CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
| Author | Aas, Oliver |
|---|---|
| Title | Intimate Anatomies : The Formation of a Biopolitical Subject through Medical Visualization |
| Summary | Set in the backdrop of “slow death” (Berlant, 2007) and rampant belief in neoliberal ideals of resilience, my thesis looks at how precarious socioeconomic conditions under neoliberalism have contributed to the increased resonance with medical technologies. However, I argue that in opposition to the cultural canon’s affliction for cathartic emotions, contemporary scenes of the often medicalized everyday life are lived out in what Sianne Ngai (2005) calls “minor affects” and states of anticipation (Anderson, 2006). By analyzing artistic representations of medical imaging technologies in the short story "War Dances" (2008) by Sherman Alexie, artist Mona Hatoum's installation "Corps étranger" (1994), I aim to show how power and oppression work through medical visualization. In turn, through an analysis of Laura Ferguson's "The Visible Skeleton Series", I follow a mode of “reparative reading” (Sedgwick, 1997) to suggest a new temporality of medicalized subjectivity that is anchored in the “here and now”. In other words, I am staging an encounter among medical aesthetics, affect and neoliberal subjectivity by tending to the ways each of these artworks respond to larger cultural worries around medical imaging that include death anxiety, mortality, bodily fragmentation and the loss of independence. Oscillating between the sociohistorical context and psychic identifications of medical imaging technologies, I draw from psychoanalysis, phenomenology, affect theory, literary theory, art criticism, feminist STS studies, medical humanities, disability studies and cultural criticism to outline the complex ways in which affect is an inherent part of neoliberalism, anticipatory scientific practices and subsequently everyday life. Inspired by the Foucauldian notion of "the medical gaze", I am especially interested in that which eludes the one-dimensional medical representations, namely the three-dimensional body. By discussing the discrepancy between the lived body and the discourse that makes it visible, I show how the “seeing eye” of contemporary technologies as political apparatus configures into structural subjectivity. |
| Supervisor | Eliasova, Vera |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/aas_oliver.pdf |
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