The Cosmetic Gaze : Body Modification and the Construction of Beauty.

Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1 Tracing the Cosmetic Gaze: From Eighteenth-Century Physiognomies to Racial Theories of the Third Reich -- The Concept of Kalókagatheia: "The Good and the Beautiful" -- Drawing an Instinctive Connection between Physical and Moral Beauty: Lavater's Physiognomy -- Lavater's Concept of Female Beauty: Devotion versus Masquerade -- Lavater's Influence on Nineteenth-Century Culture -- Darwinian Physiognomy, Eugenics, and Snapshots of Objectivity -- Excising the Deviant during the Third Reich -- The Reveal: Understanding the New Physiognomy -- 2 The Dark Side of Beauty: From Convulsive Beauty to Makeover Disfiguration -- Beauty's Irresistible Promise -- Nadja, or Beauty's Convulsiveness -- "The Birthmark" and Other Autobiographies of Ugliness -- From Visible to Invisible Monsters -- The Case of Michael Jackson and Other Makeover Beauty Victims -- The New Beauty, or the Survival of the Made Over -- 3 Machinic Sutures: Twenty-First-Century Technologies of Beauty -- The Subtly Refreshed Look of Cosmetic Surgery -- Realism: "It Could Be Me!" -- The Swan: You Must Surrender -- E-FIT, or How to Draw a Suspect -- The Sims: Build, Buy, Live -- Self-ploitation, or When the Gaze Strikes Back -- 4 Editing Women: The Cosmetic Gaze and Cinema -- Cinematic Anesthesia: Cosmetic Surgery and Film -- In My Skin and In the Cut: Two Accounts of Femininity -- Activating the Female Gaze -- The Spectator as Cocreator -- Conclusion: From the Male Gaze to the Cosmetic Gaze -- Notes -- Index.

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

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2024. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.