M Shildrick
Biographic Data
| ID | 50899 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Shildrick |
| GIVEN NAMES | M |
| FAMILY NAME | Shildrick |
| SIGNATURE | SHILDRICK M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Queen's University Belfast |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9360-0931 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 60 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 261 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 60 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
The Hauntology of Intracorporeal Gifts
This article addresses the embodiment and temporality of gifts through the question of an absent presence. By acknowledging the presence of the other in one's corporeal system, it is possible to rethink the gift/present as an enduring entanglement, ontologically and empirically different from the model of debt and exchange. My research engages with a radical displacement of conventional theory by exploring gifts in an intracorporeal rather than e…
The Temporalities and Spatialities of Death, Dying, and Heart Donation
Contemporary biomedical technologies surrounding deceased organ transplantation raise urgent issues regarding the temporalities of the living and the dead, the disturbance of distinctions between self and other, and the question of absence and presence. There is no simple and stable futurity, but rather a host of ontological, epistemological, and ethical issues that trouble both organ recipients and donor proxies. My claim is that heart transplan…
Disability, digital technologies and the ambivalent allure of posthumanist/transhumanist futures
Technologies, both simple and sophisticated, have always played a major role in the negotiation of a range of disabilities that are assumed to impede the expression of autonomous selfhood. Whether deployed as mechanical aides to ideally normalise physical differences, as organic-and often internal-supplements to bolster the performance of body and mind, or as digital enhancements that override the supposed shortcomings of neurodiversity, the wide…
Get a Life
Hot on the heels of a spate of her own previous books addressing the posthuman, Rosi Braidotti has turned the full focus of her gaze on the uniquely feminist perspective that has nurtured the development of the field. Posthuman Feminism makes a strong case that feminist thought, as far back as the early second wave, has set out many of the grounds on which this highly pertinent—and urgent—area of study has been built. A scholar at the heart of fe…
Robotic technologies, touch and posthuman embodiment in queer dementia care
Developing technologies raise concerns that go beyond the economies of human to human or human-animal relations to open up exploration of our place in a world of both organic and inorganic effects. I explore how practices that characterize the very specific locus of dementia care could be - and are already - queered by the intervention of technological prostheses, and especially zoomorphic robots, that are increasingly supplementing conventional …
More Posthuman Glossary
The notion of the posthuman continues to both intrigue and confuse, not least because of the huge number of ideas, theories and figures associated with this term. More Posthuman Glossary provides a way in to the dizzying array of posthuman concepts, providing vivid accounts of emerging terms. It is much more than a series of definitions, however, in that it seeks to imagine and predict what new terms might come into being as this exciting field c…
Entangling Viral Encounters, Immunity and the Gift
In the urgent context of COVID-19 – and future viral pandemics - the accepted narrative marks the virus as a stealthy predator challenging bio-immunity and causing millions of painful deaths. Even though the status of a virus as non/living suggests that it cannot function independently, we attribute malign agency to it and pitch it as an enemy to defeat. While the personal pain of death and morbidity is very real, a more challenging perspective s…
Stem Cell Transplantation, Microchimerism and Assemblages
The exploration of stem cell transplantation (SCT), especially as a socially situated phenomenon, demands a combination of empirical, biological and bioethical insights. Questions of identity, of gifting, and of mortality abound, and in kin SCT where the whole process happens within the complex relationships of a single unit, the intertwined impact on lived experience is highly concentrated. In looking at everything involved in the understanding …
Visceral Prostheses: Biotechnology and Posthuman Embodiment
In the postmodern era, when the interface of bodies, biologies and technologies increasingly challenges the very notion of what counts as human, Margrit Shildrick proposes new understandings of the limits and possible extensions of posthuman embodiment. Focusing on prostheses, Shildrick broadens our understanding of both what prostheses are and what they might mean for human embodiment. As well as rehabilitation devices used by disabled people to…
Maternal-Fetal Microchimerism and Genetic Origins: Some Socio-legal Implications
