How to Make the Body: Difference, Identity, and Embodiment

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.

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).

Thomas O. Haakenson is Associate Professor in Critical Studies and Visual Studies at California College of the Arts, USA. He is co-editor of the book series Visual Cultures and German Contexts published by Bloomsbury. He serves as Vice President of the U.S. Fulbright Association’s Chapter Advisory Board, as well as on the Advisory Board and on the Summer Workshop Program Committee for the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Freie Universität, Germany.