Superman, within the story of stem cell research24 [42] further blends the imagined borders between “real-life” individuals, fictional characters, and the science fiction bodies destined to become scientific facts with the advent of contemporary biotechnologies. This narrative convention overcomes the finiteness of current bodies, which are constituted as a.) endlessly fixable through medical practice and b.) potentially immortal, a constitution enhanced by linkages made to science fiction bodies.
The visibility of particular bodies, as examined above, exists from my point of view in a tension with the complexities of practices of imbuing and denying subjectivity in processes of representation. A report of the second face transplant performed in spring 2006 in China, which used facial components such as a “new upper lip, cheek and nose from a brain dead donor” employed a similar approach (as described above) to telling a story about bodily substances which are put into motion through medical practice (Khamsi 2006: online source). The article cited provides the reader with the name, sex, profession, and details of the life story of the recipient of the facial components but provides no further information about the donor other than his diagnosis or status as having been categorized as “brain-dead.” There is no subject to be found when the upper lip received by the recipient is called “new” and is, therefore, “bare” of every possible connection to the donor, who we can imagine to be an adult (because of the assumed size of the facial elements transplanted) and who, therefore, would have had a lifetime of expressing himself with facial components which, through the storytelling related to the process of medical intervention, are erased from an embodied history and reconstituted as “new.” This example illustrates how different spaces are categorized as those in which bodies and embodiment become a matter to and of, and are impacted by novel medical practices that are above and beyond anything previously imagined as possible. What I understand to happen here is not only the “making of” a “need” to develop new medical practices, but also the media-supported establishment and spreading of narratives of a specific sort, which lead to notions of different “bodies being embodied” in different sets of locations, connected to different sets of values, and so on.
These processes of challenging understandings of embodiment, and the mobility of bodily substances and body parts, are occurring additionally and are publicly accessible outside of the sphere of medical developments and their representation in the media. During a research visit to the US in the spring of 2006, an exhibition called Controversial Cadavers toured the US, provoking ethical discussions. Walking around New York City, entering the metro station, [43] noticing advertisements for the exhibit, I was confronted by exposed (skinless) bodies displayed on posters. The exhibit comprised skinless, partly fragmented, male (for the most part) cadavers of formerly imprisoned individuals who had been positioned in sporting poses (playing golf, football, and so forth). Skinless bodies shipped across borders in boxes, from my perspective, act as sarcastic continuation of imprisonment and the curatorial decision to have bodies be displayed in sports poses seem to be a continuation of prisoners’ bodies movement having been tightly choreographed during imprisonment.
Only one room of the exhibit in New York City had an additional note on the door, warning parents not to leave their children unsupervised while visiting the room. Otherwise there seemed to be no concern about anyone gazing at skinless human bodies for the sake of “entertainment.” The room marked with the warning sign displayed a pregnant, skinless body and external to it, fetuses. It seems that bodies are not objectifiable in a way that allows for the same (curatorial) treatment for everybody. What is the connection being made here between the representations of particular bodies in particular ways? How is it, that the corpses of male, formerly (and in ways continually) imprisoned individuals can possibly be arranged in sport poses for all to view, yet the pregnant body and fetuses carry a warning sign? Is there a relational sense or an affinity assumed between the fetuses or the pregnant woman and the children and adults viewing the exhibit, which differs from the distancing that is deemed potentially more possible between the same audience and bodies of male imprisoned persons? In what ways does the futuricity of the lifeless fetus become questionable (or possibly scary) in relation to the viewer’s own reflections on it from an embodied perspective? I do not have the space here to address these questions, but did find it crucial to point them out, as seeds for thoughts.
The advertisements for the exhibit, as well as the exhibit itself, create a space in which practices formally reserved for the medical and scientific research domain are reconfigured as practices and representations of art, and of what is oftentimes framed to be educational (art). In what ways do such exhibits not only have the potential to affect an individual level of sensory (dis-)engagement, but also provide a means of establishing a tolerance and perhaps even appreciation of practices, which would have once been considered unacceptable, through their reconstruction as art? Is it thus in the interface between biomedical practices and art that crucial questions that relate to what we understand embodiment and human identity to be, crystalize?
The examples outlined above illustrate the ways in which the temporality of embodiment and identity is shaped in relation to the specific spaces in which it occurs, with the compression of the future stem cell treatment recipient into the lived experience of the present day diabetic patient, or the erasure of the past in the process of constituting the future of the face transplant recipient. The experiential processes of the donors, as well as the subjectified experiences of recipients of substances from other bodies, seem to be displaced from [44] these discussions. It is also in response to narrations, such as those shared in the examples provided above, that this study invites experiences missing in narrations into an investigation of RGTs as well as biomedicine and explores the displacement25 (and replacement) of bodies (and bodily substances). In the pages that follow, I will connect examples such as those above, which are occurring in the context of developing biomedical practices and research, to theoretical work on the relationship between body/Körper and Leib in order to establish a background-framework, a matrix, useful in addressing and working from within the disarray characterizing the field of RGTs and biomedicine.
2.2.2 On the Interface of Body/Körper and Leib – the Significance of Translations and Relationality between Experience and Language
“The scandals of translation are
cultural, economic and political”
(Venuti 1998: 1).
“Ich kann meine Leber ja nicht spüren.
Es gibt keine Nervenzellen in der Leber,
es gibt auch keine um die Leber herum.
Dich aber kann ich spüren, du bist da.
Wir kennen uns nicht und kennen uns doch,
ich träume deine Träume, du hast die Traumchemie ja mitgebracht. […]
Wir haben uns gefunden. Und haben uns verpasst,
bleiben jetzt aber zusammen. Und leben noch ein bisschen,
du durch mich und ich durch dich”26 (Wagner 2014: 175).
The opening quotations of this section refer to impossibilities as they appear in transformation and translation processes between bodies and language(s). Both areas are crucial to this section, and they intersect. In my understanding, each quotation can be read as speaking to either area. During the studies for my second master’s, I was introduced to the historian Barbara Duden’s work. [45] Her research reflects on historical notions of the Leib and the body as site of socio-historical inquiry. In this study, I am addressing the interlinkages between Leib and body or Körper,27 and leibliche subjectivity as it relates to identity. This approach (within my study) can be seen as having been triggered by Duden’s historical work (Duden 2008, 2002a, 2002b, 1993, 1991b). Working on historical-medical understandings of pregnancy, Duden developed ideas about the historical and cultural situatedness of the Leib as well as the relationship between body and Leib. She coined the term “Leibesvergessenheit” to refer to the forgetting (or the “limbo”) of the Leib. I suggest that one could also think about the Leib as standing back, as being obscured, and thus becoming an object that appears forgotten. At the same time, this “forgetting” might be desired for the creation of ethical policies that cross historically well established ethical