ABSTRACT
The digital culture retrospective in Chapter 2 outlined the various ways in which discussions about the body frame analyses of medicalized cyberspace. There, we indicated that Part II will analyse a number of cases and examples of the issues raised by this process and what it tells us about the developing relationship between medicine and digital culture. Specifically, critical concerns have emerged within Web studies associated with the vulnerability, ownership and commercialization of bodies, each of which responds to central areas of feminist concern. Within cyberspace, the body has become re-owned, bound by the need to perform identity. Our cases in Part II articulate instances where concerns have arisen about such performances. The core concept of consideration throughout Part II is the emergent posthuman body, a political positioning of the human condition as perpetually in flux and inextricable from technological systems. Our articulation of a posthuman body should not be seen as an essentialist claim about what it means to be human, since continual change in itself is too abstract a characteristic to be meaningfully descriptive. Moreover, such a position would neglect to take into account the relative permanence of specific periods of the bodily condition for individuals. For instance, if one considers modes of communication as an indication of how humanity has undertaken various changes in language systems but also in the various media that make communication possible, the claim would be that these modes have changed. However, it is also obvious that specific modes of communication have remained the same, despite these changes; email has not replaced the telephone or face-to-face communications in many aspects of life. Moreover, people often spend their entire lives without making the transition from one mode to the other, which is in part why discourses of transformation often invite scepticism.
