Download or read book Body in Medical Culture The written by Elizabeth Klaver and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2009-04-16 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2010 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title How do concepts and constructions of the body shape people's experiences of agency and objectification within medical culture? As an object of scrutiny, the medicalized body occupies center stage in the work of doctors, nurses, medical examiners, and other medical professionals who mediate broader cultural understandings of pathology, illness, and the various physical transformations associated with life and death. The Body in Medical Culture explores how the body functions within medical culture and examines the metaphors and models of the body used to understand medical phenomena, including disease, diagnostic practices, wellness, anatomy, surgery, and medical research. Scholars from a wide range of disciplines engage representations of bodies, including polio and masculinity, sex reassignment surgery, drug marketing, endography, "designer vaginas," and hospital humor in order to challenge the normalcy of the passively objectified medicalized body.

Download or read book The Transparent Body written by Jose Van Dijck and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2011-05-01 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the potent properties of X rays evoked in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain to the miniaturized surgical team of the classic science fiction film Fantastic Voyage, the possibility of peering into the inner reaches of the body has engaged the twentieth-century popular and scientific imagination. Drawing on examples that are international in scope, The Transparent Body examines the dissemination of medical images to a popular audience, advancing the argument that medical imaging technologies are the material embodiment of collective desires and fantasies--the most pervasive of which is the ideal of transparency itself. The Transparent Body traces the cultural context and wider social impact of such medical imaging practices as X ray and endoscopy, ultrasound imaging of fetuses, the filming and broadcasting of surgical operations, the creation of plastinated corpses for display as art objects, and the use of digitized cadavers in anatomical study. In the early twenty-first century, the interior of the body has become a pervasive cultural presence - as accessible to the public eye as to the physician's gaze. Jose van Dijck explores the multifaceted interactions between medical images and cultural ideologies that have brought about this situation. The Transparent Body unfolds the complexities involved in medical images and their making, illuminating their uses and meanings both within and outside of medicine. Van Dijck demonstrates the ways in which the ability to render the inner regions of the human body visible - and the proliferation of images of the body's interior in popular media - affect our view of corporeality and our understanding of health and disease. Written in an engaging style that brings thought-provoking cultural intersections vividly to life, The Transparent Body will be of special interest to those in media studies, cultural studies, science and technology studies, medical humanities, and the history of medicine.

Download or read book Wild Science written by Janine Marchessault and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wild Science investigates the world-wide boom in 'health culture'. While self-help health books and medical dramas are popular around the globe, we are bombarded with daily media images of DNA research, and news reports about cloning, the fight against AIDS, cancer and depression. With popular culture now the principal means through which the non-scientific population encounters science why do certain images of science get promoted above others? Contributors examine the public meanings of science, revealing the frictions and contradictions within popular representations of what medicine can and should do. Focusing on the visual culture of medicine, they show how representations of science have a direct impact on popular perceptions of the limits of science, and ultimately on health education, funding and research, and examine the belief that media literacy in popular representations of medicine makes an ethical public discourse on the aims of science possible. With sections addressing the new visual technologies which make the human body into a virtual territory, the diagnostic and medical practices centered around women's bodies, and popular debates around genetics and identity, Wild Science argues that science is a practice bound in values and institutions, and argues for a responsible engagement with the public cultures of science and health.

Download or read book Body Modification written by Mike Featherstone and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2000-06-06 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating collection explores the growing range of body modification practices such as piercing, tattooing, branding, cutting and inserting implants, which have sprung up recently in the West. It asks whether this implies that we are returning to traditional tribal practices of inscribing identities onto bodies on the part of 'modern primitives', or is body modification better understood as purely cosmetic and decorative with body markings merely temporary signs of transferable loyalties? Contributors address the question of the permanence of body transformation through fitness regimes and body building; look at the French performance artist Orlan and the Australian performance artist Stelarc who explored Western standard o

