Body Utopianism
Prosthetic Being Between Enhancement and Estrangement
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Beschreibung
This book investigates how desires to transform our bodies can bring utopia to the present, and how utopian practices often lead to distinctly dystopian or anti-utopian outcomes. It is the first comprehensive study to address the paradoxical relationship between bodies and utopianism. Franziska Bork Petersen discusses doping, bodybuilding and cosmetic surgery alongside practices such as retouching the ‘body as image’ on social media, and looks at how fashion modelling and performance ‘estrange’ the body. Techniques and technologies to transform our bodies are increasingly accessible and suggest an excessive identification of the body as lacking. To ‘be a body’ in a culturally meaningful way, we incessantly improve our bodily appearance and capacity. The book therefore addresses the utopianism inherent in a cultural understanding of bodies as increasingly controllable.
Franziska Bork Petersen is a performance scholar and teaches at Roskilde University, Denmark,the Danish National School of Performing Arts, and Heinrich-Heine Universität, Germany. Her work on dance, performance art and fashion has appeared in Performance Research and MedieKultur: Journal of media and communication research.
This book investigates how desires to transform our bodies can bring utopia to the present, and how utopian practices often lead to distinctly dystopian or anti-utopian outcomes. It is the first comprehensive study to address the paradoxical relationship between bodies and utopianism. Franziska Bork Petersen discusses doping, bodybuilding and cosmetic surgery alongside practices such as retouching the ‘body as image’ on social media, and looks at how fashion modelling and performance ‘estrange’ the body. Techniques and technologies to transform our bodies are increasingly accessible and suggest an excessive identification of the body as lacking. To ‘be a body’ in a culturally meaningful way, we incessantly improve our bodily appearance and capacity. The book therefore addresses the utopianism inherent in a cultural understanding of bodies as increasingly controllable.
Addresses the paradoxical relationship between bodies and utopianism Connects altering the body to the desire for utopia Poses that utopianism is inherent when treating bodies as controllable
Autor*in
Franziska Bork Petersen
Themen in »Body Utopianism«
Thomas More human enhancement body modification plastic surgery contemporary capitalism