Registration for CDS 15 is open!
Images. They are everywhere, and they surround us. It used to be that, in the United States at least, one had to go to Times Square to be surrounded by images. But, over the last century, we have built a society where screens with images are everywhere—first in cinemas, then televisions, and then video consoles and phones and glasses and watches and virtual reality headsets.
It is hard to imagine that this proliferation of images itself has not been a factor in the changed status of the image in various domains of our existence.
Take the human body, for example. There is a focus on the image of the body, a wish to have the body take on a certain image. For an example relevant to the city that will host Clinical Study Days 15: the May 15, 2022, issue of the New York Times Magazine, the “Health Issue,” was titled “Shape Shift: On Our Obsession with Modifying Our Bodies.” This issue addressed practices that go beyond fashion, the veiling of the body, or inscriptions on the bodies (of tattoos) or piercings, to a survey of surgery practices to create a certain body image. This is also, of course, an issue in the trans movement, the assertion that an identity as a certain gender should correlate with an ability to have a body image of a certain type.
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