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“Why Should Our Bodies End at the Skin?”: Embodiment, Boundaries, and Somatechnics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 September 2014

Margrit Shildrick
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Abstract

Donna Haraway's enduring question—“Why should our bodies end at the skin?” (Haraway 1990, 220)—is ever more relevant in the postmodern era, where issues of bodies, boundaries, and technologies increasingly challenge not only the normative performance of the human subject, but also the very understanding of what counts as human. Critical Disability Studies has taken up the problematic of technology, particularly in relation to the deployment of prostheses by people with disabilities. Yet rehabilitation to normative practice or appearance is no longer the point; instead, the lived experience of disability generates its own specific possibilities that both limit and extend the performativity of the embodied self. I look at what is at stake in the challenge to the Western logos that comes specifically from the capacities of the disabled body, understood not as a less than perfect form of the normative, but as figuring difference in a nonbinary sense. Feminist theory has long contested the isomorphism of the logos, but I go beyond simply setting out the grounds for revaluing multiple variant forms. The feminist turn to Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze opens up the problematic to a celebratory positioning of difference and transcorporeality as the very conditions of life.

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Information
Hypatia , Volume 30 , Issue 1: Special Issue: New Conversations in Feminist Disability Studies , Winter 2015 , pp. 13 - 29
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 by Hypatia, Inc.

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