Pathology: A Diffractive Encounter of Machine/Body

Abstract

I’ve been thinking about poems and about college as rhizomes (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), and as diffractive techniques (Barad 2007; Gullion 2018) for thinking about the social world. This project emerged as a way for me to understand my embodied experience of abdominal surgery. I began with the creation of an art journal, and then wrote a poem to accompany the images. I created the images and the text while thinking about my experience of undergoing surgery and diffracting that through Haraway’s (2016) ideas about cybernetics and machine bodies.

Keywords

• diffraction
• poetic inquiry
• art journaling
• rhizomes
• surgery
• endometriosis