ABSTRACT
The story Arthur Kroker relates about the body in post-modernity, or hyper-modernity in his terms, is that it has been ‘unplugged from the planet’; accordingly, the signal form of the postmodern body is the disappearing body – a notion that the natural body has no ontological status separate from the proliferation of rhetorics that now invest the body with simulated meaning. High fashion – as one technology of urban corporeal identity – is preoccupied with multiculturalism. Bodies that labor include a full range of working bodies as well as maternal bodies. Repression is a pain management technique. The technological repression of the material body functions to curtail pain by blocking channels of sensory awareness. Of all the forms of technological embodiment, the disappearing body is the one that promises most insistently the final erasure of gender and race as culturally organized systems of differentiation. Postmodern embodiment is not a singularly discursive condition.
