Wearable Objects and Curative Things

This interdisciplinary volume mobilises an object-centred approach to explore a set of entanglements between art and fashion and health and medicine. Addressing a rich range of ‘wearable’ artefacts, from mobility aids to clothing and accessories to digital health tracking devices, its theoretical framework has been inspired by the work of materialist thinkers that include Sherry Turkle, Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett. The political theorist Jane Bennett extends the body materialism of Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Irigaray and Butler (among others) to consider the vitality of non-human objects. Building on Bruno Latour’s notion of things as actants, Bennett proposes that objects exert a ‘thing power materialism’; that is, objects are not merely passive and inert matter, but active relational agents that are able ‘to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle’. Bennett explicitly links this materialist framework to questions of human health and wellbeing, arguing that human flourishing can only be realised through recognising the shared materiality and interconnectedness of all things, both human and non-human. This volume responds to Bennett’s call to ‘take seriously the vitality of (nonhuman) bodies’, addressing objects—and more specifically, wearable objects—as ‘things that matter’ in the exploration of human health and its wider contexts.