Coda: Rereading the Male Body—The Cultural Power of Representation

Abstract

The coda foregrounds the cultural power of representation by attending to the larger insights gained from the collected contributions. It deepens the book’s emphasis on the—represented—body as the multifaceted discourse it is and maps out its influence on dimensions of social experience and the making of our bodies. It also locates representation as a theoretical concept and traces its relation to regimes of power and their potential subversion, the mobilization of affect, acts of self-fashioning, space-making, and knowledge production. Understanding itself as a reverse introduction, the coda maps out yet different lines of convergences between the articles assembled in the collection, presents access points to the volume and the topic for readers, and sketches larger methodological and theoretical approaches to the ‘male body’.