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Module Catalogue

HI3T8-30 Rebuilding the Body: The Pursuit of Perfection, 1861-2021

Department
History
Level
Undergraduate Level 3
Module leader
Roberta Bivins
Credit value
30
Module duration
10 weeks
Assessment
100% coursework
Study location
University of Warwick main campus, Coventry

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Introductory description

We live in demanding times. Humans today are bombarded with images of ‘perfect’ 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: ‘What is a perfect body, and who is served by the pursuit of perfection?’ Comparisons across global cultures of 'perfection' will test Eurocentric understandings of what constitutes the physical and mental' ideal'.

Module aims

This module will explore the emergence of contemporary cultures of 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 emergence of a marketplace of perfectibility, it 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. These cases studies will incorporate attention to biomedical and technological developments while challenging claims that novel tools and techniques drive changing ideas about perfect bodies, minds or lives. By sifting specific case studies, students will develop the tools required to trace the impacts on ideals of human perfection of social, political and economic change; gender, class and ethnic positionality; and the dissemination of cultural assumptions through mass media. 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.

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Week 1 Introduction and Key Approaches
Week 2: Restoring Masculinity: War-torn Bodies and Minds
Week 3 Repairing Difference: Plastic Surgeries of War and Peace
Week 4 Selling Better Bodies: Commercialising Perfection
Week 5 Selling Better Brains: Medicating Minds
Week 6 Reading Week
Week 7 Pursuing Pleasure: From Vibrators to Viagra
Week 8 Making Babies: New Reproductive Technologies
Week 9 Seeing and Selecting: Dystopian Perfection
Week 10 Body hackers: Self-Enablement and Rejecting “Perfect”
Week 11 Conclusion and Critical Essay Workshop

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

  • Demonstrate a systematic knowledge and understanding of the pursuit of ideal embodiment in the US and UK from 1861-2021.
  • Critically analyse and evaluate the social, economic and political impacts of cultures of self-improvement through medical, technological and commercial interventions on embodiment.
  • Effectively communicate ideas, and make informed, coherent and persuasive arguments relating to the role of the media and the marketplace in selling 'perfect' selfhood.
  • Critically review and consolidate theoretical, methodological, and historiographical ideas relating to ability, disability, and identity in the modern period.
  • Produce critically engaged undergraduate scholarship on the history and contemporary impacts of the pursuit of perfect bodies and lives.
  • Contextualise and critically evaluate contemporary cultures of perfectionism and hyper-attainment.

