In a conference in 1996, Michel Foucault stated that, for him, utopias were born from the human desire to escape from the prison of the body, or to erase bodies altogether. Shortly after, upon reflection, the philosopher felt he was mistaken, concluding instead that what deprives the body of its utopian possibility would be the weight and the limits we are taught to give it. From a contemporary perspective, David Le Breton, in L Adieu au corps (1999), notes that, with the acceleration of technological advances, the body s activities have been increasingly atrophied, replaced by services and devices, forcing the body into a position of limitation or disease. The present research investigates how works from cinema, the visual arts and literature, mainly produced in the first decades of the 21st century, interact with those approaches, discussing three imaginaries concerning the body: as a barrier to be surpassed by the human being through technology; as a reflection of anthropocentrism and of temporality conceptions, in dialogue with the notions of progress, devenir, and performance; and as a place of memory record, through inscriptions or mutilations on the flesh, or through the lack of flesh entirely, turned into a spectral absence. Narratives in which the body is deformed, reformed, or that aim to overcome the body, were selected in order to understand certain aspects of contemporaneity from these representations that deal with the most elementary material unit of the human being.