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Each of the chapters of this book lays out the content and order of issues discussed and analyzed at the beginning of the chapter. Additionally, and upon request by the group of colleagues who provided feedback for the original study, I also provide an overview as part of this introduction. In following my colleagues’ advice, I am acknowledging readers’ needs and the understanding that the reason for any author to write is for an audience to read. Having asked why I should provide information about the content of chapters twice, all readers so far stated, that they wanted a place to “go back to” to read about the content of each chapter as part of the whole story, but also a place to quickly return to at the beginning of each chapter providing information about the chapter’s content only.

Following this introduction, chapter two, titled “On the Matrix of this Study OR How to Soar,” creates connections to work conducted and theories developed in various disciplines related to this research at the time during the original data collection for this study. It furthermore introduces embodied ways of engaging with a field in which developments change at very a fast pace. In the second chapter, I additionally outline the overall conceptual approach and interdisciplinary nature of the study.

In chapter three, titled “The Methodological Conceptualization of the Project,” I lay out the methodological approach employed in the study according to the conceptualization of this research, including the bilingual fieldwork conducted, and the analysis and writing-up of the data. I continue the chapter, emphasizing how these categories of research practice are not temporally, nor spatially distinct, but rather have overlapped in various ways consistently throughout the study. The chapter provides insight into factors that influenced the choice of the research area as well as the thematic topic. This section also provides information about the pre-study conducted in relation to the PhD that this book is based on, and its impact on the research design of this study. Following this section, I provide a summary of the multi-sided approach to qualitative research employed in this study, and the various sites, which characterized the “location” of my research. I outline how I made the decision to conduct research and collect data in the UK and Germany. In addition, I explain how the approach taken in this study relates to a wider group of comparative research conducted at the interface of life and social sciences. This third chapter also speaks to how technologies addressed in this study were chosen and how they can be “clustered.” Next, I explain how I conducted the fieldwork for this project and specify information about the visual and conversational data collected, [28] the definition of experts and expertise used within this study, the means of choosing and contacting conversation partners and the composition of the conversation guidelines. Lastly, I focus on the methodological processes that informed the analysis and writing of the dissertation foundational to this book, as well as the inclusion of art production as a process-related analytical tool. I additionally articulate the means by which the conversations were transcribed and authorized. Within the same subsection, I furthermore address choices made with respect to writing a study based on and influenced by constant bilingual engagement with the primary data as well as theoretical and political developments related to the field of my research. This section also explores the “translation” of the conceptual approaches taken within this study, as they relate to working with textual, visual, and written data, into written work and art production.

The fourth chapter of this study, called “Fragmentations,” is the first analysis chapter. It thematically focuses on what I refer to as practices of fragmentation. At the center of the analysis (within this chapter) are descriptions and imagery that depict, “represent,” and speak to the relationships between women and bodily substances, as well as the boundaries of and between the inside and the outside of bodies. The chapter begins with a brief word about the “politics” of focusing on fragmentations. Next, it provides a short overview of the context of social science research into biomedical practices and biomedical research, and how such research informed this study. The following two core sections of the chapter predominantly analyze media representations, artwork, and the narratives of conversation partners. At the end of this chapter, I offer further reflections about how discourses and material practices, related to bodies and Leib, are conceptually interconnected.

The fifth chapter titled “Body Geographics. Territories, Trades, and Mappings in Inequality,” provides readers with some of the more contemporary voices regarding developments that have taken place concerning the mapping of and trading with human/bodily substances. This part explicates why and how terms such as “trade” and “trafficking” are used within the frame of this specific study. I then furthermore discuss social scientific engagements with these historically newer developments and contemporary notions of ownership, paying specific attention to the different conceptual framings that are emerging from feminist theory and from the field of Leibphilosophy, such as in the work of Gernot Böhme. This establishes a foundation in which to embed the subsequent sections of the chapter, thereby illustrating their entwinement with a broader set of discursive developments and legal frameworks. The first section of this chapter also introduces insights into how strategies of mapping create social environments in which different forms of inequality and trading relations can flourish, due to the very specific positioning of both active and passive actors. Following that, I provide readers with an account of international exemplary past events, which I understand to have shaped discourses of trading [29] and trafficking in human substances as well as understandings of human bodies as “territory.” Such understandings, in turn, allow for territorial ownership of bodily substances to become subject of legal considerations. This second part, investigates the interdependent relationality between that which is an “object” of ownership, practices of fragmenting and visualizing, and that which is understood as a potential object to be owned. Also, in this chapter, my analysis draws upon different forms of data in order to analyze verbal, written, and visual discourses that, in one way or the other, relate to the political economy of, or are applied to, bodily substances. Again, chapter five is concerned with how developments possibly impact people’s experiences and how discourses surrounding medical developments rely on and relate to the experience of somatic truth (Duden 1991b, 1993, and unpublished conversations during ifu¹² 2000). Having addressed the conditions and consequences of fragmenting practices in biomedical performances in the first analysis chapter of this study, in this second analysis chapter, my attention focuses on furthering an understanding of the wide-ranging issues that are connected with each other as they are processes taking place within, or as they are outcomes of biomedical performances. Chapter five illustrates that commercialization of the (human) body and trading in and with bodily substances is a well-established economic sector of the 21st century.

