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body
discussion forum
background
As the ground for most human action and interaction,
ideas about the body proliferate in scientific, philosophical,
artistic and medical contexts. In this discussion group, ideas
about how we treat, know and represent our bodies were considered.
What are your ideas your own and other's bodies? Here
are some ideas about the body from others.
The chimpanzees, not the gorilla, are our closest relatives
... The genetic distance (1.6%) separating us from pygmy or
common chimps is barely double that separating pygmy from
common chimps (0.7%) ... The remaining 98.4% of our genes
are just normal chimp genes ... Our important visible distinctions
from other chimps - our upright posture, large brains, ability
to speak, sparse body hair, and peculiar sexual lives - must
be concentrated in a mere 1.6% of our genes.
Jared Diamond, The Rise and Fall of
the Third Chimpanzee, Vintage, London, 1992, p 19
Feminists and philosophers seem to share a common view of
the human subject as being made up of two dichotomously opposed
characteristics: mind and body, thought and extension, reason
and passion, psychology and biology. This bifurcation of being
is not simply a neutral division of an otherwise all-encompassing
descriptive field. Dichotomous thinking necessarily hierarchises
and ranks two polarised terms so that one becomes the privileged
terms and the other its suppressed, subordinated, negative
counterpart.
Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies:
Toward a corporeal feminism, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1994
How does one see, and hence think about an epidemic? ...
The experienced onlooker in New York will be aware of the
large number of emaciated women and men walking with sticks
or being pushed in wheelchairs - everyday sights which one
may easily come to take for granted in a city which has already
experienced well over 50,000 diagnosed cases of AIDS.
Simon Watney, 'Signifying Others:
Global AIDS, Red Ribbons and Other Controversies', Pavel Buchler
and Nikos Papastergiardis (eds), Random Access: On Crisis
and Its Metaphors, Rivers Oram Press, London, 1995, p 193
The price that we pay for our [medical] accomplishments
is landing us in a morass of ethical quandaries. Is it fair
to use animals' organs to save human lives? Should we really
be picking and choosing our embryos, our future children,
based on the genes they do - or do not - carry? Can we justify
testing potentially life-saving drugs on trauma patients who
- broken and unconscious - are unable to give informed consent?
Should we allow aborted foetuses to be used as the source
of curative stem cells, or, perhaps, create human clones from
which cells or organs could be harvested for therapeutic use?
Robert Winston and Lori Oliwenstein,
Superhuman: The awesome power within, BBC Worldwide Ltd, London,
2000, p 21
What is the posthuman? Think of it as a point of view characterised
by the following assumptions ... First, the posthuman view
privileges informational pattern over material instantiation,
so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an
accident of history rather than an inevitability of life.
Second, the posthuman view considers consciousness, regarded
as the seat of human identity in the Western tradition ...
Third, the posthuman view thinks of the body as the originl
prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or
replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation
of a process that began before we were born. Fourth, and most
important, by these an other means, the posthuman view configures
human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with
intelligent machines. In the posthuman, there is no essential
differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence
and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological
organism, robot teleology and human goals.
N. Katherine Hayles, How we became
posthuman? Virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature and informatics,
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, p 3-4
A woman's body is where she fights for liberation. It is
through her body that oppression works, reifying her, sexualising
her, victimising her, disabling her. Her physicality is the
medium for others to work on her; her job is to act as their
viceroy, presenting her body for their ministrations, and
applying to her the treatments that have been ordained.
Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman, Anchor,
London, 1999, p 135
We know ourselves in our mortality.
Alphonso Lingis, The Community of
Those Who Have Nothing in Common, Indiana University Press,
Bloomington, 1994, p 159
All concepts of race, emerging out of eighteenth century
materialism, are concepts of bodies, but all along they have
had to be reconciled with notions of embodiment and incarnation.
The latter became what distinguish white people, giving them
a special relation to race. Black people can be reduced (in
white culture) to their bodies and thus to race, but white
people are something else that is realised in and yet is not
reducible to the corporeal, or racial.
Richard Dyer, White, Routledge, London,
1997, p 14
The international Human Genome Project has been in full
swing for a decade or more, mapping the sequence of the DNA
coding in both human and other model organisms. In humans,
that's three billion letters of information (though much is
apparently junk mail) comprising perhaps 100,000 different
genes. I find it magically emblematic of the headlong rush
of scientific prowess that James Watson, one of the two men
who cracked the DNA code in 1953, should have been a director
of the Project in its first four years ... Ominously, Watson
departed in 1992, apparently over the ethical question of
who owns the human genome. He warned against a competitive,
nationalistic approach to the new bioscience, where research
groups try to patent strings of human DNA code.
Damien Broderick, The Last Mortal
Generation, New Holland Publishers, Sydney, 1999, p 75
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