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“Any kind of technological usage bears in itself a

possible modification of our Leib.

Any chosen technology is not neutral and it

moulds us by depositing sedimentations”

(Liberati 2014: 184).

“[…] knowledge can not be separated from

the bodily world of feeling and sensation; knowledge is bound up

with what makes us sweat, tremble, all those feelings

that are crucially felt on the bodily surface,

the skin surface where we touch

and are touched

by the world” (Ahmed 2004: 171).

Having illustrated different approaches through which bodies are framed in public spaces, having discussed issues arising in translations between German and English, and having outlined historical and philosophical understandings of the relationship between Leib and Körper, in the following pages I will elaborate on some key theoretically influential developments for the study of body and Leib, which do not explicitly use the term or refer to Leib. This section will name a selection of theorists whose work will be used in this study as examples in order to point to the range of voices and disciplines that are concerned with the body.

My intention throughout this study is to keep sight of the body as cultural, political, social, and historical as described by Michel Foucault and to attend to its discursive disposition as developed by, for example, Judith Butler (Butler 1993, 2015, Foucault 2008, 2010, 2014). References to Foucault’s work within this study led to including theoretical voices that revisited, sought to challenge, or extended Foucault’s work, such as Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “bare life” as it relates to “sovereign power” – Agamben’s response to Foucault’s bio power (Agamben 2016, 2014, 2009, 2007, 2006, 2000, 1998). Poststructuralist approaches to the body as have been (further) developed by, for example, Sara Ahmed, Foucault, or Butler, and phenomenological approaches developed by Helmuth Plessner, Hermann Schmitz, Merleau-Ponty, or Edmund Husserl must be acknowledged as fundamentally different, although they may potentially be located within the same schools of thought (Plessner 1985, Merleau- Ponty 1966, Husserl 1998 and 1946, Schmitz 1965 and 1967). However, these theoretical (poststructuralist and phenomenological) approaches are methodologically “combinable” in sociological, theoretical and empirical work.

One possible reading of Butler’s earlier work is that in framing a somewhat flexible feasibility of the body as an “effect of the intellect,” Butler’s re-signification [55] of the materiality of the body as intelligible and malleable “paves,” on a theoretical level, ways to consider technologies as co-inhabiting the power to perform and confirm the “produceability” (Herstellbarkeit) of beingness (Butler 1997).⁴² Such understanding, however, has the potential (planned or not) to support theoretical frameworks that serve advancing key features of modernity, such as effectiveness, plan-ability, and feasibility.⁴³ These in turn can foster discourses in RGTs that “declare void” notions of hope and can empower discourses that conceptualize the mind (as separate from the body) as the main maker of bodies. However, in contrast to, for example, Duden’s critique of Butler’s work as reducing the body to being discursive, my reading of Butler agrees more with Robert Gugutzer’s interpretation of her work (Gugutzer 2004). He lays out that within the focus of Butler’s work the interweaving/entanglement of discourse and matter allow an understanding of the materiality of body and its linguistic signification as inextricably connected (Gugutzer 2004, Butler 1997). From this perspective, Butler’s work can be used in connection with phenomenological approaches, having in mind that a reading of her work (as well as ways of critiquing it) must note that Butler’s discourse theory has a linguistic theory (sprachtheoretische) orientation (Bublitz 2003).⁴⁴ While you will not read Butler’s name in any of the analyses chapters, I was reading and discussing her work during the data collection phase for this study, and I believe that her writing was in “the back of my mind” during different phases of this study. In my reading of it, her work, as well as Foucault’s writings, share with phenomenological approaches and/or approaches that refer to theories of action (Handlungstheorie), that the (sexed) body is understood to be “constructed” either through discourse, interaction, modes of experiencing (oneself as subject), or sentience. Thus, Butler’s work, as well as Foucault’s, or Agamben’s can inform the analyses in this study, understanding that, as Chris Shilling states in reference to Foucault: “As the body is whatever discourse constructs it as being, it is discourse rather than the body that needs examining in Foucault’s work” (Shilling 1993: 81). The conceptual references to Foucault within this study follow Lindemann’s and Paula Irene Villa’s conviction [56] that even if the body is seen as made to be a specified object through its coating with discourses, there has to be something in the first place for it to be coated (Lindemann 1999, Villa 2000). “Der Körper wird zwar auf vielfältige Weise zum Objekt gemacht, indem er mit Diskursen überzogen und die Art und Weise seiner Verwendung geregelt wird usw., aber auf die Frage was da mit Diskursen überzogen wird, wessen Verwendung geregelt wird erhält man keine Antwort”⁴⁵ (Lindemann 1999: 151). On this note, when referring to post-structural work within this study, in order to reflect on approaches that differ but communicate with newer theoretical work in the field of phenomenology, I do so in accord with Lindemann’s critique, hence emphasizing the search for and interest in that which is “under” or I would say “within” the discursive coat.⁴⁶