Consciousness & Thought, Human Geography, Popular Culture, Body, Embodiment 

In the twenty-first century, the body is experienced less as a fixed entity than it is as a protean product and a project of technological, medical and artistic invention. These essays address the proliferation of such transformative practices as tattooing, piercing, self-cutting, cosmetic and trans-sexual surgery, prosthetics, organ transplants and life extension technologies. Establishing links among these varied practices, the contributors illuminate the dramatic and widespread changes that have taken place across generations in attitudes towards the relation of the body to the mind, to agency and to subjectivity. This book also addresses a paradox that has shaped recent body modification debates. Although physical transformations are usually experienced as self-expressive and libratory, they are frequently understood to be socially determined, economically driven and culturally enmeshed. Contributors to the volume engage this contradiction directly, exploring ways in which diverse body practices are capable of subverting power while also at times re-inscribing it. - from Amzon