Media and the Rhetoric of Body Perfection

Cosmetic Surgery, Weight Loss and Beauty in Popular Culture

Deborah Harris-Moore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317098942
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Against the background of the so-called 'obesity epidemic', Media and the Rhetoric of Body Perfection critically examines the discourses of physical perfection that pervade Western societies, shedding new light on the rhetorical forces behind body anxieties and extreme methods of weight loss and beautification. Drawing on rich interview material with cosmetic surgery patients and offering fresh analyses of various texts from popular culture, including internationally-screened reality-television shows including The Biggest Loser, Extreme Makeover and The Swan as well as entertainment programs and documentaries, this book examines the ways in which Western media capitalize on body anxiety by presenting physical perfection as a moral imperative, while advertising quick and effective transformation methods to erase physical imperfections. With attention to contemporary lines of resistance to standards of thinness and attempts to redefine conceptions of beauty, Media and the Rhetoric of Body Perfection will appeal to scholars and students of popular culture, television, media and cultural studies, as well as the sociology of the body, feminist thought, body transformation and cosmetic surgery.

Chapter 1
Survival of the Fittest

In the West, where media graphically featuring both men’s and women’s bodies are abundant, it is difficult to identify, much less characterize, a dominant rhetorical trend related to bodies. Contradictory messages regarding the body can be found everywhere. These contradictory messages, which conflate and update normative definitions of beauty, make any ideal largely contextual and difficult to obtain. A magazine with contradictory messages also gives the appearance of ideological neutrality, but mostly for white, middle- to upper-class women. To cite a well-known case: plastic surgery icon Heidi Montag simultaneously represents a statuesque image of beauty and complete monstrosity. She has become the newest internationally recognized human Barbie doll since Sarah Burge, Cindy Jackson, and perhaps the most recognized but commonly overlooked Dolly Parton, whose formidable bust and platinum blonde hair undeniably made her the real life, if unexpectedly honky-tonk, Barbie of the 1980s. But due to Heidi Montag’s extreme plasticity and, according to dominant media sources, apparent psychological instability, she is not the ideal she hoped to become. In their study of the effects of actual Barbie dolls on self-image, Jacqueline Urla and Alan C. Swedlund point out the difficulty in tracing the sources of any popular ideal:

Neither universal nor changeless, idealized notions of both masculine and feminine bodies have a long history that shifts considerably across time, racial or ethnic group, class, and culture. Body ideals in twentieth-century North America are influenced and shaped by images from classical or “high” art, the discourses of science and medicine, and increasingly via a multitude of commercial interests, ranging from mundane life insurance standards to the more high-profile fashion, fitness, and entertainment industries. Each have played contributing, and sometimes conflicting, roles. (278)

Urla and Swedlund motion toward the growing range of commercial interests that profit from body rhetoric at the end of the 20th century, including a list of medical industries (insurance and fitness) and entertainment industries in order to indicate the wide-ranging spectrum. Their observation is correct, and at the time includes an imbedded prediction: we can likewise trace the growing popularity of entertaining and fictional medical shows such as ER, Scrubs, and House to the beginning of the 21st century. The discourses of science and medicine, as Urla and Swedlund observe, have always affected body ideals. These discourses have saturated weight loss and cosmetic surgery rhetoric, from news and political rhetoric regarding the obesity epidemic to the television shows featuring fictional or real plastic surgeons that change patient’s self-esteem and quality of life.

The many ways in which the weight loss market and cosmetic surgery market overlap is indicative of a larger rhetorical paradigm in the postmodern West; a rhetoric of perfection. Cosmetic surgery is an attempt to achieve a physical ideal or maintain youth, and weight loss carries with it a moral dimension aiming for perfection; for example, anorectics often are seeking control and perfection in their extreme weight loss. Moreover, if cosmetic surgeries have become more extreme, so too have weight loss methods, with gastric banding and bypass becoming increasingly popular in industrialized countries. I would argue that these procedures, however extreme, occur on a transformation spectrum, which is largely shaped by social constructions of health, normalcy, gender, and beauty. This chapter explores the rhetoric of perfection and agency, which, from a feminist and fat-studies perspective, shapes the weight loss industry and cosmetic surgery market. I argue that both weight loss and cosmetic surgery are rhetorically constructed in media as means of controlling the body and, according to related advertisements and popular representations, the rite of passage in becoming an agent in a competitive and body-obsessed society. Transformational rhetoric, whether in the realm of weight loss or cosmetic surgery, presupposes that people are not true agents until they accept improvement as a cultural imperative. In other words, people must actively participate in the transformation market, buying products and services, or surgeries, in order to improve their appearances.

