The Cosmetic Gaze

The Cosmetic Gaze
Author :
Publisher : MIT Press
Total Pages : 239
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780262300322
ISBN-13 : 026230032X
Rating : 4/5 (32X Downloads)

Book Synopsis The Cosmetic Gaze by : Bernadette Wegenstein

Download or read book The Cosmetic Gaze written by Bernadette Wegenstein and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012-03-02 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.


The Cosmetic Gaze Related Books

The Cosmetic Gaze
Language: en
Pages: 239
Authors: Bernadette Wegenstein
Categories: Social Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2012-03-02 - Publisher: MIT Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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 unders
The Cosmetic Gaze
Language: en
Pages: 239
Authors: Bernadette Wegenstein
Categories: Computers
Type: BOOK - Published: 2012-03-02 - Publisher: MIT Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This work looks at how the act of looking at our own and others' bodies is informed by the techniques, expectations, and strategies (often surgical) of bodily m
Beauty Matters
Language: en
Pages: 356
Authors: Peg Zeglin Brand
Categories: Philosophy
Type: BOOK - Published: 2000-05-22 - Publisher: Indiana University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Beauty has captured human interest since before Plato, but how, why, and to whom does beauty matter in today's world? Whose standard of beauty motivates African
The World Wars Through the Female Gaze
Language: en
Pages: 228
Authors: Jean Gallagher
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 1998 - Publisher: SIU Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In The World Wars Through the Female Gaze, Jean Gallagher maps one portion of the historicized, gendered territory of what Nancy K. Miller calls the "gaze in re
The Power of Beauty
Language: en
Pages: 801
Authors: Nancy Friday
Categories: Health & Fitness
Type: BOOK - Published: 2014-02-07 - Publisher: Rosetta Books

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Reflections on how physical appearance, and beliefs about it, affect women’s lives from a #1 bestselling author who’s “enormously fun to read” (The New