Women’s Bodies and the Evolution of Anti-rape Technologies: From the Hoop Skirt to the Smart Frock

In this article, we explore smart deterrents and their historical precedents marketed to women and girls for the purpose of preventing harassment, sexual abuse and violence. Rape deterrents, as we define them, encompass customs, architectures, fashions, surveillant infrastructures, apps and devices conceived to manage and protect the body. Online searches reveal an array of technologies, and we engage with their prevention narratives and cultural construction discourses of the gendered body. Our critical analysis places recent rape deterrents in conversation with earlier technologies to untangle the persistent logics. These are articulated with reference to the ways that proto-digital technologies have been imported into the realm of ubiquitous computing and networks. Our conceptual framework offers novel pathways for discussing feminine bodies and their messy navigation of everyday life that include both threats to corporeal safety and collective imaginings of empowerment.

Affect Theory and Breast Cancer Memoirs: Rescripting Fears of Death and Dying in the Anthropocene

Re-evaluating dominant cultural narratives around dying and death is central to new critiques of individualism and human exceptionalism. As conceptual tools for theorizing the end of the individual proliferate, the affective dimensions of this project are often overlooked, especially as they pertain to individual subjects. In contrast, a significant number of iconic queer and feminist thinkers have suffered breast cancer and written memoirs representing the subjective experience of confronting mortality. This article identifies the affective orientations towards one’s own mortality as missing from queer and feminist thinking on embodiment in the Anthropocene. As a remedy, the article reads several iconic feminist breast cancer memoirs – Sontag, Lorde, Sedgwick, Jain and Boyer – for their complex representations of affect, in particular fear, in relation to dying and death. Using the affect theory of Silvan Tomkins, this analysis contributes to critiques of cancer culture in medical humanities and of mortality and embodiment in feminist environmental humanities.

Exploring the Multiplicity of Embodied Agency in Colombian Assisted Reproduction

Analyses of assisted reproductive technologies have demonstrated how objectification and agency can coexist in infertility centres. How objectification creates opportunities for empowerment, however, has not yet been explored. In analysing women’s narratives of assisted conception in Colombian infertility clinics, I demonstrate the complexity in women’s embodied experiences of various objectifying stages of assisted conception and argue that their experiences produced multiple forms of embodied agency. Women used diagnostic procedures to learn about their bodies and infertility complications, which augmented their authority over their bodies and treatment. They drew upon their embodied knowledge to reduce treatment anxieties, while sensations such as pain were made purposeful, and hence meaningful, as women strove to reconfigure the significance of the embodied sensations of conception in a context of medicalized reproduction. In these narratives, we see that lived bodies are productive agents of social change, generating meanings and working to reshape dominant social understandings.

Interview with Samantha Frost, ‘Attentive Body’: Epigenetic Processes and the Self-formative Subjectivity

The interview is a follow-up from Samantha Frost’s article, ‘The Attentive Body’ in Body & Society 26(4). Tomoko Tamari invites Frost to explore her interest in ‘biocultural creatures’, with its focus on ‘bodies’ responsive self-transformation’ in epigenetic processes, and unfolds Peirce’s account of the index for understanding meaning-making in biological processes. Tamari also introduces Katherine Hayles’s notion of ‘cognitive nonconscious’ to raise the question of the possible theoretical and mechanical similarities/discrepancies between epigenetic processes in organisms and the meaning-making process in computational systems. Drawing on Jacob von Uexkull’s notion of ‘umwelt’ and introducing Yoshimi Kawade’s remarks on a living being’s subjective orientation in environments, a further question about ‘intention’ and ‘subjectivity’ enables Frost to further unpack her notion of ‘the attentive self’ and discuss its relation to ‘intentionality’ and ‘referentiality’ in epigenetic processes. Finally, Samantha Frost mentions her current projects on the connection between ‘attention-as-responsive-self-transformation’ and ‘mode-of-living-as-form-of-live’.

