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

As a cross-disciplinary movement, cultural studies is both a historic partner and a rival of the history of technology. In Replaceable You, David Serlin shows the power of cultural studies at its best, informed by a careful understanding both of the technology itself and of its reception. This is all the more valuable because his period, the late 1940s and the 1950s, was so complex and has been all too easy to oversimplify.

Serlin studies four ways in which postwar Americans used technology to modify their own and others' bodies: prosthetics, plastic surgery, hormone therapy, and gender-change procedures. In each case he deals with a paradox. Medicine was supposed to liberate, reveal, or restore the true self, yet it also was an agent of the conformist spirit of the times, often even of official propaganda.

Like other conflicts, World War II brought a renewed interest in replacement limbs and other devices for disabled veterans. But this new wave of innovation was different, Serlin argues, because it drew on a repertory of advanced materials and mechanisms, from lucite and titanium to servomotors. The new hybridized body of the wounded soldier was shaped by, and contributed to, a reaffirmation of masculinity. In official documents and popular culture alike, the rehabilitated veteran ceased to be the fragile, disheartened victim that many professionals had assumed him to be, and emerged as a virile, capable participant in the workforce. One of Serlin's star turns is a reading of the split-hook hand as a transitional technology representing a new style of white-color modernist worker.

Serlin's chapter on the "Hiroshima Maidens" shows a different side of postwar modernism, comparing the controversial redevelopment of the devastated city with the program for repairing the radiation scars of twenty-five young women disfigured by U.S. atomic bombing. A Japanese Protestant minister initiated the program, with the help of the American editor Norman Cousins and the Religious Society of Friends, for bringing the young women, many hidden by their families, to leading American surgeons for removal of scar tissue. Serlin shows how the women were caught up in others' goals: promoting (or neutralizing) antinuclear protest, countering the militarist image of the old Japan with a revival of its more feminine arts, assimilating the Maidens to American upper-middle-class dress and self-advancement. The final twist was that after Japanese surgeons—trained in the United States with unused public donations to the Maidens' cause—returned to their home country and introduced modern plastic surgery, many of the specialists they trained became pioneers of Westernizing cosmetic procedures.

For a public weary of depression and war, synthetic hormones represented an even more powerful force for technological transformation of self than surgery. Serlin contrasts the use of the feminizing estrogen therapy that drove the computer pioneer Alan Turing to suicide with its sunnier expression in the article in Ebony, a magazine aimed at African Americans, by the former cabaret singer Gladys Bentley, "I Am a Woman Again," celebrating her return from lesbianism to domestic happiness. Bentley's apparent bliss is contrasted with the rise and fall of Christine Jorgensen, the army clerk first acclaimed by the popular press—including some military publications—as proof of science's power to transmute gender, then bitterly scorned as a desexed male, ultimately exhibited as a (highly paid) nightclub curiosity. Finally, Serlin suggests, Jorgensen's earnest creed of femininity gave way to the new camp sensibility pioneered by Andy Warhol, who had also transformed himself with surgery on his nose as well as a trim of his original family name.

Cultural studies sometimes reduces historical actors to victims of baleful, all-seeing authorities. While Alan Turing was indubitably destroyed by such repression, most of the figures discussed here embraced the brave new world of the 1950s and its promises of social integration through technological enhancement of the body, and Serlin treats their aspirations with respect and empathy. In ending the book with...