Indicative reading list

  • Suzannah Biernoff, ‘Medical Archives and Digital Culture: From WWI to BioShock’. Medical History 55, no. 3 (2011): 325–30.
  • Yaba Amgborale Blay, Skin Bleaching and Global White Supremacy: By Way of Introduction The Journal of Pan African Studies, 2011 (e-journal)
  • Linda M. Blum, and Nena F. Stracuzzi. "Gender in the Prozac nation: Popular discourse and productive femininity." Gender & Society 18, no. 3 (2004): 269-286.
  • Linda M. Blum, "Mother-blame in the Prozac nation: Raising kids with invisible disabilities." Gender & society 21, no. 2 (2007): 202-226.
  • Stuart Blume, The artificial ear: Cochlear implants and the culture of deafness. Rutgers University Press, 2019.
  • Zachary Paul Birnbaum, "Regulating the Cyberpunk Reality: Private Body Modification and the Dangers of 'Body Hacking'." J. Bus. & Tech. L. 16 (2021): 119.
  • Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men's Bodies, Britain, and the Great War (London: Reaktion Books, 1996).
  • Genaro Castro-Vázquez, The Politics of Viagra: Gender, Dysfunction and Reproduction in Japan. Body & Society, 12(2) 2006, 109-129. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X06064328
  • Claire Susan Chatterton, Working in a ‘World of Hurt’. Nursing and Medical Care Following Facial Injury During World War One, European Journal for Nursing History and Ethics, 2022, https://doi.org/10.25974/enhe2021-5en
  • Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Heredity and Hope: The Case for Genetic Screening (Harvard University Press, 2008)
  • Eric Daffron, RE-MANTLING THE FACE: THE FACIAL POLITICS OF WWI-ERA PORTRAIT MASKS, Body Studies, 3 (1) 2021, 30-41.
  • Creed, Fabiola. "Talk shows and ‘tanorexia’: motherhood and ‘sunbed addiction’ on British television in the 1990s." In ‘Everyday health’, embodiment, and selfhood since 1950, pp. 272-293. Manchester University Press, 2024.
  • Jose van Dijck, Imagenation: Popular Images of Genetics, (Macmillan Press, 1998)
  • Duarte, Bárbara Nascimento. "Entangled agencies: New individual practices of human-technology hybridism through body hacking." NanoEthics 8, no. 3 (2014): 275-285.
  • Alexander Edmonds, S0 Yeon Leem, (2020). Making faces racial: how plastic surgery enacts race in the US, Korea and Brazil. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 44(11), 1895–1913. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2020.1791353
  • Jeanette Edwards, Donor conception and (dis)closure in the UK: siblingship, friendship and kinship. Sociologus, 65(2) 2015. https://doi.org/10.3790/soc.65.1.101
  • Jeanette Edwards, Harvey, P., & Wade, P. Technologized Images, Technologized Bodies. Berghahn Books, (2010).
  • Kaja Finkler, Experiencing the New Genetics: Family and kinship on the medical frontier. (Philadelphia: UPenn, 2000).
  • Jennifer Fishman, “Making Viagra: From Impotence to Erectile Dysfunction,” in Tone and Watkins (eds.) Medicating Modern America: Prescription Drugs in History (New York University Press, 2007)
    Theresa George, Reconstructing Identity: Carlton Burgan, Patient Zero in the Development of Plastic Surgery, Civil War through World War I (MA Thesis, California Polytechnic University, 2023).
  • Samantha D. Gottlieb, and Jonathan Cluck. "“Going Rogue” re-coding resistance with type 1 diabetes." Digital Culture & Society 4, no. 2 (2018): 137-156.
  • Bernice L. Hausman, “Demanding Subjectivity: Transsexualism, Medicine, and the Technologies of Gender.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 3, no. 2 (1992): 270–302. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3704058.
  • Lisa Herschbach, Prosthetic reconstructions: making the industry, re-making the body, modelling the nation, History Workshop Journal, Volume 44, Issue 1, AUTUMN 1997, Pages 22–57, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/1997.44.22
  • David Herzberg, Happy pills in America: from Miltown to Prozac. JHU Press, 2010.
  • Cressida J Heyes, Cosmetic Surgery: A Feminist Primer (London: Routledge, 2016).
  • Morghen Jael, "Body Hacking and Conceptions of Corporeality." Aletheia: The Arts and Science Academic Journal 2, no. 1 (2022): 52-61.
  • Gwen Kay "Dying to be Beautiful": The Fight for Safe Cosmetics (Ohio State University Press, 2005)
  • Elaine M. Laforteza, "Prosthetics and the Chronically Ill Body: Living with Type 1 Diabetes and an Insulin Pump." M/C Journal 22, no. 5 (2019).
  • Rachel Maines, The Technology of Orgasm: Hysteria, Vibrators, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999)
  • Lara Marks, Sexual Chemistry: A History of the Contraceptive Pill (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).
  • Alka Menon, Reconstructing race and gender in American cosmetic surgery. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40(4), 2016 597–616. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2016.1206590
  • Dorothy Nelkin, M. Susan Lindee, The DNA Mystique: The Gene as a Cultural Icon (New York: W.H.Freeman and Co, 1995).
  • Timothy Omer, "Empowered citizen ‘health hackers’ who are not waiting." BMC medicine 14, no. 1 (2016): 118.
  • Erin O’Connor, “‘Fractions of Men’: Engendering Amputation in Victorian Culture.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 39, no. 4, 1997, pp. 742–77. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/179368. Accessed 19 Jan. 2025.
  • Katherine Ott, "Material culture, technology, and the body in disability history." (2018)
  • Nelly Oudshoorn, “Imagined Men: Representations of Masculinities in Discourses on Male Contraceptive Technology,” in Saetnan, Outshoorn, and Kirejczyk (eds.) Bodies of Technology (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2000)
  • Malcolm Potts 'Two pills, two paths: a tale of gender bias', Endeavour. 2003;27(3):127-30. doi: 10.1016/s0160-9327(03)00103-0. PMID: 12965156.
  • David Rothman, “Dialysis and national priorities.” Beginnings Count (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
  • David Serlin, Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
  • Edward Shorter, Before Prozac: The troubled history of mood disorders in psychiatry. Oxford University Press, 2008.
  • Michelle Stanworth, Reproductive technologies: gender, motherhood and medicine, (Oxford: Polity press, 1987).
  • Kara Swanson, “Buying Dad from the Sperm Bank.” Banking on the Body: The Market in Blood, Milk, and Sperm in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2014)
  • Lynn M. Thomas, "Skin lighteners, black consumers and Jewish entrepreneurs in South Africa." In History Workshop Journal, vol. 73, no. 1, pp. 259-283. Oxford University Press, 2012.
  • Andrea Tone, “Making Room for Rubbers.” History and Technology (2002) 18(1): 51-76.
  • Andrea Tone, “Tranquilizers on Trial,” in Tone and Watkins (eds.) Medicating Modern America: Prescription Drugs in History (New York University Press, 2007)
  • Jaipreet Virdi, Hearing happiness: Deafness cures in history. University of Chicago Press, 2020.
  • Keith Wailoo and Simon Pemberton, The Troubled Dream of Genetic Medicine: Ethnicity and Innovation in Tay-Sachs, Cystic Fibrosis and Sickle Cell Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

