We are our Brains: Disembodied Brain Films in 1950s Cold War America

Authors

David P. Pierson, University of Southern MaineFollow

Files

Document Type

Book Chapter

Description

Personified Body Parts in Cinema, Literature, and Visual Culture investigates the power of personifying body parts in cinema, television, visual culture, literature, erotica, folklore, and mystique.

Culturally, socially, and poetically exposing hidden aspects and subtleties of human existentialism, this book vigorously questions and problematizes numerous artistic, aesthetic, technological, naïve, and macabre manipulations of body parts for various purposes. A diverse team of authors explore how scribing human traits to limbs, eyes, brains, genitalia, hearts, and other inner organs is grotesque and aesthetic, repealing and appealing, intimidating and intimate, rude and enjoyable, material and spiritual, surprising and mundane. Personified organs are interrelated with bodily integrity, visceral aesthetics, distorted nature, social anxiety and acceptability, cultural classifications and hierarchies, and dissident innovativeness andradicalism.

This interdisciplinary volume involves body studies; cinema, television, and media studies; literature studies; cultural, intercultural, and countercultural studies; mythology and folklore studies; gender, sexuality, trans and queer studies; ethnicities and postcolonialism; and art history.

ISBN

9781032892351

Publication Date

Spring 4-17-2025

Publisher

Routledge

City

New York

Keywords

body parts, film, science fiction, brain science

Disciplines

Critical and Cultural Studies | Film and Media Studies | Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Ethnicity in Communication | Neuroscience and Neurobiology | Other Film and Media Studies

Recommended Citation

Pierson, David P., "We are our Brains: Disembodied Brain Films in 1950s Cold War America" (2025). Faculty, Staff, and Alumni Books. 710.
https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/facbooks/710