plastic surgery

Pretty Modern: Beauty, Sex, and Plastic Surgery in Brazil

mandy — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 08:00:00 +0000

In this well-crafted ethnography, anthropologist Alexander Edmonds explores narratives and practices surrounding plastic surgery in contemporary Brazil. Cosmetic procedures, or estetica, have been increasing rapidly among the urban populations. Rather than simply lamenting the increase of plastic surgeries in a country famous for embracing the sensual, Edmonds instead explores the reasons why estetica has become so popular across race, class, and gender lines. Examining beauty culture in Brazil from an ethnographic perspective, he suggests in Pretty Modern that it is essential to understand what beauty means and does for differently located social actors.

Arguing that anthropologists have typically ignored the aesthetics and erotic allure of beauty, he instead takes practices such as plastic surgery seriously for what they can reveal about the fears and aspirations of urban Brazilians. He begins from the premise that perceptions and acts of beautification can only be understood within specific moments and relationships, and he set out to explore the locations where definitions of beauty are defined and negotiated: cosmetic surgery clinics, public hospitals, TV studios, favelas, cafes, and homes.

Edmonds interviewed and observed plastic surgeons, celebrities, fashion models, low-income domestic workers, media producers, and housewives in order to make sense of the increasing popularity of plastic surgery. He shadowed doctors, students, and patients in hospitals and clinics to observe consultations, surgeries, and trainings. Additionally, he engaged with images and stories of plastic surgery in popular culture through ethnographic observations of media production sites and textual analysis of magazines dedicated to estetica.

Throughout Pretty Modern, Edmonds follows two simultaneous lines of analysis. First, he uses the specific socio-historical circumstances of contemporary Brazil to shed light on the significance of beauty and cosmetic surgery. At the same time, he uses the desire for beauty as a point of entry to examine the larger tensions and anxieties of modernizing Brazil, specifically the effects of the global capitalist economy, market inequalities, and consumer culture.

The book is organized into three interrelated sections, which each focus on plastic surgery in relation to a particular domain of modern experience: medicine and psychology, race and nation, and gender and sexuality. First, Edmonds provides a genealogy of self-esteem and shows how this concept has allowed plastic surgery to be mobilized as treatment for mental suffering. He situates this analysis in the longer history of medical and therapeutic techniques of self-governance in Brazil and examines how the redefinition of cosmetic surgery as a method of “aesthetic health” has produced a language of rights around these practices.

Next, Edmonds contextualizes current beauty practices through Brazilian nationalism and local racial politics, and explores the historically specific ways that color, beauty, and power intersect. He unpacks the aesthetics of race and the scientific racism that imbues discussions of beauty and appearance in past and present Brazil.

Finally, Edmonds examines the role of cosmetic surgery in relation to the larger political economy of female reproduction. Specifically, he shows the ways that plastic surgery highlights the tensions between women’s roles as sexual and maternal subjects and argues that plastic surgeries have become naturalized as part of women’s health along with cesareans and tubal litigations.

Edmond’s thorough analysis is shaped by his engagement with broader literatures on Brazilian history and anthropology, capitalist modernity, neoliberal subjectivity, and the political economy of desire. However, Pretty Modern also reflects the best aspects of ethnographic research and writing: thick descriptions of personalities, spaces, and encounters; detailed accounts of conversations with a wide array of people; and a refusal to ignore or explain away the contradictions that shape people’s perceptions and practices in everyday life.

Written by: Traci Yoder, April 5th 2011

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work

admin — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 00:28:00 +0000

Directed by Anne Sundberg, Ricki Stern

In the previous millennium when I was an idealistic young thing attending Barnard College, the women’s college affiliated with Columbia University, there was a lot of talk about who before us had walked the hallowed halls: anthropologist Margaret Mead; writers Edna St. Vincent Millay, Zora Neale Thurston, Francine du Plessix Gray, Patricia Highsmith and Ntozake Shange; recent United States ambassador to the U.N. Jeanne Kirkpatrick; musicians Laurie Anderson and Suzanne Vega (whose song “Luka” was then on all the airwaves); NPR’s Susan Stamberg; nationally syndicated columnist Anna Quindlen; choreographer Twyla Tharp; and a pre-Omnimedia Martha Stewart, whose daughter had also recently attended.

We students looked up to these women, our heroes. No trivia about them was too slight to swap and discuss. But I can only remember a couple of times when the name Joan Rivers was mentioned, and then only with a smirk. It seemed unbelievable that someone like her—brash, crass, undignified, disfigured by plastic surgery even then—could have once been part of our very serious undertakings in academia and feminism. Above all, we were earnest, and serious, and she was not.

The truth is that we failed to recognize Rivers for the pioneer she was. Those were the early days of Seinfeld. The backstage world of stand up comedy was still a mystery. There was no Comedy Central. We had no idea how brutal the world was in which she had risen. What a boy’s club. We were feminists, but we still thought we had to be ladies, or at least decorous. We disapproved of Joan Rivers.

Well, what did we know? Martha would go on to rule over all things female: weddings, entertaining, flowers, crafts, cooking. But the surprise is that Joan Rivers, now seventy-five years old, who seemed even then to be on the wane, continues. And the entertaining new documentary, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work shows the incredible scrappiness and determination it has taken her to survive.

