Peer-Reviewed Images

Abstract

This chapter concerns itself with the body and the circulation of its image in the consumerist landscape of contemporary India. It argues how the body is constantly under the influence of the ideal body type, which inspires consumers to reconfigure their bodies to emulate the ideal body type. This requires sufficient attention, visibility, disciplining, and display. It also explains how this emulative process reproduces similar body types through work on and care of the body, thus transforming bodies into images for visual consumption. It advances a conceptual model of image–body inseparability and situates such emulative practices within the larger context of erosion of the stigma against the eroticized body in recent times across various platforms of contemporary visual and popular media. The author argues that such stigma has significantly diminished.