This final, concluding chapter of the book offers a reflection on what the production of digital media reveals about the cultural politics of these technologies. Drawing together the threads developed in the previous chapters, and especially UX writers’ own theorizations of language, I discuss the normative dimensions of interface design and make the case for a posthumanist approach to language in digital media interfaces. My central argument is simple: regardless of how people choose to use digital media, the software itself always posits an ideal way of using it – it entails an inbuilt ideal users have to respond to, even if that response is to contest the norm the software produces. In this way, focusing on the production of interface texts provides a valuable perspective on the broader cultural politics of digital media by theorizing UX writers, software, and users as part of a complex sociotechnical assemblage rather than as individual, disconnected agents.

Chapter 1 provides an overview of the central argument of the book. Medical anthropology, psychology, and psychiatry must steer a course between realism and constructivism, integrating the useful features of both perspectives. Metaphor theory and 4-E cognitive science provide ways of integrating cognitive and socio-cultural processes. Metaphor production and comprehension involves cognitive and emotional processes embodied and enacted through rhetoric and social discourse. These practices constitute a hermeneutic circle that can be traced from body to person to social world and back. They show how symbols and things live in the same world. This work has implications for understanding the ways illness experience and healing practices are embedded in larger systems of knowledge/power. The metaphors that arise in individuals’ struggles to make sense of their predicaments and to heal from affliction are borrowed from everyday concepts of mind and body, as well as the political language of power, resistance, and dissent. Every metaphor lends power to a particular view of the world. We must judge the value of metaphors on their moral, political, aesthetic, and pragmatic implications.

Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly (1799) narrates two scenes of panther attacks. In the first scene, Huntly’s mind is paralyzed, while in the second, Huntly’s body kills a stalking panther by hurling a tomahawk across a dark cave, an effort stemming from our bodily “constitution.” This introduction argues that this artist not only troubled the mind-centered ontology of consciousness—the Cartesian idea of the mind’s dominance over the body—but also explored the ontological alternatives that centered the expressions of our material body’s “constitution.” It both uncovers the posthumanist accents of this work, and reveals the way it prods us to refurbish posthumanism by historicizing it. Starting with Brown, this introduction thus recovers a set of texts focused on “minding the body,” on not simply eroding the philosophical distinction between the mind and body in order to trouble a mind-centered ontology and imagine a body-centered alternative to it, as posthumanism does. It also reveals the way artists used the expressive agency of these historical bodies to imagine less repressive alternatives to nineteenth-century structures of power—including chattel slavery, market capitalism, and patriarchy—whose claims to dominance involved reducing the body to little more than mindless matter.

Henry Box Brown not only mailed himself in a box from Richmond in Philadelphia in 1849, but he also remediated this experience of embodiment later in competing slave narratives, on stage, in a panorama, and through his role as a magician and mesmerist. In these four “acts,” Brown uses the representation of his experiences of Black embodiment across various media both to support and—simultaneously—to undercut the mind-centered ontology that structured the system of chattel slavery’s reduction of Blackness to mindless matter. Rather than imagine ontological drift, as Bird does, or ontological betweenness, like Forrest, Brown uses different representations of Black embodiment to imagine existence as always already ontologically doubled, as something governed by the mind-centered paradigm that demeans the body, and by the body-centered paradigm that makes the material body’s expressive agency crucial for the fullest articulation of humanity. Brown suggests that consciousness emerges simultaneously from the mind and the body, and that by carefully curating these overlapping, and doubled, forms of consciousness, Black subjects can “mind the body” in order to imagine alternatives to white culture’s dehumanizing of Blackness.

In his intensely physical acting, the nineteenth-century actor, Edwin Forrest, crafted a working-class theatrical aesthetic that imagined our existence not as drifting, but as ontologically between, an ontological third term distinct from both the mind-centered and the body-centered ontological paradigms. By recovering the way Forrest staged his own muscular—and white—body in his interpretation of Shakespeare’s Othello (1826) and in Bird’s The Gladiator (1831), this chapter argues that Forrest used the experience of his labored at, and laboring, body to perform this ontological betweenness as an alternative to the antebellum market’s alienation and regulation of working-class bodies. In staging the agency of white, working-class bodies against Black inagentic bodies on stage, Forrest’s performance of ontological betweenness “minded the body” by offering his adoring working-class audiences less alienated—but racially complicated—ways to perform their own material embodiment in the early nineteenth century.

Chapter 5 explores the effects of identity strategies. In this chapter, an intersectional approach illuminates the parameters of identity and affect that define the universal citizen. The chapter argues that when activists embody identity strategies in public events, activists politicize the terms of personhood and citizenship, giving rights a specific, embodied form. The chapter first examines Free Gender’s deployment of their strategy of commensurability during their participation in memorial services for deceased lesbians. It shows how memorial services are a moment when members of the organization can provide support to the deceased’s family, the local community, and each other. By embodying the confluence of the identities of lesbian, African, and community member during this community activity, the organization challenges dominant notions of who is entitled to the right to live free of violence. The chapter then examines La Fulana’s participation in the annual Pride march in Buenos Aires. The deployment of lesbian visibility challenges the gendered and heteronormative parameters of the ideal citizen through lesbians’ embodied enjoyment and pleasure in public activity. The chapter concludes by considering the importance of embodiment and emotional context to the successful deployment of identity strategies.

