Neuromutation/Rio 06

Neuromutation, a new context

In interrogating the assumptions associated with the “normal” body, scientists working in the new field of hybrid studies have problematized conception of the body that construct as “ a malleable extension of subjectivity”(Tanner, 2002, 114). The Body as a story or a text can be now read and interpreted, after M. Foucault method, as “ the sick body, the well body, the gendered body, the narrative body”( Brieger, 2004, 409), and in the last two decades has been the crossing of traditional disciplinary boundaries.The new context of biotechnology, with neurogenetic, nanobiology and morphogenetic, offers the possibility to create hybrid body.

The transfiguration of body (or bodies) concerns simultaneously “the crossing of the boundaries between such heterogeneous realms as the individual psyche-soma complex an society”(Pechriggl, 2005, 102). The nature-culture dichotomy cannot be applied because the deconstruction of body’s paradigm had been showed how the naturalisation of the body is the result of an ideological interpretation ; thus the association of the form female and nerve, male and muscle “ should directly reflect social condition”(Jordanova, 1989, 59) even if the importance of gendered associations of body parts and their metaphorical extensions must be controlled by an epistemological study.