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Short abstract:

This paper draws on perspectives in feminist STS to historically examine efforts of a group of Chinese scientists, medical professionals, and educators who worked to nurture and and train individuals with exceptional sensory abilities in an era of social and economic modernization.

Long abstract:

This paper explores how, since the late 1970s, a group of Chinese scientists, medical professionals, and educators have strived to enhance human potential through sensory training, particularly during a time when society underwent drastic political and economic transformations. Proponents of a newly emerged discipline known as "Somatic Science" argued that unlike inanimate objects, humans could consciously control their physical and mental states to harmonize with natural and built environments. They believed that the human body possessed dormant extraordinary sensory abilities, including reading texts without sight, communicating messages without speech, and moving laboratory equipment without touch. They suggested that with proper training, these sensory abilities could allow better human-machine interactions, faster scientific discoveries, and provide the state with technological and scientific advantages in the impending "new information revolution" around the globe.

This paper uses the case of "Somatic Science" in post-socialist China as an entry point into the relationship between embodiment and information technologies. It provides a historical account of humans' embodied intimacy with data and information. Situated in feminist Science and Technology Studies (feminist STS) perspectives, I aim for my research to be part of what STS scholar Lucy Suchman describes as "sciences of the artificial" by questioning the divide between nature and culture, subject and object, bodies and technologies (Suchman, 2007). As this paper shows, during the training and experimentation processes, research subjects -- primarily children and young females -- learned to develop a feeling for information (Keller, 1984).