Born in 1933, Joan Rivers grew up Joan Molinsky in affluent Larchmont, NY, a dark-haired girl with a big nose. Her mother, as she relates, continually assured her that “looks don’t matter.” Meaning that she was ugly and they all knew it. “No man,” Joan says, at one particularly poignant moment, “has ever told me I looked beautiful. Oh, they say, ‘You look great!’ But never beautiful.” And so the plastic surgeries began—very early, from all appearances. By the time of her first TV appearances, in the mid-1960s, her nose had been transformed into a ski slope, although not yet the snub it is today.

Part of the fascination of the film is the grotesque state of her present face, with eyes slanted to cat-like angles from numerous lifts and lips and cheeks so swollen she can sometimes barely speak. But despite her obsession with her looks, Joan is, in an interesting way, completely without vanity. The film opens with her bare face, shot closer-up than any of us would allow for ourselves. One can see the veins in her eyelids and hints of scar tissue around her eyes and nose. She looks old, unhealthy, fragile, almost dead. Gradually, thick stage makeup is slapped on, in a healthy golden shade that gives no hint of the ashen, ruddy skin beneath. Heavy eye shadows and liners, lip liners and lipstick, until the Joan we know from photos finally emerges. It is a complete transformation. Joan has really let us see the real her underneath.

She even allows the camera to run right after she returns from a session at the dermatologist, where she’s been all “shot up.” Her face is splotchy from the needle, her cheeks puffed up so high it looks as though she’s suffering a horrible allergic reaction. But what Joan needs more than anything, far more than dignity, is attention. If the camera wants to roll, she’s game.

In the same way she is completely open about the ups and downs of her career, her relationships with her husband and daughter, the humiliations, anger, fears and needs that drive her. She even agrees, for the money, to a celebrity roast she finds mean and hurtful. She needs the money to fund her unbelievably lavish lifestyle. She has ridden in only limousines “since 1986.” And she lives in insane palatial comfort. Her manager says it’s like “the Queen of England.” Joan says it’s like “Maria (sic) Antoinette.” Let’s just say poor Bernie Madoff lived like a pauper compared to Joan. But she is also generous to her numerous staff. They are paid well, and Joan takes care of their children’s private school tuitions too. No wonder they are devoted. Good thing. It looks as though her staff are the only ones celebrating her 75th birthday. And one of the saddest moments in the film is when she says she has probably only three friends whom she can call to share a piece of good news.

And so it’s work, work and more work for Joan, who is perhaps just as driven as the legendary Martha. From Florida to Connecticut to the backwoods of Wisconsin, from plane to plane, convention hall to casino to QVC to shill the jewelry that makes her millions, despite the indignities, humiliation and exhaustion, Joan soldiers on.

Joan is all the things we young Barnard women abhorred back in the day: rude, obnoxious, offensive, freakish. But she is also a woman who recognized what she needed and went out to get it. Self-made, self-perpetuating, hard-working and indefatigable, Joan Rivers is a force to be reckoned with, indeed a piece of work.

Cross-posted at Frothygirlz.com

Written by: Grace @ Frothygirlz.com, August 3rd 2010

Youth Knows No Pain

admin — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 04:07:00 +0000

Directed by Mitch McCabe

HBO Films

Four viewings of Mitch McCabe’s documentary, Youth Knows No Pain, have me scratching my head. I am puzzled over exactly what McCabe was attempting to say with this film. Is Youth Knows No Pain a love letter to McCabe’s deceased plastic surgeon father or an obsession with mortality? Is this is a commentary on the consumerism and increasing narcissism of Western society? How about a meditation on how youth obsessed Americans are? An exploration of how ageism and sexism conflate to render women of a certain age invisible? Youth Knows No Pain is all of these things and none of these things. The film is rather unfocused, never deeply delving into any of the issues raised.

The film all too often degenerates into navel-gazing. McCabe is obsessed with her own image, and there are no fewer than forty shots of McCabe gazing into mirrors or taking photographs of herself. McCabe admits she spends exorbitant sums on wrinkle creams, despite $70,000 of debt. She also says she would happily let her health insurance lapse so that she can afford salon visits every six weeks.

Youth Knows No Pain’s other subjects are equally shallow. Shelley soothes the pain of an impoverished upbringing with unabashed materialism; dropping $35,000 on plastic surgery in one year, she states that she misses being the target of street harassment. Lyndsay feels its her asymmetrical mouth that holds her back from a career in broadcasting. Dr. Zein Obagi injected his fifteen year old daughter with Botox. Erica, another daughter of a plastic surgeon, aspires to appear in Playboy. Erica’s father, Frank, regularly criticized his daughter’s appearance during her teen years, going so far as to ask her if her breasts were symmetrical. And I wanted to slap the taste out of Gary’s mouth when he suggests Hillary Clinton is long overdue for plastic surgery because, according to him, no one wants to see a woman looking “old and haggy.”

All of the subjects state that plastic surgery makes people feel good and that alone is a sufficient justification for it. The subjects equate aging with being ugly and alone, an assumption McCabe seems to share as she never challenges it. Many of the subjects insensitively insult McCabe’s appearance, but McCabe doesn’t have the salt to call any of them on it. She seems not the least bit interested in the “grow old gracefully” position, either. Two interviewees expressed outright disdain for cosmetic procedures, decrying society’s fear of the aged, but neither woman is identified by name and neither gets more than two minutes of screen time.

The film’s title is belied by an interview early in the film. One subject bursts into tears upon seeing a picture of himself at age twenty-four, stating that he was thinking of all the things he put himself through at that age. He also remains unidentified and is never seen again. Freak Out Over Aging would have been a much better title for this movie, which premieres tonight at 9 p.m. EST/PST on HBO.

Written by: Ebony Edwards-Ellis, August 31st 2009