What are the implications of microchimerism in sociocultural and ethico-legal contexts, particularly as they relate to the destabilization of genetic origins? Conventional biomedicine and related law have been reluctant to acknowledge microchimerism-the existence of unassimilated traces of genetic material that result in some cells in the body coding differently from the dominant DNA-despite it becoming increasingly evident that microchimerism is…
Transplantation: Changing biotechnologies and imaginaries
This special issue explores developing understandings of the limits and possible extensions of organ and tissue transplantation. Encompassing interdisciplinary research around biomedicine, philosophy, literature and film, science and technology studies, anthropology, and transplant studies, the special issue demonstrates how our understanding of embodiment is being transformed in the age of advanced biotechnologies. As the centuries-old project o…
Hauntological dimensions of heart transplantation: The onto-epistemologies of deceased donation
The practice of human organ transplantation studies is shot through with questions concerning the concepts of selfhood and identity that continually reach out towards transmigration, displacement and haunting. In particular, heart transplantation is the site at which the parameters of human life and death are tested to their limits, not simply for the recipient but for the donor too. In conventional biomedicine, the definition and therefore the m…
Body Shock: Unsettling the Biosciences through Postconventional Materialities
The focus of this article is the problematic of data in the life sciences with regard to the supposedly singular event of heart transplantation. In mainstream discourse, organ transplantation is seen as a straightforward exchange of body parts in which fatally deteriorating biological elements are replaced by more competent and enduring components. Post-transplant a variety of biological, immunological, and pharmaceutical data are collected and e…
Neoliberalism and Embodied Precarity
The term neoliberalism has appeared in the policies of the Global North for several decades, with the concept of precarity in employment practices coming from the same period. In the last few years, however, precarity has been embodied and personalized, coming to signify not only an epistemological category but something more akin to an ontological state that raises complex questions of identity. My contribution uses it in that latter sense and w…
Visual Rhetorics and the Seductions of the Monstrous: Some Precautionary Observations
What does it mean to look at the monstrous? For many people, monstrous embodiment in its many forms arouses discomfort that is more or less successfully managed through the medium of our differential senses. While the creation of an interval between self and other through sight and representation allows for a reassuring self-security, there is also the sense of a certain destabilising ‘yuk’ factor present. Yet, our persistent fascination with the…
Openings on the Body: A Critical Introduction
Messy entanglements: Research assemblages in heart transplantation discourses and practices
The paper engages with a variety of data around a supposedly single biomedical event, that of heart transplantation. In conventional discourse, organ transplantation constitutes an unproblematised form of spare part surgery in which failing biological components are replaced by more efficient and enduring ones, but once that simple picture is complicated by employing a radically interdisciplinary approach, any biomedical certainty is profoundly d…
Gut Feminism
Liz Wilson rarely disappoints, and her latest offering, Gut Feminism , takes up her long standing project to bring feminism into irreducible and unruly alliance with biology several provocative steps further. Taking as her starting point the entrenched resistance evident in feminist thought to biological data, Wilson offers the startling claim that the gut is “a site of intense biological, pharmaceutical, and psychological agency, on which the ce…
Fleshing Out Feminist Theory
This text traces the development and implications of strategies of remembering the body in feminist theory, after what could be termed the somaphobia of early second-wave scholarship that saw attention to bodily matters as a potential point of ambush by hostile commentators. In reinstating the corporeal, however, all the conventional tropes of modernism that have both insisted on a conceptual split between mind and body, and recognised only one f…
XI. Death, debility and disability
The question of assisted dying with respect to people with disabilities is a hugely controversial area.Public opinion in western Europe is broadly in favour of decriminalisation -as is already the case in Belgium, Switzerland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.But on the part of disabled people there seems to be an overwhelming rejection of any proposals that loosen current laws 1 .It is not difficult to understand the special anxieties that any for…
Heart transplants: Identity disruption, bodily integrity and interconnectedness
Of heart transplant recipients, 30 per cent report ongoing or episodic emotional issues post-transplant, which are not attributable to medications or pathophysiological changes. To this end, our team theorized that cardiac transplantation introduces pressing new questions about how patients incorporate a transplanted heart into their sense of self and how this impacts their identity. The work of Merleau-Ponty provided the theoretical underpinning…
