The Cosmetic Gaze

by Wegenstein, Bernadette

• ISBN13: 9780262232678
• ISBN10: 0262232677
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-03-02
• Publisher: Mit Pr

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Introduction	p. ix
Tracing the Cosmetic Gaze: From Eighteenth Century Physiognomies to Racial Theories of the Third Reich	p. 1
The Concept of Kalókagatheia: "The Good and the Beautiful"	p. 5
Drawing an Instinctive Connection between Physical and Moral Beauty: Lavater's Physiognomy	p. 8
Lavater's Concept of Female Beauty: Devotion versus Masquerade	p. 13
Lavater's Influence on Nineteenth-Century Culture	p. 22
Darwinian Physiognomy, Eugenics, and Snapshots of Objectivity	p. 24
Deviant Bodies: Criminals and Women = Monsters	p. 29
Excising the Deviant during the Third Reich	p. 42
The Reveal: Understanding the New Physiognomy	p. 50
The Dark Side of Beauty: From Convulsive Beauty to Makeover Disfiguration	p. 61
Beauty's Irresistible Promise	p. 64
Nadja, or Beauty's Convulsiveness	p. 66
"The Birthmark" and Other Autobiographies of Ugliness	p. 70
From Visible to Invisible Monsters	p. 80
The Case of Michael Jackson and Other Makeover Beauty Victims	p. 88
The New Beauty, or the Survival of the Made Over	p. 97
Machinic Sutures: Twenty-First-Century Technologies of Beauty	p. 109
The Subtly Refreshed Look of Cosmetic Surgery	p. 111
Realism: "It Could Be Me!"	p. 119
The Swan: You Must Surrender	p. 126
E-FIT, or How to Draw a Suspect	p. 137
The Sims: Build, Buy, Live	p. 142
Self-ploitation, or When the Gaze Strikes Back	p. 147
Editing Women: The Cosmetic Gaze and Cinema	p. 151
Cinematic Anesthesia: Cosmetic Surgery and Film	p. 153
In My Skin and In the Cut: Two Accounts of Femininity	p. 164
Activating the Female Gaze	p. 174
The Spectator as Cocreator	p. 177
Conclusion: From the Male Gaze to the Cosmetic Gaze	p. 183
Notes	p. 185
Index	p. 219
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