Body Parts: Critical Explorations in CorporealityChristopher E. Forth, Ivan Crozier In many forms of discourse, specific parts of the human anatomy may signify, or act as a substitute for, the whole body/person: the presence of a large gut may render a man effeminate or represent someone who has lost control of his appetites; visible muscles indicate strength of body, but also constitution or will; a hard penis indicates a male body in a state of perfection. In this volume, scholars from a variety of historical and cultural studies disciplines examine scientific, medical, popular, and literary texts, paying special attention to the different strategies employed in order to establish authority over the body through the management of a single part. By considering body parts that are usually ignored by scholars - the skin, blood, the pelvis, the hair - the essays in this volume render the idea of a single, coherent body untenable by demonstrating that the body is not a transhistorical entity, but rather, deeply fragmented and fundamentally situated in a number of different contexts. |
Contents
Blood Will Tell The Vascular System and Criminal Dangerousness | 17 |
Bums in the Time of Cholera Sex Sodomy and Representations of the Fundament | 44 |
All the Appearances Were Perfectly Natural The Anus of the Sodomite in NineteenthCentury Medical Discourse | 65 |
The Primitive Pelvis The Role of Racial Folklore in Obstetrics and Gynecology During the Twentieth Century | 85 |
Hairy Heine or the Braiding of Gender and Ethnic Difference | 105 |
The Tears of Lacteros Integrating the Meanings of the Human Breast | 123 |
Enlightened Hands Managing Dexterity in British Medicine and Manufactures 176018001 | 142 |
CONSTRUCTING | 159 |
Phallic Performance Phalloplasty and the Techniques of Sex | 177 |
Guts and Manhood The Culture of the Abdomen in Modern France | 191 |
From Pieces to Whole The Sexualization of Muscles in Postwar Bodybuilding | 207 |
Working Out the Bodys Boundaries Physiological Aesthetic and Psychic Dimensions of the Skin in German Nudism 18901930 | 229 |
I Will Kill Myself If I Have to Keep My Fat Calves Legs and Cosmetic Surgery in Paris in 1926 | 247 |
| 265 | |
About the Contributors | 271 |
Potential Space Potential Sex The Value of the Vagina in Transsexual Autobiography | 161 |
Common terms and phrases
aesthetic American anal anatomical anus April Ashley argued beauty biceps black women blush bodily body's bodybuilding breast breastfeeding Caroline Cossey Casper chirurgie esthétique cholera circumcision cosmetic surgery criminal Darwin Desbonnet dexterity discourse disease doctor Edmond Desbonnet Emotions endometriosis Erasmus Darwin erotic experience fashion female body Forensic Freud function gender genital Geoffre Geoffre's German Heine homosexual human hygienic idea ideal identity images JAMA Jewish Jews Josiah Wedgwood Journal labor lactation legs Lombroso London male body masculinity maternal Medicine Mein System mental milk modern moral Mosso muscles muscular natural Negro nineteenth century noted nudist nursing Obstetrics operation organs Paris penis phallic phalloplasty Physical Culture physicians physiology practice Race racial rectum role Routledge sexual difference Sigmund Freud signifier signs skin social sodomy sphygmograph stereotypes Surén surgeons surgical Tardieu Tarnowski tion trans transsexual autobiography twentieth century University Press vagina Wedgwood woman York Zopf
Popular passages
Page 3 - Contrary to modern canons, the grotesque body is not separated from the rest of the world. It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits. The stress is laid on those parts of the body that are open to the outside world, that is, the parts through which the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes out to meet the world.