Author-Meets-Critics: Anaesthetics of Existence and Beautyscapes

Abstract

This author-meets-critics panel engages with two recent books on embodied experience and technologies of the self. Cressida Heyes’ Anaesthetics of Existence argues that “experience” as a social and political category must have its own constitutive exclusions. Her chapters examine why liminal events—the rape of unconscious victims, the emptiness of evening drinking, and giving birth—have been excluded from experience, and how technologies in media, management, and medicine compel or enable us to step outside ourselves. Beautyscapes, by contrast, looks at a particular site of embodied change: international medical travel for cosmetic surgeries. It traces the relationships between different agents in the structures that enable it, while offering illustrative narratives based on rich ethnographic research. Heyes and Jones are previous collaborators who find exciting and novel connections between their very different work as a philosopher and sociologist of culture, respectively. Both books seek to understand the material conditions of lived experience, moving between the larger frames of institutionalized technologies (obstetrics or surgery; digital images; anaesthesia) to personal narrative, and back again. Both have an intersectional feminist method, and both examine crossing between and liminality—the movement from home country to surgical site and holiday destination, or from surgical before to after; as well as from working self to leisure self, or from pregnant to parent. These themes are elaborated by two of our long-time junior collaborators: J. R. Latham connects this scholarship to critiques of medicine within trans studies, and Catherine Clune-Taylor comments on how racial inequities in healthcare constrain narratives of self.

Chair

• Bronwyn Wilson, The University Of Melbourne

Discussant

• Catherine Clune-Taylor, Princeton University

Individual Presentations

• After Anaesthetics: The Politics of Refusal - Cressida J. Heyes, University of Alberta - Edmonton

• Global Bodies: Aesthetics, Anaesthetics and Being Elsewhere - Meredith Jones, Brunel University London

• Experiencing Experience: Re-turning to the Gender Clinic - J. R. Latham, Deakin University

Session Organizer

• Cressida J. Heyes, University of Alberta - Edmonton