Women, Biomedical Research and Art. Ninette Rothmüller

and described in the opening section of this chapter. Employing a social scientific approach to the analysis of the difference between and intertwinement of Leib and body/Körper can furthermore act as a methodological tool and as a means of momentum for situating this study within the broader domain of research. If, when talking about body, one can merely refer to the body as an object which presents itself to the consciousness like any other object, then, building onto Jäger’s theoretical investigation, a study concerned with women’s embodiment and subjectivity in the field of biomedicine must find a way in which to capture the encounter of both, the body, as object and surface for the impact of power, as well as the Leib, as experiential momentum of individual life. This is where Jäger’s theoretical approach to the entwinement of Leib and Körper/body becomes interesting for this study (Jäger 2004). It is hoped that this theoretical approach will prove helpful in terms of how identity can be captured within a study concerned with women’s bodies, such that it will facilitate a reference to life, as experienced by a subject. It will, furthermore, help to develop an approach for looking at the changeability inherent in the body and the difficulties this creates when mechanical concepts are applied about the very same.

      [63] In my analysis chapters, I examine the possible potential of the Leib to act as “the spanner in the works” within post-modern biomedical discourses. I refer to Böhme’s claim that the mechanization of the Leib relates to the instrumentalization of the body but reaches further as it finally questions the “being Leib” as (form of) existence (Böhme 2003, 2010). Leib, in its capacity to remind us about human finiteness, is a crucial notion in this study. It allows us to analytically engage biomedical developments and concepts as they apply to post-modern ideas of the body (as endlessly fixable) and to the Leib as connecting these notions to individual experiences of human finiteness. Hence, drawing onto the Leib and the body as entangled, as Jäger puts it, works against the displacement of the Leib within social scientific work and reinforces Böhme’s call to understand “being Leib” as exercise or task (Jäger 2004, Böhme 2003).

      Within this approach, the notion of Leibesvergessenheit,⁵⁷ in the Dudenian sense, can be a theoretical tool to analyze forms of Leibesvergessenheit as a necessary condition for the on- going inventions and practices of RGTs and biomedicine. The term “Leibesvergessenheit” facilitates an understanding of how a medical concept of the body as having a relative locality, as Schmitz puts it, works towards a framing of the body in which it can be seen as a diagnosable and “fixable” object, therefore offering a different base for medical treatment.

      When focusing on women and developments in the field of RGTs and biomedicine, the blurring of boundaries between reproductive medicine (fertility treatment) and biomedical practice and genetic research cannot be ignored. The body is often represented as a resource: of information, of potential, of research material. Yet, following Jäger’s investigation into how to address the body within social scientific work as both discursive knowledge as well as lived experience, the body being addressed as materialized resource misses out on the individual component of experience. Hence, bringing into this study an understanding of the body as always also being Leib, necessitates that current biomedical developments examined as well as data used in the analysis are discussed on the basis of this very contemporaneousness of Leib and body. Incorporating this understanding facilitates insights into women’s experiences within various frameworks of reproductive and biomedical practice, as well as the interplay of the structure of those frameworks and practices with individual experience, which in this sense is always “Leibtied.”⁵⁸ By employing notions of the Leib, I refocus attention that is paid to future bodies put forward in representations and reflections in public spaces as described in the introduction, onto the individual experiences of the present.