Download or read book Digital Performance written by Steve Dixon and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2015-01-30 with total page 828 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The historical roots, key practitioners, and artistic, theoretical, and technological trends in the incorporation of new media into the performing arts. The past decade has seen an extraordinarily intense period of experimentation with computer technology within the performing arts. Digital media has been increasingly incorporated into live theater and dance, and new forms of interactive performance have emerged in participatory installations, on CD-ROM, and on the Web. In Digital Performance, Steve Dixon traces the evolution of these practices, presents detailed accounts of key practitioners and performances, and analyzes the theoretical, artistic, and technological contexts of this form of new media art. Dixon finds precursors to today's digital performances in past forms of theatrical technology that range from the deus ex machina of classical Greek drama to Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk (concept of the total artwork), and draws parallels between contemporary work and the theories and practices of Constructivism, Dada, Surrealism, Expressionism, Futurism, and multimedia pioneers of the twentieth century. For a theoretical perspective on digital performance, Dixon draws on the work of Philip Auslander, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, and others. To document and analyze contemporary digital performance practice, Dixon considers changes in the representation of the body, space, and time. He considers virtual bodies, avatars, and digital doubles, as well as performances by artists including Stelarc, Robert Lepage, Merce Cunningham, Laurie Anderson, Blast Theory, and Eduardo Kac. He investigates new media's novel approaches to creating theatrical spectacle, including virtual reality and robot performance work, telematic performances in which remote locations are linked in real time, Webcams, and online drama communities, and considers the "extratemporal" illusion created by some technological theater works. Finally, he defines categories of interactivity, from navigational to participatory and collaborative. Dixon challenges dominant theoretical approaches to digital performance—including what he calls postmodernism's denial of the new—and offers a series of boldly original arguments in their place.

Download or read book Posthuman and Nonhuman Entanglements in Contemporary Art and the Body written by Justyna Stępień and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-05-15 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disclosing the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman bodies, understood here as more/than/human entanglements, this book makes a crucial intervention into the field of contemporary artistic studies, exploring how art can conceptualize material boundaries of entangled beings/doings. Drawing on critical posthumanist and new materialist thought, in this book, nonhumans become subjects of ethics, aesthetics, and politics that produce equally relevant meanings. Designed to include multiple artistic perspectives and forms of expression, which range from sculptures to bio-art and performative practices, the book argues that we are entangled with other organisms around us not only by our socio-cultural connections but predominately by the transformations that we all undergo with the world’s materiality. Thus, the artistic works discussed do not merely reflect the world but transform it, offering solutions for practising alternative ethical values and acting better with and for the world. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, cultural studies, media studies, body studies, performance studies, animal studies, and environmental studies.

Download or read book The Enlightenment Cyborg written by Allison Muri and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For many cultural theorists, the concept of the cyborg - an organism controlled by mechanic processes - is firmly rooted in the post-modern, post-industrial, post-Enlightenment, post-nature, post-gender, or post-human culture of the late twentieth century. Allison Muri argues, however, that there is a long and rich tradition of art and philosophy that explores the equivalence of human and machine, and that the cybernetic organism as both a literary figure and an anatomical model has, in fact, existed since the Enlightenment. In The Enlightenment Cyborg, Muri presents cultural evidence - in literary, philosophical, scientific, and medical texts - for the existence of mechanically steered, or 'cyber' humans in the works seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers. Muri illustrates how Enlightenment exploration of the notion of the 'man-machine' was inextricably tied to ideas of reproduction, government, individual autonomy, and the soul, demonstrating an early connection between scientific theory and social and political thought. She argues that late twentieth-century social and political movements, such as socialism, feminism, and even conservatism, are thus not unique in their use of the cyborg as a politicized trope. The Enlightenment Cyborg establishes a dialogue between eighteenth-century studies and cyborg art and theory, and makes a significant and original contribution to both of these fields of inquiry.

