Lewis, A. D. (2022). The Body Politic: A Review of Cells at Work!, vols. 1-6. BMJ Medical Humanities Blog. Retrieved from https://blogs.bmj.com/medical-humanities/2022/03/30/the-body-politic-a-review-of-cells-at-work-vols-1-6/
ABSTRACT:
In transforming the body’s routines and responses into a manga narrative, Cells at Work! fashions a social system for its cellular characters.1 That system, notably, more resembles a socialist autocracy than the democracy familiar to its Japanese or North American audiences. This authoritarian socialism, more common to China and Soviet-era Russia, creates a necessary distance between the reader and their subject matter, namely one’s own body. Cells at Work! utilizes that distance to establish a neutrality between the reader and the body as subject. One’s physical being and somatic activities do not become totally alien as much as the inward is turned outward; the mismatch of political realities opens a gap between the reader (i.e. the possessor of a body) and the body as its own, independent space.