The Cosmetic Gaze ─ Body Modification and the Construction of Beauty

If the gaze can be understood to mark the disjuncture between how we see ourselvesand how we want to be seen by others, the cosmetic gaze--in BernadetteWegenstein's groundbreaking formulation--is one through which the act of looking at our bodies andthose 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 bodiesas awaiting both physical and spiritual improvement. In The Cosmetic Gaze,Wegenstein charts this synthesis of outer and inner transformation. Wegenstein shows how thecosmetic gaze underlies the "rebirth" celebrated in today's makeover culture and how itbuilds upon a body concept that has collapsed into its mediality. In today's beauty discourse--onreality TV and Web sites that collect "bad plastic surgery"--we yearn to experience abettered self that has been reborn from its own flesh and is now itself, like a digitally remasteredcharacter in a classic Hollywood movie, immortal. Wegenstein traces the cosmetic gaze fromeighteenth-century ideas about physiognomy through television makeover shows and facial-recognitionsoftware to cinema--which, like our other screens, never ceases to show us our bodies as they couldbe, drawing life from the very cosmetic gaze it transmits.

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.