Borderline Bodies in Art and Visual Culture: Unsettling Identity and Place Since 1800 (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781526182722)

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.

Author: Keren Hammerschlag
ISBN-10: 1526182726
ISBN-13: 9781526182722
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Language: English
Published: 06/16/2026
Pages: 344
Format: Hardcover