Transforming Bodies

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.

"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

• 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