Borderline Bodies in Art and Visual Culture: Unsettling Identity Place Since 1800

This collection of essays traverses media, styles, geographies and disciplines to offer innovative interpretations of visual representations of human bodies that might be considered ‘borderline’. ‘This book signals a transgressive new corporeal turn - a postcolonial materialism - in the borderspaces of health humanities.’ —Warwick Anderson, author of Intolerant Bodies and Spectacles of Waste‘This groundbreaking volume of interdisciplinary visual studies provides wide-ranging analyses of the complex cultures of Borderline bodies across our globalised world.’ —Anthea Callen, University of Nottingham 'Borderline bodies develops innovative conceptual tools for studying representations relating to multiply-marginalised bodies.' —Roger Nelson, Nanyang Technological University 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. Its focus is images and objects of human bodies, made since 1800, that might be considered ‘borderline’: the threshold that marks out and sits between national, ethnic, physical, psychological, geographic or temporal categories. These categories also include those constructed by scholars because they sit at the intersection of disciplines or sit outside accepted notions of what constitutes ‘art.’ By mapping the ways human bodies traverse borders and straddle categories, this volume’s essays approach anew the relationship of bodies to traditional modes of representation, especially in art and medicine, and encourage us to think differently about how we understand the relationship between human corporeality, identity and place. 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. Borderline Bodies offers original interpretations of visual representations of the human body as both bounded and porous, fortified and vulnerable, mobile and constrained—subject to borders yet capable of crossing and challenging them. It also examines images and objects that are themselves “borderline,” positioned at disciplinary intersections or outside conventional definitions of serious art. By mapping how bodies traverse borders and unsettle categories, the volume reconsiders the relationship between corporeality and traditional modes of representation in art and medicine. Transdisciplinary and transnational analyses of objects from diverse geographies illuminate themes such as identity, racialisation, typologies of the body, encounters between bodies, mobility, and bodily transformation. The result is a fresh approach that disrupts assumptions about the normative human form embedded in Western image-making traditions.