Research element

Students will use primary research in the historical databases, film, literature, and popular culture to write their first and third essays. They MAY, with module leader's permission and ethics approval, use social media research and surveys to further explore their topics.

Interdisciplinary

This module will include readings from science and technology studies, medical anthropology, and medical sociology. Some sources will be drawn from the medical literature.

International

While the principal geographies of this module will be the US and UK, it will also include global examples for the purpose of critical comparison.

Subject specific skills

See learning outcomes.

Transferable skills

See learning outcomes.

Study time

Type Required
Seminars 19 sessions of 2 hours (13%)
Tutorials 4 sessions of 1 hour (1%)
Private study 258 hours (86%)
Total 300 hours

Private study description

History modules require students to undertake extensive independent research and reading to prepare for seminars and assessments. As a rough guide, students will be expected to read and prepare to comment on three substantial texts (articles or book chapters) for each seminar taking approximately 3 hours. Each assessment requires independent research, reading around 6-10 texts and writing and presenting the outcomes of this preparation in an essay, review, presentation or other related task.

Costs

No further costs have been identified for this module.

You do not need to pass all assessment components to pass the module.

Assessment group A
Weighting Study time Eligible for self-certification
Assessment component
Seminar contribution 10% No

This assessment will reflect students' active contributions to small and whole group discussions in seminar. There will be no penalty for non-participation when students have excused absences, but unexcused absences will draw a score of 0 for that day. Student preparation encompasses completing their required readings for the day -- c. 2-3 hours per seminar.
Reassessment component
1000 word reflective essay in lieu of Seminar Contribution Yes (extension)
Assessment component
1500 word essay 10% Yes (extension)

This essay, identifying, interrogating and critically contextualising a piece of historical advertising, reporting, or self-help advice, will support students in developing the digital and archival skills they will require for their final essays, and the critical and analytical skills they will use for their intermediate essay assessment.
Reassessment component is the same
Assessment component
3000 word source-based essay 40% Yes (extension)

Students will select from a curated list a novel, film, autobiographical account, or (with advanced permission) physical object, social media artefact or other digital source, and use it to explore attitudes towards the pursuit of perfection. Examples will include sources from different cultures and geographies from the Cold War to the present day.
Reassessment component is the same
Assessment component
3000 word essay 40% Yes (extension)

Drawing on and extending the case studies we have explored across the module, use the historical literature and primary research to analyse the pressure to be ‘perfect’ and the ways in which individuals, societies, corporations and states experience and respond to changing expectations and ideals of embodiment. Students will define their own titles, subject to module leader approval.
Reassessment component is the same
Feedback on assessment

Written feedback provided via Tabula; optional oral feedback in office hours.

Courses

This module is Optional for:

  • UHIA-Q302 Undergraduate History (Part-Time)
    • Year 3 of Q302 History (Part Time)
    • Year 3 of Y306 History (Part Time)
  • Year 3 of UHIA-V102 Undergraduate History (Renaissance and Modern History Stream)
  • Year 4 of UHIA-V103 Undergraduate History (Renaissance and Modern History Stream) (with Year Abroad)
  • UVCA-LA99 Undergraduate Liberal Arts
    • Year 3 of LA99 Liberal Arts
    • Year 3 of LA92 Liberal Arts with Classics
    • Year 3 of LA73 Liberal Arts with Design Studies
    • Year 3 of LA83 Liberal Arts with Economics
    • Year 3 of LA82 Liberal Arts with Education
    • Year 3 of LA95 Liberal Arts with English
    • Year 3 of LA81 Liberal Arts with Film and Television Studies
    • Year 3 of LA80 Liberal Arts with Global Sustainable Development
    • Year 3 of LA93 Liberal Arts with Global Sustainable Development
    • Year 3 of LA97 Liberal Arts with History
    • Year 3 of LA71 Liberal Arts with Law
    • Year 3 of LA91 Liberal Arts with Life Sciences
    • Year 3 of LA75 Liberal Arts with Modern Lanaguages and Cultures
    • Year 3 of LA96 Liberal Arts with Philosophy
    • Year 3 of LA94 Liberal Arts with Theatre and Performance Studies