Prosthetic Bodies

Abstract

The human body is a material site of meaning, of lived experience that also exists within sociocultural and symbolic frames of reference that encode the body from the outside. Technoscience is one such external frame, modifying our understanding of the body throughout the ages. The invention of the stethoscope and discovery of x-rays in the nineteenth century, for instance, transformed the seemingly solid body into something penetrable. This view of a penetrable, pliable body developed with the advent of eugenics in the early twentieth century, encouraging the view that the body can be molded and improved on. In the second half of the twentieth century and at the start of this twenty-first century, we have witnessed huge advances in medical science that have further changed our perceptions of the body. Landmark breakthroughs in genetic medicine and nanotechnology have rendered the body always theoretically alterable by science, prompting discussions in cultural theory of the “body without organs” (Deleuze and Guattari 4).