InterAlia 9/2014 - Bodily Fluids (original) (raw)
The InterAlia editorial board proudly and gratefully presents the special Bodily Fluids issue, whose guest editors – Michael O’Rourke, Kamillea Aghtan and Karin Sellberg – have assembled a number of fascinating contributions. Many thanks! As was the case with the previous themed issue (8/2013, published in Polish), guest editors directed the selection and editorial process while observing the peer review standard normally employed at InterAlia. We plan to continue publishing guest-edited thematic issues, as indicated in our published calls.
Related papers
Nomenclature and knowledge-culture, or, we don't call semen 'penile mucous'
2014
Science reflects cultural practices and also occurs within them, and this ‘knowledge-culture’ is constituted by the public imaginary (general understandings and perceptions of phenomena) and the ‘scientific imaginary’ (the ability to envision scientific questions, methods, meanings and material possibilities for studying phenomena). In this feminist science laboratory case study, I argue that nomenclature contributes to epistemologies of ignorance, delimiting knowledge-culture and the scientific imaginary about vaginal fluid, which has implications for understandings of women’s bodies as well as sexual health potentials. Abject terms for vaginal fluid (vaginal mucous; vaginal discharge) preclude its existence in the scientific imaginary except as passive signs of dis-ease. I argue for a gendered abjectness of vaginal fluid’s names by situating it next to fluids that are tied to other mucosal surfaces, thus showing that even when gender is not involved in the name, gendered knowledge-culture can still affect science. I discuss how my ongoing lab research in social neuroendocrinology attends to the immune properties of vaginal fluid and positions women’s bodies as agentic, taking seriously the promise that ‘vaginal fluid’ might afford.
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