Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America (review)

David Serlin's remarkable book illuminates the culture and politics of postwar America by investigating intersections of race, class, gender, medicine, and technology. Perhaps inspired by Foucault's focus in History of Sexuality on four figures of nineteenth-century discourse (the hysterical woman, the masturbating child, the Malthusian couple, and the homosexual), Serlin presents four mid-twentieth-century case studies of troubled bodies. Analyzing veteran amputees supplied with prostheses; the A-bomb victims brought to the United States for plastic surgery in 1955, known as the Hiroshima Maidens; African American entertainer Gladys Bentley, who reported herself cured of the lesbian lifestyle by hormone treatments; and sex-change pioneer Christine Jorgensen, Serlin finds a postwar concern for reshaping the body enabled by technological developments and an expansive consumer culture that viewed medical regimens as commodities for purchase. Importantly, making use of "medical miracles" to "physically articulate . . . private identities" (p. 161) required interaction with medical and psychological experts, and considerations of normative masculinity, femininity, and patriotic American citizenship.

Serlin provides a thick descriptive context, effectively mobilizing an impressive array of primary sources—including press accounts and photographs, films, television, comics, public art, poetry, and government records of political and medical institutions—and secondary literatures on a wide range of topics, from important studies of Cold War culture, to the history of prosthesis technology and scientific knowledge on hormones, and the publishing history of Ebony. The discussion of the Hiroshima Maidens incorporates State Department concerns that their appearance would inflame ban-the-bomb sentiment, developments in plastic surgery, and an astonishing episode of This Is Your Life that brought members of the Maidens entourage face-to-face with an Enola Gay copilot. While occasionally Serlin provides a rich interpretive framework before he explains its relevance (pp. 76, 150), the reader's patience is well rewarded. Furthermore, Serlin's close analysis of postwar discourse, which draws upon the methodologies of literary and visual culture criticism, offers quite perceptive, and at times humorous, observations throughout the book.

An example of Serlin's fine interpretive sensibilities is the meanings he finds in Stars and Stripes and other newspapers that initially reported Jorgensen's sex-change story in positive tones. Utilizing postwar narrative conventions that explained the experience of soldiers returning to combat and home-front veterans alike, he says that Jorgensen's mother's comment, "you send a person over [to Europe] and you have a completely different person coming back," described something familiar to Americans rather than abnormal (p. 169). Interrogating the sources themselves as well as their particular commentary on Jorgensen, Serlin concludes that "postwar military culture encouraged the news media to quantify and reproduce every intimate moment, every private heartbreak, and every recognizable human experience for mass consumption. . . . The war had invested popular culture with a fertile and highly profitable commodity, the human interest story, distilled from the wounded masculine psyche" (p. 169).

One quibble is the positioning of an extended paragraph on postwar historiography in endnote 31 (p. 208), for addressing the themes outlined would clarify how Serlin's book is a "direct response to and departure from" this literature (p. 15). Another is the opposition that Serlin asserts between black bourgeois desire and civil rights struggles to explain Bentley's transformation (p. 151): surely a galvanizing force in the civil rights movement was the lack of equal access to consumption at lunch counters, suburban developments, and myriad other locations.

Replaceable You provides significant insights beyond its historical context. While the brutal results of twentieth-century eugenics are well known, for example, Serlin's consideration of how sexist and racist ideologies infiltrated the field of endocrinology undermines—in important ways—confidence in contemporary medical knowledge about the body as unmediated. Moreover, with higher numbers of U.S. soldiers surviving combat injuries today, Serlin's work raises questions about media coverage of current amputee veterans and their high-tech prostheses, and interest...