The sixth chapter of this study titled “Gendered Harvest,” mainly focuses on gendered aspects of mobilizing bodily substances both in space and time. In doing so, I recognize the intertwining and intersecting of gender with other aspects of a person’s life that lead to (partly new) injustices. I am starting this chapter with an examination of the relationships that are present between practices, actors, and substances. In this section, I analyze linguistic practices, particularly regarding substances that are framed as waste and/or regarding their “biovalue.” Next, I pull in voices from Leibphilosophy/phenomenology. I put forward the notion of body substance recycling and the challenges such a concept generates. Following this, I survey discourses of “donation” and “gift” in the wider field of RGTs and the potential consequences of such discourses for women in various national and geographical settings, as well as in personal situations. This chapter contains less art compared to the last two chapters. It is, nevertheless, the chapter ending the circle of analysis chapters within this study and providing critical insights into the complexity of issues dealt with. This allows the next chapter to focus on art as a tool that, per my suggestion, can handle such complexities differently.

A colleague has compared reading chapter seven, which lays within the analytical part of this study (although differing from the analytical chapters before), to a roller coaster ride. Adding that, after riding this roller coaster, he would go straight to line up for yet another ride, and then another. This chapter [30] begins with the statement that it is not a chapter after all, but a “text” following Roland Barthes’ concepts of a text. Next, I engage in a brief reflection on creating. I follow that by an introduction to how key concepts, such as time and space, are crucial components to site-specific and participatory artwork. Then I discuss terminologies used in site-sensitive and participatory art, such as space vs. place, or site, which is followed by an introduction of the concept of “Niemandsland”¹³ as the place the chapter is written from and within. Following this, I discuss the contribution the participatory art project Of Women made to this study and can make to discussing the value that artistic and embodied knowledge production processes have for research that aims to include diverse populations and voices. This chapter discusses Of Women in communication to two additional participatory projects conducted by others within the timeframe of this study. That section is followed by a short conclusion.

Lastly, the study ends with a chapter called “Showdown.” I borrow this term from poker, a game I don’t play. In doing so, I play with taking authority away from me as the writer of this study and handing it over to people who engage in the field and will lead it in the future. Showdown in poker refers to the requirement at the end of a round of poker for all remaining players to be obliged to show their cards in order to determine which is the strongest hand. The showdown is the end and its purpose is for the winner to appear. Thus, having started this study with a prologue that invited readers behind the curtain in order to see, again at the end of the study, I use a term that refers to visibility. Furthermore, the term showdown acknowledges that at least given the experiences I gathered throughout this study while wearing so many different hats: as bioethics expert for the European Commission, as artist, as writer and colleague, as mother, as researcher, and as first-generation PhD student, in this game (biomedicine and RGTs ) there are some that win, and some that lose.

Who is who, is intersectional to other historical and contemporary factors, for people and countries alike. This last chapter provides exercises for readers and for education/teaching in the field of RGTs and biomedical practice that wishes to include and activate notions of the Leib as addressed in this study. With this last chapter, I am leaving the field of my research. In doing so, I turn linear time, as it should apply to a PhD student’s life, upside down. This study does not mark the beginning of my academic commitment to and expertise in the field; it marks the end of my engagement. I’ve published and spoken, I’ve created and cried, I’ve listened and written, I’ve taught and thought. This is the showdown; I am providing vocabulary and pedagogical tools and with that I am leaving traces in the future of the research field this study engages.