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 peoples motives and aspirations as they embrace or reject enhancement technologies, which are closely entangled with negotiations over gender, class, age, nationality and ethnicity.
Recenzijos
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
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Uncanny Aesthetics of Repairing, Reshaping, and Replacing
Human Bodies
Alvaro Jarrķn and.Chiara Pussetti
PART I: REPAIR
Chapter
1. Ideologies of Repair in Erectile Dysfunction Treatment and Mens
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-Londońo
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 Womens Sexuality in Brazil
Fabķola Rohden
Afterword: Beyond the Flesh
Lenore Manderson
Index
Alvaro Jarrķn is Associate Professor of Anthropology at College of the Holy Cross. He is the author of The Biopolitics of Beauty: Cosmetic Citizenship and Affective Capital in Brazil (University of California Press, 2017).
