Transforming Bodies: Makeovers and Monstrosities in American Culture

by H. Steinhoff

Overview

At the turn of the twenty-first century, American media abound with images and narratives of bodily transformations. At the crossroads of American, cultural, literary, media, gender, queer, disability and governmentality studies, the book presents a timely intervention into critical debates on body transformations and contemporary makeover culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781137493781
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	06/09/2015
Edition description:	2015
Pages:	267
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.03(d)

About the Author

Heike Steinhoff is Assistant Professor of American Studies at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. Her main areas of research are gender studies, theories and representations of the body, and sexuality in American culture and cultural theory. She is the author of Queer Buccaneers: (De)Constructing Boundaries in the PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN Film Series.

Table of Contents

PART I: BEFORE 1. Transforming Bodies: An Introduction 2. Body Thoughts: Transforming Bodies in the 'New Body Theories' PART II: TRANSFORMATIONS 3. Extreme Makeovers: Transforming Bodies in Popular Culture 4. Monstrous Makeovers: Somatechnics of Resistance in Postmodern Consumer Culture Chuck Palahniuk's Invisible Monsters 5. Troubling Subjects: Beauty, Plastic Surgery and (Non-)Normative Bodies in Cosmetic Surgical Culture FX's Nip/Tuck 6. Modifying Teens: Coming of Age in a Dystopian World of Beauty Scott Westerfeld's Uglies Series PART III: AFTER 7. Final Suture and New Before: A Conclusion

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"In Transforming Bodies, Steinhoff performs a detailed and insightful examination of the ways in which popular cultural articulations of transforming bodies function as sites upon which contemporary political, cultural, technological, and ethical concerns about the self and the social are played out. Her strategic appropriation of the ubiquitous makeover narrative, coupled with her innovative account of 'technologies of monstrosity', makes Steinhoff's engagement with oft-overlooked texts such as Chuck Palahniuk's novels, and Scott Westerfeld's youth science fiction series Uglies, a stand-out in the ever growing field of body modification studies." - Nikki Sullivan, Macquarie University, Australia

"In language that is both accessible and rigorous, Heike Steinhoff illuminates the contours of a makeover culture gone monstrous. Through the figure of the excessive body mapped out across several iterations of US popular culture, Steinhoff lucidly demonstrates how efforts to govern the social body through control of the individual body both reproduce and undermine norms of embodiment, the self, and the aberrant. Transforming Bodies helps us see how transformation writes a new kind of beauty on the body, a beauty simultaneously gorgeous and grotesque." - Brenda R. Weber, Indiana University, USA

Editorial Reviews

The book is certainly a refreshing read for scholars interested in current trends of American cultural and media studies and, more specifically, the sociology of gendered bodies. But the focus on intermediality and the numerous popular cultural examples hold an interest for lay audiences too … . Steinhoff’s book allows us a glimpse at collective fantasies of postapocalyptic reality acted out on the surface of transforming bodies.” (Anna Kérchy, Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, Vol. 23 (2), 2017)

From the Publisher