Exoskeletons, Rehabilitation and Bodily Capacities

Motility impairments resulting from spinal cord injuries and cerebrovascular accidents are increasingly prevalent in society, leading to the growing development of rehabilitative robotic technologies, among them exoskeletons. This article outlines how bodies with neurological conditions such as spinal cord injury and stroke engage in processes of re-appropriation while using exoskeletons and some of the challenges they face. The main task of exoskeletons in rehabilitative environments is either to rehabilitate or ameliorate anatomic functions of impaired bodies. In these complex processes, they also play a crucial role in recasting specific corporeal phenomenologies. For the accomplishment of these forms of corporeal re-appropriation, the role of experts is crucial. This article explores how categories such as bodily resistance, techno-inter-corporeal co-production of bodies and machines, as well as body work mark the landscape of these contemporary forms of impaired corporeality. While defending corporeal extension rather than incorporation, I argue against the figure of the ‘cyborg’ and posit the idea of ‘residual subjectivity’.

Headphones, Auditory Violence and the Sonic Flooding of Corporeal Space

In this article, I develop and redirect Julian Henriques’s model of sonic dominance through examination of accounts of acoustic violence and torture involving headphones. Specifically, I show how auditory experience has been weaponized as an intracorporeal phenomenon, with headphones effecting a sense of sounds invading the interior phenomenological space of the head. By analysing reported cases of sonic violence and torture involving headphones through a composite theoretical lens drawn from the fields of music, sound and body studies, I argue that in saturating the head’s perceived interior with sound, perpetrators of violence perform sonic dominance across two interrelated levels: the subjugation of interiorized auditory space via the notion of flooding, in which attention is directed towards the experience of the body as a vessel for sound; and the resulting manipulation of phenomenological head–mind linkages, with emphasis on the head as a ‘space’ for both sound and thought.

Hearing Gloves and Seeing Tongues? Disability, Sensory Substitution and the Origins of the Neuroplastic Subject

Researchers in post-war industrial laboratories such as Bell Labs and the Smith-Kettlewell Institute pioneered solutions to compensate for sensory loss through so-called sensory substitution systems, premised on an assumption of cortical and sensory plasticity. The article tracks early discussions of plasticity in psychology literature from William James, acknowledged by Wiener, but explicitly developed by Bach-y-Rita and his collaborators. After discussing the conceptual foundations of the principles of sensory substitution, two examples are discussed. First, ‘Project Felix’ was an experiment in vibrotactile communication by means of ‘hearing gloves’ for the deaf at Norbert Wiener’s laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, demonstrated to Helen Keller in 1950. Second, the tactile-visual sensory substitution system for the blind pioneered by Paul Bach-y-Rita from 1968 onwards. Cumulatively, this article underlines the crucial yet occluded history of research on sensory impairments in the discovery of underlying neurophysiological processes of plasticity and the emergent discourse of neuroplastic subjectivity.

Primordial Haptics, 1925–1935: Hands, Tools and the Psychotechnics of Prehistory

‘Psychotechnics’, Weimar Germany’s science du jour, typically is framed as a symptom of ‘technological media’ – obscuring the persistent significance of ‘dexterity’, ‘skill’ and ‘manual labour’ at the time. More broadly, there is a tendency to construe ‘the haptic’ as predominantly a casualty of modernity: skilled hands replaced by conveyor belts; skilled hands defended by the rearguard actions of arts-and-crafts movements; skilled hands destroyed by industrialized warfare. Drawing on contemporary investigations into the ‘organ of touch’, this essay aims to complicate this picture by reconstructing the proto-ergonomic project of Friedrich Herig, a German engineer, amateur prehistorian and expert on craft labour who rose to distinction in the 1920s as a designer of ‘ideal’ hand tools. Herig’s eclectic sources of inspiration reveal that matters of ‘touch’, far from obsolete, were intimately bound up with matters of tools – their design, uses and putative origins – and thus, with matters of (manual) labour.

Surface Media: McLuhan, the Bauhaus and the Tactile Values of TV

Marshall McLuhan understood television (TV) as a tactile medium. This understanding implied what Bruno Latour might call a ‘symmetrical’ conception of tactility. According to McLuhan, not only human actors are endowed with the sense of touch. In addition, TV, digital computers and other ‘electric media’ use light beams and similar scanning techniques for ceaselessly ‘caressing the contours’ of their surroundings. This notion of tactility was crucially shaped by the holistic aesthetics of the early Bauhaus. To get at the specific features of the TV image, McLuhan relied on the writings of László Moholy-Nagy and Sigfried Giedion, in particular their use of photography for capturing and highlighting the ‘texture’ of surfaces. However, he hardly reflected the social and political factors that, in the age of electric media, contribute to the ‘symmetricization’ of touch.