Living On; Not Getting Better
The contemporary emergence of the concept 'debility', which pertains to a broad swathe of humanity whose ordinary lives simply persist without ever getting better, shares a time span with an acute critique of neo-liberal biopolitics. Where capital has historically relied on a population that through its labour necessarily becomes debilitated, the newer model of understanding references the intrinsic profitability of debility itself. The two dimen…
Staying Alive: Affect, Identity and Anxiety in Organ Transplantation
The field of human organ transplantation, and most particularly that of heart transplantation where the donor is always deceased, is one in which the rhetoric of hope leaves little room for any exploration or understanding of the more negative emotions and affects that recipients may experience. Where a donated heart is commonly referred to as the 'gift of life', both in lay discourse and by those engaged in transplantation procedures, how does t…
Estranged Bodies: Shifting Paradigms and the Biomedical Imaginary
This introductory article provides a contextual and theoretical overview to this special issue of Body & Society. The special issue presents five selected case studies - focusing on the contexts of transplantation, psychiatry, amputation and war, and a transvalued media ecology of cancer - to offer meditations on a number of interlinked questions. The first of these is the entanglement of biomedical governance - political/economic as well as self…
Women and the gift: Beyond the Given and the All-Giving
Most feminist philosophers will be familiar with at least some of the literature around the gift that has appeared in recent years, particularly in the work of Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous, who
Why Should Our Bodies End at the Skin?”: Embodiment, Boundaries, and Somatechnics
Donna Haraway's enduring question—“Why should our bodies end at the skin?” (Haraway 1990, 220)—is ever more relevant in the postmodern era, where issues of bodies, boundaries, and technologies increasingly challenge not only the normative performance of the human subject, but also the very understanding of what counts as human. Critical Disability Studies has taken up the problematic of technology, particularly in relation to the deployment of pr…
Some Reflections on the Socio-cultural and Bioscientific Limits of Bodily Integrity
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Troubling dimensions of heart transplantation
Heart transplantation is now the accepted therapy for end-stage heart failure that is resistant to medical treatment. Families of deceased donors routinely are urged to view the heart as a "gift of life" that will enable the donor to live on by extending and sustaining the life of a stranger. In contrast, heart recipients are encouraged to view the organ mechanistically-as a new pump that was rendered a spare, reusable part when a generous strang…
Contested pleasures: The sociopolitical economy of disability and sexuality
The postconventional body: Retheorising women's health
Messy entanglements: Research assemblages in heart transplantation discourses and practices
The paper engages with a variety of data around a supposedly single biomedical event, that of heart transplantation. In conventional discourse, organ transplantation constitutes an unproblematised form of spare part surgery in which failing biological components are replaced by more efficient and enduring ones, but once that simple picture is complicated by employing a radically interdisciplinary approach, any biomedical certainty is profoundly d…
Breaking the Boundaries of the Broken Body
Corporeal Cuts: Surgery and the Psycho-social
This Body Which is Not One: Dealing with Differences
While body modification might generally seem to take the form of denaturalizing a biological given, this article looks at the same practice as normalizing the always already unstable corpus. The dominant discourse of the post-Enlightenment relies on the notion of the centrality of the individual subject within the singular and separate body, where distinctions between self and other are secure. Against this the incidence of monstrosity in general…
Living On; Not Getting Better
The contemporary emergence of the concept 'debility', which pertains to a broad swathe of humanity whose ordinary lives simply persist without ever getting better, shares a time span with an acute critique of neo-liberal biopolitics. Where capital has historically relied on a population that through its labour necessarily becomes debilitated, the newer model of understanding references the intrinsic profitability of debility itself. The two dimen…
Posthumanism and the Monstrous Body
Staying Alive: Affect, Identity and Anxiety in Organ Transplantation
The field of human organ transplantation, and most particularly that of heart transplantation where the donor is always deceased, is one in which the rhetoric of hope leaves little room for any exploration or understanding of the more negative emotions and affects that recipients may experience. Where a donated heart is commonly referred to as the 'gift of life', both in lay discourse and by those engaged in transplantation procedures, how does t…
Re-imagining Embodiment: Prostheses, Supplements and Boundaries
