Reading for Nov 19

   This week’s reading gave me a different perspective toward material culture. The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future,[i] edited by Smith and Morra, explores human body and disability in perspective of technology of prosthetic. This collection of essays analyzes how people constitute their identity with the relationship with their replaced bodies. In Disability, Masculinity, and the Prosthetics of War, 1945 to 2005, David Serlin describes how concepts of disability and prosthetic influenced masculinity and people’s identity over time. Considering prosthetic as not a part of human body, prosthetic experiences change people’s identity creation.

   In that sense, two wedding dresses also could be considered as a part of prosthetic impulse. Brides do not experience replace of their body, but they shape their body with unnatural form with corset and express femininity for their special day. Compare with American soldiers who consider normal body and performance as masculinity, women consider femininity as unnatural shape. Throughout Serlin’s essay, I was wondering her argument of identity construction with the relationships between disability and masculinity could be interesting contrast to consider with femininity identity. Male are complete figure from the birth, so losing their body parts means losing their masculinity and identity. However, as Simone de Beauvoir pointed out in her book, The Second Sex,[ii] women were not perfect and less complete with natural figure, women had to wear corset and high heal to shape their body to express their femininity.

   The argument of posthuman body in this book interestingly expressed different ideas of prosthetic experiences and human identity. However, if the idea of prosthetic impulse could be consider as an expression of unnatural body, women were practicing reshape their body all the time throughout history.

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[i] Smith Marquard and Morra Joanne, edit, The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future, (MA: The MIT Press, 2006).

[ii] Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, (New York: Vintage Books Edition, 1989).