Wound
by
The world was beginning to flower into wounds. —J. G. Ballard, Crash A wound is relational. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a wound as “a hurt caused by the laceration or separation of the tissues of the body by a hard or sharp instrument, a bullet, etc.; an external injury” (OED Online 2021, “wound”). Wounds are agentive materializations; it takes effort and action to make wounds happen. While injury may refer to a damaging and possibly wrongful act, a wound foregrounds the body as injury’s primary object. One may follow the wound forward to consider what is entailed in recovery, and one may trace a wound backward to reflect on forensics. At stake in following wounds, then, are materialities of effect. Wounds are generative, giving rise to modes of critical attention both in ethnographic cases and in their different appearances in the health humanities. If the primacy of the concrete characterizes wounds, we might ask what wounds concretize in turn. Wounds concretize medical specialties. For instance, the case of Phineas Gage, a railroad worker who survived an accident that drove a metal rod through his skull and brain, contributed to the development of psychology and neuroscience (Macmillan 2002). Relatedly, trauma...
This essay may be found on page 215 of the printed volume.