Emeritus professor of sociology, Leibniz University, Hanover, Germany
Octobre 2012 à juin 2013
Barbara Duden was trained as a social historian and taught in the department of Sociology at Hannover University. As an intellectual early on she realized the oblivion of academic historians to the topic of "the body" as an epoch-specific experience. She studied the cleavages between the history of somatic self-perception in the past: in "humoral" self-perception in the early 18th century, the somatogenesis of the medicalized "body" in the industrial period and the recent transformation of the body of women as the frontier of biological management, its functions, developments and risks. In her public interventions, she was motivated by an articulate concern: to draw attention to the commodification of "choice", the popularization of risk-management and the need for "taught self-determination", especially for women.
A study of the colloquial gene in the perspective of the historian of the senses
Within the last two decades the word "gene" has migrated from science into ordinary conversation and references to "genes" have entered personal deliberations. In the
shadow of human genetics the first person singular or the personal pronoun, the "I" of the speaker, is subtly and profoundly affected because "genes" in ordinary speech
have the capacity to blend incompatible spheres of meaning. Outside the walls of laboratory science and DNA mapping the word has acquired an extraordinary alchemistic power, as it refers to the most concrete and personal - the soma of the speaker - while simultaneously invoking statistical probabilities and aggregate risk profiles of populations. Thus references to "my genes" are apt to implant population statistics, probability calculations, and the demand for risk management in the corporeal make-up of the person identified or addressed as gene-carrier.