Suffering difference: the ethics and politics of modifying bodies

Suffering Difference: The Ethics and Politics of Modifying Bodies takes as its provocation the apparently inevitable dovetailing of suffering and difference in contemporary Western culture, and the modification of bodies that this justifies. Through an examination of a variety of modificatory technologies, including the use of human growth hormone, limb-lengthening, cosmetic and intersex "corrective" surgeries, self-demand amputation and modern primitive practices, I demonstrate that suffering plays a key role in the (re)production of not only the norm, but of existing social injustices. -- I deploy a Lévinasian ethics to consider our responsibilities to suffering, and the inadequacy of contemporary medical science in providing such a response. I draw on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, along with a variety of feminist and critical race approaches to his work, to explore the formation of sedimentary styles of being in the world, and the attendant production of 'bodily tolerances,' the transgression of which causes suffering. These tolerances, I argue, are a technique of what Foucault identifies as biopower, focussed on the normalisation of bodies. I contrast normalising practices with those considered deviant, using Rosalyn Diprose's concept of 'corporeal generosity' to examine practices of body modification, showing that whilst it has an ethical character, these corporeal gifts cannot be unbound from the political (and economic) valuation of bodies. I argue, therefore, that practices of body modification function as a means of visibly memorialising, in and as the flesh, the gifts of normal others, and simultaneously as a way of forgetting the gifts of bodies that are othered. Finally, I explore the aneconomic, ethical effects that generosity has upon embodiment, contrasting the memorialising and forgetting involved in modification with the ethical response of alteration, a forgetting-that-matters. The responsible styles of being-in-the-world this forgetting produces challenge the asymmetries in the political valuing of bodies, and permit a response to suffering which reshapes subjectivity, sociality, ethics and politics.