One (em)body, why not everybody? The need to recognise collective embodiment in medical ethics
Authors: Watkins, M. and Walker, S.
Journal: Journal of Bioethical Inquiry
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISSN: 1176-7529
Abstract:Embodiment is an approach to our existence that seeks to capture the ways in which we are imbricated within a particular temporal and spatial environment. In doing so, this theory recognises the mechanisms by which concrete institutional frameworks co-produce our embodiment. It suggests that physical and psychological environments shapes and builds our sense of self and identity in time and space. This imbricated embodiment is particularly stark in the context of medical practice and thus medical ethics. Current approaches to medical ethics, whilst seeking to centralise the patient, through models of patient autonomy, often decay into binary discussions about the roles and power of medical practitioners. We suggest an embodied approach to medical ethics, better situates the actual patient as the core concern of ethical practice – rather than the body and mind of the patient being divorced, abstracted, and filtered through the existing dualist presumptions contained within current discourse. Whilst we suggest that embodiment is a formative first step, if we accept the claims of existing embodiment theorists – that our physical and social environment affect our embodied identities – then this necessarily implies a collective effect. The embodied human condition, is both essentially vulnerable, and relational. Embodiment is therefore co-constructed through individuals belonging or being identified with intersecting-collectives: family, friends, communities, social groups. Viewing medical ethics through this lens offers an opportunity for a much more nuanced examination of the effects of collectives and group belonging on individuals – both as a positive source of collectivisation, values and experience, but also as a conceptual framing for problematising marginalisation and exclusion, within and about medical practice. In this paper we explore what embodiment may mean when this collective impact of embodied existence is considered in relation to patients in clinical settings.
Source: Manual