Enhanced Human Bodies in Literature and Cinema
We live in an age of optimization. Norms of beauty and performance are relentlessly getting harder to achieve without modifying the psychophysiology of human beings. Humans are faced with choices and demands regarding increasing and reducing the size, mass, and weight of different body parts and the modification of the way they function. The normal no longer means the common, it means the optimal. From special diets and extreme workouts to silicon injections and from plastic surgery to brain chips, the human body is transforming into a workshop for different arts and technologies. The cosmetic surgery market, for example, is worth more than 57 billion dollars and is expected to continue to grow very fast.