Chapter 1 lays out the theoretical framework that guides the rest of the book. The chapter makes the case that social movement scholars have not yet fully integrated the insights of intersectional theory on social movements’ strategic identity work. The first part of the chapter reviews the literature on collective identity, collective action framing, and identity strategies to generate a synthetic picture of the factors that influence identity strategizing: political and discursive opportunities, opposition and oppositional discourses, and intramovement and organizational dynamics. Through applying an intersectional lens to these factors, the chapter explains the conditions under which organizations choose to strategize multiple identity categories at once. The chapter continues with an intersectional approach to illuminate the political effects of identity strategies. An intersectional approach focuses on the embodied dimension of identity deployment. This section develops the idea that when activists embody identity strategies in public, they challenge the concept of the universal subject of rights by giving rights a specific form. This conceptualization of identity strategies clarifies the influence that they allow organizations to have on politics even without directly engaging the formal political system.

Human-embodied relations are being fundamentally transformed by increasingly globalised abstracting processes. Developments including the planetary reach of technoscience, cybercapitalism, and communications technologies. They are increasingly framing how we live our bodies. They enable phenomena as diverse as the global trade in body parts and the distribution of pharmaceuticals. However, there is also a less obvious reframing of our bodies going on. Biotechnologies have been steadily remaking the foundations of human procreation, gestation, and identity formation, albeit unevenly in different parts of the world. This enquiry weaves together related themes: modifying genetic organisms, reproducing human life, gestating a fetus, presenting sexual identity, and being vaccinated. In the case of COVID, a technoscientific fix is presented as necessary to mitigate the effects of a world turned upside down by the technologisation and exploitation of planetary ecology. Technoscience is displacing modern science. The chapter seeks to show how technoscientific intervention associated with ideologies of overcoming bodily constraint is remaking what it means to be human.

In democracies based on elections, representation brings a novel kind of freedom to the fore, one that does not need to be associated with the citizen’s direct action or presence in the place where decisions are made, as is the case in direct democracy. It enlarges the space and meaning of politics in ways that cannot easily be reduced to electoral authorization and consent, and it invariably connects with both the lawmaking institution and the citizens’ voluntary participation, their equal right to define the political direction of their country but also claim, vindicate, and monitor their representatives. This chapter analyzes “political representation” in its actors, components and processes and compared it to other forms (as statistical sample and embodiment) and finally discusses the implications of the mixture of representation and democracy in contemporary politics.

A poet celebrated for his syncretism, Shelley’s sense of fluidity arguably extends to his understanding of sex and sexuality, as he wrote during a time of peak flexibility and transition in thinking about gender-sex. Reading Erasmus Darwin’s descriptions of variously sexed plants, Ovid’s tales of shapeshifting, and William Lawrence’s intertwinement of sexed and racialised bodies, Shelley, the great poet of relation, comes to see the body as materially shifting, porous, and relational. Reading passages from A Discourse on the Manners of the Ancient Greeks Relative to the Subject of Love alongside the figure of nonbinary, intersex creation in ‘The Witch of Atlas’, Asia’s transformation into the posthuman ‘lamp of light’, and the nonhuman ‘shape all light’ in ‘The Triumph of Life’, this essay suggests Shelley began to understand polymorphous sexuality connected to sexed bodies of shapeshifting, mutable morphology.

Chapter 4 delves deeper into screen life, adopting an even more human-centred focus, in order to uncover the affective aspect of screen lives. Maintaining an embodied approach, this chapter explores how affective experiences with screens are intentionally elicited through how media is designed, how affect on screens might differ from affect outside screens, and how digital affect can inform practices, and practices induce affect. The chapter begins by defining affect, then digital affect more specifically, before turning to interviewees for their perspectives on how they feel and sense on screens, touching on topics such as micro digital affect, algorithms, and the pandemic. Crescent voices in this chapter help illustrate how digital affect is vital to understanding digital literacy practices and screen lives, especially the double-edged aspects of our affective relationships to screens.

After exploring the multimodal effects of BeReal, and the way in which it foregrounds place and event, this chapter explores the work of Hayles, Barad, and Braidotti, before utilizing New Literacy Studies to explore contrastive socio-cultural and social practices. The chief focus is on teasing out a theory of digital-materiality: not only what materialities and modes are present on screens, but also what inferences, values, and agendas these materialities carry. Postdigital lives entail entirely new relationships with materialities, though this does not mean a break with the physical and embodied, since postdigital life also contains many embodied ways of engaging with screens, ones which work across both the physical and the digital. This chapter attempts to conceptualize the distinct logic that people use to understand screens, while striking at more lived understandings of literacy. Consulting crescent voices on where they find comfort in their screen lives, this chapter reconciles people’s conflicting desires to pursue a flesh-and-blood life away from screens, as well as to use their screens to manifest and actualize the real aspects of their lives.