Body Thoughts: Transforming Bodies in the ‘New Body Theories’

Abstract

Current studies on the body and body transformations, including this one, need to be situated in the context of developments across the humanities in the past 20–30 years that have put an increasing emphasis and focus on the body. Though the body has always been a more or less explicit concern of individual disciplines or schools of thought (e.g. anthropology), particularly the 1990s were marked by what has alternatively been called a somatic, body, or corporeal turn (cf. e.g. Gugutzer; Shilling). Sociologists like Bryan Turner, Chris Shilling, and Mike Featherstone, feminist philosophers like Elizabeth Grosz, Judith Butler, Margrit Shildrick, Donna Haraway, and Susan Bordo, cultural historians like Barbara Duden, Michael Feher, Thomas Laqueur, Barbara Stafford, Sander Gilman, and Elizabeth Haiken, and media and literary theorists like Katherine Hayles, Anne Balsamo, and, later, Bernadette Wegenstein, turned to bodies as a site of critical inquiry. These studies have started to transform the way the humanities today think of the body — and at the same time, they have increasingly thought of the body as a body that is always in transformation, being formed and transformed in the moment that it is thought. Transforming Bodies will use the critical potential that these new body theories and studies offer to explore contemporary popular discourses of transforming bodies and at the same time elucidate how these (popular) representations of body transformation intersect with and differ from these (‘academic’) approaches to the body.