Contested Bodies with Leandro Loriga PhD

Why are some forms of body-related suffering recognised as identity, while others remain medically and morally suspect?  In this episode of Contested Bodies, I examine the comparison between Body Integrity Dysphoria and Gender Dysphoria. The aim is to asks why two forms of profound body-related distress have received such different clinical, ethical, and cultural responses.  The episode explores h...

Body Integrity Dysphoria raises a difficult question: what happens when the body a person has does not match the body they experience as their own? In this episode of Contested Bodies, I examine BID through questions of body mapping, mental imagery, body image, body schema, bodily flexibility, and the social meaning of impairment. The episode asks whether BID can be understood only as a neurologic...

Body Integrity Dysphoria becomes harder to reduce to a single explanation once the body itself is understood as mapped, interpreted, impaired, named, and judged. In this episode of Contested Bodies, I examine the second half of the history of Body Integrity Dysphoria through xenomelia, body mapping, neurological hypotheses, dysphoria, impairment, disability, and the problem of naming. The episode...

Body Integrity Dysphoria did not appear suddenly as a settled medical category; it emerged through decades of contested language, sexual interpretation, media attention, clinical uncertainty, and institutional hesitation. In this episode of Contested Bodies, I examine the first half of the history of Body Integrity Dysphoria, beginning with early public and clinical encounters with the desire for...

Season one of Contested Bodies enters the world of Body Integrity Dysphoria , or B.I.D ., a condition recognised in the World Health Organization’s ICD-11 as code 6C21. This season draws on my original research and writing on bodily autonomy, medical authority, and contested forms of suffering. It asks what happens when a person’s experience of their own body conflicts with medicine’s idea of heal...

Contested Bodies is a podcast about the clash between individual autonomy and institutional authority. Working from anthropological, moral, and ethical perspectives, the series enters the grey zones where medicine, law, and society decide what counts as legitimate suffering, what counts as treatment, and what can or cannot be done to the human body. Its aim is not to offer easy answers, but to sus...