Download or read book Biotechnology and Culture written by Paul E. Brodwin and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2001-01-22 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays on technology’s effect on our relationship with our bodies: “A timely and perceptive look . . . at some of the most anxiety producing issues of the day.” —Paul Rabinow, University of California, Berkeley As birth, illness, and death increasingly come under technological control, struggles arise over who should control the body and define its limits and capacities. Biotechnologies turn the traditional “facts of life” into matters of expert judgment and partisan debate. They blur the boundary separating people from machines, male from female, and nature from culture. In these diverse ways, they destroy the “gold standard” of the body, formerly taken for granted. Biotechnologies become a convenient, tangible focus for political contests over the nuclear family, legal and professional authority, and relations between the sexes. Medical interventions also transform intimate personal experience: giving birth, building new families, and surviving serious illness now immerse us in a web of machines, expert authority, and electronic images. We use and imagine the body in radically different ways, and from these emerge new collective discourses of morality and personal identity. This book brings together historians, anthropologists, cultural critics, and feminists to examine the broad cultural effects of technologies such as surrogacy, tissue-culture research, and medical imaging. The moral anxieties raised by biotechnologies and their circulation across class and national boundaries provide other interdisciplinary themes for discourse in these essays. The authors favor complex social dramas of the refusal, celebration, or ambivalent acceptance of new medical procedures. Eschewing polemics or pure theory, contributors show how biotechnology collides with everyday life and reshapes the political and personal meanings of the body. Contributors include Paul Brodwin, Lisa Cartwright, Thomas Csordas, Gillian Goslinga-Roy, Deborah Grayson, Donald Joralemon, Hannah Landecker, Thomas Laqueur, Robert Nelson, Susan Squier, Janelle Taylor, and Alice Wexler. “This impressive collection offers a number of rich examples of why the development of anthropological studies of science, technology, and their disruptive social effects is a leading edge of critical enquiry.” —Arthur Kleinman, Harvard University

Download or read book Experiencing the Next World Now written by Michael Grosso and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2004-01-06 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues the existence of an afterlife.

Download or read book Brands and Their Companies written by and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 2192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Future of Cultural Studies written by Jan Baetens and published by Leuven University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Secularization and Cultural Criticism written by Vincent P. Pecora and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2006-10 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Secularization and Cultural Criticism' examines the responses of a wide range of thinkers to illustrate exactly why the problem of secularisation in the study of society and culture should matter once again.

Download or read book Cambrian Quarterly Magazine and Celtic Repertory written by and published by . This book was released on 1832 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Anatomy Live written by Maaike Bleeker and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gross anatomy, the study of anatomical structures that can be seen by unassisted vision, has long been a subject of fascination for artists. For most modern viewers, however, the anatomy lesson—the technically precise province of clinical surgeons and medical faculties—hardly seems the proper breeding ground for the hybrid workings of art and theory. We forget that, in its early stages, anatomy pursued the highly theatrical spirit of Renaissance science, as painters such as Rembrandt and Da Vinci and medical instructors like Fabricius of Aquapendente shared audiences devoted to the workings of the human body. Anatomy Live: Performance and the Operating Theatre, a remarkable consideration of new developments on the stage, as well as in contemporary writings of theorists such as Donna Haraway and Brian Massumi, turns our modern notions of the dissecting table on its head—using anatomical theatre as a means of obtaining a fresh perspective on representations of the body, conceptions of subjectivity, and own knowledge about science and the stage. Critically dissecting well-known exhibitions like Body Worlds and The Visible Human Project and featuring contributions from a number of diverse scholars on such subjects as the construction of spectatorship and the implications of anatomical history, Anatomy Live is not to be missed by anyone with an interest in this engaging intersection of science and artistic practice.

Download or read book Lord of the Dark Lake written by Ron Faust and published by Turner Publishing Company. This book was released on 2014-02-28 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jay Chandler, an American archaeologist excavating an ancient Greek temple, is surprised to find himself invited to a weeklong party on an exotic island paradise owned by eccentric tycoon Alexander Krisos. The annual event—swarmed with European nobility, Texas oilmen, ballerinas and bullfighters, millionaire politicos in exile, Japanese potentates, artists, and gorgeous models—is the sort of orgiastic party many would kill to attend. But no one really expects murder to become part of the festivities . . . until it does. From the party’s start under the bright Aegean sky to the finale in the island’s underworld of dark caves, the guests are pulled to their destinies by a force as powerful as any invoked by the Greek gods—and Chandler must confront a Minotaur as deadly as the mythic one.

Download or read book This Tree Grows Out of Hell written by Ptolemy Tompkins and published by Sterling Publishing Company, Inc.. This book was released on 2008 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the Mayan, Aztec, and other related cultures from the perspective of each region's shifting understanding of the human soul. The author shows that despite their amazing achievements, these civilisations eventually crumbled because they lost touch with their sense of community, their true natures and their environments.

Download or read book Whitaker s Books in Print written by and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 2954 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: