Main description:

The technological capacity to transform biology - repairing, reshaping and replacing body parts, chemicals and functions - is now part of our lives. Humanity is confronted with a variety of affordable and non-invasive 'enhancement technologies': anti-ageing medicine, aesthetic surgery, cognitive and sexual enhancers, lifestyle drugs, prosthetics and hormone supplements. This collection focuses on why people find these practices so seductive and provides ethnographic insights into people's motives and aspirations as they embrace or reject enhancement technologies, which are closely entangled with negotiations over gender, class, age, nationality and ethnicity.

Contents:

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The Uncanny Aesthetics of Repairing, Reshaping, and Replacing Human Bodies

Alvaro Jarrin and.Chiara Pussetti

PART I: REPAIR

Chapter 1. Ideologies of Repair in Erectile Dysfunction Treatment and "Men's Health" Medicine

Emily Wentzell

Chapter 2. Repairing Sexual Ageing: Italian GPs' Discourses in the Viagra Era

Raffaella Ferrero Camoletto

Chapter 3. Repairing the Body and Improving the Nation: Corrective Plastic Surgeries for Protruding Ears in Brazil

Marcelle Schimitt

Chapter 4. The Itinerant Beauty Brigade: Repairing Social Fractures Through the "Apapacho Estetico"

Eva Carpigo

PART II: RESHAPING

Chapter 5. Shaping the European Body: The Cosmetic Construction of Whiteness

Chiara Pussetti

Chapter 6. Reshaping Masculinities and the Beauty Industry in Colombia

Alejandro Arango-Londono

Chapter 7. Reshaping and Hacking Gendered Bodies: Gay Bears and Pro-Independence Catalan Militants

Begonya Enguix Grau

Chapter 8. Remaking (Post)human Bodies in the Anthropocene: Bioart Practices

Christine Beaudoin

PART III: REPLACEMENT

Chapter 9. Can You See the Real Me? Cyborg, Supercrip or Simply a Lover of Sport

P. David Howe and Carla Filomena Silva

Chapter 10. Unfixing Blindness: Retinal Implants and Negotiations of Ability in Postsocialist Russia

Svetlana Borodina

Chapter 11. Learning Through Apps: The Replacement of Offline Cis-female Bodies with Digital Pregnancies and Menstruations

Daniela Tonelli Manica, Marina Fisher Nucci and Gabriela Cabral Paletta

Chapter 12. Remaking Desires and Femininities: Testosterone "Replacement" for Treating Women's Sexuality in Brazil

Fabiola Rohden

Afterword: Beyond the Flesh

Lenore Manderson

Index