Rebuilding the Body

Rebuilding the Body: The Pursuit of Perfection, 1861-2021 (HI3T8/HI9I7)

What's the Point of 'Perfect'?

Alice Roberts, the paleopathologist and TV presenter, stands smiling next to a live-sized image of her as perfected by science. The perfect Alice has larger eyes, large and pointed ears, and a prominent abdominal pouch from which an infant's head (also with pointed ears) protrudes.

Module Convenor: Roberta Bivins

Office: FAB3.54 email: r.bivins@warwick.ac.uk

Office hours: TBA for 2026/7

BOOK A MEETING HERE (remember to be logged in with your 桃色视频 id, and to click TODAY on the calendar to make sure you are looking at the correct week!) or contact me by email for an alternative slot.

Seminar Times and Rooms:

TBA for 2026/7

We live in demanding times. Humans today are bombarded with images of 鈥榩erfect鈥� bodies, and surrounded by products claiming to perfect our minds and lives. Self-help is big business, and individual success is persistently tied to levels of physical and mental wellness that hover just out of reach. Self-improvement is nothing new -- but our contemporary focus on perfectible bodies has intensified with the rise of secularism, consumerism, and 'self-optimisation'. This module will draw on cultural history, disability studies, and the histories of science, technology and medicine to ask: 鈥榃hat is a perfect body, and who is served by the pursuit of perfection?鈥� Comparisons across global cultures of 'perfection' will test Eurocentric understandings of what constitutes the physical and mental' ideal'.

We will look for the roots of today's culture of self-care and self-improvement; test claims about the benefits and attainability of perfect health and well-being; and historicise contemporary expectations of self-perfectibility. Looking initially at post-conflict rehabilitation, surgeries of assimilation, and the marketplace of human perfectibility, this module will challenge assumptions about ability and disability and set the stage for case studies of 'perfection' consumerism in the second half of the twentieth century.

Photographs of Surgical Cases and Specimens Taken at the Army Medical Museum (Washington : Government Printing Office, 1865-1868) (Harvard, Countway Library)

Across the module, we will use specific examples of interventions targeting the body and the mind for 'improvement'. From artificial limbs to 'saviour siblings', and from pumping weights to prozac, we will ask whether new tools and techniques of self-help drive or respond to changing ideas about perfect bodies, minds or lives. While the module's principle examples will be drawn from the US and UK, students will also encounter very different ideals and practices of 'perfection' drawn from other cultures.