Abstract
The culturally imbued body is smuggled into the social world as a coherent, legible, and well-ordered object. It makes sense and is made to make sense. A Foucauldian and Nietzschean inspired genealogical analysis seeks to pop the bubble of the ‘naturally’ formed body by considering that history, as a technology, simultaneously leaves traces on the body, while annihilating its materiality. This thesis travels with this idea of the ‘body’ by inquiring how it is co-constituted alongside technology in different historical regimes of power. Each regime of power (sovereign, disciplinary, biopolitical, pharmacopornographic) is represented by a particular technology. These technologies range from architecture, institutions, medicine (over and under the counter), reproductive technologies, bodily prosthetics, biohacking techniques, and gender transitioning technologies. Each technology (technics) takes the form of the body (soma); they become fully integrated, producing somatechnics. This thesis demonstrates how power was once external, spectacular, and ritualised. Power now, is diffuse, miniature, and internal; it dissolves into the body. The body is host to micro-prosthetic forms of power such as molecular ‘slow technologies’. Furthermore, power is slowly moving from the somatic body to also encompass the ‘mind’, neuronal processes (brain ‘plasticity’) and the ‘psyche’ of the individual. At the end of this exploration, I consider how the ‘annihilated’, flimsy body, particularly the trans* body, can regain its fleshy materiality through practices of self-writing and experimentation. Going to unpromising places may present otherwise unknown and unanticipated experiences. While the material body may be experiencing potential disappearance via its entanglements with (bio-)technologies, I ultimately argue that the war between (somatic-)politics and the flesh is still fiercely waged.
Keywords: somatechnics, Foucault, post-Foucault, technologies of power, queer theory, queer ontology, pharmacopornography, contraceptive technologies, biohacking, gender, gender transitioning, biopolitics, biocapitalism, neoliberalism, technologies of the self.