Keywords

Genre theory, embodiment, posthumanism, health at every size

Abstract

This project focuses on persistent gaps in philosophies of the body: the enduring mindbody divide in accounts of phenomenology, the unfulfilled promises of representing and inhabiting the body in online and virtual spaces, and the difference between health as quantified in medical discourse versus health as lived experience. These tensions are brought to light through the electronic food journal genre where the difficulty in capturing pre-noetic, outsideconsciousness aspects of experience and embodied health are thrown into relief against circulating cultural discourses surrounding health, body size, self-surveillance, and self-care. The electronic food journal genre serves as a space for users to situate themselves and their daily practices in relation to medicalization, public policy, and the conflation of health and body size. These journals form artifacts reflecting life writing practices in digital spaces that model compliant self-surveillance as well as transgressive self-care. The journals instantiate the mind-body-technology interactivity of extended cognition, but also point toward a rupture in the feedback loops that promise to integrate pre-noetic aspects of being and experience. By exploring the tensions inherent in these online food journaling spaces, this project concludes by offering a PEERS heuristic/heuretic for assessing theories and technologies of embodiment and health for their ability to access what resides in the "remainder" of current embodiment philosophy and to identify the aspects of lived experience left unattended in USDA health policy, food journaling interfaces, and embodiment philosophy. The PEERS model can be used to evaluate existing technologies for their capacity to map true mind-body-technology interactivity and to build new theory that accounts for a fuller, more nuanced approach to understanding embodied reality and embodied health.

Notes

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Graduation Date

2012

Semester

Fall

Advisor

Bowdon, Melody

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

College

College of Arts and Humanities

Degree Program

Texts and Technology

Format

application/pdf

Identifier

CFE0004783

URL

http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/CFE0004783

Language

English

Release Date

6-15-2018

Length of Campus-only Access

5 years

Access Status

Doctoral Dissertation (Open Access)

Subjects

Arts and Humanities -- Dissertations, Academic, Dissertations, Academic -- Arts and Humanities

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