The Body as Interface

The body is a battleground. As such it has been at the center of debates in cultural and gender studies for over two decades. The concept of a culturally constructed, gendered, racialized, and class-contoured body which emerged from these debates is meanwhile being challenged, though, by an increasing impact of the life sciences. Evolving from neurobiology, molecular genetics, and biotechnology are projections of a post- or transhuman subject as well as new insights into our corporeality and the ways our bodies interrelate with the world. Situating the body at an intersection of a range of discourses in the human, social, and natural sciences, this collection of essays explores this fundamental shift by way of dialogues between disciplines in the course of which our sense of beauty and human nature, memory and trauma, immunity, power, and pain is being transformed.