Sea of bodies: a medical discourse of the refugee crisis in Tears of Salt: A Doctor’s Story

2021 ◽  
pp. medhum-2021-012242
Author(s):  
Lava Asaad ◽  
Matthew Spencer
Keyword(s):  
Death And Dying ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
The Body ◽  
Refugee Crisis ◽  
Medical Gaze ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Mass Migration ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Asymmetric Power

In the memoir Tears of Salt: A Doctor’s Story, Pietro Bartolo (2018) relates visceral descriptions of illness, injury and death endured by refugees on their journey of escape to the shores of Lampedusa in the Mediterranean. The medical gaze of the doctor/author further complicates the political and philosophical discourse of mass migration, foregrounding and calling into question the myriad ways in which the migrating human body is subjugated to forms of structural violence that render it ungrievable and inhuman. The migrating body, a production of and outcast from nation-states, is destined to make its way to news outlets where its suffering is gazed upon, sympathised with and later forgotten about. The surge of images revealing the realities of migrating bodies afflicted with pain, disease, trauma and sexual assault is illustrative of the asymmetric power of biopolitics at work, in which some bodies are, according to the formulations of Judith Butler and Giorgio Agamben, allowed to die or made killable. This paper will examine issues of illness, death and dying in relation to Bartolo’s accounts of refugees in order to observe what is gained and what is lost in applying a medical gaze to the ‘refugee crisis’. In addition to the memoir, we examine the scholarship of violence against the refugee body, the realities of ignoring their pain and how these exploited bodies are portrayed within a global narrative. This article reconfigures the detachment between the human as a socially constructed centre of subjectivity and the body in pain. The corporeality of illness and death that migrants face positions them in an abject position and distances them farther from the rhetoric of human rights. The ontological being of these individuals in medical discourse rarely goes beyond acknowledging that it is normal and expected for these bodies to be in pain. In what ways can we in the humanities gear the discussion towards the raw physicality of fragmentation, distortion and rejection of refugees and immigrants? What role can such a view play in building an ethic of lasting care for the dispossessed? Our research addresses these questions through our reading of the memoir.

‘You be my body for me’

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Kellogg
Keyword(s):  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
The Body ◽  
Phenomenology Of Spirit ◽  
Politics Of Recognition ◽  
Liberal Politics ◽  
Property Relations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Current Shift

Judith Butler and Catherine Malabou’s recent exchange, ‘You Be My Body for Me: Body, Shape and Plasticity in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit’, is remarkable because in their rereading of Hegel’s famous lord and bondsman parable, rather than focusing on recognition, work, or even desire, Butler and Malabou each wonder about how Hegel contributes to a new way of thinking about ‘having’ a body and how coming to ‘be’ a body necessarily involves a kind of dispossession. Butler and Malabou’s reading of Hegel is congruent with a current shift on the left away from a liberal politics of recognition to a (post-)Marxist analytic of dispossession: a move, in other words, away from liberal ‘solutions’ of redistribution – of either goods or recognition – towards thinking through issues of settler colonialism, forced migration and empire. Butler and Malabou’s piece points towards the insight that Hegel’s parable must be thought in terms of the political history of possessive individualism, and so in terms of the history of juridically defined property relations; the history of regarding both the body and the land as property. The ‘two valences’ of dispossession, in other words, refers in fact to a logic of property relations, one between those who ‘have’ property (either land or the property of their own bodies) and those who are juridically defined as propertyless.

Medicine: Experimentation, Politics, Emergent Bodies

2012 ◽  
Vol 18 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Michael ◽  
Marsha Rosengarten
Keyword(s):  
Public Health Policy ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Controlled Trial ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Medical Evidence ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Healthy Human ◽  
Randomized Controlled

In this introduction, we address some of the complexities associated with the emergence of medicine’s bodies, not least as a means to ‘working with the body’ rather than simply producing a critique of medicine. We provide a brief review of some of the recent discussions on how to conceive of medicine and its bodies, noting the increasing attention now given to medicine as a technology or series of technologies active in constituting a multiplicity of entities – bodies, diseases, experimental objects, the individualization of responsibility for health and even the precarity of life. We contrast what feminist theorists in the tradition of Judith Butler have referred to as the question of matter, and Science and Technology Studies with its focus on practice and the nature of emergence. As such we address tensions that exist in analyses of the ontological status of ‘the body’ – human and non-human – as it is enacted in the work of the laboratory, the randomized controlled trial, public health policy and, indeed, the market that is so frequently entangled with these spaces. In keeping with the recent turns toward ontology and affect, we suggest that we can regard medicine as concerned with the contraction and reconfiguration of the body’s capacities to affect and be affected, in order to allow for the subsequent proliferation of affects that, according to Bruno Latour, marks corporeal life. Treating both contraction and proliferation circumspectly, we focus on the patterns of affects wrought in particular by the abstractions of medicine that are described in the contributions to this special issue. Drawing on the work of A.N. Whitehead, we note how abstractions such as ‘medical evidence’, the ‘healthy human body’ or the ‘animal model’ are at once realized and undercut, mediated and resisted through the situated practices that eventuate medicine’s bodies. Along the way, we touch on the implications of this sort of perspective for addressing the distribution of agency and formulations of the ethical and the political in the medical eventuations of bodies.

