Botsa Katara // Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) is a neologism attributed to “a sensory phenomenon typically characterised by electrostatic-like tingling across the scalp, following the line of the spine downwards, extending to the arms and further depending on the intensity of the response” (1)[1].This sensation is triggered by certain auditory, tactile, visual and cognitive…
Author: botsak
Prosthesis and Disability in the Age of Superhuman Functionality
Botsa Katara // Prostheses have been known to humanity since antiquity, with their earliest traces found in Ancient Rome and Egypt. But despite their existence for centuries, their evolution has been a slow and steady one. The change from simple wooden limbs to more aesthetically and technologically enhanced versions was the result of the 19th…
“What Do Women Want?”: On Female Sexual Research and the Difficulty of Claiming Desire
Botsa Katara // Sigmund Freud once famously claimed that “The great question that has never been answered … and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is, What does a woman want?” (Bergner 15). The answer to this question shall ever be elusive,…
Pat-a-caking One’s Way into the World of Blindness
Botsa Katara// “But he wouldnay get his fucking Dysfuckingfunctional Benefit man he would be lucky to get fucking re-registered … and the actual compen was a joke. Nay chance.” (Kelman 248) The epigram belongs to James Kelman’s Booker Prize winning novel, How Late It Was, How Late. Published in 1994, the novel documents the travails…
The Kinetic Eloquence of Hands
Botsa Katara // Listen: a four–worded wave speech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeeis, ooos. Vehement breath of waters amid seasnakes, rearing horses, rocks. In cups of rocks it slops: flop, slop, slap: bounded in barrels. And, spent, its speech ceases. (Joyce 45) If listening ceases with speech, and speech with sound, then does language cease too? And,…
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