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How to Make the Body: Difference, Identity, and Embodiment brings together contemporary and historical readings of the body, exploring the insights and limits of established and emerging theories of difference, identity, and embodiment in a variety of German contexts. The engaging contributions to this volume utilize and challenge cutting-edge approaches to scholarship on the body by putting these approaches in direct conversation with canonical texts and objects, as well as with lesser-known yet provocative emerging forms. To these ends, the chapter authors investigate “the body” through detailed studies across a wide variety of disciplines and modes of expression: from advertising, aesthetics, and pornography, to social media, scientific experimentation, and transnational cultural forms. Thus, this volume showcases the ways in which the body as such cannot be taken for granted and surmises that the body continues to undergo constant--and potentially disruptive--diversification and transformation.

This edited collection explores the malleability and influence of body image, focusing particularly on how media representation and popular culture's focus on the body exacerbates the crucial social influence these representations can have on audiences'perceptions of themselves and others. Contributors investigate the cultural context and lived experiences of individuals'relationships with their bodies, going beyond examination of the thin, ideal body type to explore the emerging representations and portrayals of a diverse set of body types across the media spectrum, paving the way for future research on this topic. Scholars of media studies, popular culture, and health communication will find this book particularly useful.

Awareness of the role that physical difference plays in an individual's ability to negotiate personal and cultural spaces has spread into a variety of disciplines within the past two decades. This collection of essays adds to the growing corpus of work exploring the body as a site of cultural inscription by focusing exclusively on how this process plays out in the sphere of popular culture. The nine essays in this collection touch on a variety of topics of interest to both scholars and students of the body, ranging from contested issues within the discourse on fat and anorexia, to tattoos, domestic violence campaigns, mastectomy, neurasthenia, and gendered identity. By drawing on the work of scholars from a variety of disciplines within the social sciences and humanities, this collection provides models of how different disciplines approach the body. By incorporating perspectives from new and emerging fields like New Historicism, as well as Queer Theory, Fat, and Disability Studies, it simultaneously demonstrates how the use of a body perspective can expand and enliven understanding within these disciplines, and thus should be of interest to a wide variety of readers.

The aim of this book is to explore the body in various historical contexts and to take it as a point of departure for broader historiographical projects. The chapters in the volume present the ways in which the body constitutes a valuable and productive object of historical analysis, especially as a lens through which to trace histories of social, political, and cultural phenomena and processes. More specifically, the authors use the body as a tool for critical re-examination of particular histories of human experience, and of societal and cultural practices, thus contributing to the burgeoning area of body history in terms of both specific case studies as well as historiography in general.

The maternal body is a site of contested dynamics of power, identity, experience, autonomy, occupation, and control. Representations of the maternal body can mis/represent the childbearing and mothering form variously, often as monstrous, idealized, limited, scrutinized, or occupied, whilst dominant discourses limit motherhood through social devaluation. The maternal body has long been a hypervisible artifact: at once bracketed out in the interest of elevating the contributions of sperm-carriers or fetal status; and regarded with hostility and suspicion as out of control. Such arguments are deployed to justify surveillance mechanisms, medical scrutiny, and expectation of self-discipline. This volume helps to develop a more critical understanding of what it means to be an embodied mother. The materiality of maternity and its centrality to family and social life remains too often viewed as a ‘fringe'subject, the province of feminists, activists, hysterical women. For too long, the maternal body has been subject to ‘expert'advice, guidance, censure, and control. Those of us maternal bodies are at risk of being commodified and diminished, having our bodily realities reduced to mechanistic functions and our lived experience disregarded. From art to medical surveillance, from genetics to radioactivity, goddess to breastfeeding, poetry to Indigenous community, dance to body size, the critical eye of the academic and the lived experience of the mother bring into being in this work a body of understanding, of expression, of knowledge and the power and authority of the lived experience, through and about the embodied mother. This critical-creative work encompasses new insights, new research, and redeveloped perspectives which combine the personal with the pervasive and point to new meaning-making in critical motherhood studies via the medium of the maternal body.

Celebrity culture today teems with stars who challenge long-held ideas about a “normal” body. Plus-size and older actresses are rebelling against the cultural obsession with slender bodies and youth. Physically disabled actors and actresses are moving beyond the stock roles and stereotypes that once constrained their opportunities. Stars of various races and ethnicities are crafting new narratives about cultural belonging, while transgender performers are challenging our culture's assumptions about gender and identity. But do these new players in contemporary entertainment media truly signal a new acceptance of body diversity in popular culture? Focusing on six key examples—Melissa McCarthy, Gabourey Sidibe, Peter Dinklage, Danny Trejo, Betty White, and Laverne Cox—Rebellious Bodies examines the new body politics of stardom, situating each star against a prominent cultural anxiety about bodies and inclusion, evoking issues ranging from the obesity epidemic and the rise of postracial rhetoric to disability rights, Latino/a immigration, an aging population, and transgender activism. Using a wide variety of sources featuring these celebrities—films, TV shows, entertainment journalism, and more—to analyze each one's media persona, Russell Meeuf demonstrates that while these stars are promoted as examples of a supposedly more inclusive industry, the reality is far more complex. Revealing how their bodies have become sites for negotiating the still-contested boundaries of cultural citizenship, he uncovers the stark limitations of inclusion in a deeply unequal world.

