underlines that vulnerabilities are established intersectionally, and that marginalizations, experienced by certain populations, communities, and individuals, cannot speak for marginalizations experienced by other populations, communities, or individuals. Yet, the analysis of such marginalizations can inform pedagogical discussions looking at the intersectionality of [27] marginalizations, as these materialize at borders, in medical laboratories and biomedical practices, in legal discussions, and so on.
1.1.3 Content of Chapters
Each of the chapters of this book lays out the content and order of issues discussed and analyzed at the beginning of the chapter. Additionally, and upon request by the group of colleagues who provided feedback for the original study, I also provide an overview as part of this introduction. In following my colleagues’ advice, I am acknowledging readers’ needs and the understanding that the reason for any author to write is for an audience to read. Having asked why I should provide information about the content of chapters twice, all readers so far stated, that they wanted a place to “go back to” to read about the content of each chapter as part of the whole story, but also a place to quickly return to at the beginning of each chapter providing information about the chapter’s content only.
Following this introduction, chapter two, titled “On the Matrix of this Study OR How to Soar,” creates connections to work conducted and theories developed in various disciplines related to this research at the time during the original data collection for this study. It furthermore introduces embodied ways of engaging with a field in which developments change at very a fast pace. In the second chapter, I additionally outline the overall conceptual approach and interdisciplinary nature of the study.
In chapter three, titled “The Methodological Conceptualization of the Project,” I lay out the methodological approach employed in the study according to the conceptualization of this research, including the bilingual fieldwork conducted, and the analysis and writing-up of the data. I continue the chapter, emphasizing how these categories of research practice are not temporally, nor spatially distinct, but rather have overlapped in various ways consistently throughout the study. The chapter provides insight into factors that influenced the choice of the research area as well as the thematic topic. This section also provides information about the pre-study conducted in relation to the PhD that this book is based on, and its impact on the research design of this study. Following this section, I provide a summary of the multi-sided approach to qualitative research employed in this study, and the various sites, which characterized the “location” of my research. I outline how I made the decision to conduct research and collect data in the UK and Germany. In addition, I explain how the approach taken in this study relates to a wider group of comparative research conducted at the interface of life and social sciences. This third chapter also speaks to how technologies addressed in this study were chosen and how they can be “clustered.” Next, I explain how I conducted the fieldwork for this project and specify information about the visual and conversational data collected, [28] the definition of experts and expertise used within this study, the means of choosing and contacting conversation partners and the composition of the conversation guidelines. Lastly, I focus on the methodological processes that informed the analysis and writing of the dissertation foundational to this book, as well as the inclusion of art production as a process-related analytical tool. I additionally articulate the means by which the conversations were transcribed and authorized. Within the same subsection, I furthermore address choices made with respect to writing a study based on and influenced by constant bilingual engagement with the primary data as well as theoretical and political developments related to the field of my research. This section also explores the “translation” of the conceptual approaches taken within this study, as they relate to working with textual, visual, and written data, into written work and art production.
The fourth chapter of this study, called “Fragmentations,” is the first analysis chapter. It thematically focuses on what I refer to as practices of fragmentation. At the center of the analysis (within this chapter) are descriptions and imagery that depict, “represent,” and speak to the relationships between women and bodily substances, as well as the boundaries of and between the inside and the outside of bodies. The chapter begins with a brief word about the “politics” of focusing on fragmentations. Next, it provides a short overview of the context of social science research into biomedical practices and biomedical research, and how such research informed this study. The following two core sections of the chapter predominantly analyze media representations, artwork, and the narratives of conversation partners. At the end of this chapter, I offer further reflections about how discourses and material practices, related to bodies and Leib, are conceptually interconnected.
The fifth chapter titled “Body Geographics. Territories, Trades, and Mappings in Inequality,” provides readers with some of the more contemporary voices regarding developments that have taken place concerning the mapping of and trading with human/bodily substances. This part explicates why and how terms such as “trade” and “trafficking” are used within the frame of this specific study. I then furthermore discuss social scientific engagements with these historically newer developments and contemporary notions of ownership, paying specific attention to the different conceptual framings that are emerging from feminist theory and from the field of Leibphilosophy, such as in the work of Gernot Böhme. This establishes a foundation in which to embed the subsequent sections of the chapter, thereby illustrating their entwinement with a broader set of discursive developments and legal frameworks. The first section of this chapter also introduces insights into how strategies of mapping create social environments in which different forms of inequality and trading relations can flourish, due to the very specific positioning of both active and passive actors. Following that, I provide readers with an account of international exemplary past events, which I understand to have shaped discourses of trading [29] and trafficking in human substances as well as understandings of human bodies as “territory.” Such understandings, in turn, allow for territorial ownership of bodily substances to become subject of legal considerations. This second part, investigates the interdependent relationality between that which is an “object” of ownership, practices of fragmenting and visualizing, and that which is understood as a potential object to be owned. Also, in this chapter, my analysis draws upon different forms of data in order to analyze verbal, written, and visual discourses that, in one way or the other, relate to the political economy of, or are applied to, bodily substances. Again, chapter five is concerned with how developments possibly impact people’s experiences and how discourses surrounding medical developments rely on and relate to the experience of somatic truth (Duden 1991b, 1993, and unpublished conversations during ifu12 2000). Having addressed the conditions and consequences of fragmenting practices in biomedical performances in the first analysis chapter of this study, in this second analysis chapter, my attention focuses on furthering an understanding of the wide-ranging issues that are connected with each other as they are processes taking place within, or as they are outcomes of biomedical performances. Chapter five illustrates that commercialization of the (human) body and trading in and with bodily substances is a well-established economic sector of the 21st century.
The sixth chapter of this study titled “Gendered Harvest,” mainly focuses on gendered aspects of mobilizing bodily substances both in space and time. In doing so, I recognize the intertwining and intersecting of gender with other aspects of a person’s life that lead to (partly new) injustices. I am starting this chapter with an examination of the relationships that are present between practices, actors, and substances. In this section, I analyze linguistic practices, particularly regarding substances that are framed as waste and/or regarding their “biovalue.” Next, I pull in voices from Leibphilosophy/phenomenology. I put forward the notion of body substance recycling and the challenges such a concept generates. Following this, I survey discourses of “donation” and “gift” in the wider field of RGTs and the potential consequences of such discourses for women in various national and geographical settings, as well as in personal situations. This chapter contains less art compared to the last two chapters. It is, nevertheless, the chapter ending the circle of analysis chapters within this study and providing critical insights into the complexity of issues dealt with. This
