The Transformation of the Body in Today’s Media Culture

Attitudes to “the life of the body” and its visible canons reflect the most significant challenges with their dramatic character and changeability. No longer do contemporary theoretical approaches interpret the body to mean only “a biological fact”. It is a socio-cultural phenomenon, a social construct that embodies a system of social relations and is represented by the media. Mass media translate diverse representations of corporeity. On the one hand, it speaks of openness and democracy, the possibility to take a new glance at habitual corporal stereotypes. Moreover, network communications have provided an opportunity for collective and public reflection and developing people’s versions of the corporeal norm. But, despite a polysemantic nature of visual representations, they keep on being ideologically painted and largely determined by a particular cultural tradition and the current system of cultural codes. The article aimed to identify what socio-cultural canons of corporeity, corporeal images new media reproduce. The authors exploited the program of cultural and visual studies as a methodological dominant for examining the corporeity representations. In the authors’ view, the most relevant of them is a quality technique that allows for analyzing, flexibly and reflexively, individual practices in the body representations and carrying out culturological conceptualization. It was the reason why we examined thirty utterances in the form of an essay written by the respondents aged 18–23. All of them were intensively involved in the social networks VKontakte and Instagram.