From Publishers Weekly
When Blum was a teenager, her mother convinced her to have rhinoplastic surgery; since it might increase her daughter's marriage-market value, it seemed to her mother irresponsible not to. A botched job resulted in further corrections, Blum's incurable addiction to surgery-and this book. As an English professor at the University of Kentucky and admitted participant in the culture of perfective surgery, Blum manages the language of media theory and In Style magazine with equal aptitude. As face lifts and tummy tucks become increasingly affordable to middle-class Americans, Blum argues, even those who have never considered the knife cannot escape cosmetic surgery's implications and its pervasive promotion by everyone from doctors to those who play them on TV. Having interviewed numerous plastic surgeons, Blum shows how they promise to reveal one's "authentic" inner self by unmooring that self from its current physical expression. Blum suggests that our pursuit of a superior "after picture" arises from our identification with two-dimensional stars of page and screen: celebrity culture's mirror stage. But as surgeons promise to harmonize the patient's eternally youthful self-image with a traitorous aging body, they obfuscate the actual, unattainable object of desire: not one's own lost figure, but the image of the star (itself often surgically maintained). According to Blum, such confusions bring either repeated surgeries or aggression toward celebrity bodies (witness our tabloid fascination with stars' surgery, and Internet games like Smack Pamela Anderson). While Blum's claim that "little by little, we are all becoming movie stars-internally framed by the camera eye" might seem unduly cataclysmic, even "non-surgical" women may value her honest probing of the paradoxical sense that "I am my body and yet I own my body." 18 b&w photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"Considers ways in which the practice of cosmetic surgery captures the condition of identity."--The Bookseller
Book Description
When did cosmetic surgery become a common practice, the stuff of everyday conversation? In a work that combines a provocative ethnography of plastic surgery and a penetrating analysis of beauty and feminism, Virginia L. Blum searches out the social conditions and imperatives that have made ours a culture of cosmetic surgery. From diverse viewpoints, ranging from cosmetic surgery patient to feminist cultural critic, she looks into the realities and fantasies that have made physical malleability an essential part of our modern-day identity. For a cultural practice to develop such a tenacious grip, Blum argues, it must be fed from multiple directions: some pragmatic, including the profit motive of surgeons and the increasing need to appear young on the job; some philosophical, such as the notion that a new body is something you can buy or that appearance changes your life. Flesh Wounds is an inquiry into the ideas and practices that have forged such a culture. Tying the boom in cosmetic surgery to a culture-wide trend toward celebrity, Blum explores our growing compulsion to emulate what remain for most of us two-dimensional icons. Moving between personal experiences and observations, interviews with patients and surgeons, and readings of literature and cultural moments, her book reveals the ways in which the practice of cosmetic surgery captures the condition of identity in contemporary culture.
Download Description
When did cosmetic surgery become a common practice, the stuff of everyday conversation? In a work that combines a provocative ethnography of plastic surgery and a penetrating analysis of beauty and feminism, Virginia L. Blum searches out the social conditions and imperatives that have made ours a culture of cosmetic surgery. From diverse viewpoints, ranging from cosmetic surgery patient to feminist cultural critic, she looks into the realities and fantasies that have made physical malleability an essential part of our modern-day identity. For a cultural practice to develop such a tenacious grip, Blum argues, it must be fed from multiple directions: some pragmatic, including the profit motive of surgeons and the increasing need to appear young on the job; some philosophical, such as the notion that a new body is something you can buy or that appearance changes your life. Flesh Wounds is an inquiry into the ideas and practices that have forged such a culture. Tying the boom in cosmetic surgery to a culture-wide trend toward celebrity, Blum explores our growing compulsion to emulate what remain for most of us two-dimensional icons. Moving between personal experiences and observations, interviews with patients and surgeons, and readings of literature and cultural moments, her book reveals the ways in which the practice of cosmetic surgery captures the condition of identity in contemporary culture.--This text refers to the Digital edition.
About the Author
Virginia L. Blum is Associate Professor of English at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of Hide and Seek: The Child Between Psychoanalysis and Fiction (1995). Rating 4.5
Review of Flesh Wounds: The Culture of Cosmetic SurgeryVirginia L. Blum examines the topic of cosmetic surgery in her research-based informational book Flesh Wounds: The Culture of Cosmetic Surgery. The book, written by the English professor at the University of Kentucky, appeals to many audiences, is informative in many subjects, and is greatly influenced by her background with cosmetic surgery. Flesh Wounds can be widely used because she uses the book to inform the public on the basics and the inside Randy/ Oklahoma State UniversityThe book Flesh Wounds: The Culture of Cosmetic Surgery by Virginia L. Blum takes the reader into the minds of the individuals influenced by cosmetic surgery. Blum is an English Professor at the University of Kentucky and she became a victim of the cosmetic surgery craze when she was a teenager. Blum writes a very intriguing book about how cosmetic surgery captivates the interests of patients. She points out that society has taken to the fascination of cosmetic surgery, due to the fixation on celebrities. Celebrities stand as a two-dimensional image, where society looks to celebrities for body images. Celebrities are also looking elsewhere for body images too. Society is slowly turning into a unified body mold. Basically society is going to one day be seperated by groups of body types. Society is losing the individual identity that has supported our cultures for years. Flesh Wounds contributes to an understanding of why society is so focused on the outter appearences. Today, society is based on two negative aspects, that is whether a person is attractive or unattractive. Beauty does not make a person more intelligent, nor does not being beautify make a person less intelligent. I liked this book, because Blum does an impressive job providing the evidence of how cosmetic surgery is destroying individualism. |
