Heike Raab: Technobodies and Dis/Ability - An Analyses of a Discoursive Relationship of Tension

In recent times especially female, queer and crip body are a favoured target of a new set on discourses about embodied technologies of normalization. For that reason I want to examine these (bio-)technological developments in the field of the body as a kind of the new somatic logics of neoliberalism.
My thesis is that we can see within in that frame a reformulation of dis/ability (and heteronormativity or gender) centered on a cyborgian utopia, evoked through biopolitical discourses. An utopia of a boundless and technological intensified bodies which displace the traditional borderlines of dis/ability, queerness or gender. One important role in these reformulations of the relationship of body, nature and culture, are playing discourses on the bio-technological manipulated queer/crip body which arise by neoliberal capitalism.
Donna Haraway postulated as on of the first feminist scientists, that it can be possible, with such network-systems of human-technological Hybrids (Cyborgs), to query the traditional binary forms of the bodily order. These new processes of embodiement are possible through incorporations of techniques into the body and through intersections from bodies with machines.
Referring to Haraway, Rabinow and Barad I contrast the hype about the queer/crip as cyborg which blurs every sociocultural binary system with the phenomenon on a new kind of so called liberal eugenics.
In short: I want to outline in my talk current debates about the body in the Disability Studies and connect them with discussions in Gender/Queer Studies in the light of debates about the benefit and adaption of optimization and at the formation of strategies of normalization of the body in the age of biopower. At centre will be the relationship between the body, discourses, practices and norms concerning to technological developments like neuroprosthesis or enhancement and their impact for Disability Studies.