Issue Details: First known date: 2022... 2022 Breast Augmentation and Artificial Insemination: Monstrous Medicine and the Female Body in Recent Fiction
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'Recent fiction that depicts medical intervention upon the female body as monstrous reveals societal anxiety around aesthetic and reproductive medicine. As biotechnology rapidly advances, the female body continues to be a site on which improvements, efficiencies and controls are imposed. While Kristeva’s abject and Creed’s ‘monstrous-feminine’ explain the capacity of the female body to imbue horror, this literary analysis explores how the experience of the medicalized female body can convey anxiety relating to escalating aesthetic and reproductive demands. Works of fiction by Kawakami, Mazza, Hortle, Booth, Giddings, Gildfind and Taylor are considered in terms of medicine and the female body, with the narratives revealing common themes of monstrosity. Bakhtin’s grotesque and Kristeva’s abject informs the analysis, as does Foucault’s concept of the ‘medical gaze’. Bartky’s ‘fashion-beauty complex’ frames the investigation into depictions of cosmetic surgery, while the impact of capitalism is considered in relation to reproductive technologies and medical experimentation. The power structures that medicine operates within are considered and the article argues that the representation of medicine as monstrous in relation to the female body expresses collective unease about the increasingly unstable boundaries of the human body itself.' (Publication abstract)

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    y separately published work icon The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture vol. 11 no. 1-2 2022 25600139 2022 periodical issue

    'In our twenty-first century context, we tell stories through the foods we eat, the images we share, the people we follow on social media, the shows we watch and the music we listen to. From film to television, from Twitter accounts to the latest fandom trend, popular culture provides us with channels through which our narratives of everyday can transform from immaterial notions to very material and tangible objects of consumption. At the centre of our ways of storytelling lies the formation of our identities. This editorial introduces a Special Issue of the Australasian Journal of Popular Culture that is focused on exploring the many complex intersections between storytelling, identity and popular culture.' (Lorna Piatti-Farnell; Gwyneth Peaty; Ashleigh Prosser : Editorial introduction)

    2022
    pg. 163-177
Last amended 4 Jan 2023 09:13:23
163-177 Breast Augmentation and Artificial Insemination: Monstrous Medicine and the Female Body in Recent Fictionsmall AustLit logo The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture
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