Body Utopianism: Prosthetic Being Between Enhancement and Estrangement investigates how desires to transform our bodies can bring utopia to the present and the everyday. It argues that transformative utopian practices often, but not always, lead to distinctly dystopian or anti-utopian outcomes that confirm the status quo. It is the first comprehensive study to address the paradoxical relationship between bodies and utopianism.

The book discusses doping, bodybuilding and cosmetic surgery alongside practices such as retouching the ‘body as image’ on social media. It looks at how fashion modelling and performance can ‘estrange’ the body.

Techniques and technologies to transform our bodies are increasingly accessible and suggest an excessive identification of the body as lacking. To ‘be a body’ in a culturally meaningful way, we incessantly improve our bodily appearance and capacity. The book addresses the utopianism inherent in a cultural understanding of bodies as increasingly controllable.