Flesh Wounds: The Culture of Cosmetic Surgery

Virginia L. Blum9780520217232, 0520217233

When Blum was a teenager, her mother convinced her to have rhinoplastic surgery; since it might increase her daughter’s marriage-market value, it seemed to her mother irresponsible not to. A botched job resulted in further corrections, Blum’s incurable addiction to surgery-and this book. As an English professor at the University of Kentucky and admitted participant in the culture of perfective surgery, Blum manages the language of media theory and In Style magazine with equal aptitude. As face lifts and tummy tucks become increasingly affordable to middle-class Americans, Blum argues, even those who have never considered the knife cannot escape cosmetic surgery’s implications and its pervasive promotion by everyone from doctors to those who play them on TV. Having interviewed numerous plastic surgeons, Blum shows how they promise to reveal one’s “authentic” inner self by unmooring that self from its current physical expression. Blum suggests that our pursuit of a superior “after picture” arises from our identification with two-dimensional stars of page and screen: celebrity culture’s mirror stage. But as surgeons promise to harmonize the patient’s eternally youthful self-image with a traitorous aging body, they obfuscate the actual, unattainable object of desire: not one’s own lost figure, but the image of the star (itself often surgically maintained). According to Blum, such confusions bring either repeated surgeries or aggression toward celebrity bodies (witness our tabloid fascination with stars’ surgery, and Internet games like Smack Pamela Anderson). While Blum’s claim that “little by little, we are all becoming movie stars-internally framed by the camera eye” might seem unduly cataclysmic, even “non-surgical” women may value her honest probing of the paradoxical sense that “I am my body and yet I own my body. 18 b&w photos not seen by PW.

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Table of contents :
EEn……Page 1
Flesh Wounds – The Culture of Cosmetic Surgery……Page 2
Copyright Info……Page 6
Dedication……Page 7
TOC……Page 9
Acknowledgments……Page 11
The Beginning……Page 13
The Surgeon……Page 17
Surgery……Page 23
Damage……Page 25
Pathological Concern……Page 27
Role Reversals……Page 29
Aesthetic Judgment……Page 36
The Surgical Touch……Page 38
2 Untouchable Bodies……Page 47
Body Landscapes……Page 53
Imperfectly Perfect……Page 65
Surgical Subjects……Page 66
The Lure Of The Two-dimensional……Page 71
Aesthetic Landscape……Page 79
Timing……Page 84
The Plastic Surgeon And The Plastic Surgeon’s Wife……Page 88
A Phase Apart……Page 92
Men Act And Women Appear……Page 95
Figure 1. “doc Hollywood,” Stephen Hoef.in, Enjoys Posing For The Camera (“he’s A Cut Above,” Muscle And Fitness Magazine Feb. 1……Page 96
Figure 2. Surgeon As Artist, Dr. Leon Tcheupdjian…….Page 97
Projecting The Body……Page 99
Whose Body?……Page 104
Figure 3. Advertising The Bene.ts Of Surgery—a Modern-day Galatea. CourTesy Of American Society Of Plastic And Reconstructive Su……Page 107
A Surgical Cure……Page 115
Losing Love……Page 122
The Lost Body……Page 132
The Geography Of Appearance……Page 138
Haunted By The Object Relation……Page 148
5 As If Beauty……Page 157
“As If”……Page 158
Star Culture And The Making Of Twentieth-Century Bodies……Page 159
Becoming-Celebrity……Page 166
All About Eve-As If Identifications, Fan Culture, And Perfect Skin……Page 173
Hollywood Skin……Page 185
Transformational Bodies……Page 189
What If……Page 192
Before And After—hollywood Style……Page 200
Before And After Pictures— Metamorphosis……Page 205
After Pictures……Page 209
Photogr Aphic Memories……Page 212
Evidence……Page 214
Bodies Of Evidence: Movie-star Surgeries……Page 216
Actresses And Cosmetic Surgery: A Shared History……Page 220
Surgical Secrets /Cultural Lies: Why We Like Makeover Stories……Page 225
7 Being and Having – Celebrity Culture and the Wages of Love……Page 232
Beauty Bashing……Page 233
You Ought To Be In Pictures……Page 236
Steal This Look……Page 238
Death And Celebrity……Page 243
Ripping Them To Shreds……Page 247
Borderlines / Borderlands……Page 254
Television And The Symbolic Violence Against The Family……Page 258
Colonizing The American Body……Page 263
Becoming-Celebrity……Page 271
8 Addicted to Surgery……Page 274
In The Beginning……Page 275
Farrah’s Face……Page 280
Better……Page 282
The Slippery Slope……Page 285
The Fix……Page 292
Movie-Star Dreams……Page 293
Promises, Promises: The New World Of Consumer Choice……Page 297
The Perverse Cycle Of Addiction……Page 299
Notes……Page 303
Works Cited……Page 327
Index……Page 353