scholarly journals Disrupting Lunar Cycles: Selling Seasonal Menses

Author(s):  
Christine Dol

Women's embodied experience of menarche, menses, and menopause can reveal underlying misogynist biosocial assumptions embedded within medical and political policies and practices designed specifically for women based solely on our uniquely physiological embodied experiences. A new menstrual suppressing drug - Seasonale is the latest pharmaceutical insult/assault against women by the pharmaceutical industry capitalizing on the traditional Victorian misconceptions regarding the female body as being the diseased body in need of cultural control. This essay takes up Arthur Kleinman 's concept of 'explanatory models' to analyze the hidden issue of the gendered nature of biomedical discourse and the issue of medical knowledge production. The focus of this paper is on how biomedical discourses in the form of 'scientific' pharmaceutical rhetoric is actually constructing 'explanatory models' for women to practice and conform to a specific notion of the ideological woman in American society - the seasonal bleeder. I argue that well into the 21st century, the female body embodied in natural reproductive functions is produced discursively as an idiom of pathology ill the 'explanatory models' produced by Western biomedical discourse.

2019 ◽  
Vol 76 (2) ◽  
pp. 484-501
Author(s):  
Rachel Hendery ◽  
Andrew Burrell

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the possibility for the galleries, libraries, archives and museums sector to employ playful, immersive discovery interfaces for their collections and raise awareness of some of the considerations that go into the decision to use such technology and the creation of the interfaces. Design/methodology/approach This is a case study approach using the methodology of research through design. The paper introduces two examples of immersive interfaces to archival data created by the authors, using these as a springboard for discussing the different kinds of embodied experiences that users have with different kinds of immersion, for example, the exploration of the archive on a flat screen, a data “cave” or arena, or virtual reality. Findings The role of such interfaces in communicating with the audience of an archive is considered, for example, in allowing users to detect structure in data, particularly in understanding the role of geographic or other spatial elements in a collection, and in shifting the locus of knowledge production from individual to community. It is argued that these different experiences draw on different metaphors in terms of users’ prior experience with more well-known technologies, for example, “a performance” vs “a tool” vs “a background to a conversation”. Originality/value The two example interfaces discussed here are original creations by the authors of this paper. They are the first uses of mixed reality for interfacing with the archives in question. One is the first mixed reality interface to an audio archive. The discussion has implications for the future of interfaces to galleries, archives, libraries and museums more generally.


Somatechnics ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jackie Wykes

When the Farrelly brothers' movie Shallow Hal (2001) was released, one reviewer suggested that the film ‘might have been more honest if [it] had simply made Hal have a thing about fat women’ ( Kerr 2002 : 44). In this paper, I argue that Kerr hits the mark but misses the point. While the film's treatment of fat is undoubtedly problematic, I propose a ‘queer’ reading of the film, borrowing the idea of ‘double coding’ to show a text about desire for fat (female) bodies. I am not, however, seeking to position Shallow Hal as a fat-positive text; rather, I use it as a starting point to explore the legibility of the fat female body as a sexual body. In contemporary mainstream Western culture, fat is regarded as the antithesis of desire. This meaning is so deeply ingrained that representations of fat women as sexual are typically framed as a joke because desire for fat bodies is unimaginable; this is the logic by which Shallow Hal operates. The dominant meaning of fatness precludes recognition of the fat body as a sexual body. What is at issue is therefore not simply the lack of certain images, but a question of intelligibility: if the meaning of fat is antithetical to desire, how can the desire for – and of – fat bodies be intelligible as desire? This question goes beyond the realm of representation and into the embodied experience of fat sexuality.


Author(s):  
Michael P. Kosty ◽  
Anupama Kurup Acheson ◽  
Eric D. Tetzlaff

The clinical practice of oncology has become increasingly complex. An explosion of medical knowledge, increased demands on provider time, and involved patients have changed the way many oncologists practice. What was an acceptable practice model in the past may now be relatively inefficient. This review covers three areas that address these changes. The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) National Oncology Census defines who the U.S. oncology community is, and their perceptions of how practice patterns may be changing. The National Cancer Institute (NCI)-ASCO Teams in Cancer Care Project explores how best to employ team science to improve the efficiency and quality of cancer care in the United States. Finally, how physician assistants (PAs) and nurse practitioners (NPs) might be best integrated into team-based care in oncology and the barriers to integration are reviewed.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Amelia Fiske

While chemicals are often described and acted upon in technoscientific forums as isolated, discrete entities, vernacular experience points to possibilities of experiencing, speaking about, and imagining chemical exposures that have otherwise been rendered politically obsolete. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in the Ecuadorian Amazon, this article invokes accounts of daily life in order to argue that vernacular experience is necessary for understanding what it means to live in a place of environmental hazard, and for building a more inclusive politics of knowledge production in models and assessments of toxicity. Descriptions such as “naked in the face of contamination,” “swimming in oil,” “smoke thick like marmalade,” or exclamations of pain re-lived “tsaac!” refuse hegemonic assumptions about how chemicals alter and enable life. To take these descriptions of life seriously is to recognize the ways that chemical concentrations often far exceed the ‘normal’ forms and quantities modeled in risk assessments of standard oil operations. The chemically saturated present demands a reconfiguration of toxicity – as a socio-material process, epistemic concept, and embodied experience – in order to work towards political and environmental, as well as epistemological, justice.


