Description
Book Synopsis The technological capacity to transform biology - repairing, reshaping and replacing body parts, chemicals and functions – is now part of our lives. Humanity is confronted with a variety of affordable and non-invasive 'enhancement technologies': anti-ageing medicine, aesthetic surgery, cognitive and sexual enhancers, lifestyle drugs, prosthetics and hormone supplements. This collection focuses on why people find these practices so seductive and provides ethnographic insights into people’s motives and aspirations as they embrace or reject enhancement technologies, which are closely entangled with negotiations over gender, class, age, nationality and ethnicity.
Trade Review “This is a brilliant collection of essays about recent trends on body modifications and bodily performances… this is a great example of how anthropology can move on, addressing new issues while keeping grounded on the overarching questions of free-will and social determinations, resources and inequalities.” • Cristiana Bastos, University of Lisbon
“The book presents a timely and serious interdisciplinary analysis of contemporary body modification practices located in diverse cultural contexts. A range of topics/practices are covered and the importance of an intersectional frame is emphasized throughout. It constitutes an original contribution to a field dominated by health-focused and psychological accounts.” • Brendan Gough, Leeds Beckett University
Table of Contents List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Uncanny Aesthetics of Repairing, Reshaping, and Replacing Human Bodies
Alvaro Jarrín and.Chiara Pussetti
PART I: REPAIR
Chapter 1. Ideologies of Repair in Erectile Dysfunction Treatment and “Men’s Health” Medicine
Emily Wentzell
Chapter 2. Repairing Sexual Ageing: Italian GPs’ Discourses in the Viagra Era
Raffaella Ferrero Camoletto
Chapter 3. Repairing the Body and Improving the Nation: Corrective Plastic Surgeries for Protruding Ears in Brazil
Marcelle Schimitt
Chapter 4. The Itinerant Beauty Brigade: Repairing Social Fractures Through the “Apapacho Estético”
Eva Carpigo
PART II: RESHAPING
Chapter 5. Shaping the European Body: The Cosmetic Construction of Whiteness
Chiara Pussetti
Chapter 6. Reshaping Masculinities and the Beauty Industry in Colombia
Alejandro Arango-Londoño
Chapter 7. Reshaping and Hacking Gendered Bodies: Gay Bears and Pro-Independence Catalan Militants
Begonya Enguix Grau
Chapter 8. Remaking (Post)human Bodies in the Anthropocene: Bioart Practices
Christine Beaudoin
PART III: REPLACEMENT
Chapter 9. Can You See the Real Me? Cyborg, Supercrip or Simply a Lover of Sport
P. David Howe and Carla Filomena Silva
Chapter 10. Unfixing Blindness: Retinal Implants and Negotiations of Ability in Postsocialist Russia
Svetlana Borodina
Chapter 11. Learning Through Apps: The Replacement of Offline Cis-female Bodies with Digital Pregnancies and Menstruations
Daniela Tonelli Manica, Marina Fisher Nucci and Gabriela Cabral Paletta
Chapter 12. Remaking Desires and Femininities: Testosterone “Replacement” for Treating Women’s Sexuality in Brazil
Fabíola Rohden
Afterword: Beyond the Flesh
Lenore Manderson
Index
