displayed a pregnant, skinless body and external to it, fetuses. It seems that bodies are not objectifiable in a way that allows for the same (curatorial) treatment for everybody. What is the connection being made here between the representations of particular bodies in particular ways? How is it, that the corpses of male, formerly (and in ways continually) imprisoned individuals can possibly be arranged in sport poses for all to view, yet the pregnant body and fetuses carry a warning sign? Is there a relational sense or an affinity assumed between the fetuses or the pregnant woman and the children and adults viewing the exhibit, which differs from the distancing that is deemed potentially more possible between the same audience and bodies of male imprisoned persons? In what ways does the futuricity of the lifeless fetus become questionable (or possibly scary) in relation to the viewer’s own reflections on it from an embodied perspective? I do not have the space here to address these questions, but did find it crucial to point them out, as seeds for thoughts.
The advertisements for the exhibit, as well as the exhibit itself, create a space in which practices formally reserved for the medical and scientific research domain are reconfigured as practices and representations of art, and of what is oftentimes framed to be educational (art). In what ways do such exhibits not only have the potential to affect an individual level of sensory (dis-)engagement, but also provide a means of establishing a tolerance and perhaps even appreciation of practices, which would have once been considered unacceptable, through their reconstruction as art? Is it thus in the interface between biomedical practices and art that crucial questions that relate to what we understand embodiment and human identity to be, crystalize?
The examples outlined above illustrate the ways in which the temporality of embodiment and identity is shaped in relation to the specific spaces in which it occurs, with the compression of the future stem cell treatment recipient into the lived experience of the present day diabetic patient, or the erasure of the past in the process of constituting the future of the face transplant recipient. The experiential processes of the donors, as well as the subjectified experiences of recipients of substances from other bodies, seem to be displaced from [44] these discussions. It is also in response to narrations, such as those shared in the examples provided above, that this study invites experiences missing in narrations into an investigation of RGTs as well as biomedicine and explores the displacement25 (and replacement) of bodies (and bodily substances). In the pages that follow, I will connect examples such as those above, which are occurring in the context of developing biomedical practices and research, to theoretical work on the relationship between body/Körper and Leib in order to establish a background-framework, a matrix, useful in addressing and working from within the disarray characterizing the field of RGTs and biomedicine.
2.2.2 On the Interface of Body/Körper and Leib – the Significance of Translations and Relationality between Experience and Language
“The scandals of translation are
cultural, economic and political”
(Venuti 1998: 1).
“Ich kann meine Leber ja nicht spüren.
Es gibt keine Nervenzellen in der Leber,
es gibt auch keine um die Leber herum.
Dich aber kann ich spüren, du bist da.
Wir kennen uns nicht und kennen uns doch,
ich träume deine Träume, du hast die Traumchemie ja mitgebracht. […]
Wir haben uns gefunden. Und haben uns verpasst,
bleiben jetzt aber zusammen. Und leben noch ein bisschen,
du durch mich und ich durch dich”26 (Wagner 2014: 175).
The opening quotations of this section refer to impossibilities as they appear in transformation and translation processes between bodies and language(s). Both areas are crucial to this section, and they intersect. In my understanding, each quotation can be read as speaking to either area. During the studies for my second master’s, I was introduced to the historian Barbara Duden’s work. [45] Her research reflects on historical notions of the Leib and the body as site of socio-historical inquiry. In this study, I am addressing the interlinkages between Leib and body or Körper,27 and leibliche subjectivity as it relates to identity. This approach (within my study) can be seen as having been triggered by Duden’s historical work (Duden 2008, 2002a, 2002b, 1993, 1991b). Working on historical-medical understandings of pregnancy, Duden developed ideas about the historical and cultural situatedness of the Leib as well as the relationship between body and Leib. She coined the term “Leibesvergessenheit” to refer to the forgetting (or the “limbo”) of the Leib. I suggest that one could also think about the Leib as standing back, as being obscured, and thus becoming an object that appears forgotten. At the same time, this “forgetting” might be desired for the creation of ethical policies that cross historically well established ethical borders in the field of medical research and practices. For example, the questioning of the skin as a “natural” border, became, and continues to become, possible.
I am not convinced that the Leib is a “lost good.” Paying attention to a significant body of feminist research which aims to further an understanding of women’s feelings and experiences while working through issues connected with “infertility” and RGTs leads me to understand that individual experiences as relating to the Leib are certainly a matter to (feminist) research (Bell 2014, Wilson 2014, Harwood 2007, Inhorn ed 2007, Rapp 1999, Franklin 1997, Nave-Herz 1989, Ginsburg 1989). Yet, none of these studies listed introduces or works with the notion of “Leib.” From my perspective, paying attention to notions of Leib can bring a crucial “tool” and critical conceptual contemplations to an analysis of biomedical developments as they relate to power, gender, race, class, and ultimately money. Including notions of the Leib creates options to challenge mainstream narrations of biomedical success and illuminates crucial individual experiences within the economic machinery of biomedical interventions, including trades in the body. Such individual experiences in turn can foster an understanding of inequalities established between people involved in biomedical practices on various levels, as they are: medical professionals, “donors,” family members, and so on.
While there are case studies showing the complex results of inequalities established within biomedical practice, such as studies on the John Moore case,28 there were, at the time of data collection for this study (to my knowledge) no interdisciplinary studies (published in either German or English) [46] using various forms of data and introducing the philosophical notion of the Leib to an analysis of biomedical practices. I strongly trust that a notion of Leib that includes ideas of non-linearity29 (for example, of time) and is thus not strictly framed as marking a transition from one state to the other, can help address imbrications of body/Körper/Leib in current times (Wils 2002). In opposition to one possible reading of Duden’s earlier work, in which Leib is a notion “belonging” within a more temporal period of the past, the “differentiation” and/or relationality I apply between body/Körper and Leib is not a historical or transformative one. I more so consider a loss of vocabulary that refers to Leib as a crucial part of the establishment of discourses activated within body centered medicine, which builds upon the denial of Leib as individually experienced entity that counteracts notions of routinely, efficiently, and orderly exchange processes involving moving bodily substances in linear time and three-dimensional space, and as part of this oftentimes between bodies (Böhme 2003).
The term “body” or “Körper” does not capture an acknowledgement of individual bodies being ultimately non-objectified or non-comparable.30 This is in part why the terms body and Körper lend themselves to support certain medical discourses that come to matter in, for example, how organ transfer is commonly framed as a process in which an objectifiable part of a body is simply transferred to another body (Schadwinkel 2011). Such discourses are however, not able to address
