BioSocieties

Thorpe, Holly; Clark, Marianne; Brice, Julie

doi: 10.1057/s41292-019-00176-2pmid: N/A

Over the past decade, a critical mass of feminist scholars has been working to develop new ways of understanding the complex interactions between the social and biological body. Working broadly under the umbrella of ‘new materialisms,’ a subgroup of feminist scholars is proposing alternative non-dualistic models for engaging with biology, corporeality, science, and matter. In this study, we take inspiration from this body of literature, and particularly Samantha Frost’s recent concept of ‘biocultural creatures’ to explore the complex entanglements between sporting cultures and women’s biological bodies. In conceiving of biology differently, this study reveals the dynamism and plasticity of the biocultural sporting body and reveals sportswomen as active agents in these processes. Interviews with sportswomen in two different sporting cultures—endurance multi-sport events (triathlon and Ironman) and rugby sevens—offer rich insights into how different body ideals, physical requirements, support structures, and performance cultures intra-act with women’s biological bodies, and particularly their embodied experiences of the health condition known as Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S). Ultimately, this study reveals sportswomen as biocultural creatives, “constantly composing, decomposing and recomposing” (Frost 2016, p. 149) in response to their engagement with distinctive sporting habitats.

Laugerud, Solveig

doi: 10.1057/s41292-019-00178-0pmid: N/A

Psychological trauma has become the main framework for understanding the impact of rape on individual victims. Trauma has traditionally been understood as a mental illness conceptualized in opposition to normality. This dichotomous model of trauma is now in competition with a scale model in which trauma is conceptualized on a scale of normality. In this article, I study these two models of trauma by analyzing victims’ narratives of rape. I investigate how trauma emerges in victims’ narratives of rape to consider the ways in which the trauma discourse contributes to shaping how victims make sense of, and respond to, experiences of rape. The analysis is based on qualitative interviews with rape victims. I argue that the interviewees primarily talk about trauma on a scale of normality in which they portray trauma as something they can develop if they do not take responsibility for their health. In this way, they can escape trauma and, accordingly, the potential stigmatizing effects of psychiatric labels. At the same time, however, escaping trauma in this manner makes trauma inescapable, as it entails their continued commitment to take responsibility for their health.

Chiapperino, Luca

doi: 10.1057/s41292-019-00181-5pmid: N/A

This paper reports on ethnographic research conducted in a behavioural epigenetics laboratory working on the transgenerational inheritance of “early-life stress” in rodents. The article describes the experimental steps that lead to the production of an understanding of “stress” as a nexus of molecules and experiences, biological and biographical events. In particular, the paper focuses on the experimental protocol of Environmental Enrichment (EE). EE is a housing regime for experimental animals that the lab employs to correct the ‘aberrant’ epigenetic effects of ‘stress’. The use of EE gets narrated as a therapeutic intervention restoring, within the experimental system of the lab, the centrality of the body as entity endlessly modified by the interactions with its (material and social) environments. Drawing from these observations, I detail the lab’s mixed factual and value-laden work going into the production of a biosocial understanding of “stress”. This process, I argue, oscillates between an emphasis on the material, organic and molecular traces of experiences, and circumscribed attempts to deal with the biosocial complexities of this phenomenon in experimentation. As such, the practices reported here may be of interest to current STS engagements with post-genomic science and the way it forays into complex thinking of body–environment entanglements.

Chen, Jia-shin

doi: 10.1057/s41292-019-00180-6pmid: N/A

Heibaika (Mandarin for black-and-white cards) are tools that Taiwanese parents use for infants below 3 months old. These cards are claimed to stimulate vision and enhance the brain. Although the scientific efficacy of heibaika is questionable, the wide circulation of these cards illustrates the ways some try to urge laypeople to imagine and picture the infant brain. Thus, the use of heibaika constitutes a good example of neuroparenting and neuroculture, where flourishing neuroscience transforms the parenting culture. In the present study, multiple methodologies are applied, and the emergence of heibaika is identified as a twenty-first century phenomenon popularised by online forums and postpartum care centres, among many other channels. Heibaika are contextualised in the globalisation of neuroparenting through translation since the 1990s and the rising anxiety of contemporary Taiwanese parents. Through interview analysis, parents are classified into believers, sceptics, and cautious experimenters. Their anticipations and worries are further elaborated. The paper concludes by highlighting its three major contributions: the importance of studying lay neuroscience as a way to rethink and problematise the boundary between science and culture, the enrichment of the concept of neuroparenting, and the emphasis on the dimension of globalisation and knowledge transmission.