Cecilia Åsberg: Bodies Out of Order

„Bodies are not what they used to be. Life after the Life Sciences takes on new forms, teach us new words, like epigenetics, neuroplasticity and translational medicine, while also evidencing a highly ambivalent form of “transcorporeality” (Stacy Alaimo) that is not new at all, but was there all along. Perhaps we are slowly awakening from a modern illusion that kept nature from culture, human from animal, technical from biological, and word from world. Less divided, more differentiated. In that case, we need to recalibrate and reinvent our analytical tools, including the category of gender – perhaps even change our conversational habits across the arts and sciences. When we are always already becoming with others, with the world, the posthuman ethics of entanglement entails both responsibilities, opportunities and limitations.“ (Cecilia Åsberg)

Cecilia Åsberg, Head of Gender Studies at the Linköping University (Sweden) talks about an illusion of a human being as being a measure of all things – also in the following interview – Åsberg summarizes her lecture* Bodies Out of Order: Transcorporeal Encounters, Feminist Science Studies, and Ethics of the Posthumanities, discusses the bacterias, genomes and feminist posthuman ethics.

*Åsberg’s lecture took a place within the public lecture series „Shifting Patterns, Shifting Gender Norms in Science and Engineering“ at the Johannes Kepler Univerity Linz on January 15 this year. It was organized by the Institut für Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung (JKU Linz).