Neither essence nor appearance: the production of bodies, “normalities” and freedoms mediated by technosciences

Abstract

In this article, we investigate to what extent some bodies materialize the norms from interventions of contemporary technosciences. It is a qualitative study in which three narratives of people who experienced drastic bodily transformations through dietary restrictions, excessive physical activities or bariatric surgeries were constructed. These stories were juxtaposed with anthropological literature about the body and with the elaborations of feminist theorists, especially Judith Butler and Donna Haraway, in order to foster a debate about the individual and collective effects of the self-production of new subjectivities. Finally, it is evident that, in the process of materializing “normality”, the boundaries between nature and technique are blurred and bodies can open up to new constraints as well as to new projects of freedom, in which neither their supposed essences, nor their appearances are at stake anymore.