Curated Bodies: Aesthetic Human Categorization and Bodily Differentiation in Magazines (A06)

• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 442261292

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.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres
• Subproject of: SFB 1482: Studies in Human Categorization
• Applicant Institution: Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
• Project Head: Professor Dr. Oliver Scheiding