Bøker av Margrit Shildrick

In the postmodern era, when the interface of bodies, biologies and technologies increasingly challenges the very notion of what counts as human, Margrit Shildrick proposes new understandings of the limits and possible extensions of posthuman embodiment. Focusing on prostheses, Shildrick broadens our understanding of both what prostheses are and what they might mean for human embodiment. As well as rehabilitation devices used by disabled people to replace or augment impaired parts of the body, Shildrick introduces visceral organic prostheses, which involve any cellular material that cannot be identified with the self, from organ transplantation to the physiological processes of microchimerism and the microbiome. Beyond origin narratives that concentrate on 'host' and 'guest' and 'self' and 'other', she examines the transformative possibilities that prostheses offer as they extend the nature of the embodied self beyond genetic singularity. Building on cutting-edge interdisciplinary research in critical disability studies, transplantation studies, and bioscience, Visceral Prostheses argues that bodies with prostheses in whatever form should no longer be understood as irregular forms of normative embodiment, but as limit cases of a common experience. In doing so, it challenges the western understanding of the singular self and welcomes a new understanding of the human.

Drawing on postmodernist analyses, this volume presents a feminist investigation into the marginalization of women within western discourse that denies both female moral agency and embodiment. The anxiety that postmodernism cannot yield an ethics, nor advance feminist concerns is addressed.

Asks why we see some bodies as monstrous or vulnerable and examines what this tells us about ideas of bodily normality and bodily perfection. Drawing on feminist theories of the body, biomedical discourse and historical data, this title argues that the response to the monstrous body has always been ambivalent.