Abstract. With the recognition of relational thinking, methodologies approaching
spaces as containers were discarded and reconfigured in social geography.
However, there are other “containers” still present in these debates – and
present as part of the relations in space – such as the “black box” of the
human body. In order to advance the opening of the Black Box of the Body
(Guthman, 2012), the article discusses social geographical thinking
concerning materiality after the Cultural Turn, which concentrates on a
post-dualist and thus a post-humanist concept of materiality. The ensuing extension of the epistemological critique of dualistic thinking
as part of the cultural turn by an ontological critique refers to
radical-relational conceptions of NatureCultures (Haraway) and Posthumanist
Performativities (Barad), which comprise discursive as well as material
power relations. These conceptions neither romanticize nature (or even
interpret it in a reactionary way) nor inflate culture. Rather, such a
perspective allows to examine the materiality and intra-activity of social
environmental conditions at the micro-level of the embodied subject,
considering that matter itself acts performatively and even how such
performances are enacted. This article concentrates on theoretical crises within social geography in
order to discuss the geography of social crises using the example of
environmental injustice and the somatization of the environment with respect
to food and health. By extending the “surface”-view on embodied subjects as
being socio-culturally encoded and discursively normalized,
chemical-biological metabolic processes are also addressed. Therefore, the
body is understood as the place where social crises, structures of
inequality and discursive categories materialize.
The Posthuman Body in Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box”