Abstract
A successful television comedy actress features under a banner that reads ‘Tortured lives’. Her ‘shock confession’ includes repeat cosmetic surgery and extreme dieting, but her circumstances and her outlook hardly invite pity:
‘I’ve always dreamt of looking beautiful. And now, with a pocketful of money and an opportunity to wear the most gorgeous designer clothing, I’m not going to blow my chance,’ says Patricia, who earns $11 million a year for her role [in Everybody Loves Raymond].1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Donna Haraway, ‘The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others’, in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler (eds), Cultural Studies, Routledge, New York and London, 1992, p. 312.
Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller and Sally Shuttleworth, ‘Introduction’, Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science, Routledge, New York and London, 1990, p. 2.
For a discussion of this development, see Maurice Bloch and Jean Bloch, ‘Women and the Dialectics of Nature in Eighteenth-century French Thought’, in C. McCormack and M. Strathern (eds), Nature, Culture and Gender, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 1980.
Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Allen and Unwin, St Leonards, 1994, p. 14.
Moira Gatens, ‘Towards a Feminist Philosophy of the Body’, Imaginaiy Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality, Routledge, London and New York, 1996, p. 51.
See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Brian Massumi (trans.), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1987; and Stuart Hall, “‘On Postmodernism and Articulation”, an Interview with Stuart Hall’, edited by Lawrence Grossberg in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, Routledge, London and New York, 1996.
Dorothy Nelkin and Susan Lindee, The DNA Mystique: The Gene as a Cultural Icon, W.H. Freeman, New York, 1995, p. 198. Jon Turney’s Frankenstein’s Footsteps: Science, Genetics and Popular Culture, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1998 likewise notes the ascendency of genetics within science and popular culture.
Paul Rabinow, ‘Artificiality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality’, in J. Crary and S. Kwinter (eds), Incorporations, Zone Books, New York, 1992, p. 236.
See, for instance, Judith Butler’s recent The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1997.
Chilla Bulbeck, Social Sciences in Australia: An Introduction, Harcourt Brace, Sydney, 1993, p. 386.
Michael Haralambos, Robert van Krieken, Philip Smith and Martin Holborn, Sociology: Themes and Perspectives, Australian edition, Longman, Melbourne, 1996, p. 716.
See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge, Robert Hurley (trans.), volume 1, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1978.
Germaine Greer, The Whole Woman, Doubleday, London, 1999.
Kathy Davis, Reshaping the Female Body: The Dilemma of Cosmetic Surgety, Routledge, New York and London, 1995.
Nikolas Rose, Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power and Personhood, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, p. 160.
quoted in ibid., p. 5.
See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, and Foucault, The History of Sexuality.
See Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful, pp. 167–8; Sander Gilman, Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul, Duke University Press, Durham, NC and London, 1998, p. 11.
See Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1988.
Deborah Lupton, The Imperative of Health: Public Health and the Regulated Body, Sage, London, 1995, p. 79.
John Adams notes the connections between risk taking and heroism in his Risk, UCL Press, London, 1995, p. 2.
Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1987, p. 5.
Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1993.
Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, Vintage, London and New York, 1991.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, H.M. Parshley (trans.), Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1972.
Martin Danahay, ‘Mirrors of Masculine Desire: Narcissus and Pygmalion in Victorian Representation’, Victorian Poetry, vol. 32, no. 1, Spring, 1994, p. 35. Kathy Davis makes a similar point in “A Dubious Equality”’.
John Woodforde, The History of Vanity, St Martin’s Press, New York, 1992, p. XX.
Valerie Tiberius and John D. Walker, ‘Arrogance’, American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 4, October 1998, p. 379.
See Anne Ring, ‘The Countdown to New Heights of Sexist Ageism in the Media of the New World Order’, in M. Alexander et al. (eds), Refashioning Sociology, Australian Sociological Association Conference Proceedings, Brisbane, 1998 for a discussion of this phenomenon in the context of the media.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2003 Suzanne Fraser
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Fraser, S. (2003). Glossing Femininity: Women’s Magazines. In: Cosmetic Surgery, Gender and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230500228_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230500228_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-51160-0
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-50022-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social & Cultural Studies CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)