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Abstract:
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This article offers a contribution to ongoing philosophical, sociological, and feminist debates about
cosmetic surgery (1) and is part of a larger project that examines the spatial and temporal aims and
effects of cosmetic surgery, using media analysis and interviews with recipients and surgeons. The
mother project argues that cosmetic surgery is part of a suite of anti-aging tools-medical, lifestyle,
and beauty technologies- that, contrary to popular belief, do not aim to recreate youth but rather
are deployed to create a new phase of life identified as the "stretched middle age." However, this article
diverts to theorize-experimentally and heuristically-about cosmetic surgery in relation to
postmodern architecture. Re-reading Fredric Jameson's 1984 piece about Los Angeles' Westin
Bonaventura Hotel while immersed in the larger project led to speculation about how his description
might be adopted as an analytical template for an alternative way of approaching cosmetic
surgery. Furthermore, criticisms he makes of the Bonaventura as user-unfriendly and superficial
are adapted to describe cosmetic surgery as it is currently enacted. This analogy is then extended
in regard to another (later) postmodern structure, Melbourne's Federation Square. Z Analysis and
description of the site are projected onto cosmetic surgery with the aim of showing that the technology
has the possibility of a developmental trajectory similar to the one between the Bonaventura
and Federation Square. Rather than snag on the wholly literal-which might attempt to practically
describe the experiences of cosmetic surgically-altered has the potential to altered women in
various postmodern spaces-this exercise is mainly speculative and metaphoric. The standpoint is
intertwined with that of Kathryn Pauly Morgan, arguing that cosmetic surgery could contribute to a celebration of the fully participatory grotesque body as defined by Mary Russo. Some "extreme
practitioners" of cosmetic surgery are used as examples of how it has the opportunity to progress in
interesting and diverse directions, and these ideas are married with Federation Square's aesthetics
in order to imagine a future, possibly utopic, cosmetic surgery. |
