Paper long abstract:

While information-technology based technologies of the self - epitomized in the "quantified self" movement - have recently garnered a lot of attention, measuring techniques have played an important role in health-related practices way before the recent hype. Practices of weight-management are a prime example here. This paper investigates how people in contemporary Austrian society employ different kinds of techniques - novel and old - in order to achieve or sustain desired body shapes and forms of embodiment. Building on neo-materialist and practice approaches, it poses questions of what kind of novel subjective, ethical and physical capacities and what kind of associations between different (non-human and human) actants are enabled trough such techniques, e.g. when people regularly measure their weight, count calories or learn to "listen" to bodily cues in novel ways. I will show how these technologies are implicated in the emergence of novel forms of subjectivity and embodiment, and how they are embedded in wider life strategies that increasingly assume somatic forms. Finally, I will build on my analysis of weight-management practices to reflect on how quantifying and non-quantifying, novel and old technologies of the self articulate with each other within such practices, and I will draw possible implications for our understanding of how new techno-scientific techniques are embedded in wider regimes of the self.

This paper draws on a multi-method ethnography, on narrative interviews and focus group discussions, part of which have been gathered within the research project "Perceptions and Imaginations of Obesity as a Socio-scientific Problem" (PI: Ulrike Felt).