Edition 4
Making Perfect Bodies
- Published 1st June, 2004
- ISBN: 9780733314339
- Extent: 268 pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm)
From genetics to extreme body makeovers, the convergence of science and popular culture in pursuit of perfection goes to the heart of who we are and what we might be.
The compelling writing in Making Perfect Bodies explores the limits of this preoccupation and its far-reaching implications.
Writers include: Robyn Williams, Paul Chadwick, Bernie Matthews, Donald Horne, Charles Watson, Natalie Corban, Elspeth Probyn, Meera Atkinson, Matthew Ricketson, Melissa Lucashenko, Sherwin B Nuland, John Menadue, Creed O’Hanlon, Michael Wilding and many more.
In this Edition
Writing, standing on your head
THE WRITER NEEDS a body to perform writing. The body is a text written by thought, experience, genetics, culture, performance, fashion, personality. The body is the self, the self is an illusion, and personality is one of its illusions. The writer creates a body...
Finding order in art and life
PHYSICISTS, WE ARE often told, dream of formulating a single equation to explain the world. Yet the fundamental law of life has been articulated for more than 150 years and was appreciated intuitively long before then ‑ the second law of thermodynamics which, though...
Our bodies
THINK OF ABORIGINAL bodies. Think of Cathy Freeman, standing and waiting on the track in Sydney, lean, still, and nothing in her face except what's needed to be The Best. Think Kyle Vander-Kuyp. Nova Perris. Evonne Goolagong-Cawley. Patrick Johnson. Think speed, and grace, and...
Imperfect bodies of the poor
POOR PEOPLE'S BODIES have always told stories about poverty's origins and remedies. In their own accounts, poor people say their bodies often fail them. But in the stories that are told about them, their bodies more often signal defects of character and effort and...
Chewing the fat
I HAVE BEEN fascinated by fat ever since I was a pre-teen anorexic. My fascination may have preceded the onset of anorexia, although I don't remember being particularly worried about getting fat. My father, apparently, was a rare male anorexic when he was young...
Making perfect babies
THE BYSTANDER APPEARED shocked. Open-mouthed, she was standing there shaking her head. "Not one", she said, "not one but two. Don't you know that kind of thing is preventable now?" The objects of her disgust were the two children of Sarah D., a woman I...
Sculpting your own brain
THE GREAT SPANISH neuroanatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal believed that with personal commitment and willpower we can do almost anything with our brains. "Consider the possibility that any man could, if he so wished, be the sculptor of his own brain, and that even...
Promise of miracles in the age of uncertainty
Planets full of bronzed healthy clean-limbed individuals merrily prancing through their lives meant that the only doctors still in business were the psychiatrists, simply because no one had discovered a cure for the universe as a whole – or rather the one that did exist had been...
Beauty and the bêtê noire
I COME FROM a long line of beautiful women. This short, simple statement raises immediate questions: why am I so sure? How is this beauty defined? I am sure because I have observed others' responses to my mother, my grandmothers, and my aunts and...
Journey to the spare world
I HAVE TO get to Lollipops by 3.30pm and it's not going well. Lollipops is a children's party venue which my support group has hired for the afternoon. We've got it to ourselves from after school until 6pm. There are going to be jumping...
Mind, body and age
ON THE DAY of my birth, Boxing Day, 1921, something seemed wrong in the small rented brick house in the lower-middle-class Sydney suburb of Kogarah. In the real-life nativity scene in the main bedroom, the doctor, the midwife, my grandmother and my mother were...
Scapho is Greek for boat
WE HAVE PUSHED our way through the strong heat of Adelaide's hottest summer since nineteen-o-something to get here, but there is nowhere to rest. We get to the door and are faced with a blur of faces: children and their parents. We see them...
Neglecting the body
"TAKE UP GOLF," they said. Both of them within the space of a week. The acupuncturist and the alternative healer. It was not the advice I had expected. Not from them. They were both rather spiritual people. I would not have been surprised at...
DNA and the justice game
I HAD JUST received double digits for the Brisbane National Australia Bank robbery when they transferred me into B Block at the Sir David Longland Correctional Centre (SDLCC) – a jail with the fearsome reputation as the killing fields of the Sunshine State. This...
Born to win, with a little help
IN THE TODDLER pool, babies are gurgling and blinking determinedly in the arms of young male swimming instructors. In the heated indoor pool, older women taking a water aerobics class splash and stretch to the strains of It's Raining Men. Outside, in the 50-metre...
End sex
ALICE TURNS HER key stealthily, like they're breaking into someone else's life. She pulls Drew after her, kicking the door shut behind them. Relieved to see her flat still looks the same. Home sweet home: all exposed pipes and rising damp, metal entrails and...
Like a Christmas cake
SHE WAKES IN darkness, shivering, a sudden chill on her back like the breath of a ghost. She lies still, eyes closed in a pretence of sleep, as he slides from beneath the kake-buton to rise and pad across the tatami flooring to the...
Gift to Sebastiano
THE TAILOR WAS always awed by the sight of a stranger returning from the lawless world of sleep so, having only just set eyes on him for the first time, he had many questions for the prone figure of Orsino Duran. What if I...
Featured Contributors
Melissa Lucashenko
Melissa Lucashenko is an award-winning Goorie author of Bundjalung and European heritage. Her first novel, Steam Pigs, was published...
Donald Horne (dec.)
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Elspeth Probyn
Elspeth Probyn FAHA, FASSA is Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. Her books include Sexing...
Inez Baranay
Inez Baranay was born in Italy to Hungarian parents who immigrated to Australia, where she grew up.She is the...
