scholarly journals Body Fluids and Fluid Bodies: Trans-Corporeal Connections in Contemporary German Narratives of Illness

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 55
Author(s):  
Katja Herges

Medicine uses body fluids for the construction of medical knowledge in the laboratory and at the same time considers them as potentially infectious or dirty. In this model, bodies are in constant need of hygienic discipline if they are to adhere to the ideal of the closed and clean organism without leakage of fluids. In contrast, psychoanalytical feminist body theory by Julia Kristeva (1982), Elisabeth Grosz (1989) and Margrit Shildrick (1999) has deconstructed the abject body and its fluids in Western culture and medicine. While postmodern feminism has often focused on discourses about bodies and illness to the neglect of their materiality, more recently, material feminism has drawn particular attention to lived material bodies with fluid boundaries and evolving corporeal practices (Alaimo and Hekman 2007). Stacy Alaimo has developed a model of the trans-corporeal body that is connected with the environment through fluid boundaries and exchanges (2010, 2012). Influenced by these trends in feminist body theory, illness narratives, often based on autobiographical experiences of female patients or their caregivers, have increased in recent decades in the West (Lorde 1980; Mairs 1996; Stefan 2007; Schmidt 2009; Hustvedt 2010). Such narratives often describe explicitly the material and affective aspects of intimate bodily experiences. In this article, I analyze two German quest illness narratives: Charlotte Roche’s pop novel Feuchtgebiete (2008) and Detlev Buck’s German-Cambodian film Same Same But Different (2010) that is based on the memoir Wohin Du auch gehst by German journalist Benjamin Prüfer (2007). In both narratives, the protagonists and their partners struggle in their search for love and identity with illness or injury in relation to body fluids, including hemorrhoids and HIV. I argue that Feuchtgebiete and Same Same But Different not only critique medical and cultural discourses on body (fluids) and sexuality but also foreground a feminist trans-corporeal concept of the body and of body fluids that is open to fluid identities and material connections with the (global) environment. At the same time, the conventional and sentimental ending of these quest narratives undermines the possibilities of the trans-corporeal body and its fluid exchanges.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Chavoshian ◽  
Sophia Park

Along with the recent development of various theories of the body, Lacan’s body theory aligns with postmodern thinkers such as Michael Foucault and Maurice Merlot-Ponti, who consider body social not biological. Lacan emphasizes the body of the Real, the passive condition of the body in terms of formation, identity, and understanding. Then, this condition of body shapes further in the condition of bodies of women and laborers under patriarchy and capitalism, respectively. Lacan’s ‘not all’ position, which comes from the logical square, allows women to question patriarchy’s system and alternatives of sexual identities. Lacan’s approach to feminine sexuality can be applied to women’s spirituality, emphasizing multiple narratives of body and sexual identities, including gender roles. In the social discernment and analysis in the liberation theology, we can employ the capitalist discourse, which provides a tool to understand how people are manipulated by late capitalist society, not knowing it. Lacan’s theory of ‘a body without a head’ reflects the current condition of the human body, which manifests lack, yet including some possibilities for transforming society.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andri Nirwana

Abstract: The phenomenon of the people who forcibly took covid's corpse 19 from the hospital to be taken care of by Fardhu Kifayah by his family and the community, became a conclusion that there was community doubt about the management of Tajhiz Mayat conducted by the hospital. Coupled with the circulation of the video of the Ruku movement 'in the corpse prayer conducted by unscrupulous parties at the Hospital, became added doubts from the public against the hospital. To solve this problem, this research uses a Descriptive Analysis approach, namely by formulating a question, namely How to arrange Covid 19's body in Banda Aceh and this question will be answered with several theories and data sets from the field. So it was concluded in a conclusion that answered the formulation of the problems mentioned. Theoretically the spread of covid 19 is very fast, the size of the virus is only 0.1 micrometer and is in body fluids, especially nasopharyngeal fluid and oropharyngeal fluids of infected people, fluids in the body of covid 19 bodies can get out through every gap of the body such as mouth, nose, eye and rectum, because it requires special techniques in its management. Fardhu kifayah to covid 19 bodies should be carried out by trained Ustad and trained health workers, so that the spread stopped. The results of this study concluded that the management of the Moslem bodies died at Zainal Abidin Hospital in Banda Aceh was in accordance with the Fatwa of the Aceh Ulama Council (MPU) and the bodies were handled by trained Ustad and health workers.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanurup Das ◽  
Abhimanyu Harshey ◽  
Ankit Srivastava ◽  
Kriti Nigam ◽  
Vijay Kumar Yadav ◽  
...  

