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David Serlin. Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 244 pp. 111. $60.00 (cloth, 0-226-74883-9), $25.00 (paperbound, 0-226-74884-7).
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...