them give rise to new ethical practices and forms of governance and how these practices feed back on the level of individual experience. For example, in what ways do ethical approaches espoused in one country come to travel within this globalizing context, such that ethical frameworks are both mobilized and demobilized by contemporary practices in quite different spheres? On an international level, art exhibitions, created by the use of medical practices that don’t serve the treatment of a person, but involve the very same techniques (e.g. the amputation of a limb) travel the world and, in doing so, compel people in other countries to find an ethical base on which to show (or not show) such exhibits, thereby establishing some degree of a relationship between the ethical approaches of both the host and home country. On a private level, German fertility patients are travelling to Spain to receive fertility treatment, which is not available in Germany because of different legal and ethical framings (Orobitg and Salazar 2005, Spiewak 2003). It is important for this study, as it is concerned with embodiment, to acknowledge the interconnectedness of the movement and travel of people, bodily substances, technologies, medical practices, and body parts.
[39] 2.2 Body/Körper and Leib – an Attempt to Define Relationality through Translation, Time, and Meaning
“Das System ist nahezu geschlossen, nahezu,
denn an den Rändern des Diskurses taucht das
Monströse auf, das nicht in der Verschmelzung
mit der Technik lauert, sondern auf der
menschlichen Sterblichkeit beruht”22 (Wenner 2002: 100).
“Embodiment is a concept in constant motion”
(Harris 2016).
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak states in an interview: “[…] if one really thinks of the body as such, there is no possible outline of the body as such. I think that's about what I would say. There are thinkings of the systematicity of the body, there are value codings of the body. The body, as such, cannot be thought, and I certainly cannot approach it” (Spivak 1989: 149). This has to be seen not as a limitation to the engagement with the issue, with the body, but rather as a delimitation of any engagement. If the body cannot be thought, then what I am aiming to do in this study is to look at individual, societal, and medical “narrations and materialities,” connected to experiences and theoretical encounters with bodies and embodiment. With the awareness of the body as not “thinkable” in Spivak’s terms, the motivation of this study is to find innovative ways of understanding the multi-layered experienced and theorized locality of women’s bodies in the field of biomedicine. Using visual data, artwork, practice, and written text, in addition to the verbal data collected during the course of this project, provides insights into the discursive relatedness of different ideas which arise in public reflections and (inter-) disciplinary discussions. I will begin the following section by looking at exemplary spaces of public reflections in media coverage and art related to biomedical developments before turning my attention to disciplinary discussions.
[40] 2.2.1 An Introduction to Spaces of Public Reflections: On Erasing and Connecting “Semi-real” Bodies
“For if the skin is a border,
then it is a border that feels”
(Ahmed 2000: 45).
“But there is no such thing as the human. Instead,
there is only the dizzying multiplicity of the cut
human, the human body as interminably cut,
fractured”
(Athanasiou 2003: 125).
During the pre-study for this project, I became concerned with the contemporary conflations of arguments, bodies (literally), and perspectives in the field of RGTs and biomedicine, and the potential for fragmentations on various levels inherent in past, current, and emerging medical and research practices. Listening to conference presentations at the time of data collection for this study, it sometimes seemed to me as if reports about biomedical practices that were based on the fragmentation of the body were followed by social scientific responses that seemed to oftentimes either lack a coherent argument and hence “zig-zag” through the terrain trying not to “hit” anyone, or that seemed to present an argument that missed, from my point of view, addressing important social or cultural components of the performance of biomedical practices. Zoloth’s presentation, as I referred to in the introduction to this study, can, from my experience of listening to it, illustrate this difficulty.
The theoretical matrix applied in this study has been developed in response to my experiences of the conflations of arguments, bodies, and perspectives. In order for the theoretical matrix of my study to grasp contemporary framings of bodies and of bodily substances, and in order to provide impulses in the area of social scientific research into biomedical issues at stake, I chose to first learn more about whose bodies are talked about and looked at in public spaces within biomedical developments at the time of data collection and how (these) bodies got framed in various sites and by various actors. As the analysis chapters will incorporate insights into media and art representations of bodies, the following section introduces notions of bodies in the public sphere, such as in media reports and art exhibits in order to provide an idea about bodies (or notions of bodies) that are missing in the overall picture and ways in which the theoretical matrix for this study relates and reacts to this. Within this learning process, I came to understand that writings that exalt, for example, the possible success of stem cell research, are often based upon an understanding of the possibility to fragment bodies as a precursor to combining bodily substances acquired from different bodies. Such writing frequently also embeds the future prospects [41] of medical research in present day constructions and representations of medical needs and wishes (Syed 2006, Kitzinger et al. 2003). In this line of thought, the practice of cloning an embryo from which to derive a stem cell line for the envisioned future treatment of future patients creates a link between the present and the future, bridging the gap between the current state of not yet having any treatment available (nor the techniques envisioned as necessary for the development of the treatment) and the future wish for treatment yet to be achieved. During the time of data collection for this study, donors of bodily substances in the field of stem cell research in the UK (and elsewhere) were most often women receiving fertility treatment or women who were undergoing hormonal stimulation solely to “donate” eggs for research. For the first group, these women were going through a very specific time in their lives, with bodily experiences being closely linked to feelings of inferiority (Throsby 2004). Thus, their “donation” of eggs or embryos is likely encompassed within their experiences of treatment.
In relation to the comparable invisibility of donors’ bodies (in a majority of the media) in the process, the bodies of future recipients are those that are made visible in, for example, the UK media coverage that I researched. Following the announcement that the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) had granted the first UK license for embryonic stem cell research involving somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT)23 to the Newcastle Fertility Centre in 2004, future patients, rather than egg or embryo donors, were featured as visible actors in the media stories (Throsby and Roberts 2008). The representation of a young woman living with diabetes, whose story was featured at the time of the announcement, provided readers with an image of a future treatment recipient through a contemporary individual narrative tied to a present-time body (Wainwright and Williams 2008). Reference to the life story of an individual allows for different conceptual approaches toward the validation for scientific research; consequently, the research can be viewed as closely linked to individual needs even if due to the basic state of the research and cost factors involved in the possible realization of treatments. The people referred to as potential recipients may realistically never be eligible recipients of treatment.
Building connections between (future) bodies, which can as yet only be imagined, and present subjects in media reports about biomedical research, is a practice that I understand as writing practices of binding. The binding of future bodies to the stories of individuals (from everyday life or those heroic ones such as the Christopher Reeve narrative) lends individual narratives to science fiction bodies. Indeed, the narrative