Coleman - Transforming Images

Transforming Images

Contemporary social and cultural life is increasingly organized around a logic of self-transformation, where changing the body is seen as key. Transforming Images examines how the future functions within this transformative logic to indicate the potential of a materially better time. The book explores the crucial role that images have in organizing an imperative of transformation and in making possible, or not, the materialization of a better future. Coleman asks the questions: which futures are appealing and to whom? How do images tap into and reproduce wider social and cultural processes of inequality?

Drawing on the recent turns in social and cultural theory to affect and emotion and to understanding life in terms of vitality, intensity and liveness, the book develops a framework for understanding images as felt and lived out. Analysing different screens across popular culture the screens of shopping, makeover television programmes, online dieting plans and government health campaigns it traces how images of self-transformation bring the future into the present and affectively draw in some bodies more than others.

Transforming Images will be of interest to students and scholars working in sociology, media studies, cultural studies and gender studies.

Rebecca Coleman is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Lancaster University. Her research is concerned with theoretical and empirical explorations of the relations between bodies and images, with a particular focus on temporality. Publications include The Becoming of Bodies: Girls, Images, Experience (2009, Manchester University Press).

International library of sociology Founded by Karl Mannheim

Editor: John Urry

Lancaster University

Recent publications in this series include:

Risk and Technological Culture

Towards a sociology of virulence

Joost Van Loon

Reconnecting Culture, Technology and Nature

Mike Michael

Advertising Myths

The strange half lives of images and commodities

Anne M. Cronin

Adorno on Popular Culture

Robert R. Witkin

Consuming the Caribbean

From arkwarks to zombies

Mimi Sheller

Between Sex and Power

Family in the world, 19002000

Goran Therborn

States of Knowledge

The co-production of social science

and social order

Sheila Jasanoff

After Method

Mess in social science research

John Law

Brands

Logos of the global economy

Celia Lury

The Culture of Exception

Sociology facing the camp

Blent Diken and Carsten Bagge Laustsen

Visual Worlds

John Hall, Blake Stimson and Lisa Tamiris Becker

Time, Innovation and Mobilities

Travel in technological cultures

Peter Frank Peters

Complexity and Social Movements

Multitudes acting at the edge of chaos

Ian Welsh and Graeme Chesters

Qualitative Complexity

Ecology, cognitive processes and the re-emergence of structures in post-humanist social theory

Chris Jenks and John Smith

Theories of the Information Society, 3rd Edition

Frank Webster

Crime and Punishment in Contemporary Culture

Claire Grant

Mediating Nature

Nils Lindahl Elliot

Haunting the Knowledge Economy

Jane Kenway, Elizabeth Bullen, Johannah Fahey and Simon Robb

Global Nomads

Techno and new age as transnational countercultures in Ibiza and Goa

Anthony DAndrea

The Cinematic Tourist

Explorations in globalization, culture and resistance

Rodanthi Tzanelli

Non-Representational Theory

Space, politics, affect

Nigel Thrift

Urban Fears and Global Terrors

Citizenship, multicultures and belongings after 7/7

Victor J. Seidler

Sociology through the Projector

Blent Diken and Carsten Bagge Laustsen

Multicultural Horizons

Diversity and the limits of the civil nation

Anne-Marie Fortier

Sound Moves

IPod culture and urban experience

Michael Bull

Jean Baudrillard

Fatal theories

David B. Clarke, Marcus A. Doel, William Merrin and Richard G. Smith

Aeromobilities

Theory and method

Saulo Cwerner, Sven Kesselring and John Urry

Social Transationalism

Steffen Mau

Towards Relational Sociology

Nick Crossley

Mobile Lives

Anthony Elliott and John Urry

Stillness in a Mobile World

David Bissell and Gillian Fuller

Unintended Outcomes of Social Movements

The 1989 Chinese student movement

Fang Deng

Revolt, Revolution, Critique

The paradox of society

Bulent Diken

Travel Connections

Tourism, technology and togetherness in a mobile world

Jennie Germann-Molz

Mobility, Space and Culture

Peter Merriman

China

The cultural logic of contemporary capitalism

Lash Scott, Keith Michael, Arnoldi Jakob and Rooker Tyler

Staging Mobilities

Ole B. Jensen

Transforming Images

Screens, affect, futures

Rebecca Coleman

China Constructing Capitalism

Economic life and urban change

Lash Scott, Keith Michael, Arnoldi Jakob and Rooker Tyler

Staging Mobilities

Ole B. Jensen

Transforming Images

Screens, affect, futures

Rebecca Coleman

First published 2013

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2013 Rebecca Coleman

The right of Rebecca Coleman to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Coleman, Rebecca.

Transforming images : screens, affect, futures / Rebecca Coleman.

p. cm. (International library of sociology)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Self-perception. 2. Representation (Philosophy) I. Title.

BF697.5.S43.C65 2013

ISBN: 978-0-415-67884-1 (hbk)