Before we go any further, a word about the terms I deploy in this chapter. There are significant implications attending the use of terms such as overweight, obese, and fat. Amy Erdman Farrell argues in Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture that descriptive categories like overweight and obese come from the medical profession to categorize fat bodies. On the other hand, critics of the medicalization of particular weight categories have instead embraced the terms fat and fatness to lift the medical and stigmatized categorization of certain individuals, and to describe instead politics of identity. Following a trend in fat acceptance and activism, I will use the terms fat and fatness—along with Farrell and many other activists—unless I am reflecting the language of the medical profession including terms like obese and overweight, which are shaped by Body Mass Index categorizations. I will use these terms only for the sake of depicting its preferred terminology, or for the purpose of analyzing medical texts. Before I move specifically to the history and implications relevant to the rhetoric of fatness and weight, I include a discussion of agency and autonomy, etching out some critical theoretical considerations that affect both weight loss and cosmetic surgery rhetoric.

The Problem of Agency

At the center of many critical theories of the body, disability, and gender, the notion of agency has proven difficult to define and theorize. Many feminist scholars have debated body rhetorics and politics in terms of agency and whether performing bodies are subjects or objects in larger discourses surrounding the body. In a study on weight loss and cosmetic surgery, for instance, Jayne Raisborough examines the notion of self-formation from a sociological approach and explores the effects of what she calls “lifestyle media” on one’s relationship to the self. She argues that the goal of most people engaged in weight loss plans or undergoing cosmetic surgery work to be recognized in a society that only endorses the worth of certain bodily forms. According to Raisborough, standards of normalcy shape these definitions (20). But I would argue that medical rhetoric has infiltrated popular media on a large scale and become the governing terminology of competitive social arenas. Medical doctors have become popular fictional characters or reality stars on television shows such as Scrubs (NBC and ABC), House (Fox), and the reality show The Doctors (CBS). On cable networks such as The Medical Channel and The Learning Channel, cameras have infiltrated surgical rooms and filmed real surgeries as television drama. Cosmetic surgeons have reaffirmed standards of beauty through their fictional or real television ethos, represented often as creative gods in programs such as Nip/Tuck (FX) and Dr. 90210 (E!), and through their online presence in clinic websites and beauty blogs, such as sites where curious individuals can ask questions and a doctor will answer inquiries online.¹ Shows including The Swan (Fox), The Biggest Loser (NBC), and Bridalplasty (E!) have demonstrated that doctors are increasingly becoming a part of reality television shows in which participants compete for prizes through their transformations.

An extreme transformation, whether catalyzed by seemingly necessary bariatric surgery or conducted through a series of presumably elective cosmetic surgeries, present revealing, frequently overlapping theoretical and rhetorical considerations. Representations of transformation of all varieties moreover regularly conflate medical authority and necessity with cosmetic benefits; for example, most invasive weight loss and cosmetic surgeries require medical doctors to perform them. On the perfection spectrum, medical notions of health, wellness, and normalcy have become destabilized and less attainable through terminological slippages where health becomes operationalized; a few ubiquitous example phrases include notions of “healthy skin,” “healthy weight,” “healthy teeth,” and “healthy hair.” Youth is considered healthier than mature age, often conflating looking young with health and beauty. Since more cosmetic surgeons are showing up in various television genres, legitimizing the need for physical improvement, they have become major players in social competition. Social actors thus are not just yearning for recognition as Raisborough claims, they are in a constant fight for personal improvement. Perfection looms as an elusive mirage toward which consumers strive.

In the context of a self-improvement competition, the logic of placing, say, a bariatric patient deemed “morbidly obese” on a spectrum alongside a cosmetic surgery patient seeking breast implants will be questioned. But this move is entirely deliberate. By placing weight loss in the same theoretical realm as cosmetic surgery, and especially by comparing side-by-side extreme cases of both, I seek to draw attention to the social and competitive aspects that shape definitions of normalcy and beauty. Most importantly, I seek to de-emphasize the categorization of fatness as a strictly medical concern. In a culture where medicine has already mingled with popular media as a substantive force in everyday life, it is important to reverse the medical gaze and examine some “medical” and “pathological” problems like fatness as conflations with “popular” stereotypes. Most people do not live in isolation, unaware of popular culture. On the contrary, most people inhabit media-saturated spaces and internalize idealized representations of bodies. Many also experience the effects of negative stigmas, either from first-hand experience of being stigmatized themselves or by their participation in systems fraught with stereotyping. We cannot, in other words, pretend that losing weight is only about medical health.

