Rematerializing the Cyborg: Understanding the Agency of People Living with Technologies Inside Their Bodies

Abstract

In many popular and medical accounts, pacemakers and internal cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs) are often portrayed as almost magical technologies. Once implanted in bodies, they will work automatically by themselves and don't require any agency of their `users.' As I argue in this book, any discourse or policy that assumes a passive role of people living with technologies inside their bodies silences the fact that keeping cyborg bodies alive involves their active engagement. To understand the agency of `wired heart cyborgs,' as I call them, this first introductory chapter provides a critical intervention in dominant discourses that conceptualize cyborgs as passive or merely as a linguistic or metaphorical entity. These approaches are problematic because they silence the lived experiences and voices of cyborgs, adopt a narrow focus on cyborgs as individuals, and neglect the materiality of hybrid bodies. Inspired by recent feminist post-humanist studies on the intimate relationships between bodies and technologies, this chapter argues that it is important to re-materialize the cyborg. The chapter describes conceptual tools used in the book in order to account for the ways in which wired heart cyborgs sense and make sense of their materially transformed bodies.