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

Wegenstein, Bernadette

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262232677 ISBN 13: 9780262232678

Verlag: MIT Press, 2012

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.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Bernadette Wegenstein is Research Professor in the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University, where she also directs the Center for Advanced Media Studies. The author of Getting Under the Skin: Body and Media Theory (MIT Press, 2006), she is also a documentary filmmaker.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: MIT Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0262232677
• ISBN 13: 9780262232678
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar