Body, Subject & Subjected

The Representation of the Body Itself, Illness, Injury, Treatment & Death in Spain and Indigenous and Hispanic American Art & Literature

Hominids have always been obsessed with representing their own bodies. The first "selfies" were prehistoric negative hand images and human stick figures, followed by stone and ceramic representations of the human figure. Thousands of years later, moving via historic art and literature to contemporary social media, the contemporary term "selfie" was self-generated. The Body, Subject & Subjected illuminates some "selfies." This collection of critical essays about the fixation on the human self addresses a multi-faceted geographic set of cultures, analyzing such representations from medical, literal and metaphorical perspectives over centuries. The essays reveal critics' insights when "selfies" are examined through a focused "lens" over a breadth of cultures. The result, complex and unique, is that what is viewed – the visual art and literature under discussion – becomes a mirror image, indistinguishable from the component viewing apparatus, the "lens".