Bodies We Fail

... with Jules Sturm

1. »Completely unnecessary!« – Why is that not true for your book?

To counter persistent trends of stereotyping human bodies into fixed categories of gender, race, ability, or age, this book aims to expose how we visualize bodies. The way we picture bodies often determines what we ›make‹ of them. »Bodies We Fail« offers ways of seeing bodies differently and accounts productively for the difficulty of making sense of human embodiment.

2. What new perspectives are opened up by your book?

With the help of artworks and cutting edge theories, this project challenges not only the constraints of social norms, but also the visual mechanisms that maintain and perpetuate them on the site of the body. The book offers possible ways of ›de-scripting‹ and ›un-learning‹ our visions of especially those bodies that disturb the norm. It shows that due to the abundance of possible meanings, the body has a great conceptual capacity to teach us how to see and know differently.

3. What's the book's possible impact on the current discourse?

Many studies of the body deconstruct embodied difference or call on specific types of non-conforming bodies to act subversively. This book challenges all bodies' ability to create and disrupt bodily norms. Consequently, it extends and crosses the limits of academic and social classifications of embodiment.

4. With which audience would you like to discuss your book?

With scholars and artists who recognize the body's conceptual potential to counter discrimination and marginalization.

5. Your book in one sentence:

An interdisciplinary project that disentangles bodies from normatively descriptive images and complicates simplified visions of our bodies.