Fact and fantasy. The body of desire in the age of posthumanism

Item does not contain fulltextThis essay proceeds by presenting different 'takes' on corporeality in the age of posthumanism. Alternating theoretical reflections with personal experiences and/or observations on aspects of embodiment--and thus trying to do justice to Merleau-Ponty's insight that any body is always already a 'body-in-the-world'--it seeks to explore the function of fantasy generally and of cultural production in particular in the process of the body/subject's differentiated becomings. Additionally taking into account the increasing 'technologization' of bodily matter and corporeal practices in the Western world today, these cumulative reflections eventually result in an attempt to combine, or rather assemble, the ostensibly incommensurable ideas on the body/subject offered by Freud and Deleuze/Guattari, respectively, to point up the critical role of fantasy, operating as the necessary interface, in the material/cultural production of embodied subjectivity

Happy re-birthday : weight loss surgery and the 'new me'

Weight loss surgery (WLS) is one element of the contemporary 'war on obesity'. Those who undergo surgery frequently refer to it in terms of their 're-birth'. This article considers what is signified by the discourse of re-birth, and asks what material and discursive work is required to support the identity of the post-surgical 'new me'. The article argues that rather than referring to the visibly transformed body, the discourse of re-birth signals the reconfiguration of the self as a disciplined subject who is able to exercise control and restraint over consumption. This enables those undergoing WLS to position themselves as participants in the 'war on obesity', rather than its denigrated objects. However, this identity claim is difficult to claim consistently and requires the acquisition of both familiar and novel disciplinary techniques oriented towards the normalization of the post-WLS body, and which are body enabling and constraining

Gendered Spaces and Intimate Citizenship

International audienceThis article situates breastfeeding politics in the context of intimate citizenship, where women's capability to care in a range of social spaces is at stake. Drawing on the work of Lefebvre and Fenster, the article considers the extent to which recent breastfeeding promotion work by the Health Promotion Agency in Northern Ireland has sought to reconceive of social spaces in ways that have the potential to improve intimate citizenship for breastfeeding women

Putting the ‘T’ into South African human rights: transsexuality in the post-apartheid order

Informed by narratives provided by self-identified South African transsexuals, whose lives span different periods of South Africa’s political and social history, this article seeks to explore how South Africa’s medical, legal and military establishments have exerted power over the transsexual body. A variety of studies outline the extent to which the apartheid state was a highly gendered state characterized by inflexible patriarchal norms and the dominance of violent and authoritarian forms of masculine expression. Hyper masculinization and militarization were explicit goals of the apartheid state. Deviance from the state’s prescribed gender norms was not simply socially unacceptable, it was, in many cases, punishable. South Africa’s post-1994 democratic Constitution, in contrast, explicitly outlaws discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. But the democratic legal framework, which provides significant protections for freedom of sexual expression and freedom from discrimination for homosexuals has arguably had less of an impact on the lives of South Africa’s transsexual community. The state, even the post-apartheid state, has been loathe to move beyond the idea of a necessary correlation between the physical make-up of the body and the gender identity of a person in the way in which it has treated the idea of transsexualism