Abstract

In the past decades we have seen the introduction of more and more technologies that operate under the surface of the body, including artificial hips, knees and hearts, pacemakers, breast and cochlear implants, prosthetic arms and legs, spinal cord stimulators, and emerging human enhancement technologies. Understanding the agency, vulnerability and resilience of people living with technologies inside their bodies is therefore an urgent issue. Technologies inside bodies challenge a longstanding tradition of theorizing human-technology relations in STS, philosophy of technology, and history of science. For a long time, most theories on human agency, including the work of Bruno Latour and Don Ihde, only addressed technologies external to the body. These theoretical approaches conceptualize the interactions between humans and technologies merely as finite and limited, temporal events and focus on devices that are more or less under the control of humans. Technologies implanted in bodies challenge these approaches to human-technology relations in two different ways. First, these devices are designed in such a way that they delegate no agency to its 'users', in terms of how they are supposed to interact with these technologies. Second, implants involve continuous interactions between human bodies and technologies that may last a whole life time. Understanding the agency, vulnerability and resilience of people living with technologies implanted in their bodies also challenges social studies of cyborgs because this scholarship silences the lived experiences and voices of people living with implants and neglects the materiality of hybrid bodies. In my lecture, I will discuss recent feminist studies on the intimate relationships between bodies and technologies that argue that it is important to re-materialize the cyborg. Based on my current research on pacemakers and implantable defibrillators I suggest that medical implants may best be considered as body-companion technologies. This metaphor invites us to approach technologies implanted in bodies as devices that act as life-long companions that are inextricably intertwined with all aspects of life, including the process of dying. Approaching technologies inside bodies as body- companion technologies draws the attention to the multiplicity of human-technology relations co-constituted by gender, age, and the geo-political landscape.

Biography

Nelly Oudshoorn is Professor Emerita of Technology Dynamics and Health Care at the University of Twente. Her research interests and publications include the co-construction of technologies and users, with a particular focus on medical technologies. She is the author/co-editor of three award-winning books, including The Male Pill. A Biography of a Technology in the Making ( Duke University Press 2003, awarded with the Rachel Carson Prize 2005 by the Society for Social Studies of Science in 2005; Telecare Technologies and the Transformation of Healthcare (Palgrave Macmillan 2011, winner of the Book Prize 2012 of Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness of the British Sociological Association); and The New Production of Users: Changing Involvement Strategies and Innovation Collectives, co-edited with Hyysalo and Elgaard Jensen (Routledge 2016, awarded with the Freeman Prize of the European Association for the study of science and technology in 2016). In addition, she is the author of Beyond the Natural Body. An Archeology of Sex Hormones (Routledge 1994) and co-editor of Bodies of Technology. Women's Involvement with Reproductive Medicine ( Ohio State University Press 2000, together with Saetnan and Kirejczyk) and How Users Matter. The Co-construction of Users and Technology (MIT Press, 2003), together with Pinch.