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“The scandals of translation are

cultural, economic and political”

(Venuti 1998: 1).

“Ich kann meine Leber ja nicht spüren.

Es gibt keine Nervenzellen in der Leber,

es gibt auch keine um die Leber herum.

Dich aber kann ich spüren, du bist da.

Wir kennen uns nicht und kennen uns doch,

ich träume deine Träume, du hast die Traumchemie ja mitgebracht. […]

Wir haben uns gefunden. Und haben uns verpasst,

bleiben jetzt aber zusammen. Und leben noch ein bisschen,

du durch mich und ich durch dich”²⁶ (Wagner 2014: 175).

The opening quotations of this section refer to impossibilities as they appear in transformation and translation processes between bodies and language(s). Both areas are crucial to this section, and they intersect. In my understanding, each quotation can be read as speaking to either area. During the studies for my second master’s, I was introduced to the historian Barbara Duden’s work. [45] Her research reflects on historical notions of the Leib and the body as site of socio-historical inquiry. In this study, I am addressing the interlinkages between Leib and body or Körper,²⁷ and leibliche subjectivity as it relates to identity. This approach (within my study) can be seen as having been triggered by Duden’s historical work (Duden 2008, 2002a, 2002b, 1993, 1991b). Working on historical-medical understandings of pregnancy, Duden developed ideas about the historical and cultural situatedness of the Leib as well as the relationship between body and Leib. She coined the term “Leibesvergessenheit” to refer to the forgetting (or the “limbo”) of the Leib. I suggest that one could also think about the Leib as standing back, as being obscured, and thus becoming an object that appears forgotten. At the same time, this “forgetting” might be desired for the creation of ethical policies that cross historically well established ethical borders in the field of medical research and practices. For example, the questioning of the skin as a “natural” border, became, and continues to become, possible.

I am not convinced that the Leib is a “lost good.” Paying attention to a significant body of feminist research which aims to further an understanding of women’s feelings and experiences while working through issues connected with “infertility” and RGTs leads me to understand that individual experiences as relating to the Leib are certainly a matter to (feminist) research (Bell 2014, Wilson 2014, Harwood 2007, Inhorn ed 2007, Rapp 1999, Franklin 1997, Nave-Herz 1989, Ginsburg 1989). Yet, none of these studies listed introduces or works with the notion of “Leib.” From my perspective, paying attention to notions of Leib can bring a crucial “tool” and critical conceptual contemplations to an analysis of biomedical developments as they relate to power, gender, race, class, and ultimately money. Including notions of the Leib creates options to challenge mainstream narrations of biomedical success and illuminates crucial individual experiences within the economic machinery of biomedical interventions, including trades in the body. Such individual experiences in turn can foster an understanding of inequalities established between people involved in biomedical practices on various levels, as they are: medical professionals, “donors,” family members, and so on.

While there are case studies showing the complex results of inequalities established within biomedical practice, such as studies on the John Moore case,²⁸ there were, at the time of data collection for this study (to my knowledge) no interdisciplinary studies (published in either German or English) [46] using various forms of data and introducing the philosophical notion of the Leib to an analysis of biomedical practices. I strongly trust that a notion of Leib that includes ideas of non-linearity²⁹ (for example, of time) and is thus not strictly framed as marking a transition from one state to the other, can help address imbrications of body/Körper/Leib in current times (Wils 2002). In opposition to one possible reading of Duden’s earlier work, in which Leib is a notion “belonging” within a more temporal period of the past, the “differentiation” and/or relationality I apply between body/Körper and Leib is not a historical or transformative one. I more so consider a loss of vocabulary that refers to Leib as a crucial part of the establishment of discourses activated within body centered medicine, which builds upon the denial of Leib as individually experienced entity that counteracts notions of routinely, efficiently, and orderly exchange processes involving moving bodily substances in linear time and three-dimensional space, and as part of this oftentimes between bodies (Böhme 2003).

