Phenomenologists like Foucault’s teacher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argue that the successful performance of everyday bodily tasks depends on the mutual incorporation of the instruments used to perform a task into the body and the dilation of ou…the sight of myself hunched in its black framework of aluminum and plastic” (p. 46). In her Quickie P100, Mairs is at one and the same time positioned and situated in the world. (Diedrich 2001, 218–19)Diedrich points out that for Mairs the Quickie P100 is not merely a bodily auxillary but an integral part of Mairs’s body. I want to suggest that there may be important intertwined ontological and ethical points to be made here that go beyo…
Nancy Mairs
writer · 3 mentions across 1 reading
In this course
Nancy Mairs appears as a crucial case study for theorizing how technologies become incorporated into the lived body and extend human presence in the world. Her reflections on her relationship to her Quickie P100 wheelchair—understanding it not as a prosthetic aid but as a constitutive part of her embodied self—grounds discussions of tool-body integration that draw on phenomenological traditions from Merleau-Ponty. Through her writing, the course examines how assistive technologies raise ontological questions about where the boundary of "the body" lies and what ethical obligations follow from that entanglement.
Mentioned in 1 reading
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