Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how discourse on 3D bioprinting technologies in popular science journals and newspapers targets physical functionality in humans as either individual and varying, general and normative – or rather envisions a transhuman, utopian level of enhanced functionality.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores whether and in what way pop-science and business discourse on the development of 3D bioprinting technologies, is embedded in transhuman, futuristic visions of enhanced functionality in popular science journals and newspapers. It investigates the issue of how popular discourse on these technologies talk of functionality as either individual and varying, general and normative – or rather as envisioning a transhuman, utopian level of enhanced functionality.

Taking departure from the notion in disability studies that it is the environment that disables, and not the person that is disabled - the paper wishes to understand the ways in which functionality is expressed as located either in the physical person or in its environment, in popular discourse on 3d bioprinting.

The paper further wishes to problematize the understanding of interiority contra exteriority - or person and environment in this case - if instead taking a phenomenological stance of human agency. Where may we locate physical disability if there are no clear demarcations between person and environment? What consequences may such conceptual dissonance have for disability rights discussions, as well as for the technical development of (non-organic) 3D printed aids and protheses, in contrast to 3D bioprinted devices – such as body parts or organs? The first is seemingly more easily accepted as empowering by disability rights communities; but will the latter rather be discarded as an expression of ableism and violence?