Review of Prosthesis - Leonardo Reviews (original) (raw)
Related papers
Catalogue for an exhibition of art works by Gavin Younge – the decade 1997–2007 at Le Cloître des Billettes, 24, rue des Archives, Paris, 75004.
Embodied practices of prosthesis
Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, 2021
While the prosthesis is often thought of as a technology or an artefact used to ‘fix’ or make ‘whole’ a disabled body, it has also become an important figuration and metaphor for thinking about disabled embodiment as an emblematic manifestation of bodily difference and mobility. Furthermore, the ambiguity and broadness of prosthesis as an object and a concept, as well as its potential as a theoretical and analytical thinking tool, show up in widely different areas of popular culture, art and academic scholarship. In this article, we explore the opportunities of the ways in which prosthesis might be a helpful and productive fi gure in relation to framing, analyzing and understanding certain healthcare-related practices that are not traditionally associated with disability. Our aim is to suggest new ways of building onto the idea of the performative value of the prosthetic fi gure and its logics as a continuum through which very different forms of embodied practices could be meaningfu...
Prosthetic Configurations and Imagination: Dis/ability, Body, and Technology
Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, 2018
Prosthesis has been a useful medium for thinking about the identity of people with disabilities, who often rely on artificial devices in their daily lives. Recent advances in technology have altered the biological body via so-called enhancement technologies, which can augment bodily forms and functions to improve human characteristics. Given its corrective abilities, prosthesis has become the "interconstitutive" point which links body and machine, blurring the borderline between normal and abnormal, abled and disabled, human and cyborg. People with disabilities are no longer the only ones using prostheses to fix their bodily deficiencies; non-disabled people need them even more to modify their "imperfect" bodies. Being human, as Lennard Davis points out, has become "an aspect of supplementarity" (69). The essay will take a biocultural approach to the study of the scientificized and medicalized body to construct a dialectical discourse between ableism and dis/ability, the natural body and the artificial hybrid, humanity and technology, and related issues. Concurrently critiquing, historicizing, and theorizing prosthetics, the essay lays out a balanced and complex picture of the merging of flesh, machine, and subject, and, by doing so, offers a reconceptualization of dis/ability and post/humanity in a futurist society from the perspectives of materiality, metaphoricity, and reflexivity of prosthetics.
Tecnoscienza, 2023
Prostheses are complex, ambivalent, and non-uniform objects. Even be-fore it “exists” as a material entity, the prosthesis, and more specifically the future body-prosthesis relation, is already present in one’s amputation and rehabilitation trajectory. It is indeed integrated by healthcare professionals in amputation surgical protocols as well as during care in the pre-fitting rehabilitation phase. Not there yet, it still shapes, materially, amputees’ bodies. Likewise, while amputees wait for its arrival, the prosthesis is an ob-ject they imagine and possibly fantasise about. Then, once manufactured and materially present, prostheses become part of a long, uncertain, and ever-changing process of creating a body-prosthesis alliance. Spanning from rehabilitation to daily-life at home, this process oscillates between adaptation and dis-adaptation, embodiment and rejection, capacities and limitations, hopes and disappointments.Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with amputees and health-care professionals in France, the purpose of this article is to delve into amputees’ daily experiences, in order to grasp the complexity of the alli-ance that is woven between amputees’ bodies and prostheses over time. More precisely, we will use the dialectic of absence and presence as a guide for our analysis, since these two notions are enlightening to understand the complex embodiment and collaboration between the amputee, his/her body, and his/her prosthesis. They shed light on the temporalities, the spaces, and the issues of the body-prosthesis relationship in the process of embodiment and appropriation throughout the life course.
How did prostheses serve to help the physically impaired in antiquity?
The necessity for prostheses was as apparent in antiquity as it is today. There are two primary considerations for these devices; form and function. Form is both the aesthetics of the appliance in its own right and also how accurately the appliance replicates its natural counterpart. Function refers to how effectively the device performs its assigned task(s). With these in mind, it be will discussed whether the examples of ancient prostheses available to us today shared such considerations, and if so, in what way did benefit the physically impaired.