ABSTRACT
This is a ‘somatic society’ in which the body has become ‘the principal field of political and cultural activity’ (Turner, 1992: 12, 162). While the body is integral to our ‘self-identity’ (Shilling, 2003:1), and constitutes what we are in the world, it is also wrapped in aesthetic, philosophical, semiotic, sociological, biopolitical, medical, legal and economic discourses and practices, and so it is increasingly read as a map of dichotomous performative processes. Because of this fluidity between discourses and materialities, our bodies are unstable, changeable, even malleable. Now, more than ever, we are able to transform our appearance, alter our sex, acquire artificial limbs, mask the signs of our age, delay previously lethal diseases, and even predict and prevent the onset of some diseases altogether. One day, we may be able to move at a distance or regenerate parts of our bodies that have ceased to function. Although the body presumes an identity, we are striving towards the possibility of becoming at once multiple and fragmented. We live in a post-human world. We are seeking to become trans-human, possibly even transgenic.
