Personified Body Parts in Cinema, Literature, and Visual Culture

Personified Body Parts in Cinema, Literature, and Visual Culture investigates the power of personifying body parts in cinema, television, visual culture, literature, erotica, folklore, and mystique.

Culturally, socially, and poetically exposing hidden aspects and subtleties of human existentialism, this book vigorously questions and problematizes numerous artistic, aesthetic, technological, naïve, and macabre manipulations of body parts for various purposes. A diverse team of authors explore how scribing human traits to limbs, eyes, brains, genitalia, hearts, and other inner organs is grotesque and aesthetic, repealing and appealing, intimidating and intimate, rude and enjoyable, material and spiritual, surprising and mundane. Personified organs are interrelated with bodily integrity, visceral aesthetics, distorted nature, social anxiety and acceptability, cultural classifications and hierarchies, and dissident innovativeness andradicalism.

This interdisciplinary volume involves body studies; cinema, television, and media studies; literature studies; cultural, intercultural, and countercultural studies; mythology and folklore studies; gender, sexuality, trans and queer studies; ethnicities and postcolonialism; and art history.

Gilad Padva is a scholar and lecturer in cultural studies, film studies, men's studies and queer theory. He is the author of Straight Skin, Gay Masks, and Pretending to Be Gay on Screen (2020) and Queer Nostalgia in Cinema and Pop Culture (2014). He is the co-editor of Leisure and Cultural Change in Israeli Society (2020), Intimate Relationships in Cinema, Literature and Visual Culture (2017), and Sensational Pleasures in Cinema, Literature and Visual Culture: The Phallic Eye (2014). He is currently an independent scholar and lecturer.

Yair Koren-Maimon is the Chair of the Department of Literature and a senior lecturer at Gordon College of Education in Haifa, Israel. His main research interests are multidisciplinary literature studies, psychology, gender studies and film studies. He is the author of Therapist-Patients Relations in the Literature of Shmuel Yosef Agnon [in Hebrew] (2015) and the co-editor of Representations: Reality, Imitation, and Imagination—Critical Studies [in Hebrew] (2020).