Description: How to Make the Body: Difference, Identity, and Embodiment brings together contemporary and historical readings of the body, exploring the insights and limits of established and emerging theories of difference, identity, and embodiment in a variety of German contexts. The engaging contributions to this volume utilize and challenge cutting-edge approaches to scholarship on the body by putting these approaches in direct conversation with canonical texts and objects, as well as with lesser-known yet provocative emerging forms. To these ends, the chapter authors investigate "the body" through detailed studies across a wide variety of disciplines and modes of expression: from advertising, aesthetics, and pornography, to social media, scientific experimentation, and transnational cultural forms. Thus, this volume showcases the ways in which the body as such cannot be taken for granted and surmises that the body continues to undergo constant--and potentially disruptive--diversification and transformation.
Brief description: Jennifer L. Creech is Associate Professor of German, Affiliate Faculty in Film & Media Studies, and Associate Faculty in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at the University of Rochester, USA. She is the author of Mothers, Comrades and Outcasts in East German Women's Films (2016) and co-editor of Spectacle: German Visual Culture, Volume 2 (2015).
Review Quotes:
"From biblical arousals to RAF corpse art; from Joy's feminist pornography to Dr Bitch Ray's bodily interventions, there is much to admire in this thought-provoking essay collection on the visual culture and politics of the body in real-world German contexts." --Michael Hau, author of Performance Anxiety: Sport and Work in Germany from the Empire to Nazism (2017), and Head of History, Monash University, Australia
"How to Make the Body is a rich, multi-faceted volume that demonstrates the value of focusing on the body, and embodiment, in examining various aspects of visual culture in 20th and 21st-century German contexts [...] and with a strong and welcome emphasis on feminist and queer approaches." --Rick McCormick, Professor of German, Nordic, Slavic, and Dutch, University of Minnesota, USA "Engaging with a diverse array of events, texts, and representations of lived experience, How to Make the Body powerfully mobilizes a range of cutting-edge theoretical approaches to generate new understandings of embodiment vital to German Studies and beyond." --Sara F. Hall, Associate Professor of Germanic Studies, University of Illinois Chicago, USA