The Cosmetic Gaze: Body Modification and the Construction of Beauty
Bernadette Wegenstein
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 “rebirt ... More
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.
Keywords:
modification techniques,
modification expectations,
modification strategies,
moralizing gaze,
spiritual improvement,
outer transformation,
inner transformation,
makeover culture,
physiognomy,
facial-recognition software
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2012 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780262232678 |
| Published to MIT Press Scholarship Online: August 2013 |
DOI:10.7551/mitpress/9780262232678.001.0001 |
