Beyond reflection: Diffractive and intra-active interventions in health knowledge

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Moore, A orcid iconORCID: 0000-0001-9884-0427 (2026) Beyond reflection: Diffractive and intra-active interventions in health knowledge. Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine. ISSN 1363-4593

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Abstract

This article, for Health’s 30th anniversary special issue, engages with feminist theoretical frameworks which have been used to interrogate the ways reproductive health knowledges are made, shared, and contested. The paper begins by critically revisiting the history of the Women’s Health Movement, illustrating how representationalist epistemologies can fall short in disrupting the material-discursive apparatuses that uphold dominant biomedical logics. Following this, the article explores what a diffractive, new materialist methodology can offer to this field. Haraway’s ‘virtual speculum’ and Barad’s ‘agential realism’ are explored as provocations for reimagining how we can engage diffractively with the mediation of reproductive bodies and technologies. This paper therefore argues that a diffractive, agential realist approach not only decentres human agency, but foregrounds the entangled processes through which knowledge and health are enacted.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: 1117 Public Health and Health Services; 1608 Sociology; Public Health; 4206 Public health; 4410 Sociology
Subjects: H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman
R Medicine > R Medicine (General)
Divisions: Humanities and Social Science
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date of acceptance: 14 June 2026
Date of first compliant Open Access: 23 July 2026
Date Deposited: 23 Jul 2026 09:30
Last Modified: 23 Jul 2026 11:04
DOI or ID number: 10.1177/13634593261468036
URI: https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/29051
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