Fabricating the Body
Session Organizer: Elizabeth Klaver
Southern Illinois University Carbondale
Department of English 4503, Carbondale, IL 62901
etklaver@siu.edu

Dorothy Hamill and Middle-aged Romeos: Performing and Maintaining the Able Body

Dorothy Hamill glides across the ice, her middle-aged body showing no signs of the arthritis that threatens to disable her should she fail to take the expensive anti-inflammatory drug that she hawks on TV. A middle-aged man walks into a room with a mysterious new glow the source of which his co-workers cannot pin down but which a helpful voice-over attributes to Viagra. Prescription drug commercials targeted at a middle-aged and older audience play upon ableist and ageist fears that we will lose our sexual potency, our grace, and our very ability to function normally in a society where normal functioning is keyed to young able-bodiedness. Thus, the ordinary slowing of sexual response as one ages becomes medicalized as a condition to be treated. The decline in athleticism that even athletes experience as they age is to be staved off as long as possible through the use of the correct pill(s), lest they have to admit the advance of age or disability. This paper will argue that current advertising, on the one hand, reinforces the stigmas associated with age and disability as they are written on the body and, on the other, reinscribes the perfect young, able body as everyone's unattainable ideal.

Linda Seidel
Truman State University
lseidel@pop.truman.edu

Surgically Modified Performance: The Altered Body in Reality TV

This paper explores recent literature and theory that addresses surgical bodily modification in light of the current popularity of shows such as “Extreme Makeover.” Through a focus on Katherine Dunn’s novel, Geek Love, a text which examines the effect of extreme bodily modification and the normalizing cultural dictates that prompt such modification, I will contend current ‘reality TV’ that focuses on such modification often champions the idea of appearance over and above identity. Implicitly conforming to an extreme Cartesian split, such shows contend that the mind can control/reshape the body. I will then read such a disavowal of embodiment as a defining in relation to contemporary America’s obsession with controlling and/or transcending the body. Such a schema contends that the body does not ‘matter’ in contemporary culture (to use Judith Butler’s theoretical premise). Rather, the body is a site to be ‘performed’ as the mind (whether it be the individual mind or the ideological cultural mind) sees fit. Arguing that much recent literature and theory resists this overarching impetus to control the body and perform it in very particular ways, I will suggest the pressing need to draw on such work in order to reassess, or reveal even, the dangers inherent in shows such as “Extreme Makeover.”

Natalie Wilson
nkwc@earthlink.net

The (Dead) Body as Text: "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" and the Performance of Close Readings

Every week large numbers of households tune into CBS's procedural drama "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" and watch a team of forensic scientists, a coroner, and a homicide detective perform specialized "close forensic readings" not only of crime scenes, but more importantly of victims' bodies. The body is usually the main source of evidence, and even the absence of

evidence has significance. As the body is deconstructed, the body's history is constructed. The body is both observed in situ and taken into another context (the morgue) and "unpacked" (autopsied) for further symbols to be interpreted. In this way, the body can correspond to the reading of texts - texts may be treated as bodies to be autopsied. But, in addition to these readings where the body is an entirely passive participant, reenactments are performed, both with the aid of special effects and the investigators' imagination, and through physical reenactment, turning the body itself into a script and a site of action. In this context, forensic reading of the body, while strictly portrayed as scientific, also becomes metaphorical, performative and both text- and context-driven.

Merie E. Kirby
University of St. Thomas
mekirby@stthomas.edu