University of British Columbia Peter Wall Institute of Advanced Studies PHYSICAL CULTURE, POWER, AND THE BODY

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TECHNOLOGISED BODIES: TRANSFORMATIONS IN UNDERSTANDINGS OF THE BODY AS NATURAL

Kate O’Riordan

Abstract: Technologized Bodies: Transformations in Understandings of the Body as Natural The human body, and the female body in particular, has traditionally been the marker of the natural. It has been conceptualized and represented as natural flesh to be formed, socialized, and conditioned by culture.However it has never been tame; the excess of the body is that which disrupts social structure and resists containment. Understandings of the body have been continually mapped, imagined, contested and transformed through imaging techniques in medicine, art and visual culture. In the 20th and 21st centuries the scopic regimes of digital imaging technologies have contributed to an ongoing techologization of the body. Through these regimes the body has been rendered simultaneously penetrable, opaque, malleable, wired and networked. Drawing on visual digital culture I outline the ways in which technologies are intertwined with physical bodies producing understandings of these bodies as structured through technologized networks. Examples of mediated and virtual bodies are used to illustrate arguments that the body is not only restructured but both imprisoned and empowered by these transformations and technologizations.