The Cosmetic Gaze: Body Modification and the Construction of Beauty
The Cosmetic Gaze: Body Modification and the Construction of Beauty
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Abstract
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 this book’s formulation—is one through which the act of looking at our bodies and the bodies of others is already informed by the techniques, expectations, and strategies (often surgical) of bodily modification. It is, the author says, also a moralizing gaze, a way of looking at bodies as awaiting both physical and spiritual improvement. The book charts this synthesis of outer and inner transformation. It shows how the cosmetic gaze underlies the “rebirth” celebrated in today’s makeover culture and how it builds upon a body concept which has collapsed into its mediality. In today’s beauty discourse—on reality TV and websites that collect “bad plastic surgery”—we yearn to experience a bettered self which has been reborn from its own flesh and is now itself, like a digitally remastered character in a classic Hollywood movie, immortal. The author 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.
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Front Matter
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1
Tracing the Cosmetic Gaze: From Eighteenth-Century Physiognomies to Racial Theories of the Third Reich
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2
The Dark Side of Beauty: From Convulsive Beauty to Makeover Disfiguration
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3
Machinic Sutures: Twenty-First-Century Technologies of Beauty
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4
Editing Women: The Cosmetic Gaze and Cinema
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End Matter
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