ABSTRACT
Petra Jonvallen describes how the practices of managing emotions and responses to the life and death of the birthing room combine with the introduction of new technologies, and how technologies and emotions can, following Mol, co-produce multiple bodies. Employing what Mol terms praxologies, it attends to practice to problematize the idea of medical technologies as universally applicable and bodies and practitioners as neutral users. The author examines how bodies and machines are linked together and the relationships they form. Jonvallen approaches the question of emotions and the abject in her analysis of emotions in the birthing room, presenting research she has done on the integration of a new, electronic foetal monitor into the Swedish health care. Boundaries and cuts, though of a very different kind, also play large roles in Boel Berner's chapter on the technological infrastructures of blood donation. The normal and the pathological are shaped in knowledge practices in which technology is an actor.
