We tend to treat the body as something natural and fixed, but Chiara Lacroix, a doctoral researcher in the EUI Department of History, explains why a historian might disagree. Her research examines body modification practices in Europe, particularly in France and Italy between the 1870s and the 1930s, including plastic surgery, fitness, and fashion. Chiara describes a shift in how people came to see their bodies: no longer as given, but as malleable, as something that could be sculpted and optimised throughout a lifetime.
That shift, Chiara argues, cut both ways. On one hand, it opened possibilities for people to reshape themselves beyond the limitations imposed on them, including rigid gender roles. On the other, it created new pressures to conform, to measure the body against standards and work to meet them.
For Chiara, the takeaway is to see today's culture of self-improvement not as something inevitable, but as part of a specific historical development that does not have to stay the way it is.
Watch the full video to learn more about Chiara's research.
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With special thanks to La Cocciaia ceramic studio in Florence for hosting this video.
Chiara Lacroix is a PhD researcher in the EUI Department of History. Her doctoral thesis, "Altering appearance: Aesthetics and health in the transition to European modernity," is supervised by Monika Baar and Lauren Kassell.
Her publications on the history of the body and medicine include "Man and embryo: historicizing ideas about humanity in the study of reproduction, 18th–19th centuries" (2024) and "Confronting the field: Tylor's Anahuac and Victorian thought on human diversity" (2022).