The term “body” or “Körper” does not capture an acknowledgement of individual bodies being ultimately non-objectified or non-comparable.³⁰ This is in part why the terms body and Körper lend themselves to support certain medical discourses that come to matter in, for example, how organ transfer is commonly framed as a process in which an objectifiable part of a body is simply transferred to another body (Schadwinkel 2011). Such discourses are however, not able to address how any medical intervention not only acts on the level of the body, but also on the level of the Leib (Sharp 1995). Alexandra Manzei emphasizes that “jeder medizinisch-technische Eingriff [verändert] nicht nur den Körper als Objekt, sondern immer auch die physische, psychische und soziale Existenz des Menschen”³¹ (Italics in Original, Manzei 2003: 187). Wagner, whose quote opens this section, writes about the unknown donor of the liver he received “Ich spüre Dich bei jedem Atemzug,”³² and thus connects his identity with the donor, that he imagined to have been female, through a reference to the ultimate life source, the breath, as it signifies the moment the individual (body) literally takes in environmental information (Wagner 2016: online source). [47] Every breath is a fractured moment of Einverleibung³³ and in this sense connects to the social existence of the person. Thus, while the skin is the only organ that connects to the outside world and the (material) inside of a body, breath is the individual rhythmic activity that “transcends” notions of inside and outside.

Historically speaking, it is interesting in this context, as Duden lays out “that until the fifth century (and for many centuries thereafter) the eye not only sent out rays with which it saw, the eye also ‘breathed in’ what it perceived. Breathing, smell, and sight were still all of the same stuff: the breath” (Duden 1991b: 33f.). Given that it is not touch but gaze that determines medical diagnosis, the historical relationship between seeing and breathing is intriguing.

Much of Duden’s work has been translated into English, and in translations the term “Leib” in her work has frequently been translated into body (ibid). I have been present in various discussions of her work, with or without her present, in English and German, and speaking from my experience, I would say that how her writings were discussed, for example, which other authors or theories it was related to and how, was interdependent with the term “Leib” having been translated or not. In most of the literature I have been engaging with for this study, in translations from English to German, the word body is commonly translated into the word Körper. However, translating from German into English, the German term Leib is often also translated into body, with the English term body therefore capturing characteristics of both terms Körper and Leib. Thus, from my perspective, an awareness of the need to attend not only to the relationships between words used in English or German, but also to the relationship between the concepts is necessary. It is specifically important, when looking at and working with the sources used for the analysis within this study, but also when looking at how individual and social experiences are rooted and co-produced through “cultured” language and use of terminology itself.

I decided, at the beginning of this study, when formulating the questionnaires for the conversations to be held that I would be using the German term “Leib” within this study. What felt like an instinctive decision as I began my research, made more sense as time progressed. The discussions of concepts as they relate to the terms Leib or Körper in German, which were conducted in various sites, including English speaking settings, oftentimes initiated interesting and deep interdisciplinary reflections on the relationship between language, individual and social experiences, and culture.

During the same timeframe, I started to read “the same” novels in both English and German, one after the other, as a means to train my everyday English. More often than not, I felt that I had read two different stories, two different books. [48] While I thought at the beginning of this experience that I am just differently “at home” in reading German novels and that the difference between the books lies in my readership only, I soon came to understand that there is more to the phenomena of translation and the creation of meaning in different languages. I continued to use the word “Leib” in all of my English writing and oral presentations and am most certain that this decision impacted “how” I thought and wrote about developments, on how I build an argument, and where I let my analysis “wander to.” A question arising from the practice of leaving a term untranslated is, for example, what components of the analyses did leaving the term Leib untranslated allow for, or trigger? It wasn’t until 2016 that I listened and spoke to a scholar from translation studies, a field that I was only vaguely aware of until then. In a presentation, translation studies scholar Carolyn Shread talked about her decision to sometimes “not translate” a word, but to more so acknowledge “that this word is a stranger here” (Shread 2016: work in progress presentation). When listening to her “scales fell from my eyes” and I understood, that I purposefully had decided to “have a stranger” in my English research and that this stranger had on many levels fulfilled crucial tasks for this study.

