The Cosmetic Gaze: Body Modification and the Construction of Beauty - Hardcover

Inhaltsangabe

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 Wegensteins 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 todays makeover culture and how it builds upon a body concept that has collapsed into its mediality. In todays 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.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.