Transforming Bodies: Makeovers and Monstrosities in American Culture - Hardcover

"In Transforming Bodies, Steinhoff performs a detailed and insightful examination of the ways in which popular cultural articulations of transforming bodies function as sites upon which contemporary political, cultural, technological, and ethical concerns about the self and the social are played out. Her strategic appropriation of the ubiquitous makeover narrative, coupled with her innovative account of 'technologies of monstrosity', makes Steinhoff's engagement with oft-overlooked texts such as Chuck Palahniuk's novels, and Scott Westerfeld's youth science fiction series Uglies, a stand-out in the ever growing field of body modification studies." - Nikki Sullivan, Macquarie University, Australia

"In language that is both accessible and rigorous, Heike Steinhoff illuminates the contours of a makeover culture gone monstrous. Through the figure of the excessive body mapped out across several iterations of US popular culture, Steinhoff lucidly demonstrates how efforts to govern the social body through control of the individual body both reproduce and undermine norms of embodiment, the self, and the aberrant. Transforming Bodies helps us see how transformation writes a new kind of beauty on the body, a beauty simultaneously gorgeous and grotesque." - Brenda R. Weber, Indiana University, USA

At the turn of the twenty-first century, American media abound with images and narratives of bodily transformations. At the crossroads of American, cultural, literary, media, gender, queer, disability and governmentality studies, the book presents a timely intervention into critical debates on body transformations and contemporary makeover culture.