Paper short abstract:

This paper considers the peculiar place of the prosthesis when thinking about disability, citizenship, health and rehabilitation. The bodies produced that emerge and not only sleek, replicable and desirable but are also historically constituted; fleshy, porous and fallible.

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers the peculiar place of the prosthesis when thinking about disability, citizenship, health and rehabilitation. Prosthesis based research has the ability to speak to local, national, and international interests of the individuals and organisations involved in the design, fitting and wearing of a prosthetic device, as well as multinational companies that manufacture, market and supply them. Blurring the lines of enhancement and impairment, they speak to the processes of globalisation, and the increasing technologising of life as we know it. Prostheses produce bodies that not only emerge as sleek, replicable and desirable but that are also historically constituted; fleshy, porous and fallible. I argue that the prosthesis is a both an abstract and a concrete boundary object (Star and Griesemer, 1989). They create a paradox, in part due to their coupling of the technological to the biological, but also due to their potential for disrupting the categories 'natural' and 'augmented', and to the literary origins of the very term prosthesis (Wills 1995). By placing prostheses at the centre of my investigations, I find that not only are they interesting to think about, but that they are even more interesting to think with. The history of prostheses is intimately tied to military action, to state building and to the production of a mobile labour force. Building on Cresswell's idea of prosthetic citizenship (2009), I ask what these intimate and often messy relationships to technology can bring to the anthropological table.