Shildrick, Margrit, Dr.

By Katherine Harrison on 23 Apr | 0 comments

GEXcel project: The queer body: disability, sexuality and prosthetics.

In the era of postmodernity, the disabled body can raise acute questions about the always ambivalent relationship between embodied subjects, sexuality and biotechnology. Where in the past, the term prosthesis intended some material object that stood in for a lack that was seen as a negative but compensatable aspect of embodiment, the emphasis now is firmly on enhancement and supplement. For many disabled people, the expression of sexuality relies to a greater or lesser extent on the deployment of prosthetics, no longer resulting in a less than perfect model of normative practices, but in a highly productive alternative that inevitably queers the meaning of sexuality itself. At the same time the notion of prostheses can be transformed to encompass the Deleuzian understanding of embodiment as necessarily entailing assemblage that may take both organic and non-organic forms.

Biographical notes:

Margrit Shildrick is Reader in Gender Studies at Queen’s University Belfast where her research interests focus on postconventional theories of the body particularly in the context of new medical technologies, bioethics, prosthetics, and disability. She is the author of several books including Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism and Bio(ethics) (Routledge); Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self (Sage); Dangerous Discourses of Disability, Subjectivity and Sexuality (Macmillan, due June 2009); as well as 2 edited collections with Janet Price and another with Roxanne Mykitiuk.