Introduction: Shape-shifting -- Orlan's body of work -- Looking inside the human body -- Between self and other -- Interior/exterior -- Beauty/The monstrous feminine -- Penetrating layers of flesh: carving in/out the body of Orlan -- Few comments on self-hybridations -- Extractions: a performative dialogue "with" Orlan
Summary
The French artist Orlan is infamous for performances during which her body is surgically altered. Responding to Orlan's definition of her performance surgeries as "carnal art," C. Jill O'Bryan considers how the artist's ever-fluctuating face questions idealized beauty and female identity, and complicates the notion of identity-and its relation to the body-at the boundary dividing art from identity