The Inherent Link between Gender and Sexuality: A Queer View to the Portrayal of Women in Herland, Things Fall Apart, Bombay Brides, and The Winner Stands Alone

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-22
Author(s):  
Suparna Roy
Keyword(s):  
Women Characters ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Body ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Symbolic Order ◽  
Helene Cixous ◽  
Cultural Perspectives ◽  
Things Fall Apart ◽  
Gender Trouble

Stevie Jackson and Jackie Jones regarded in her article- Contemporary Feminist Theory that “The concepts of gender and sexuality as a highly ambiguous term, as a point of reference” (Jackson, 131, ch-10). Gender and Sexuality are two most complexly designed, culturally constructed and ambiguously interrelated terms used within the spectrum of Feminism that considers “sex” as an operative term to theorize its deconstructive cultural perspectives. Helene Cixous notes in Laugh of Medusa that men and women enter the symbolic order in a different way and the subject position open to either sex is different. Cixious’s understanding that the centre of the symbolic order is ‘phallus’ and everybody surrounding it stands in the periphery makes women (without intersectionality) as the victim of this phallocentric society. One needs to stop thinking Gender as inherently linked to one’s sex and that it is natural. To say, nothing is natural. The body is just a word (as Judith Butler said in her book Gender Trouble [1990]) that is strategically used under artificial rules for the convenience of ‘power’ to operate. It has been a “norm” to connect one’s sexuality with their Gender and establish that as “naturally built”. The dichotomy of ‘penis/vagina’ over years has linked itself to make/female understanding of bodies. Therefore my main argument in this paper is to draw few instances from some literary works which over time reflected how the gender- female/women characters are made to couple up with a male/man presenting the inherent, coherent compulsory relation between one’s gender and sexuality obliterating any possibility of ‘queer’ relationships, includes- Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), Bombay Brides (2018) by Esther David, Paulo Coelho’s Winner Stands Alone (2008) and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall apart (1958).

scholarly journals ADOLESCÊNCIA, SUBJETIVIDADE E QUESTÕES DE GÊNERO NO TEATRO DE MARK RAVENHILL

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 30-39
Author(s):  
Fabiano Fleury Souza Campos
Keyword(s):  
Structural Analysis ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Body ◽  
And Gender

A partir da análise estrutural, focada, sobretudo, nos personagens da peça Shopping and Fucking (1996), escrita pelo dramaturgo britânico Mark Ravenhill, evidenciamos uma relação incomum entre os elementos formadores desse trabalho teatral e as discussões sobre subjetividade, gênero e sexualidade voltadas para os adolescentes, nos dias atuais. Os contornos dos personagens dessa peça desestabilizam certas noções pré-concebidas sobre a individualidade e a corporeidade, por exemplo. Para a nossa análise, apoiamo-nos sobre os apontamentos de teóricos dedicados tanto ao teatro, como Pierre Sarrazac e Elinor Fuchs, quanto à sociologia e política, como Judith Butler. A peça por meio do discurso agressivo e a violência direcionadas ao corpo dos personagens é capaz de abalar as certezas e a moralidade previamente determinadas de seus espectadores.YOUTH, SUBJECTIVITY AND GENDER IN MARK RAVENHILL’S THEATER Abstract: from the structural analysis, focused mainly on the characters of the play Shopping and Fucking (1996), written by British playwright Mark Ravenhill, our study shows an unusual relationship between the elements of theatre and the contemporary discussions about subjectivity, gender, and sexuality among adolescents presented in this play. The contours of the characters destabilize certain preconceived notions to individuality and embodiment, for example. Our analysis are supported, for instance, by theater theories developed by Pierre Sarrazac and Elinor Fuchs, and sociology concepts implemented by Judith Butler.  Through aggressive discourse and violence directed to the body of the characters, the play is able to shake the certainties and moralities previously found in Ravenhill’s viewers.Keywords: Ravenhill. Contemporary British Theater. Adolescence. Subjectivity. Gender. 

