“[...]Cynthia Schairer also gave an intriguing talk on prosthetics. Citing disability studies instead of cultural theory, she first cautioned against fetishising or romanticising prosthetics. I took this is an omen, as I had actually come to hear her talk because I like to imagine that I wouldn’t mind being rebuilt like the Bionic Woman. But the important bit is that she argued against envisioning prosthetics as extensions of the self, and instead repositioned them as interfaces between the body/self and the world. By focussing on how a prosthesis can create a whole social body, we erase the physical body’s work and pain. (Those sexy cheetah legs require gaining a huge amount of hip and thigh strength and relearning one’s sense of balance because of differences in bipedal and quadripedal locomotion, and all prosthetics run the risk of chafing and infection.) Instead, she argued, we need to attend to the kinds of “tenuous and incomplete connections” at hand. Anyone interested in mobile, wearable or embedded technologies might learn something valuable from this position: a focus on prosthetic technologies as interfaces rather than extensions brings into high relief matters of infrastructure and issues of access and use, and highlights techno-social fragilities that challenge technologically deterministic perspectives…” - Anne Galloway. Related post: Hacking the Human.