Chelsea Charms: ciało kuriozalne jako marka
Chelsea Charms: The curious body as a brand

Summary/Abstract: Chelsea Charms claims that she has the biggest artificial breasts in the world. She is followed by more than 270,000 users on Twitter. Charms gives interviews to the mainstream media. She also runs her own website. Although she has never used her body in hardcore pornography, she is nevertheless a kind of celebrity, very careful about her image, defined, obviously, by her enormous bust. Charms very clearly identifies herself with her breasts. In the media her breasts are presented as the essence of her personality. In a cultural sense, there is no difference between her image and her bust, allowing us to speak of a peculiar branding, with Charms’s breasts serving as a “logo”. In this article I analyse how the media figure of “the woman with the largest (augmented) breasts in the world” comes to life, in relation to Celia Lury and Scott Lash’s theory of the global culture industry and Hartmut Boehme’s take on the cultural role of fetishism in modernity. I attempt to deconstruct the “Chelsea Charms” brand in the context of contemporary image culture, which feeds on augmented bodies like no other. At the same time, I pose a crucial question: Does having an artificial body automatically lead to having an artificial identity or is the relation between the two much more complex, and by reconstructing it, can one can better understand contemporary strategies of identity building, even outside of this particular case? The answer is paradoxical: because of her curious character, Chelsea Charms can be seen as a model exponent of the culture of virtuality, which is based on the myths of individual agency, creative freedom, and plasticity of human existence, including the body.

• Details
• Contents