This book investigates how desires to transform our bodies can bring utopia to the present, and how utopian practices often lead to distinctly dystopian or anti-utopian outcomes. It is the first comprehensive study to address the paradoxical relationship between bodies and utopianism. Franziska Bork Petersen discusses doping, bodybuilding and cosmetic surgery alongside practices such as retouching the ‘body as image’ on social media, and looks at how fashion modelling and performance ‘estrange’ the body. Techniques and technologies to transform our bodies are increasingly accessible and suggest an excessive identification of the body as lacking. To ‘be a body’ in a culturally meaningful way, we incessantly improve our bodily appearance and capacity. The book therefore addresses the utopianism inherent in a cultural understanding of bodies as increasingly controllable.
Author(s): Franziska Bork Petersen
Series: Palgrave Studies in Utopianism
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 310
City: Cham
Contents
1 Introduction
The Body and Utopia
The Body as Topos/Place
The Body as Eu-Topia
The Body as Ou-Topia
Clarification of Terms: Utopia, Dystopia, Anti-Utopia—and ‘the’ Body
Thoughts on Method
Previous Work on the Body in Utopian Studies
Contributions to Research
Structure
Bibliography
Part I Impossible, Imagined and Imaginary Bodies
2 On Being a Body in Thomas More’s Utopia
Clothing the Body Indistinguishable
Social Inequality
Morality
Individuality
Unequal Feasting
Strip to Wed
Causing Him Delight
Non-Reciprocal Transactions
The Deceptive Sex
Conclusion: More’s Flawed Humanism
Bibliography
3 Impossible Body Escapes
A Christian Body: Catherine of Siena’s Embodiment
Saint Catherine of Siena
The Utopian ‘No’ as Impossible Body Denial
A Colonial Body: The U.S. Virgin Islands Queens’ Utopian Actions
U.S. Virgin Islands Queens
The Utopian ‘No’ as Embodied Defiance
Beauty Pageants
A Mechanical Body in Early Fashion Modelling
Automatons
Early Fashion Modelling
The Utopian ‘No’ as Machinic Embodiment
Embodied Desire, Impossibility and Mechanisation
Conclusion: Utopia and Dystopia
Bibliography
4 Technological Bodies Becoming Images
Part-Time Cyborgs
Quantified Self
The Body as Image
Contemporary Online Bodies
The Imaginary as a Utopian Category
Sexting
Conclusion: Calculability and Control
Bibliography
Part I Conclusion
Part II Human Enhancement
5 Bodies of Lack
Eugenics
Degeneracy
Improving the National Body
Applied Eugenics
Fixable Lack
Infinite Lack
Conclusion: Utopianism as Process
Bibliography
6 Utopias of Bodily Capacity
Open-Ended Enhancement in Elite Sports
Fragmented Machine Bodies
Doping as Technique: Indistinguishability Between Therapy and Enhancement
Out-Competing ‘Body Time’
Conclusion: The Improved Body as Machine
Bibliography
7 Beautifying Body Modification
Cosmetic Surgery: Ceaseless Nipping and Tucking to Become Normal
Individual Transformation as Cultural Iteration
Bodybuilding: Excessive Enhancement as Deviant
Building and Rebuilding the Body
Conclusion: Transformation as Ideal
Bibliography
Part II Conclusion: Capitalism’s Utopian Co-optation of Embodied Normalcy
Part III Utopian Estrangement
8 Bodily Estrangements of Space
Mattress Performance (Carry that Weight)
Spatial Estrangement from the Status Quo
Beyond the Individual: Relational Aesthetics
Not Presenting an Alternative
Conclusion
Bibliography
9 Estrangements of Corporeality
Fashion in Utopia
Unrecognisable Fashion Bodies in Plato’s Atlantis
‘Novelty’ in Utopianism and Fashion
Educating Desire Affectively
Conclusion
Bibliography
10 Estrangements of Reproduction
Transformella
Estranging the Nuclear Family
An Outlandish Utopian ‘Good’
Conclusion
Bibliography
Part III Conclusion
11 Conclusion
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Being vs Living
Utopia as the Result of a Doing
Transformation
Bibliography
Index