AbstractThe ex-vivo biochemical changes of different body fluids also referred as aging of fluids are potential marker for the estimation of Time since deposition. Infrared spectroscopy has great potential to reveal the biochemical changes in these fluids as previously reported by several researchers. The present study is focused to analyze the spectral changes in the ATR-FTIR spectra of three body fluids, commonly encountered in violent crimes i.e., semen, saliva, and urine as they dry out. The whole analytical timeline is divided into relatively slow phase I due to the major contribution of water and faster Phase II due to significant evaporation of water. Two spectral regions i.e., 3200–3400 cm−1 and 1600–1000 cm−1 are the major contributors to the spectra of these fluids. Several peaks in the spectral region between 1600 and 1000 cm−1 showed highly significant regression equation with a higher coefficient of determination values in Phase II in contrary to the slow passing Phase I. Principal component and Partial Least Square Regression analysis are the two chemometric tool used to estimate the time since deposition of the aforesaid fluids as they dry out. Additionally, this study potentially estimates the time since deposition of an offense from the aging of the body fluids at the early stages after its occurrence as well as works as the precursor for further studies on an extended timeframe.


1976 ◽  
Vol 75 (4) ◽  
pp. 705-714 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph B. Keller ◽  
Sol I. Rubinow

Slow flow of a viscous incompressible fluid past a slender body of circular crosssection is treated by the method of matched asymptotic expansions. The main result is an integral equation for the force per unit length exerted on the body by the fluid. The novelty is that the body is permitted to twist and dilate in addition to undergoing the translating, bending and stretching, which have been considered by others. The method of derivation is relatively simple, and the resulting integral equation does not involve the limiting processes which occur in the previous work.


2007 ◽  
Vol 81 (17) ◽  
pp. 9605-9608 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy D. Kurt ◽  
Matthew R. Perrott ◽  
Carol J. Wilusz ◽  
Jeffrey Wilusz ◽  
Surachai Supattapone ◽  
...  

ABSTRACT Chronic wasting disease (CWD) of cervids is associated with conversion of the normal cervid prion protein, PrPC, to a protease-resistant conformer, PrPCWD. Here we report the use of both nondenaturing amplification and protein-misfolding cyclic amplification (PMCA) to amplify PrPCWD in vitro. Normal brains from deer, transgenic mice expressing cervid PrPC [Tg(cerPrP)1536 mice], and ferrets supported amplification. PMCA using normal Tg(cerPrP)1536 brains as the PrPC substrate produced >6.5 × 109-fold amplification after six rounds. Highly efficient in vitro amplification of PrPCWD is a significant step toward detection of PrPCWD in the body fluids or excreta of CWD-susceptible species.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Horacio J Adrogué ◽  
Nicolaos E Madias

Respiratory acid-base disorders are those disturbances in acid-base equilibrium that are expressed by a primary change in CO2 tension (Pco2) and reflect primary changes in the body’s CO2 stores (i.e., carbonic acid). A primary increase in Pco2 (and a primary increase in the body’s CO2 stores) defines respiratory acidosis or primary hypercapnia and is characterized by acidification of the body fluids. By contrast, a primary decrease in Pco2 (and a primary decrease in the body’s CO2 stores) defines respiratory alkalosis or primary hypocapnia and is characterized by alkalinization of the body fluids. Primary changes in Pco2 elicit secondary physiologic changes in plasma [HCO3ˉ] that are directional and proportional to the primary changes and tend to minimize the impact on acidity. This review presents the pathophysiology, secondary physiologic response, causes, clinical manifestations, diagnosis, and therapeutic principles of respiratory acidosis and respiratory alkalosis.  This review contains 4 figures, 3 tables, and 59 references. Key words: Respiratory acidosis, respiratory alkalosis, primary hypercapnia, primary hypocapnia, hypoxemia, pseudorespiratory alkalosis


2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 294-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasmin Ibrahim ◽  
Anita Howarth

Through the biotechnology of the force-feeding chair and the hunger strike in Guantanamo, this paper examines the camp as a site of necropolitics where bodies inhabit the space of the Muselmann – a figure Agamben invokes in Auschwitz to capture the predicament of the living dead. Sites of incarceration produce an aesthetic of torture and the force-feeding chair embodies the disciplining of the body and the extraction of pain while imposing the biopolitics of the American empire on “terrorist bodies”. Not worthy of human rights or death, the force-fed body inhabits a realm of indistinction between animal and human. The camp as an interstitial space which is beyond closure as well as full disclosure produces an aesthetic of torture on the racialised Other through the force-feeding chair positioned between visibility and non-visibility. Through the discourse of medical ethics and the legal struggle for rights, the force-feeding chair emerges as a symbol of necropolitics where the hunger strike becomes a mechanism to impede death while possessing and violating the corporeal body.


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