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This book examines how pacemakers and defibrillators participate in transforming life and death in high-tech societies. In both popular and medical accounts, these internal devices are often portrayed as almost magical technologies. Once implanted in bodies, they do not require any 'user' agency. In this unique and timely book, Nelly Oudshoorn argues that any discourse or policy assuming a passive role for people living with these implants silences the fact that keeping cyborg bodies alive involves their active engagement. Pacemakers and defibrillators not only act as potentially life-saving technologies, but simultaneously transform the fragility of bodies by introducing new vulnerabilities. Oudshoorn offers a fascinating examination of what it takes to become a resilient cyborg, and in the process develops a valuable new sociology of creating 'resilient' cyborgs.
List of contents
Part I Introduction: Theorizing the Resilience of Hybrid Bodies.- 1. Rematerializing the Cyborg: Understanding the Agency of People Living with Technologies inside Their Bodies.- 2. On Vulnerable Bodies, Transformative Technologies, and Resilient Cyborgs.- Part II Technogeographies of Resilience.- 3. Creating Material-Resilient Cyborgs: Sensing and Tuning Agencies of Pacemakers and Defibrillators.- 4. Passive Victims of Faulty Machines? Anticipating and Taming ICD Shocks.- 5. Wired-Heart Cyborgs and the Materiality of Everyday Life.- Part III Resilience and Difference.- 6. 'How Did You Get that Scar?': Gender and the Appropriation of Visibly Marked Bodies.- 7. How Age Matters: The Emotional Work of Younger and Older People Living with Defibrillators.- Part IV How Hybrid Bodies Fall Apart.- 8. "Should we turn off the pacemaker?": Trajectories of Dying and Geographies of Rights and Responsibilities.- 9. The Second Life of Pacemakers: Creating Resilient Implants and Infrastructures for Pacemaker Reuse in the Global South.- 10. Conclusions: Towards a Sociology of Resilient Cyborgs.- Index.
About the author
Nelly Oudshoorn is Professor Emerita of Technology Dynamics and Healthcare at the University of Twente, the Netherlands. She is the author of several award winning books on the development and use of new technologies in healthcare.
Report
"Resilient Cyborgs is an exquisitely observed account of an important topic, and deserves a wide readership. In feminist science and technology studies and related fields, we have much to learn from the wired heart cyborgs living among us." (Anne Pollock, Catalyst, catalystjournal.org, April, 2021)
"I found Resilient Cyborgs to be an excellent discussion of the shared work required in order to live (and die) with a pacemaker or defibrillator. Oudshoorn is particularly successful in placing patient experience and expertise front and centre, without ever under-( or over-) stating the role of medics, technicians, friends and family, society and politics. As a young, female wired heart cyborg myself ... encountered many new-to-me aspects of life with a cardiac device." (Laura Donald, Sociology of Health & Illness, April 8, 2021)
"This book can act as a thought-provoking work for different scholars in getting closer to a complex theme. ... Oudshoorn's analysis on a more solid basis. The intersectional approach may provide an important heuristic for grasping the multiple differences on building resilience." (Veronica Moretti, TECNOSCIENZA, Vol. 11 (2), 2020)
