This paper is the introduction to a special issue of the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics (IJFAB) 11.2 (ed. Freeman). The topic of the special issue is Feminist Phenomenology, Medicine, Bioethics, and Health. In this introduction, I motivate the issues, questions, problems covered in the special issue and provide chapter summaries of all of the contributions.

This collection explores how feminist knowledges work as interventions in physical cultures and recognises the considerable contribution of feminist theories and methodologies to understanding the power relations implicated in embodied movement. Our introductory piece weaves together questions about the gendered formation of physical cultures (across leisure, sport, the arts, tourism, well-being and various embodied practices) with key issues raised by contributing authors from a range of disciplinary perspectives and theory-method approaches. Exploring questions of digital and physical cultures, more-than-human relations, post and decolonial ways of knowing and contemporary onto-epistemologies, this feminist collection aims to contribute to the movement of ideas within and across Physical Cultural Studies. Bringing together diverse perspectives around our common focus we entangle physical cultures with a range of gendered problematisations and interventions that produce different ways of knowing, imagining and doing feminisms.

This article explores the relation among illness, home, and belonging. Through a feminist phenomenological framework, I describe the disorientations of being diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD) and living with mental illness. This research anticipates the consequences of illness and serious (bodily) disorientations for a conception of belonging as seamless body-world compatibility. Instead, this article examines how the (in)stability of bodily dwellings in experiences of disorientation can suggest ways of being in the world that are more attentive to interdependency, unpredictability, and change in human experience. I argue that these types of dwellings function as a more capacious and apposite metaphor to account for variations in belonging. This discussion outlines the ethical importance of building worlds that make room for different ways of being at home in and through our interactions with others. Although my discussion does not supply norms for ethical action, I contend that a feminist phenomenology of illness generates saliences and illuminates sensibilities that can transform our ways of being with others.

This article asks how to study evasive and seemingly immaterial transdisciplinary phenomena such as affective formations that organize our technoscientific societies and cultures. I argue that understanding such phenomena requires developing methodologies that engage fields of knowledge production that appear unrelated. The article uses the dynamics of temporality and belonging underlying population genetics as a case study. I show how two seemingly incompatible fields of knowledge production—queer theorization of temporality and population genetic technologies and practices—can together engender new insights on how temporality and belonging organize population genetic knowledge. I argue that neither field of knowledge production could achieve such insight alone; instead, insight emerges from the unexpected resonances as well as friction between the two fields. I develop this argument through an analysis of the configurations of temporality and belonging on the Genographic Project website.

10th International Conference Crossroads in Cultural Studies in Tempere July 1-4, 2014 This article examines Iranian cultural studies in the field of representation studies. Our main question asks how Iranian cultural studies researches apply the method of representation and, more importantly, how we can apply the method of representation studies to the studies of representation in Iran. We also ask, to what extent can we follow that traces of power (biases) in “critical research” itself. The results demonstrate that representation studies in Iran operate as a part of ideological state apparatuses in two ways: First, they reinforce cultural clichés; and second, they overlook subjects that power centers do not wish to be studied. In the first case, the subordinate groups such as women, youth, and ethnic minorities are studied only as identities after they have become “cultural clichés” in the media. In the process universities and research centers reproduce cultural clichés through such studies. In the second case, specific issues related to religious and sexual minorities and immigrants are overlooked or deemphasized because they are believed to be politically too sensitive in the view of power centers. We conclude that although cultural studies was supposed to be the advocate of the subordinate groups, in Iran it has further marginalized the disenfranchised and voiceless groups by producing knowledge that is in the service of power.

This review synthesizes S. Lochlann Jain's monograph Malignant (2013) and Jackie Stacey's monograph Teratologies (1997).