Social media, beauty standards and the discriminatory bias in body transformation practices: a commentary on why posthuman thinking matters

• Autor(a) principal: Lo Bosco, Maria Concetta
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/48918

In “We post-humans: from genesis to freedom”, Pussetti critically reflects on the meaning of what we can understand today as “human” following, in particular, the growing use of medical biotechnologies (such as endocrinology, genetic engineering, cosmetic surgery, and dermatology) for betterment purposes. While the history of the human species has always been accompanied by practices of body transformation due to humans’ inherent aspiration and tension to construct, alter and improve their own selves, the contemporary proliferation of less invasive and low-cost cosmetic procedures has provided us incredible chances of transform-ability and new opportunities of “molding” the body we would like to have. Drawing from Remotti’s1 concept of anthropo-poiesis, which indicates the various processes of self-construction of the individual particularly from the point of view of body modification, Pussetti argue that we are actively engaged in a continuous process of self-construction thanks to socialization, acculturation, and our deliberate practices of body modifications. A feeling of incompleteness spurs our imagination and drives us to creatively explore new ways of being and aspire to ideals we are encouraged to meet, responding to the economic demands and socio-cultural expectations of the society we live in. Taken in a dialogical relationship, we alter our body and self in a continuous process of adaptation to, reinvention of, and resistance to the world around us. The idea according to which we have always been posthuman - not only because of our intimate and mutual relationship with our non-human others but first and foremost because we are always moving towards a future vision of ourselves - is not new.