Transforming Images

<p>Contemporary social and cultural life is increasingly organised around a logic of self-transformation where changing the body is seen as key. <em>Transforming Images</em> 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 organising an imperative for transformation and in making possible or not the materialisation 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?</p><p>Drawing on the recent ‘turns’ to affect and emotion and to understanding life in terms of vitality intensity and ‘liveness’ in social and cultural theory the book develops a framework for understanding images as <em>felt and lived out</em>. 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. </p><p><em>Transforming Images</em> will be of interest to students and scholars working in sociology media studies cultural studies and gender studies.</p>