Platypus

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Unfinished Bodies: Cosmetic Surgeries Among Aging Sex Workers in Singapore

 Rong Mu  October 26, 2026

When I met Mia in her massage parlour, she had recently undergone cosmetic surgery. She openly showed me the sutures, dense and deep, tracing almost her entire hairline. Two weeks earlier, she had travelled to Shanghai for a major facelift involving the lifting and tightening of the skin. She even showed me videos of the operation: the surgeon peels back the skin of her face, pulls it taut, and sutures it into its new position. It reminded me of The Painted Skin in Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (Liaozhai Zhiyi), where the demon peels off a face like a mask and replaces it with another. However, what gave Mia her new face was not a supernatural spell but modern surgery: a painful, costly, and carefully planned intervention made possible by highly sophisticated surgical techniques. More important, it carries Mia’s hope for work. Originally from China and now a permanent resident in Singapore, Mia has been working in the sex industry for more than ten years. “I’m fifty now,” she told me. “Just look at all the young, beautiful girls in the building. If I don’t undergo cosmetic surgery, what choice do I have? How could I ever compete with them? I need to survive. I still have to work and make money.” For Mia, cosmetic surgery was crucial to both her work and her future. If her appearance determined her competitiveness in the market, then surgery was an investment in her livelihood. (read more...)

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A One-Trick Pony Among Poly-Metis at the 16th ESOCITE Congress

 David Antolínez  October 21, 2026

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Sing, Muse, of the triumphs and tribulations of Latin American scholars gathered to discuss the fragile threads linking Science, Technology, and Society. Sing, Muse, of the congress held earlier this year in Colombia, barely a couple of days after the presidential election with the rising shadow of fascism. Sing, Muse, of that uneasy feeling, sharpened throughout three days of intellectual exchange, leading to the realization that our inquiries must choose between the Scylla of romanticism and the Charybdis of rationalism. From the beginning I felt the hospitality of the professors of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, despite them being busy with final arrangements. Too aware of my peripheral role in this community, I decided to stay at the margin and pay close attention to others. A feminist ethnographer working with textiles gave the inaugural lecture. She started by confessing her ambivalent feelings about the usefulness of these international meetings. She next remembered one of the first congresses of the Latin American network, where John Law eagerly spoke about non-human agency. Despite the lack of remuneration and the inevitable waste (printed materials, disposable coffee cups, megabytes of stored files in the cloud, etc.), the committee accepted the challenge of hosting the 16th Congress of the Asociación Latinoamericana de Estudios Sociales de la Ciencia y la Tecnología (ESOCITE), hoping it would be an opportunity to connect different researchers and projects. The nostalgia in the room was almost palpable. (read more...)

Broilers That Can’t Even Fend for Themselves: Mother Hens and Production Infrastructures

 Maria Isabel Trivilin  October 19, 2026

Este conteúdo também está disponivel em português.

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‘chickens take care of themselves, they live all around, withstanding by themselves’; they know how to ‘eat lizards, crickets, just to withstand and stay around here’ — João Karitiana, apud Vander Velden (2025) Among the Karitiana, a people from the southwestern Brazilian Amazon, there is a specific way of referring to certain animals raised in large numbers. Translated as “to grow,” kerep designates, among others, chickens, animals that do not need to be cared for directly by humans, managing on their own to find food. Even in domestic backyards, someone feeds them, which does not prevent them from finding earthworms and other things around them. But survive they do. In rural Brazil, chickens are raised free-range, fed corn or cracked corn, scratching freely around the yard. As Vander Velden explains, drawing on João Karitiana’s words, chickens take care of themselves, regulate their own rhythms and maintain a relatively independent existence. They “withstand on their own” and remain, in a way, apart from the human community they live in. (read more...)

Listening with Whales: Song, Grief, and Obligation Across Ways of Knowing

 Marie Comuzzo  October 15, 2026

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Whether through awe and wonder or death and grief, human-whale relations throw into relief important epistemic, ethical, spiritual, legal, and scientific tensions. Because whales migrate across oceans and have long been in relation with humans across the globe, they inhabit multiple and often conflicting worlds of meaning and obligation. What happens in the aftermath of a whale’s death, when a whale might simultaneously be an ancestor, a source of scientific knowledge, and a potential threat to the continuation of a local ecotourist economy? (read more...)

My Unemployment in the Time of AI

 Anna Huntington  October 6, 2026

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On October 16th, 2024, I found myself unemployed. While some say unemployment can be a time to relax and catch up on sleep, this really wasn’t the case. My unemployment became a conditional liminal space, between stable pay that was without an expiration date (Odoardi et al. 2022). (read more...)

Softmaxxing Skepticism: How Looksmaxxing Culture Recruits the Mainstream

 Tiffany Prendergast  October 2, 2026

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Sitting in a parked car, phone propped up on the dashboard, recording, he takes a bite of his Chipotle bowl between sentences about a metabolic drug meant to make him eat less. Almost three months into retatrutide, he’s not sure it’s worth it anymore. The drug is still locked in Phase III clinical trials, nowhere near FDA approval, meaning sellers have no legal standing to market it for human consumption (Eli Lilly and Company 2026). He tells his viewers that he briefly looked into the gray market. (read more...)

Imagined Geographies: From Urban Expertise to Rural Health Intervention

 Luisa Madrigal Marroquín  September 30, 2026

Este contenido también está disponible en español.

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Health interventions move across spaces and geographies that they themselves help to produce. I argue that health interventions organize relationships among places and people. They define where expertise is presumed to reside, who is expected to teach, and who is expected to learn. In doing so, they reproduce an imagined distinction between places even when everyday practice continually blurs those boundaries. This post contends that health interventions designed in Guatemala City do more than travel to communities across the country. They also produce an imagined geography in which urban spaces become associated with expertise, innovation, and authority, while predominantly Indigenous Maya communities are positioned as recipients of external knowledge. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with nutrition and health interventions, I show that this distinction, between the urban spaces of Guatemala City and rural spaces of Indigenous Maya Communities, repeatedly breaks down in practice as communities and fieldworkers, those directly responsible for carrying out the interventions in the communities, reshape interventions and generate knowledge of their own. Yet the interventions themselves continue to reproduce the very rural/urban divide that everyday experience disproves. (read more...)

Beyond Deficit: Toward a Strengths-Based Approach to Male Infertility

 Juan Camilo Ospina Deaza  September 28, 2026

Este contenido también está disponible en español.

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Concerns about declining sperm quality and male reproductive capacity have become increasingly prominent in scientific, clinical, and public discussions of fertility. Yet infertility has historically been located within women’s bodies and treated primarily as a women’s problem, placing women under disproportionate reproductive responsibility, scrutiny, blame, and clinical intervention. This framing has also contributed to men’s reproductive bodies and experiences receiving comparatively limited attention. Growing concern about male reproductive capacity has been accompanied by increasing attention to how male fertility might be preserved, improved, and optimised, alongside broader demographic narratives that frame declining reproductive capacity as a potential threat to future populations. Within these discussions, men are increasingly constituted as reproductive subjects whose bodies can be monitored, modified, and enhanced. Yet this emphasis on improving male reproductive capacity sits alongside a strikingly different representation of men once infertility is diagnosed. Across clinical and social accounts, male infertility is frequently approached through the language of deficit, loss, vulnerability, and incapacity. What would it mean to develop a strengths based approach to male infertility? (read more...)