Transcorporeal Tourism: Whales,Fetuses, and the Rupturing and Reinserting of Cultural Constraints

摘要

We focus on the expressive performative eruptions that often mark interactive and embodied humanature events, on the discourses that surround and entangle them, and on ways such extra-discursive communicative moments might point us to new understandings about the intersections of nature, culture, and the body. Using the frameworks of tourist as spectactor, notions of transcorporeality and intersubjectivity, and environmental communication concepts about material-symbolic mediation of humanature relations, we explore how whale tourism and elective ultrasounds at times appear to rupture Western human-nature binaries and notions of contained human bodies, yet also provide surveilled and disciplined moments in which particular cultural constraints are reinscribed. We envision ways such rapturous-rupturous experiences can help inform a transcorporeal environmental ethic centered on vulnerability and openness, arguing such moments must be paired with embodied, constitutive, and structural recontextualization to allow for ecocultural transformation.