Full Description
Borderline bodies offers original interpretations of visual representations of human bodies as bounded and unbounded, fortified and permeable, mobile and static—subject to borders and able to traverse and challenge them. It also takes as its focus images and objects that might be considered 'borderline' because they sit at the intersection of disciplines or sit outside accepted notions of what constitutes serious 'art.'
By mapping the ways human bodies traverse borders and straddle—even dismantle—categories, this volume's essays approach afresh the relationship of bodies to traditional modes of representation, especially in art and medicine, and encourage us to think anew about how we understand the relationship between human corporeality, identity and place. Critical transdisciplinary and transnational analyses of objects and images from a range of geographies shed new light on the themes of: bodies and identity; typologies of the body; racialised bodies; 'normal' and 'abnormal' bodies; encounters between bodies; bodies in transition; bodies and mobility; and the bounded and unbounded human body. The outcome is a fresh approach to depictions of the human body produced for the purposes of artistic and medical education, aesthetic edification, and scientific and professional advancement, which disrupts assumptions about the normative human body perpetuated through Western image-making traditions.
Contents
Introduction: Borderline bodies — Tania Cleaves, Keren Rosa Hammerschlag and Natasha Ruiz-Gómez
Part I Across borders: bodies in motion
1 Phantoms of race: Shibata Koichi's models, midwifery and racial discourse in late nineteenth-century medical culture — Sonia Favi and Rebecca Whiteley
2 Lithographic yoga: posters of the yoga body in early twentieth-century Bengal — Projit Bihari Mukharji
3 Harmonious anatomies: dissecting Liu Xiaoxian's marriage of medical opposites — Alex Burchmore
4 Place/placelessness: Moshekwa Langa — Gabriella Nugent
Part II At the border: bodies collide
5 Monstrous: Paul Richer's La Femme, anthropology and race — Natasha Ruiz-Gómez
6 Draughtsman Jacques Arago and racialised distortion — Liz Conor
7 'That feeling of love and care and empathy': Angel De Cora, Stacey Fayant, a Once Known Maker and Christi Belcourt Reclaiming the Indigenous body — Gloria J. Bell
8 Coatlicue, monstrous beauty. Four postcolonial images — Frida Gorbach
Part III Without borders: bodily dissolution
9 Seen by the camera: Nudes of All Nations — Tania Cleaves
10 Matchless for the hands and complexion: James McNeill Whistler's Variations in Flesh Colour and Green: The Balcony — Keren Rosa Hammerschlag
11 A picture of health: undressing patients, redressing photographs — Zeynep Devrim Gürsel
12 Tala Madani and the abjection of motherhood — Holiday Powers
Afterword Seeing is (not) believing — Sander L. Gilman
