Bodies in the Making

Download or read book Bodies in the Making written by Nancy N. Chen and published by North Atlantic Books. This book was released on 2006 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the twenty-first century, the body is experienced less as a fixed entity than it is as a protean product and a project of technological, medical and artistic invention. The essays in Bodies in the Making: Transgressions and Transformations address the proliferation of such transformative practices as tattooing, piercing, self-cutting, cosmetic and transsexual surgery, prosthetics, organ transplants and life extension technologies. Establishing links among these varied practices, the contributors illuminate the dramatic and widespread changes that have taken place across generations in attitudes towards the relation of the body to the mind, to agency and to subjectivity. Bodies in the Making also addresses a paradox that has shaped recent body modification debates. Although physical transformations are usually experienced as self-expressive and libratory, they are frequently understood to be socially determined, economically driven and culturally enmeshed. Contributors to the volume engage this contradiction directly, exploring ways in which diverse body practices are capable of subverting power while also at times re-inscribing it.