The Cosmetic Gaze : Body Modification and the Construction of Beauty Hardback
by Bernadette (Visiting Associate Professor, The Johns Hopkins University) Wegenstein
Part of the The Cosmetic Gaze series
Hardback
Description
How the act of looking at our own and others' bodies is informed by the techniques, expectations, and strategies of body modification. If the gaze can be understood to mark the disjuncture between how we see ourselves and how we want to be seen by others, the cosmetic gaze--in Bernadette Wegenstein's groundbreaking formulation--is one through which the act of looking at our bodies and those of others is already informed by the techniques, expectations, and strategies (often surgical) of bodily modification.
It is, Wegenstein says, also a moralizing gaze, a way of looking at bodies as awaiting both physical and spiritual improvement.
In The Cosmetic Gaze, Wegenstein charts this synthesis of outer and inner transformation. Wegenstein shows how the cosmetic gaze underlies the "rebirth" celebrated in today's makeover culture and how it builds upon a body concept that has collapsed into its mediality.
In today's beauty discourse--on reality TV and Web sites that collect "bad plastic surgery"--we yearn to experience a bettered self that has been reborn from its own flesh and is now itself, like a digitally remastered character in a classic Hollywood movie, immortal. Wegenstein traces the cosmetic gaze from eighteenth-century ideas about physiognomy through television makeover shows and facial-recognition software to cinema--which, like our other screens, never ceases to show us our bodies as they could be, drawing life from the very cosmetic gaze it transmits.
Information
-
Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks
- Format:Hardback
- Pages:240 pages, 63 b&w illus.
- Publisher:MIT Press Ltd
- Publication Date:02/03/2012
- Category:
- ISBN:9780262232678
Information
-
Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks
- Format:Hardback
- Pages:240 pages, 63 b&w illus.
- Publisher:MIT Press Ltd
- Publication Date:02/03/2012
- Category:
- ISBN:9780262232678
