galvanizes a relearning of the world and a rearticulation of embodied doing.
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Notes
There has been much debate, partially in light of the aforementioned problems of translation, as to whether Merleau-Ponty was referring to a (physiological) body schema or a (representational) body image in the Phenomenology. Many scholars, working from the 1962 translation that was, until recently, the only available English translation, understand Merleau-Ponty to be using the terms “body schema” and “body image” relatively interchangeably and some have done the same in their own work (Fielding 1996; Levin 2008; Weiss 1999). Much theoretical energy has been given to this question of the difference between body image and body schema, with some scholars arguing for separate conceptualizations and usages for these two concepts given their contentious history (e.g., Gallagher 2005; Gallagher and Zahavi 2013; Taipale 2014).
I will use the term “body schema” to retain consistency with the translations of the Phenomenology.
Schilder himself translated Image from German into English and, in so doing, translated Körperschema to “body image” (rather than the more literal “body schema”). The reason for this remains unknown. In fact, only a handful of instances of “body schema” occur in the text. Despite this, I will use “body schema” for consistency across the text. I will retain Schilder’s use when directly quoting from his text. To maintain consistency with the other writings I shall cite, I will not hyphenate body image, even though Schilder himself does.
Specifically, Schilder refuses the distinction between leib (lived body) and korper (object body) (1950: 283).
At the same time, Schilder notes that it is always in a state of dissolution because we lose parts of ourselves to the world (excrement, hair) and we project parts our ourselves into the world (voice, language).
I am in agreement with Weiss’s (1999) assessment, but shall maintain the wording “the body images” for the purposes of readability.
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Rodrigues, S. To Learn the World Again: Examining the Impact of Elective Breast Surgery on Body Schema. Hum Stud 41, 255–273 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-018-9462-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-018-9462-z