Bodies in the Making: Transgressions and Transformations

by Nancy N. Chen (Editor)

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 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.

216 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2006

About the author

Nancy N. Chen is Professor of Anthropology at Scripps College. She is the author of Food, Medicine, and the Quest for Good Health and Breathing Spaces: Qigong, Psychiatry, and Healing in China.