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Barbara Duden

Biography/Bibliography/Contact

As a student of social history Barbara Duden was among the handful of Berlin women who in 1976 started COURAGE, a journal that despite the learned character of some of its contents sold from newspaper stands. Since then her writing and research have focused on the need to recognize the historical nature of the experienced body. At the time when "woman's body" finally emerged as a legitimate public issue, Duden called attention to the danger that this seeming liberation through science?based self-diagnosis, would further the dis-embodiment of women, rather than support their courage to affirm their own self-perceptions. She argued that only the rediscovery of the mode in which long-dead women felt their milk, blood, flushes, flows and lumpings could provide modern women with the necessary distance to distinguish between the functioning attributed to them by the physician, and their intuitive, self-reliant sense of flesh and blood.

In a first, major study, Duden tried to establish the legitimacy of "body" as a subject of professional history. From a large number of 18th century reports on medical visits two certainties emerged: the patients complained about a disorder in their humors and their directional fluxes, about emptiness, fullness or stoppages. It took time and courage to recognize this liquid, pulsating referent as that which today is called "my body". And it was also more surprising to recognize that the baroque physician, even when he had graduated from a university, identified mimetically with the patients narration, and that his prescription or dietetic counsel was meant to equilibrate, re-balance or re-orient humors. Empirically Duden had stumbled onto a blind spot of medical history: the transformation of the physician from a trained listener to an observer, the transformation of diagnosis from understanding to imputation.

The next major step of this "historical somatics" led further: An exhaustive collection and analysis of all printed anatomical texts that depict the content of the pregnant womb gave her the evidence, that - until the start of the 19th century - anatomists saw and drew what women told them: their woodcuts and etchings show the "coming child" that women expected, never something that resembles the entity that today is called "a foetus". The very fact that an aborted embryo was "out of human proportion" sufficed to judge it a "false fruit", a mole, an aberration of nature.

The documentation of the need to recognize only objects of appropriate proportions led her to a third step in the history of the body: the contrast between the senses in successive epochs: The history of the gaze, rather than the history of the eye's anatomy, the history of the quality that touch (hapsis) revealed or the ear heard allowed her to understand contemporary vision and hearing in a distanced way. Touch, hearing, sight or smell of the past appeared as "faculties" that relate the whole person to reality rather than as instruments that register it. This history of the senses is now culminating in the history of common sense, a "sense" that recognizes and judges the fit among perceptions. During the coming years Duden, the longest collaborator of Illich on the history of proportionality, proposes to verify as a historian his thesis that "the body" of the past ought to be entirely reconceptualized as the supreme and most concrete instance of relatedness.

Contact

b.duden@ish.uni-hannover.de

Bibliograhy

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  • Duden, Barbara (2002). Die Gene im Kopf - der Fötus im Bauch. Historisches zum Frauenkörper. Hannover: Offizin-Verlag
  • Duden, Barbara (1997): "Die Verkrebsung. Die Historikerin des erlebten Körpers vor dem zeitgeschichtlichen Phänomen der Krebsprävention." Beitrag zur internationalen Konferenz der Deutschen Krebsgesellschaft e.V.. Konferenz: "FrauenLEBEN und Krebs: Chancen für die Prävention", Frankfurt, 29.-30. Oktober 1997.
  • Duden, Barbara (1997): "Cancerisation. The historian of the experienced body faces the contemporary phenomenon of cancer prevention." Contribution to the International Conference of the German Society for Cancer: ´LIVES of women and Cancer: possibilities of prevention´, Frankfurt 29/30 October 1997. Translated by Nasha Abadian.
  • Duden, Barbara (1997): "Entkörperung im Dienst der Gesundheit. Thesen zur Veränderung der Selbstwahrnehmung von Frauen zwischen der Nachkriegs- und der Jetztzeit."
    Barbara Duden im Arbeitskreis Frauengesundheit. 4. Jahrestagung: "Von der ´Krankheit Frau´ zur Frauengesundheit. Ein anderes Verständnis von Gesundheit und Heilung." Bad Pyrmont, 7. November 1997.
  • Duden, Barbara (1997): "Der GENUS und das OBJEKT der Volkskunde: Im LICHTE der neueren Körpergeschichte."
    Vortrag gehalten auf dem ´Volkskunde-Kongreß in Marburg 1997.
  • Duden, Barbara (1997): "In Tuchfühlung bleiben - Die Soziologen und das Tätigkeitswort."
    Antrittsvorlesung an der Universität Hannover am 29. Januar 1997.
    Erschienen als: "In Tuchfühlung bleiben. Anmerkungen zu poiesis in Soziologie und Historie" in: Werkstatt und Geschichte 19 (1998): S.75-87
  • Duden, Barbara (1998): The contribution for the seminar: 'A Place for All', celebrating the seventieth birthday of Nils Christie in Vidarasen Landsby, Norway, February 24, 1998.
    Reflections on the transmogrification of "you and me" through a professional diagnosis
  • Duden, Barbara (1998): "Das Ungeborene als genetischer Anlageträger: Danke, nein."
    Manuskript für den Abschlußvortrag der Fachtagung: Beratung und Begleitung für Frauen und Paare vor, während und nach vorgeburtlicher Diagnostik: Kriterien - Konzepte - regionale Vernetzung. Evangelische Konferenz für Familien- und Lebensberatung e.V., Bonn 17.-19.11.1998.
  • Duden, Barbara (1998): "Die Ungeborenen. Vom Untergang der Geburt im Laufe der Nachkriegszeit."
    Erschienen mit verändertem Untertitel ("Vom Untergang der Geburt im späten 20. Jahrhundert") in: Jürgen Schlumbohm/ Barbara Duden/Jacques Gélis/Patrice Veit (Hg.): Rituale der Geburt. Eine Kulturgeschichte. München: Beck 1998 (Beck'sche Reihe; 1280), S.149-168.
  • Duden, Barbara and Ivan Illich (1997): "An Alternative View on Dialysis and Organ Transplants."
    Concluding Lecture at the EDTNA/ERCA Conference in Prague 5-8 July 1997, European Dialysis and Transplant Nurses Association and European Renal Care Association.
  • Duden, Barbara und Silja Samerski (1997): "Das aufgeschwatzte Risiko - genetische Beratung als Sprach-Ritual." in: Psychosozial, Jg. 21 (1998) Heft I (Nr.71). S.79-88.
  • Duden, Barbara und Silja Samerski (1997): "Kalkulation und Zuversicht - Riskantes Leben mit einem Schlagwort."
    Überarbeitete Notizen zum Vortrag in Tutzing.
  • Gosmann, Ulla (1998): "Der Müll, die Umwelt und die Frauen", in: Psychologie Heute, März 1998, 44-49.
    Eingeleitetes Interview mit Barbara Duden.
  • Duden, Barbara: "Sammlung I. Ausgewählte Schriften und Vorträge 1991-1998", in: Schriften Bremen
    aus dem Inhalt: "Der fließende und der verstockte Körper", "Schwangerschaft: Die gute Hoffnung und die Diagnose", "Die bio-optimale Frau".
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