MACMILLAN Resilient Cyborgs: Living and Dying with Pacemakers and Defibrillators (Health, Technology and Society)

This book examines how pacemakers and defibrillators participate in transforming life and death in high-tech societies. In both popular and medical accounts, these internal devices are often portrayed as almost magical technologies. Once implanted in bodies, they do not require any ‘user’ agency. In this unique and timely book, Nelly Oudshoorn argues that any discourse or policy assuming a passive role for people living with these implants silences the fact that keeping cyborg bodies alive involves their active engagement. Pacemakers and defibrillators not only act as potentially life-saving technologies, but simultaneously transform the fragility of bodies by introducing new vulnerabilities. Oudshoorn offers a fascinating examination of what it takes to become a resilient cyborg, and in the process develops a valuable new sociology of creating ‘resilient’ cyborgs. Review “Resilient Cyborgs is an exquisitely observed account of an important topic, and deserves a wide readership. In feminist science and technology studies and related fields, we have much to learn from the wired heart cyborgs living among us.” (Anne Pollock, Catalyst, catalystjournal.org, April, 2021) “I found Resilient Cyborgs to be an excellent discussion of the shared work required in order to live (and die) with a pacemaker or defibrillator. Oudshoorn is particularly successful in placing patient experience and expertise front and centre, without ever under-( or over-) stating the role of medics, technicians, friends and family, society and politics. As a young, female wired heart cyborg myself … encountered many new-to-me aspects of life with a cardiac device.” (Laura Donald, Sociology of Health & Illness, April 8, 2021) “This book can act as a thought-provoking work for different scholars in getting closer to a complex theme. … Oudshoorn’s analysis on a more solid basis. The intersectional approach may provide an important heuristic for grasping the multiple differences on building resilience.” (Veronica Moretti, TECNOSCIENZA, Vol. 11 (2), 2020) Review ‘This fine book makes me more resilient, as we all come to live with the “body companion technologies” that Oudshoorn explores with her subtle and generous critical spirit rooted in thick ethnography.  She tells us with rich detail and analytical acumen how specific kinds of implanted body companions reshape our hearts and syncopate our rhythms of living and dying. Oudshoorn’s care for the people she studies infuses the tissues of this book as she helps readers understand both new vulnerabilities and heartening resilience.’ (Donna Haraway, Distinguished Professor Emerita, History of Consciousness Department, University of California at Santa Cruz) ‘“The body electric” is the subject of Oudshoorn’s comprehensive sociology of the implantable cardiac defibrillator, that “body companion technology” placed in thousands of people annually.  From the re-making of self-awareness to the materiality and agency of the wired heart itself, the book shows what it takes to live and die as a hybrid. An important addition to the social studies of biomedicine.’ (Sharon R. Kaufman, Professor Emerita, Medical Anthropology, University of California, San Francisco) From the Back Cover This book examines how pacemakers and defibrillators participate in transforming life and death in high-tech societies. In both popular and medical accounts, these internal devices are often portrayed as almost magical technologies. Once implanted in bodies, they do not require any ‘user’ agency. In this unique and timely book, Nelly Oudshoorn argues that any discourse or policy assuming a passive role for people living with these implants silences the fact that keeping cyborg bodies alive involves their active engagement. Pacemakers and defibrillators not only act as potentially life-saving technologies, but simultaneously transform the fragility of bodies by introducing new vulnerabi