You are here

UCF Digital Collections ยป ETD Collection

Somatechnologies of Body Size Modification: Posthuman Embodiment and Discourses of Health

Download pdf | Full Screen View

Date Issued:
2012
Abstract/Description:
This project focuses on persistent gaps in philosophies of the body: the enduring mind-body divide in accounts of phenomenology, the unfulfilled promises of representing and inhabiting the body in online and virtual spaces, and the difference between health as quantified in medical discourse versus health as lived experience. These tensions are brought to light through the electronic food journal genre where the difficulty in capturing pre-noetic, outside-consciousness aspects of experience and embodied health are thrown into relief against circulating cultural discourses surrounding health, body size, self-surveillance, and self-care. The electronic food journal genre serves as a space for users to situate themselves and their daily practices in relation to medicalization, public policy, and the conflation of health and body size. These journals form artifacts reflecting life writing practices in digital spaces that model compliant self-surveillance as well as transgressive self-care. The journals instantiate the mind-body-technology interactivity of extended cognition, but also point toward a rupture in the feedback loops that promise to integrate pre-noetic aspects of being and experience. By exploring the tensions inherent in these online food journaling spaces, this project concludes by offering a PEERS heuristic/heuretic for assessing theories and technologies of embodiment and health for their ability to access what resides in the (")remainder(") of current embodiment philosophy and to identify the aspects of lived experience left unattended in USDA health policy, food journaling interfaces, and embodiment philosophy. The PEERS model can be used to evaluate existing technologies for their capacity to map true mind-body-technology interactivity and to build new theory that accounts for a fuller, more nuanced approach to understanding embodied reality and embodied health.
Title: Somatechnologies of Body Size Modification: Posthuman Embodiment and Discourses of Health.
56 views
29 downloads
Name(s): Griffin, Meghan, Author
Bowdon, Melody, Committee Chair
Scott, John, Committee Member
Campbell, James, Committee Member
Oliveira, Leonardo, Committee Member
University of Central Florida, Degree Grantor
Type of Resource: text
Date Issued: 2012
Publisher: University of Central Florida
Language(s): English
Abstract/Description: This project focuses on persistent gaps in philosophies of the body: the enduring mind-body divide in accounts of phenomenology, the unfulfilled promises of representing and inhabiting the body in online and virtual spaces, and the difference between health as quantified in medical discourse versus health as lived experience. These tensions are brought to light through the electronic food journal genre where the difficulty in capturing pre-noetic, outside-consciousness aspects of experience and embodied health are thrown into relief against circulating cultural discourses surrounding health, body size, self-surveillance, and self-care. The electronic food journal genre serves as a space for users to situate themselves and their daily practices in relation to medicalization, public policy, and the conflation of health and body size. These journals form artifacts reflecting life writing practices in digital spaces that model compliant self-surveillance as well as transgressive self-care. The journals instantiate the mind-body-technology interactivity of extended cognition, but also point toward a rupture in the feedback loops that promise to integrate pre-noetic aspects of being and experience. By exploring the tensions inherent in these online food journaling spaces, this project concludes by offering a PEERS heuristic/heuretic for assessing theories and technologies of embodiment and health for their ability to access what resides in the (")remainder(") of current embodiment philosophy and to identify the aspects of lived experience left unattended in USDA health policy, food journaling interfaces, and embodiment philosophy. The PEERS model can be used to evaluate existing technologies for their capacity to map true mind-body-technology interactivity and to build new theory that accounts for a fuller, more nuanced approach to understanding embodied reality and embodied health.
Identifier: CFE0004783 (IID), ucf:49773 (fedora)
Note(s): 2012-12-01
Ph.D.
Arts and Humanities, Dean's Office CAH
Doctoral
This record was generated from author submitted information.
Subject(s): genre theory -- embodiment -- posthumanism -- health at every size
Persistent Link to This Record: http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0004783
Restrictions on Access: campus 2018-06-15
Host Institution: UCF

In Collections