Disembodied Globalization: Remaking Bodies, Unsettling Global and Personal Horizons

How can debates about the future directions of globalization be best advanced, particularly those concerning the interchange of bodies and objects from refugees and tourists to body parts and viruses, when global relations are mediated through disembodying technologies from data platforms and digitalized surveillance to biomedicine? From the other side, how are we best to understand processes through which more embodied processes of globalization all tend to be managed, surveyed, and controlled through those more abstracted mechanisms of technological mediation? This chapter elaborates a methodologically consistent way of answering those questions. It investigates the tensions between these different forms of social interchange, arguing that disembodied globalization is now the dominant form of globalization, and is likely to be into the future. By exploring themes of embodiment, including human reproduction, sexual identity, vaccination, and genetic engineering, the chapter seeks to show how technoscientific intervention associated with ideologies of overcoming bodily constraint are remaking what it means to be human.