2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Raechel Tiffe

 Abstract This essay examines the rhetorical and structural divides between the “inside” and “outside” carceral world as they exist within the intersections of racialized state violence and biopolitics. It is also a reflection on my embodied experience, as a volunteer and activist, inside penal and correctional facilities, not in an attempt to center my “freeworld” body as more important than the embodied experiences of incarcerated people, but rather to trouble that binary altogether and to use my experience as a perceived outsider to illuminate what I call the compounds of projected deviance.  I will use my experiences working in jails as well as my experiences teaching yoga in an addiction correctional facility to argue for prison abolition and transformative justice, particularly in relation to resettlement. Drawing on the work of prison and queer studies, I argue that space, race, and sexuality interlock in significant ways in historical and contemporary prisons and jails. I will also use my reflections to argue that the feminist project of sexual liberation and autonomy must start with a rejection of sexual Othering for the most marginalized members of society: incarcerated people. 


2021 ◽  
pp. 0308518X2110680
Author(s):  
Priti Narayan ◽  
Emily Rosenman

This commentary explores the politics of writing about the economy in a culture, society, and discipline that tends to prioritize masculinist (and white) theories and definitions of economy over embodied experiences of people living their everyday lives. Inspired by Timothy Mitchell's problematization of the economy as an object of analysis, we press further on the seemingly singular unit of “the” economy and who is allowed to define it as such. We are animated by questions of who is considered an expert on the economy and how, or by whom, crises in the economy are recognized. Drawing from our own writing experiences during the pandemic and from social movements we research, we argue for alternate ways of thinking about experiences of and expertise on the economy. In reckoning with how social movements speak to power in a bid to transform economies, we consider the role of economic geography in the economy of writing and knowledge production surrounding “the economy” itself. We make the case for a more public economic geography grounded in the social and economic embeddedness of knowledge production, the material consequences of who gets to define what is economically “important,” and the potential for this expertise to be located anywhere.


2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 806-828 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorna Stevens ◽  
Pauline Maclaran ◽  
Stephen Brown

Purpose This paper aims to use embodied theory to analyze consumer experience in a retail brandscape, Hollister Co. By taking a holistic, embodied approach, this study reveals how individual consumers interact with such retail environments in corporeal, instinctive and sensual ways. Design/methodology/approach The primary source of data was 97 subjective personal introspective accounts undertaken with the target age group for the store. These were supplemented with in-depth interviews with consumers, managers and employees of Hollister. Findings The authors offer a conceptualization of consumers’ embodied experience, which they term The Immersive Somascape Experience. This identifies four key touch points that evoke the Hollister store experience – each of which reveals how the body is affected by particular relational and material specificities. These are sensory activation, brand materialities, corporeal relationality and (dis)orientation. These may lead to consumer emplacement. Research limitations/implications The authors propose that taking an “intelligible embodiment” approach to consumer experiences in retail contexts provides a deeper, more holistic understanding of the embodied processes involved. They also suggest that more anthropological, body-grounded studies are needed for the unique insights they provide. Finally, they note that there is growing consumer demand for experiences, which, they argue, points to the need for more research from an embodied experience perspective in our field. Practical implications The study reveals the perils and pitfalls of adopting a sensory marketing perspective. It also offers insights into how the body leads in retail brandscapes, addressing a lack in such approaches in the current retailing literature and suggesting that embodied, experiential aspects of branding are increasingly pertinent in retailing in light of the continued growth of on-line shopping. Originality/value Overall, the study shows how an embodied approach challenges the dominance of mind and representation over body and materiality, suggesting an “intelligible embodiment” lens offers unique insights into consumers’ embodied experiences in retail environments.


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (5) ◽  
pp. 508-523
Author(s):  
Pia Vuolanto ◽  
Harley Bergroth ◽  
Johanna Nurmi ◽  
Suvi Salmenniemi

The contestation of expertise is perhaps nowhere more pronounced than in the field of health and well-being, on which this article focuses. A multitude of practices and communities that stand in contentious relationships with established forms of medical expertise and promote personalised modes of self-care have proliferated across Euro-American societies. Drawing on multi-sited ethnography in three domains – body–mind–spirit therapies, vaccine hesitancy and consumer-grade digital self-tracking – we map such practices through the concept of ‘everyday fringe medicine’. The concept of everyday fringe medicine enables us to bring together various critical health and well-being practices and to unravel the complex modes of contestation and appreciation of the medical establishment that are articulated within them. We find three critiques of the medical establishment – critiques of medical knowledge production, professional practices and the knowledge base – which make visible the complexities related to public understandings of science within everyday fringe medicine.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document