Beauty In On The Cutting Edge By Anne Balsmore

725 Words2 Pages

In today’s society, there’s this need to be perfect in every way especially beauty-wise. A need to be society’s ideal form or image of beauty. If you don’t fit that image, then you are considered unattractive or inferior to someone that does. Also, society will try to convince you to hide yourself away from the public. Like power is equal to beauty. The more beautiful you are according to society’s standards, the more power and “privilege” you receive. This is why in the reading called “On the cutting edge”, by Anne Balsamo, she takes up the idea of the body as visual text which makes it able to be fragmented and placed under a microscope. As far as cosmetic surgery goes, Balsamo uses three mechanisms of cultural control which are “inscription, surveillance, and confession” (pg. 56). Surveillance is the another form of the Foucault’s model, where the body needs to be disciplined and watched so that it can conform to society’s standards and become a docile body. Inscription is the pathology and fragmentation of the female body being seen as flawed and always in need of repair. While confession is when the woman admits she is need of fixing or repairing, i.e. cosmetic surgery.
The “medical glaze” as described also by Carole Spitzack, is that the surgeon’s glaze is like Foucault’s medical glaze. This glaze presents the female body as unruly, excessive, pathological, and potentially threatening. The connection between how the cosmetic surgeon’s glaze translates the body like puzzle, as if it’s an object to encode, redefine, and then surgically manipulated the different “parts” of the body as see fit. Balsamo explains that relations of race, ethnicity, and class intersect to shape normative ideals of a “standard human” in diagram...

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...fession as “corrections” of medical conditions. Balsamo says the body is no longer thought to hold its own truths anymore because truths become technologically constructed. Cosmetic surgery can be by today’s standards as “fashion surgery”. Just like women who get tattoos or piercings, women who choose to cosmetic surgery as an avenue could be seen as using their as vehicle for staging cultural identities according to Balsamo. Even though she has argued that cosmetic surgeons demonstrate an unrelenting belief in a “westernized notion of natural beauty” and surgery is furthering this belief that the pleasing aesthetic face is one of pure, white, clean symmetric face. And that if you want to have power, privilege, and the social status, then you must strive to become that face that today’s society demands you have in order to be considered “normal” and “competent”.

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