'In an era that fears breakdown of bodily boundaries and immunities, the chapters in Borderline Bodies challenge us to embrace deviance and exposure and openness. This book signals a transgressive new corporeal turn - a postcolonial materialism - in the borderspaces of health humanities.'
—Warwick Anderson, author of Intolerant Bodies and Spectacles of Waste

‘This groundbreaking volume of interdisciplinary visual studies provides wide-ranging analyses of the complex cultures of Borderline bodies across our globalised world. Disrupting scholarly boundaries in art, medicine and society and customary views on gender, race and ethnicity, the authors offer important new insights into visual representations of borderline and marginal human bodies.’
—Anthea Callen, Professor Emeritus of Visual Culture, University of Nottingham

‘A very exciting volume that is sure to stimulate multiple fields of inquiry.’
—Andrew Graciano, Director of the School of Visual Art and Design, University of South Carolina

‘Ambitiously traversing diverse geographies, historical periods, and interdisciplinary methodologies, these essays offer vivid, meticulously fine-grained analyses of a panoply of visual materials. Borderline Bodies reveals the generative potentials of specific “contact points” between disciplines, media, and identity formations, and develops innovative conceptual tools for studying representations relating to multiply-marginalised bodies.’
—Roger Nelson, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore

Keren Rosa Hammerschlag is a Senior Lecturer in Art History and Curatorship at the Australian National University
Natasha Ruiz-Gómez is a Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of Essex
Tania Cleaves (née Woloshyn) is an alternative-academic and Research Development Manager at the University of Nottingham

Introduction: Borderline bodies — Tania Cleaves, Keren Rosa Hammerschlag and Natasha Ruiz-Gómez

Part I Across borders: bodies in motion
1 Phantoms of race: Shibata Koichi’s models, midwifery and racial discourse in late nineteenth-century medical culture — Sonia Favi and Rebecca Whiteley
2 Lithographic yoga: posters of the yoga body in early twentieth-century Bengal — Projit Bihari Mukharji
3 Harmonious anatomies: dissecting Liu Xiaoxian’s marriage of medical opposites — Alex Burchmore
4 Place/placelessness: Moshekwa Langa — Gabriella Nugent

Part II At the border: bodies collide
5 Monstrous: Paul Richer’s La Femme, anthropology and race — Natasha Ruiz-Gómez
6 Draughtsman Jacques Arago and racialised distortion — Liz Conor
7 ‘That feeling of love and care and empathy’: Angel De Cora, Stacey Fayant, a Once Known Maker and Christi Belcourt Reclaiming the Indigenous body — Gloria J. Bell
8 Coatlicue, monstrous beauty. Four postcolonial images — Frida Gorbach

Part III Without borders: bodily dissolution
9 Seen by the camera: Nudes of All Nations — Tania Cleaves
10 Matchless for the hands and complexion: James McNeill Whistler’s Variations in Flesh Colour and Green: The Balcony — Keren Rosa Hammerschlag
11 A picture of health: undressing patients, redressing photographs — Zeynep Devrim Gürsel
12 Tala Madani and the abjection of motherhood — Holiday Powers
Afterword Seeing is (not) believing — Sander L. Gilman