How might we create unfamiliar relationships with metabolisms?
Shared by NICOLE LAND
How might we create unfamiliar relationships with metabolisms? We often encounter shivering and sweating – activities frequently interpreted for their metabolic activity – in our Facetiming inquiry, as shivering mitten-clad hands clutch iPhones that share stories with iPhones held by sunscreen-sweaty bodies. Dominant understandings of human metabolism centre the body as the site of metabolism while biosciences explain how one body involuntarily shivers or sweats to regulate its temperature. While Facetiming, this conception of metabolisms feels inadequate as we notice how multiple technologies, ecologies, bodies, and temporalities participate in shivering and sweating. Shivers and sweat draw us into relations, and demand pedagogies, that refuse ideas of control, regulation, and boundedness. Thinking with Shotwell’s (2016) ‘politics of impurity’, where inseparability and vulnerability shape an ethic for responding to contemporary worlds, I wonder how we might do metabolisms differently – how might we craft relations with metabolisms that emphasize collectivity and complexity?
References
Shotwell, A. (2016). Against purity: Living ethically in compromised times. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
