Inhaltsverzeichnis

Heft 16 - Jahrgang 12 (2024)
Future Bodies
Herausgegeben von Henriette Gunkel / Heiko Stoff

Heiko Stoff / Henriette Gunkel: Future Bodies. A Brief Overview.
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This introduction is dedicated to the question of what it means to be human and to produce new bodies. In this context, it offers a few reflections on the present futures of bodies.

Analysen

Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky: Sie besamt: Über das Geheimnis des Lebens in Claire Denis’ Science-Fiction-Film High Life (2018).
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As I will show in the following, High Life can be read as a complex philosophical commentary on the entanglement of sexuality, gender, reproduction, and the historicity of life under the current conditions of science and technology. High Life exposes the gendered and racially differentiated violence of thanatopolitics inherent in biopolitics, and shows the ways in which the death drive can become a resistant moment that opposes the current conflation of reproductive technology and thanatopolitics. With Gilles Deleuze, I will show that, in High Life, the secret of life is not revealed from the perspective of “individual life” but from the perspective of “between moments” of a “life that is impersonal and yet singular” (Deleuze 1997, 5). Indeed, despite the omnipresence of death, the question that High Life poses concerns not death itself, but the in-between of death and individual survival.

Pascal Eitler: Making Kin in the Moreaucene. How the History of the Body May Trouble Animal Studies and Posthumanist Speculations about Future Bodies.
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This paper problematizes the idea of kinship between humans and other animals. It will deal, above all, with Donna Haraway’s manifold reflections on making kin with other animals and so-called human-animal symbionts, and ask how the history of the body may trouble animal studies and posthumanist speculations about future bodies – by decentering not only humans but other animals as well. Therefore, I will critically discuss her latest book "Staying with the Trouble. Making kin in the Chthulucene" in confrontation with Herbert George Wells’s science fiction "The Island of Doctor Moreau" and the concept of – what I would like to call – the Moreaucene.

Henriette Gunkel / Heiko Stoff: Geteilte Körperlichkeit und verteilte Körperlichkeit. Ein Gespräch mit Christopher Coenen.
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A conversation with Christopher Coenen about shared corporeality and distributed corporeality.

Sarah Horn: Mediated Trans Futurities.
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For trans and gender non-conforming people a future body is not necessarily a spectacularly enhanced or technically optimized but, above all, a liveable one. Hormones like testosterone and estrogens sometimes materialize the promise of a trans futurity with and for that particular body. At the same time, the bodily effects of these hormones are not foreseeable and, all the more, not predictable, even though video blogs that document gender transitions might give this impression at first glance. The article takes a closer look at the phenomenon of trans vlogging and discusses trans vlogs as participating in practices of imagining and enabling im/possible futures. The interest is the entanglement of media practices of self-documentation, hormonal alterations of bodies, processes of gendering and racialization within these practices and their effect on temporality: Which bodies have a future available at all – as uncertain and precarious as it might be?

Katriina Huttunen / Elina Oinas: Future Bodies in Vaccine Trial Science Practice.
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This article will focus on temporality in how contemporary biomedical vaccine trial science imagines the human body and the immune system. It presents sociological interpretations on medical research from an ethnographic study where a pharmaceutical trial testing a diarrhea vaccine was followed for two years. The trial offers an opportunity to discuss various ways in which medical researchers view and enact their objects of research, human corporeality and relationality with bacteria, both as lived everyday experience during trials – in this case in Western Africa and Northern Europe - and during the processes of designing, carrying out and explaining the trials to diverse audiences. We suggest that the focus on time and futurity in a trial brings to the fore different conceptualizations of the human body. This has to do with indeterminacy in knowing the body as an object in the immediate present. We will argue that open-ended orientations into futurity enables the vaccine trial to hold together its diverse ontological and epistemic assumptions about the body.

Offener Teil

Hadas Hirsch: The Qur’ānic Ghilmān: Shifting Gendered Boundaries of Sexuality.
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The article argues that there is a discursive space within juridical texts and Qur’ānic commentaries that justifies the postulation of a third gender or gender ambiguity. It examines the legal treatment of alternative gender identities by analyzing the personal appearance of the ghilmān. Descriptions of the ghilmān focus on glorifying their personal appearance but rarely discuss the ghilmān’s characteristics. They support the assumption that ghilmān had another hidden and unspoken role serving as sexual partners for male believers. The phenomenon of the ghilmān widens the division between the earthly world and heaven as the Qur’ānic spectrum of heavenly gender and sexuality expands known gendered boundaries.