With reference to examples of your own choice, explain and critically discuss Bakhtin`s account of the grotesque body.

Answer one of the questions below (2,000 words)

1. With reference to examples of your own choice, explain and critically discuss Bakhtin`s account of the grotesque body.
2. `Elias` theory of the civilizing process allows us to understand regimes of etiquette and body management historically`. With reference to examples of your own choice, discuss and evaluate this claim.
3. `For Pierre Bourdieu, the "natural body" is transformed into a "distinctive body"`. Discuss and evaluate this claim with reference to examples of your own choice.
4. ‘Discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, “docile” bodies’ (Foucault 1977: 138).  With reference to your own examples, discuss how bodies are normalised and disciplined in contemporary culture.
5. Gender is the `repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being` (Butler, 1990: 33). With reference to your own examples, examine how gender is imprinted on the body.
6. With reference to examples of your own choice, critically discuss David Bell`s contention that `the figure of the cyborg` raises `vital questions about the boundaries of the body, about nature, culture and technology, and about much more besides` (Bell, 2001: 150).
7. `Bodies no longer represent how we fit into the social order, but are the means for self-expression... Our bodies have become the ultimate cultural metaphor for controlling what is within our grasp` (Davis, 1997: 2). With reference to your own examples, examine how the body is (de)constructed in postmodern theory.