Berghahn Books
Remaking the Human: Cosmetic Technologies of Body Repair, Reshaping, and Replacement
Key Metrics
- Alvaro Jarr�n
- Berghahn Books
- Paperback
- 9781805393375
- -
- -
- Social Science > Anthropology - Cultural & Social
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
The technological capacity to transform biology - repairing, reshaping and replacing body parts, chemicals and functions - is now part of our lives. Humanity is confronted with a variety of affordable and non-invasive 'enhancement technologies': anti-ageing medicine, aesthetic surgery, cognitive and sexual enhancers, lifestyle drugs, prosthetics and hormone supplements. This collection focuses on why people find these practices so seductive and provides ethnographic insights into people's motives and aspirations as they embrace or reject enhancement technologies, which are closely entangled with negotiations over gender, class, age, nationality and ethnicity.
Author Bio
Dr. Alvaro Jarrín’s first research project explored the political economy of beauty in Brazil and its relationship to an unprecedented growth in plastic surgery, particularly in public hospitals. They are the author of The Biopolitics of Beauty: Cosmetic Citizenship and Affective Capital in Brazil (University of California Press), which won the NECLAS Marysa Navarro Book Prize in 2018 and an honorable mention for the AFA Michelle Rosaldo Book Prize in 2019. The book examines how aesthetic hierarchies inform Brazilian body politics and play a central part in the production of racial, gender and class difference in that nation.
Jarrín’s second research project focuses on a new type of activism in Brazil that celebrates transfeminine and transmasculine subjectivities through the production of political art, including theater, spoken word, digital art, fashion, film, music and performance art. Known as artivismo [artivism], this form of activism purposely blurs the boundaries between art and politics in order to produce visceral reactions in the audience, and thus counter the politics of disgust of Brazil’s far right, which portrays LGBT identities as a threat to the nation. The defiant visibility of gender nonconforming activists, which Jarrín calls "visceral politics," demonstrates that affect is useful for both sides of the political aisle as they make claims of who should get access to citizenship.
Prof. Jarrín teaches courses on medical anthropology, gender and sexuality, the cyborg self, inequality in Latin America, global queer activism, and racial justice.
Source: The College of the Holy Cross
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