by Keren Rosa Hammerschlag, Natasha Ruiz-Gómez, and Tania Cleaves
Borderline Bodies offers original interpretations of visual representations of the human body as both bounded and porous, fortified and vulnerable, mobile and constrained—subject to borders yet capable of crossing and challenging them. It also examines images and objects that are themselves “borderline,” positioned at disciplinary intersections or outside conventional definitions of serious art. By mapping how bodies traverse borders and unsettle categories, the volume reconsiders the relationship between corporeality and traditional modes of representation in art and medicine. Transdisciplinary and transnational analyses of objects from diverse geographies illuminate themes such as identity, racialisation, typologies of the body, encounters between bodies, mobility, and bodily transformation. The result is a fresh approach that disrupts assumptions about the normative human form embedded in Western image-making traditions.