The Becoming of Bodies

The relationship between bodies and images has long occupied feminism. The becoming of bodies, available for the first time in paperback, explores the way in which this relationship has primarily been approached and offers an alternative framework for analysis. Thinking through her original empirical research with teenage girls, involving focus groups, individual interviews and image-making sessions, Coleman moves from a consideration of media images, the focus of much feminist research, to examine images more widely; as mirrors, photographs, glimpses, comments, imagination. Addressing issues of appearance and selfhood, sex and gender, and temporality, the book takes a Deleuzian position to argue that bodies and images are not separable entities but rather entangled processes of becoming. It asks the question: how do bodies become through images? Making links between empirical research, feminist theory and Deleuzian theory, this book will be essential reading for scholars and students of Sociology, Cultural Studies and Feminist and Gender Studies.

Rebecca Coleman is Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Lancaster University.