scholarly journals Body experience in the east-slavonic culture tradition

2006 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 74-82
Author(s):  
Ye. I. Kirilenko
Keyword(s):  
Special Interest ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
The Body ◽  
Emotional Intensity ◽  
Social Body ◽  
Body Experience ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ambivalent Attitude ◽  
Culture Tradition

In the modern science, the body is an object of interest not only to the natural science and medicine, but also the humanities. Of special interest, in particular, for the medical discourse, is the ethnic body experience. The paper reveals features of the body experience in the east-slavonic culture from the analysis of the mythological tradition. This experience is characterized by the pronounced interest and ambivalent attitude to the body’s life, natural body standards; and emotional intensity. The experience of the social body is of highest priority in the culture.

Pluralistic Tendencies in Healing Abantu Illness in the Contemporary South Africa

2020 ◽  
pp. 986-1005
Author(s):  
Kholekile Hazel Ngqila
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Traditional Healers ◽  
Causal Link ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
The Body ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Eastern Cape ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Biomedical Practitioners ◽  
Social Causes

Ukuhanjwa illness was used as an example to understanding abantu illnesses. With attributional theory ukuhanjwa illness is attributed to spiritual and social causes rather than biomedical causes, whereby causal link is socially constructed between ukuhanjwa illness and entry into the body by familiars. Issues explored included conceptualisation of ukuhanjwa illness. The focus of the chapter is on the reasons for continued pluralistic tendencies in healing regardless of the expectation by the West that people should be focusing on the use of the fast evolving biomedical healing methods. The ethnographic study took place among the Southern Nguni people of OR Tambo District Municipality (ORTDM) in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. Data was collected using qualitative and ethnographic research methods amongst a sample group of 50 participants. The sample was composed of traditional healers, mothers of children who have experienced ukuhanjwa illness, elderly people (male and female), biomedical practitioners and nurses.

Precariousness, kinship, and care: Becoming human in Claire Cameron’s The Last Neanderthal

2020 ◽  
pp. 002198942096798
Author(s):  
Rūta Šlapkauskaitė
Keyword(s):  
Female Subject ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
The Body ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Origins ◽  
Shared Experience ◽  
Donna Haraway ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Twenty First Century

This article employs Christine L. Marran’s notion of “obligate storytelling” to examine the poetic structures of vulnerability in Canadian author Claire Cameron’s novel The Last Neanderthal (2017). The theoretical backbone of ideas on the materiality of being suggested by Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Erinn C. Gilson, and Matt Edgeworth, among others, solicits a reading which foregrounds the moral upshot of conceiving the body as an affective centre of life and an arc of anthropogenesis. By following this trajectory, I attempt to show how in troping the archeological dig as a biosemiotic archive, Cameron exposes the structural homologies between the lives of her two female protagonists, a twenty-first-century scientist and a Neanderthal, whose bones she has unearthed. The novel’s use of narrative bifocality offers a visceral construction of subjectivity, which takes its bearings from the shared experience of corporeal vulnerability. By thus imaginatively unspooling the affective links between the neoliberal female subject and her Neanderthal cousin, the novel calls upon us both to rescale our conceptions of creaturely life and rethink our narratives of human origins.

A Wojtyłian Reading of Performativity and the Self in Judith Butler

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Franks
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Person ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Divine Power ◽  
John Paul Ii ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Power Of God

Abstract Drawing on Hegel, Judith Butler argues that the subject is the product of its desire for subject-ion. The subject, its gender, and even the sexed body itself come into being through reiterating or parodying preexisting norms and discourses of power (“performativity”). Butler rejects the realities of substance and a fixed human nature that would limit the possibilities of performativity. I summarize and assess Butler’s proposals, highlighting both the value and the drawbacks of her theory. I then show how John Paul II’s understanding of meaning and of the body as tasks takes up what is positive in Butler. He escapes the pitfalls of her thought, however, by retaining both metaphysics and revelation. He argues that the subject exists as substance or suppositum, which defends it against the encroachment of power. He also insists on the importance of human nature, which makes the human person to be the kind of substance who can form herself through the God-given task of creative action directed toward meaningful self-gift. Lastly, John Paul II emphasizes that the divine power of God enables the person to transcend the power dynamics of the culture of death.

Butler's Sophisticated Constructivism: A Critical Assessment

Hypatia ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 17-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Veronica Vasterling
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
The Body

This paper aims to investigate whether and in what respects the conceptions of the body and of agency that Judith Butler develops in Bodies That Matter are useful contributions to feminist theory. The discussion focuses on the clarification and critical assessment of the arguments Butler presents to refute the charges of linguistic monism and determinism.

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