Bodies in the Making: Transgressions and Transformations

ISBN 10: 097125463X / ISBN 13: 9780971254633

Published by North Atlantic Books, 2007

About this Item

paperback. Text block, wrappers and binding are in like new condition, without markings of any kind. Supporting Bay Area Friends of the Library since 2010. Well packaged and promptly shipped.

Seller Inventory # BAY08-00068

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Bodies in the Making: Transgressions and Transformations
• Publisher: North Atlantic Books
• Publication Date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 097125463X
• ISBN 13: 9780971254633
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: Like New

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

There are twenty-two contributors to this project, which evolved out of a conference held at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2005.