The question of what is at stake in the notion of the corporeal integrity of human beings is one that contemporary somatechnics must increasingly face. The reassuring image of the Cartesian body as the unified, unchanging material base of continuing existence has been radically contested not simply by postconventional modes of theoretical enquiry, but more pragmatically and disturbingly by contemporary bioscientific developments. In one influenti…
Neoliberalism and Embodied Precarity
The term neoliberalism has appeared in the policies of the Global North for several decades, with the concept of precarity in employment practices coming from the same period. In the last few years, however, precarity has been embodied and personalized, coming to signify not only an epistemological category but something more akin to an ontological state that raises complex questions of identity. My contribution uses it in that latter sense and w…
Dangerous Discourses: Anxiety, Desire, and Disability
The pleasure and danger of sexuality thematizes erotic desire as always accompanied by a certain anxiety. Although some anxiety is material and precautionary, I address the issue somewhat differently through investigating the psychic factors at play in the western imaginary. Discomfort with manifestations of erotic desire is most clearly invoked by differential embodiment where the challenge to the normative body not only results in disqualificat…
The Disabled Body, Genealogy and Undecidability
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Imagining the Heart: Incorporations, Intrusions and Identity
Surgical intervention into human corporeality relies on the Cartesian machine model of the body to justify such radical intrusion as the properly reasoned and informed actions and choices of essentially disembodied sovereign subjects. Both the surgical subject and the surgical team are engaged in a form of heroic, albeit supremely functional, medicine in which questions of self, embodiment, and intercorporeality are put to one side. This is espec…
Unreformed Bodies: Normative Anxiety and the Denial of Pleasure
Robotic technologies, touch and posthuman embodiment in queer dementia care
Developing technologies raise concerns that go beyond the economies of human to human or human-animal relations to open up exploration of our place in a world of both organic and inorganic effects. I explore how practices that characterize the very specific locus of dementia care could be - and are already - queered by the intervention of technological prostheses, and especially zoomorphic robots, that are increasingly supplementing conventional …
Body Shock: Unsettling the Biosciences through Postconventional Materialities
The focus of this article is the problematic of data in the life sciences with regard to the supposedly singular event of heart transplantation. In mainstream discourse, organ transplantation is seen as a straightforward exchange of body parts in which fatally deteriorating biological elements are replaced by more competent and enduring components. Post-transplant a variety of biological, immunological, and pharmaceutical data are collected and e…
Heart transplants: Identity disruption, bodily integrity and interconnectedness
Of heart transplant recipients, 30 per cent report ongoing or episodic emotional issues post-transplant, which are not attributable to medications or pathophysiological changes. To this end, our team theorized that cardiac transplantation introduces pressing new questions about how patients incorporate a transplanted heart into their sense of self and how this impacts their identity. The work of Merleau-Ponty provided the theoretical underpinning…
XI. Death, debility and disability
The question of assisted dying with respect to people with disabilities is a hugely controversial area.Public opinion in western Europe is broadly in favour of decriminalisation -as is already the case in Belgium, Switzerland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.But on the part of disabled people there seems to be an overwhelming rejection of any proposals that loosen current laws 1 .It is not difficult to understand the special anxieties that any for…
Estranged Bodies: Shifting Paradigms and the Biomedical Imaginary
This introductory article provides a contextual and theoretical overview to this special issue of Body & Society. The special issue presents five selected case studies - focusing on the contexts of transplantation, psychiatry, amputation and war, and a transvalued media ecology of cancer - to offer meditations on a number of interlinked questions. The first of these is the entanglement of biomedical governance - political/economic as well as self…
Reappraising feminist ethics: Developments and debates
Disability, digital technologies and the ambivalent allure of posthumanist/transhumanist futures
Technologies, both simple and sophisticated, have always played a major role in the negotiation of a range of disabilities that are assumed to impede the expression of autonomous selfhood. Whether deployed as mechanical aides to ideally normalise physical differences, as organic-and often internal-supplements to bolster the performance of body and mind, or as digital enhancements that override the supposed shortcomings of neurodiversity, the wide…
Women and moral identity
Transformations: Recollective Imagination and Sexual Difference
Posthumanism and the Monstrous Body
