Body Parts Critical Explorations in Corporeality

by Forth, Christopher E.; Crozier, Ivan; Carden-Coyne, Ana; Comiskey, Carolyn Ward; Geller, Jay; Giles, Fiona; Hoberman, John; Horn, David G.; Jonsson, Fredrik Albritton; Möhring, Maren; O'Connor, Dan; Rosario, Vernon; Rousseau, George

• ISBN13: 9780739109335
• ISBN10: 0739109332
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-01-21
• Publisher: Lexington Books

Summary

In many forms of discourse, specific parts of the human anatomy may signify the whole body/person. 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, these essays 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.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	vii
Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction: Parts, Wholes, and People	1	(16)
Christopher E. Forth
Ivan Crozier
Part One: Classifying
Blood Will Tell: The Vascular System and Criminal Dangerousness	17	(27)
David G. Horn
Bums in the Time of Cholera: Sex, Sodomy, and Representations of the Fundament	44	(21)
George Rousseau
``All the Appearances Were Perfectly Natural'': The Anus of the Sodomite in Nineteenth-Century Medical Discourse	65	(20)
Ivan Crozier
The Primitive Pelvis: The Role of Racial Folklore in Obstetrics and Gynecology During the Twentieth Century	85	(20)
John Hoberman
Hairy Heine, or the Braiding of Gender and Ethnic Difference	105	(18)
Jay Geller
The Tears of Lacteros: Integrating the Meanings of the Human Breast	123	(19)
Fiona Giles
Enlightened Hands: Managing Dexterity in British Medicine and Manufactures, 1760--1800	142	(19)
Fredrik Albritton Jonsson
Part Two: Constructing
Potential Space, Potential Sex: The Value of the Vagina in Transsexual Autobiography	161	(16)
Dan O'Connor
Phallic Performance: Phalloplasty and the Techniques of Sex	177	(14)
Vernon Rosario
Guts and Manhood: The Culture of the Abdomen in Modern France	191	(16)
Christopher E. Forth
From Pieces to Whole: The Sexualization of Muscles in Postwar Bodybuilding	207	(22)
Ana Carden-Coyne
Working Out the Body's Boundaries: Physiological, Aesthetic, and Psychic Dimensions of the Skin in German Nudism, 1890--1930	229	(18)
Maren Mohring
``I Will Kill Myself If I Have to Keep My Fat Calves!'': Legs and Cosmetic Surgery in Paris in 1926	247	(18)
Carolyn Ward Comiskey
Index	265	(6)
About the Contributors	271