Artificial bodies constructed in human likeness, from uncanny automatons to mechanical dolls, have long played a complex and subtle role in human identity and culture. This book takes a range of these bodies, from antiquity to the present day, to explore how we seek out echoes, caricatures and replications of ourselves in order to make sense of the complex world in which we live. Packed with case studies, from the commedia del'arte to Hans Bellmer and the 1980s supermodel, this volume explores the divide between the “real” and the constructed. Arguing that the body “other” plays a crucial role in the formation of the self physically and psychologically, leading scholar Adam Geczy contends that the “natural” body has been replaced by a series of imaginary archetypes in our post-modern world, central to which is the figure of the doll. The Artificial Body in Fashion and Art provides a much-needed synthesis of constructed bodies across time and place, drawing on fashion theory, theatre studies and material culture, to explore what the body means in the realms of identity, gender, performance and art.

This collection offers writings on the body with a focus on performance, defined as both staged performance and everyday performance. Traditionally, theorizations of the body have either analyzed its impact on its socio-historical environment or treated the body as a self-enclosed semiotic and affective system. This collection makes a conscious effort to merge these two approaches. It is interested in interactions between bodies and other bodies, bodies and environments, and bodies and objects.

Black Women's Bodies and the Nation develops a decolonial approach to representations of iconic Black women's bodies within popular culture in the US, UK and the Caribbean and the racialization and affective load of muscle, bone, fat and skin through the trope of the subaltern figure of the Sable-Saffron Venus as an'alter/native- body'.

In recent years, there has been an explosion of interest in the contemporary social study of the body which has raised important theoretical and methodological questions regarding traditional social and cultural analysis. It has also generated corporeal theories that highlight the fluid, shifting, yet situated character of the body in society. In turn, these corporeal theories have implications for social relations in an era of new technologies and global market economies.The Body and Everyday Life offers a lively and comprehensive introduction to the study of the body. It uses case studies in performance practices to examine the key concepts, methods and critical insights gained from this area. It includes sections on: ethnographies of the body bodies of performance performing gender the ageing performing body. This book clearly illustrates the complex relationships that exist between the body, society and everyday life, and considers the negative and positive implications for the development of future socio-cultural analysis in the field. It will be an invaluable introduction for students of sociology, body studies, gender studies, dance and performance, and cultural studies.

Le corps mongol examine les techniques et les conceptions du corps des peuples mongols. Dans les conceptions de la personne et les usages du corps de ces peuples, l'animal élevé, et surtout le cheval, occupe une place essentielle. Cette relation implique des manières d'être, de penser et d'agir spécifiques que le lecteur est invité à découvrir en suivant deux axes de lecture : un axe diachronique lié au cycle de vie et un axe synchronique relatif au rapport à l'espace.

In recent years the body has become one of the most popular areas of study in the arts, social sciences and humanities. Transgressive Bodies offers an examination of a variety of non-normative bodies and how they are represented in film, media and popular culture. Examining the non-normative body in a cultural studies context, this book reconsiders the concept of the transgressive body, establishing its status as a culturally mutable term, arguing that popular cultural representations create the transgressive or freak body and then proceed to either contain its threat or (s)exploit it. Through studies of extreme bodybuilding, obesity, disability and transsexed bodies, it examines the implications of such transgressive bodies for gender politics and sexuality. Transgressive Bodies engages with contemporary cultural debates, always relating these to concrete studies of media and cultural representations. This book will therefore appeal to scholars across a range of disciplines, including media and film studies, cultural studies, gender studies, sociology, sports studies and cultural theory.

Encompassing some of the most recent academic research on mainstream issues of body image, weight and representation of the body, this collection addresses the body in areas such as ancient Greek poetry, new media art, comic book culture and biotechnology.

From feminist philosophy to genetic science, scholarship in recent years has succeeded in challenging many entrenched assumptions about the material and biological status of human bodies. Likewise in the study of Chinese cultures, accelerating globalization and the resultant hybridity have called into question previous assumptions about the boundaries of Chinese national and ethnic identity. The problem of identifying a single or definitive referent for the'Chinese body'is thornier than ever.By facilitating fresh dialogue between fields as diverse as the history of science, literary studies, diaspora studies, cultural anthropology, and contemporary Chinese film and cultural studies, Embodied Modernities addresses contemporary Chinese embodiments as they are represented textually and as part of everyday life practices. The book is divided into two sections, each with a dedicated introduction by the editors. The first examines'Thresholds of Modernity'in chapters on Chinese body cultures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—a period of intensive cultural, political, and social modernization that led to a series of radical transformations in how bodies were understood and represented.The second section on'Contemporary Embodiments'explores body representations across the People's Republic of China,Taiwan, and Hong Kong today. Contributors: Chris Berry, Louise Edwards, Maram Epstein, Larissa Heinrich, Olivia Khoo, Fran Martin, Jami Proctor-Xu, Tze-lan D. Sang, Teri Silvio, Mark Stevenson, Cuncun Wu, Angela Zito, John Zou.

This book presents some eruptions of archaic compulsions and behaviors and the forms that they acquire in contemporary societies. It explores how we see and feel our bodies and some of the ways evolution and culture are transforming them.