Drawing on a UK research study on immunization, this article investigates parents' understandings of the relationship between themselves, their infants, other bodies, the state, and cultural practices - material and symbolic. The article argues that infant bodies are best thought of as always social bundles, rather than as biobundles made social through state intervention; and concludes that, while the natural/cultural divide may now be widely accepted as artificial within the social sciences, we need to scrutinize how people in their everyday lives work out, and invest in, the distinction between the two

The organ retention scandal arose in the UK in the autumn of 1999 when knowledge of the practice of organ and tissue retention after post-mortem for subsequent diagnostic, teaching, audit and research purposes fully entered the public domain. Many families were shocked and distressed to realise that by allowing a post-mortem on their relative or child they were also deemed to have agreed to the long-term retention of organs and tissues and thus had buried or cremated, as they perceived it, not a 'whole' body but an 'empty shell'. Subsequently, informed consent was placed at the centre of recommendations for reform, now given expression in the Human Tissue Act (2004). Through a discourse analysis of the documentary evidence produced in the wake of the organ retention scandal, I argue that the emphasis on informed consent masks concerns about body wholeness. In addition, whilst informed consent is posited as key in 'balancing' the rights of the individual over the needs of medical science, this position is tempered by the concurrent presence of notions of the gift relationship and post-mortem citizenship. Incorporating these notions alongside the discourse of consent also renders concerns about the commodification of the body less acute.

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The focus of this autoethnography is the often hidden and marginalized experience of pregnancy loss. Through an exploration of “the search for meaning” in the aftermath of three different losses over a period of 9 years, I seek to problematize Western discourses which, influenced by Enlightenment ideals, adhere to linear notions of progress. Such discourses can be argued to sustain an imperative to create positive meaning from traumatic life experience, to gain beneficial insight from suffering, and ultimately to triumph over adversity. In articulating a messier and more ambiguous story, the difficulties of living through and voicing experience, which fails to conform to such a framework, is highlighted.

This article experiments with some of the insights provided by the work of Deleuze and Guattari as a move towards deterritorializing fat bodies. This is necessary because in contemporary Western society the fat [female] body is positioned and frequently experienced as lacking in social, cultural and political value and as being in need of surveillance and control, not least by the neo-liberal ‘self’. This article is a response to Deleuze and Guattari's plea to ‘think differently’, in this case about fat and weight loss. The article eschews the paradigmatic form of the traditional academic research paper, adopting a semi autoethnographic approach to present an analysis of my engagement with the Biggest Loser (diet) Club. Thinking through rather than about the body it focuses on embodied experiences of fat and the on-going process of cutting that body down to ‘normal’ size. By utilising two central concepts in Deleuzoguattarian thought – ‘becoming’ and the ‘body – without – organs’ (BwO) - I seek to demonstrate the embodied, theoretical and ethical potential of utilising Deleuze and Guattari's work to explore fat and weight loss and how this might productively serve to deterritorialize contemporary discourses which stigmatise fat bodies.