Using the German word “Leib” had led to thought-provoking conversations with colleagues, which in turn led me to reflect on certain parts of my writing. Through the process of using the term, I started to acknowledge its specific history. Using the term in this study furthermore invites readers to engage with the space “in-between” the two main languages of this study. Such engagement takes place when reading the text, as one switches from reading English to reading a German word which, if one is a German speaker, invites familiarity or, if one is not a German speaker, requires that this “stranger word” be filled with meaning as it is read. Words rooted in the term “Leib” and or containing it, such as “einverleibt” or “leibliches,” also remain untranslated. This in turn makes some sentences within this study “hard to read,” yet at the same time requests bilingual attention and supports decisions to leave power to “strangers within a text” in order to foster an investigation of what is called the “translational space” in translation studies: the space between languages that gives rise to (discursive) “newness” within and between them.³⁴

In my introduction, I wrote about the crucial contribution that the space in-between has to offer. In addition, in leaving the term “Leib” un-translated, somewhat stranded without a companion, I move from being primarily the researcher and writer of this study to being a translator, a position that Jacques Derrida describes as “beautiful and terrifying responsibility” (Derrida 20l3: 350). In doing so, I yield transparent the power writers in any language hold, as they utilize words and thus create and support certain readings and interpretations of realities (Venuti 1998).

[49] Taking a lead from Manzei’s remarkable work on the relationship between body and Leib, as it came to matter within her analyses of medical interventions (such as those involved in organ transfers); a theoretical approach to the understanding of bodies in biomedicine must pay attention to the non-comparable fabric of individual experiences and be adaptable to this premise (Manzei 2003). Out of these thoughts, questions that arose for me included: How should I work with the spoken data I have collected? How can I read and work with texts written or translated into two different languages in different cultural and disciplinary contexts and possibly times, yet which are all concerned with what is referred to when using the term body?

As the reference to the composition of the conversation guidelines in the methodology chapter of this study will illustrate, the development of the theoretical matrix that surrounds and grounds this study is not only linked to my own observations of public reflections as presented above, but furthermore to the content of the conversations carried out for this project. In my conversations, what (amongst other things) became interesting to me were narratively structured explanations, used to explain the stream of thought referred to in answers. In asking about the (term) body (most of the times at the start of a conversation), I placed the reflections of my conversational partners into the historical situatedness or context of the present. What does “body” mean (that is, here and now, referred to in our conversation)? Working with bilingual material has, from my point of view, the potential to bring yet a different awareness of the inability to ask identical questions even when using identical words (with the additional complexity that different cultural and social meanings may be embedded in the same word). Hence, even if questions are translated, cultural and social translations vary, with cultural referring more to culturally specific notions of terms, the historicity of the same, and taboos related to them, and with social referring to the social embeddedness of terms, that is, the kind of relationship between different conversational actors which is created through the use of specific terms, the possible social rules being expressed using a term, and so forth.

Conversation partners’ reflections in response to the introductory question (used to open the conversations), allowed, in my understanding, insights into culturally informed processes of understanding, categorizing, and using the word “body,” which, referring to Emily Martin, can be seen as allowing an for an initial idea about the individual experience of the body (Martin 1989). Martin emphasizes the circularity and co-constitutiveness of language and experience, making it possible to think about language as having the potential to change experience (ibid). Hence, even if asked about the terms “body” or “Körper,” following Martin, the reflection on language concerning body or Körper and the individual or social experience of the same can been seen to be reciprocal activities.

[50] Writing about the interdependent relationship between language, meaning and experience, philosopher Paul Ricoeur underlines that “to bring it [experience] to language is not to change it into something else but, in articulating and developing it, to make it become itself’ (Ricoeur 1981: 115). Language co-constitutes experience in that it is dynamic in the sense that it generates “making of the world” to one’s self and to others. Promoting the idea of the intertwining of language and experience into research as it relates to motherhood, Maria Wolf states that: “[…] die Mutter als lebendiges Subjekt, bleibt in Bezug auf die Subjektentwicklung bis heute Kreuzungspunkt zwischen Körper und Sprache”³⁵ (Wolf 2008: 741). As will be explained further in the methodology chapter of this study, becoming or being a mother also refers, in my work, to women’s capacities to reproduce and to intimate states in (for the most part) women’s lives as these states relate to reproduce and to mother. In this sense, Wolf’s statement, in my reading of it, can be opened up to speak to (not only) women, rather than to a limiting sense of “mother.”