Project A06: Curated Bodies

Aesthetic Human Categorization and Bodily Differentiation in Magazines

The research project focuses on lifestyle magazines as spaces proliferating images of bodies in the mass-medial performance of human differentiation. The performative processes of categorizing people are predicated on the media-specific aesthetics of genres in magazines and their materiality. Magazines are powerful medial infrastructures of cohesion and mediation circulating the societal dynamics of human differentiation and creating opportunities for readers to tentatively imagine and define body- and lifestyles, identities and communities. The project hence introduces the role of aesthetics into the mechanics of human differentiation.

Project team
Prof. Dr. Oliver Scheiding (PI)
Dr. Sabina Fazli (Postdoctoral Researcher)