The Cosmetic Gaze: Body Modification and the Construction of Beauty

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Bernadette Wegenstein (Visiting Associate Professor, The Johns Hopkins University)

The Cosmetic Gaze

Name: The Cosmetic Gaze
Price: 65 AUD
Availability: OutOfStock
ISBN: 9780262529662

Body Modification and the Construction of Beauty

Bernadette Wegenstein (Visiting Associate Professor, The Johns Hopkins University)

$65

Paperback

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English

MIT Press
02 March 2012

Media studies; Feminism & feminist theory

Series: The Cosmetic Gaze

How the act of looking at our own and others' bodies is informed by the techniques, expectations, and strategies of body modification.

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.

By: Bernadette Wegenstein (Visiting Associate Professor The Johns Hopkins University)
Imprint: MIT Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 11mm
ISBN: 9780262529662
ISBN 10: 0262529661
Series: The Cosmetic Gaze
Pages: 240
Publication Date: 02 March 2012
Recommended Age: From 18 years
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

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.