Abstract
This chapter focuses on active processes of transformation that alter the external appearance of the body. Narratives of over/underconsumption, bodybuilding and cosmetic surgery are modes of impression management that allow the subject to bestow meaning on the body. The visible effects of such transmogrifications are read through the visible hardness or softness of the body and shed light on processes in which the disordered or disciplined body can form a site of deviation or rebellion to cultural norms. But assuming responsibility for one’s own body project can also have debilitating effects on identities already compromised by the toils of trans-national migration, and transformations risk sliding into assimilations. Postmodernist theory permits these becomings to be linked to (textual) practices of sampling and bricolage that point to the possibility for the repeated re-construction of the self through narrative.
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- 1.
Drawing on Richard Sennett and Jean-François Lyotard among others, Bryan S. Turner has written extensively on the flight departure lounge as an ultimate symbolic locus of postmodern society, thus situating U within this particular theoretical framework. See, for example, Turner (1999, pp. 42–43). Adey explores the mediating function of mobile technologies such as those listed by McCarthy in detail (Adey 2017, pp. 208–271), and also includes the important point that the ‘virtual mediation of mobilities is actually dependent upon massively fixed […] networks.’ See also Graham and Marvin (2001).
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‘We need to remember the ‘ press ’ in an impression. It allows us to associate the experience of having an emotion with the very affect of one surface upon another, an affect that leaves its mark or trace’ (Ahmed 2012, p. 6). See also Adey on the link between motion and emotion. Adey (2017, pp. 192–199).
- 4.
‘A portmanteau of “sports”, “porn” and “metrosexual”, spornosexuals are men who go to the gym in order to share eroticized images of their toned bodies on social media’ (Hakim 2016).
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Lazzari’s comment sums up this use of food as cultural marker and interface in Wadia’s texts and more generally in the field of so-called ‘migration’ literature. ‘Pietanze, ricette e ingredienti possono indicare, di volta in volta, il legame affettivo con la propria terra d’origine o la volontà di integrarsi alla nuova cultura, adottando i suoi piatti e le sue usanze’ [Dishes, recipes and ingredients can be used to demonstrate either affective bonds with the country of origin, or the desire to integrate into the new culture, through adopting its cuisine and habits.] (Lazzari 2014, p. 6).
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The title of Chandra’s novel is difficult to translate—literally, it refers to a pint of lager and nuts. But the emphasis in the Italian words on chromatic terms of lightness (‘chiara’) and mid-brown (‘noccioline’), as well as the perspective of mid-way or medium (‘media’) means that it assumes a metaphorical value that must surely be linked to the protagonist’s dual heritage as a second generation Italian Indian subject.
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Their relationship would thus follow the model of an ‘enmeshed’ type: ‘in enmeshed families, the individual gets lost in the system. The boundaries that define individual autonomy are so weak that functioning becomes handicapped, poor differentiation’ (Minuchin et al. 1978, p. 30).
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And as such recalls the analysis of Kuruvilla’s short story ‘Aborto’ in the previous chapter. See p. 111.
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Kristeva (1982, pp. 2–3). Deborah Lupton also offers some valuable analysis of the link between food disgust and the maternal object, arguing that it is the liminal, ambiguous quality of food as something which passes the boundaries of the body and exposes its vulnerability that causes it to provoke such responses of abjection. In her analysis, ‘food is both self and non-self simultaneously’ (Lupton 1996, p. 113).
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This is something suggested also by Ogden, who similarly makes the connection between oral impregnation, fullness and pregnancy. See Ogden (2003, p. 238).
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In a similar fashion, Martin discusses Sonia Johnson’s feminist reading of how an outsider status can bestow a similar sense of flexibility in terms of the: ‘unforeseen ways in which a person unconstrained by being within a system can move and act and therefore how this flexibility could enable someone to influence the system from outside’ (Martin 1994, p. 157).
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Manning also provides a compelling argument for bodily rhythm as becoming, proposing that the dynamism of corporeal movement can allow the subject to interact with the world in a series of moments that nonetheless resist staticity and definition. See Manning (2009, p. 6).
- 14.
Ogden (2003, p. 74). Orbach numbers a variety of ways in which compulsive eating in relation to the mother can express anxieties about that very relationship: ‘My fat says to my mother: “I’m substantial. I can protect myself. I can go out into the world.” “My fat says to my mother: Look at me. I’m a mess; I don’t know how to take care of myself. You can still be my mother.” My fat says to my mother: “I’m going out in the world. I can’t take you with me but I can take a part of you that’s connected to me. My body is from yours. My fat is connected to you. This way I can still have you with me.” My fat says to my mother: “I’m leaving you but I still need you. My fat lets you know I’m not really able to take care of myself” (Orbach 1978, p. 33).
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See also Leder (1999, p. 205). ‘As I eat, the thickness of the flesh which separates self from world melts away. No longer perceived across a distance, the world dissolves into my own blood, sustaining me from within via its nutritive powers. It is through visceral, not just perceptual, exchange that the total interpenetration of body and world is realised.’
- 16.
Mar also puts on weight for the same reasons in Oltre Babilonia , though the conflict here is played out here along family lines, between mother and daughter: ‘era ingrassata per farle vedere che anche lei, sua figlia, la figlia nera, occupava uno spazio’ [She put on weight in order to show her that she, her daughter, her black daughter, also occupied a space.] (Scego 2008, p. 74).
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Poole (2011, p. 11). This builds on Sara Ahmed’s discussion of the affective properties of hard and soft body representations in The Cultural Politics of Emotions , see p. 161 above.
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In a similar fashion, the photographer Salvatore Di Gregorio undertook a photographic portrait series (‘Project Mirabella: Tales of Beauty’), in which he invited residents of the female-only refugee camp in the Sicilian town of Mirabella Imbaccari to create hair styles that they felt represented their status as refugees. See (Keefe 2016).
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‘Certain social groups may be seen as having rigid or unresponsive selves and bodies, making them relatively unfit for the kind of society we seem now to desire’ (Martin 1994, p. xvii).
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Bond, E. (2018). Revolting Folds: Disordered and Disciplined Bodies. In: Writing Migration through the Body. Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97695-2_5
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