Ouch! Eew! Blech! A Trialogue on Porous Technologies, Places and Embodiments

Abstract

In this chapter, we bring political ecologies of health and the body into conversation with environmental justice and crip theory, science, technology and society studies (STS) and biopolitics. We present a trialogue that highlights three cases of health and embodiment examining the crosscutting themes of porosity and technologies as they offer us ways to insist on the right to be and signal a politics of health in FPE: (a) the lived experience of chronic pain as a catalyst for learning about environmental injustice in Naples, southern Italy, and the epistemic activism of crip communities producing counter-knowledge and mutual aid; (b) the spread of malaria among immigrant farmworkers in southern Greece as invisibilised intersectional and embodied injustice; and (c) embracing pharmaceuticals and vlogs with ambivalence while living with the temporary condition, hyperemesis gravidarum (HG) in the northeastern United States. We bring to the fore questions around bodies, harm, care and power, as those were brought about by our own situatedness in, and response-ability towards, embodied experiences of chronic pain, infection and nausea.