Breaking the Boundaries of the Broken Body
Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Science and Difference in Popular Culture edited by Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla
Openings on the Body: A Critical Introduction
Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader
This new Reader gives students an ideal overview of the historical developments and current controversies within this dynamic area of feminist theory. Wide-ranging articles stress the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary feminist thought and include 'Sexy Bodies' and 'Performing Bodies'.Key FeaturesComprehensive coverage of differing feminist approaches to the bodyGeneral critical introduction puts the issues in contextWide range of contribut…
This Body Which is Not One: Dealing with Differences
While body modification might generally seem to take the form of denaturalizing a biological given, this article looks at the same practice as normalizing the always already unstable corpus. The dominant discourse of the post-Enlightenment relies on the notion of the centrality of the individual subject within the singular and separate body, where distinctions between self and other are secure. Against this the incidence of monstrosity in general…
Becoming Vulnerable: Contagious Encounters and the Ethics of Risk
Maternal Imagination: Reconceiving First Impressions
The concept of maternal imagination, whereby the disordered thoughts and impressions of pregnant women are used to explain the prevalence of monstrous births, was at its height during the early modern period, albeit it with many prior and subsequent manifestations. Against a more familiar, and enduring, medieval and Renaissance context of supernatural agency at work, the device of MI was seen as a 'naturalistic' model more in keeping with the adv…
Reappraising feminist ethics: Developments and debates
Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self
Relative Responsibilities
Although the feminist debate regarding to the supposed problem of relativism has moved on, there is still a nagging anxiety that the embrace of relativism undermines the feminist project. From an initial fear that questioning the notion of a singular truth would paralyse political action, more recent concerns centre on the ethical and, in particular, on responsibility. But for all that contemporary feminism celebrates fluid differences against th…
Genetics, Normativity, and Ethics: Some Bioethical Concerns
Where feminist critiques of bioscience have uncovered a whole set of operations that range round the Foucauldian notions of biopower and normativity, and have explored genetic discourse in particular to question the stability of self-identity, feminist bioethics has lagged behind. Despite an engagement with the technologies of postmodernity, including those associated with genetic research (and especially in its relation to reproduction), there h…
Transgressing the law with Foucault and Derrida: Some reflections on anomalous embodiment
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Unreformed Bodies: Normative Anxiety and the Denial of Pleasure
Aging Bodies: Images and Everyday Experience
The Disabled Body, Genealogy and Undecidability
TEST 02 - Elsevier's Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. Search and access research from the science, technology, medicine, social sciences and arts and humanities fields
A Response to Bardach and Hannabach
Contested pleasures: The sociopolitical economy of disability and sexuality
Dangerous Discourses: Anxiety, Desire, and Disability
The pleasure and danger of sexuality thematizes erotic desire as always accompanied by a certain anxiety. Although some anxiety is material and precautionary, I address the issue somewhat differently through investigating the psychic factors at play in the western imaginary. Discomfort with manifestations of erotic desire is most clearly invoked by differential embodiment where the challenge to the normative body not only results in disqualificat…
The critical turn in feminist bioethics: The case of heart transplantation
Find information about UTP Journals. University of Toronto Press is Canada’s leading academic publisher and one of the largest university presses in North America, with particular strengths in the social sciences, humanities, and business. The Book Publishing Division is widely recognized in Canada for its strength in history, political science, sociology, Indigenous studies, and cultural studies. Internationally, UTP is a leading publisher of me…
The critical turn in feminist bioethics: The case of heart transplantation
Given previously successful interventions that already have shaken up the convention, it is puzzling that the feminist critique of bioethics should be slow to embrace the exciting new developments that have emerged in philosophy and critical cultural studies over the last fifteen years or so. Both in the arenas of poststructuralism and postmodernism and in the powerful revival of phenomenological thought, in which the stress on embodiment is high…
When Species Meet
Corporeal Cuts: Surgery and the Psycho-social
Sociology (46 works) · Philosophy (36 works) · Epistemology (33 works) · Psychology (32 works) · Aesthetics (24 works) · Law (19 works) · Political science (19 works) · Psychoanalysis (19 works) · Medicine (16 works) · Philosophy (16 works)