“You Must Be Very Careful About Your Feet”: Locating multiple ontologies in online life writing about limb loss
EMILY GOLDSHER-DIAMOND (New York University, Media Culture and Communication MA)
Using a multi-perspectival approach, this study looks at cases of limb loss where subjects experience their bodies through various lenses, contexts where bodies can be medicalized, militarized, optimized for sport, sexualized, fetishized, socially marginalized, and technologized. Using Annemarie Mol’s notion of multiple ontologies (2002), I argue that questioning any singular ontology of limb loss will reveal a multi-faceted and deeply complicated group of people united by the physical demarcation of being an amputee, but divided by the innumerable ways that limb loss is experienced across cultures, locations and digital mediums. In so doing, this project will draw from the rich medley of material on relevant message boards, social networking sites and multiple blogging platforms. In this paper I use media ethnography to help interpret the lifeworlds of my three case studies, a small selection of lower-limb amputees who continually produce their own digital autobiographies mediated by everyday technologies. As a method, media ethnography accesses the online persona of the person with limb loss without outside editorial interference; therefore, avoiding the reproduction of print disability life writing that conforms to accepted narrative schemas of adversity and triumph and instead yielding analyses that attend to agency and immediacy.