To be certain, consumers are not puppet bodies hanging from the strings manipulated by nameable barons of medicine or popular culture. Foucault’s early formulation of bodies as objects of power systems—as disciplined and controlled—has been thoroughly refigured by feminists and disability scholars as an impossible and limited vision.² Yet many critics of body enhancement have adopted this bleak theoretical position, likely due to the difficulty in negotiating the contiguous material and symbolic dimensions of transformation. In Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Practices in the West, political science scholar Sheila Jeffreys presents an extreme argument regarding victimization, which captures, if not exaggerates, the rhetoric of victimhood. She argues Western beauty practices are detrimental to women, presenting an explicit argument early in her text subdued only slightly by her use of “hypophora”: “Should Western beauty practices, ranging from lipstick to labiaplasty, be included within the United Nations’ understanding of harmful traditional/cultural practices? By examining the role of common beauty practices in damaging the health of women, creating sexual difference, and enforcing female deference, this book argues that they should” (i). Through this question and immediate answer, Jeffreys asserts that traditional beauty practices such as makeup, shaving, and—to some extent—plastic surgery should be compared to cultural practices like female genital mutilation, the forced feeding of women, and other non-Western practices that have been considered cruel by outsiders. In her work, she concludes that consumers are victims of harmful Western cultural practices, but these practices have been widely accepted unlike other non-Western cultural traditions. In a subtler example, The New York Times journalist Alex Kuczynski details her own addiction to cosmetic and plastic surgery in Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession with Cosmetic Surgery,³ admitting that the addiction became a barrier to social relationships, even causing her to miss a friend’s funeral due to an appointment with her cosmetic surgeon. All of these writers create a binary that is stable and unyielding, where Western practices victimize women—and increasingly men—who then become ironically (and in some cases dangerously) dependent on their status as victims.

Discussions of agency like these tend to create a binary of power and powerlessness, in which theorists embrace extreme positions where individuals either are absolutely powerless or possess full agency. These extreme rhetorical constructs, shaped by experiences like Alex Kuczynki’s, have become popular in marketing approaches due to the general sensationalism and the extremity of the claims. Arguments about agency can lead to dead ends and often fail to reflect narratives of the majority of people who have undergone surgeries or body modification procedures. The danger is that consumers can develop a habit of identification with such representations, which reifies at once the power of bodily transformation and the powerlessness of the susceptible consumer. The extreme opposition to weight loss surgery and cosmetic surgery not only negates the actual complexity of an individual’s experience with these transformations, but limits any critic’s ability to offer any alternative readings that might actually interrupt, however temporarily and contextually, the social order.

Always a mediator of extreme binaries, Judith Butler offers one particularly useful explanation of the relationship between materiality and language, an explanation that brings rhetoricians closer to the definition of materialist rhetoric and offers an alternative to agency as it has been considered. In terms of body theory, Butler has contributed much to the field of rhetoric. Using Butler’s theories as a lens, I define materialist rhetoric by dealing, first, with the difficult tension between language and materiality and, second, with how bodies interact rhetorically with other bodies, materials, and texts. In Bodies That Matter, Butler poses the following question as a section title: “Are Bodies Purely Discursive?” Here, she points out difficulties with linguistic categories that are understood to denote the materiality of the body, that they are attempting to convey a referent that is “never fully or permanently resolved or contained by any given signified” (67). Language is forced to repeat the attempt, the circumscription, and it continues to fail. Still, Butler argues that by positing a materiality outside of language, the “materiality so posited will retain that positing as its constitutive condition” (67–8). In other words, language depends upon the positing of materiality, and so in that sense is part material itself. According to Butler, while language is not opposed to materiality, materiality cannot at once be fused with language as one entity. Instead, the potential for tensions between the two offer an opportunity to articulate and also re-envision different power relations, which emerge based on this tension.

Later in the same chapter, Butler moves to the topic of subject formation, referring to Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan to explain subjectivity and identity formation. Once the subject is conceived, it is named; that is, it is interpellated into particular identities through the act of identification from an outside source. The interpellated subject reacts to the interpellation through various forms of performance that respond to particular symbolic assignments, either performing to fulfill an assignment or performing to destabilize an assignment, or intermediary levels of resistance and acceptance. The interpellaters are also performing; they perform a particular naming. Performance becomes, then, not just an act, but a rhetorical paradigm in the form of a speech act. Butler defines performativity as “forms of authoritative speech: most performatives, for instance, are statements that, in the uttering, also perform a certain action and exercise a binding power” (225). The paradigmatic potential of performance is what becomes exposed through the performance. Butler calls this performance a reiteration of the gestures of power, but does not claim that the performance is a sign of victimization or ultimate power. She is careful to avoid essentialism or reductivism in her positioning. In her theory, subjects are always in an unstable relationship with their interpellators; every individual is interpellated, but individuals also have the potential to revise themselves in light of a particular naming. To read the act as an indication of weakness is ultimately impossible, and reading the symbolic assignment for gestures of power and the resulting performative as a responding gesture is far more productive. In other words, one cannot read a performance and conclude this person is ultimately weak or this person is all powerful. One can only read a performance for gestures of power, or in terms of power as dynamic and changing. To put it simply, power is contextual and fluid, and it is performed through symbolic acts.

While performance is generally a response to some preexisting interpellation, the performance itself, as Butler articulates, is also at some level a revision of that interpellation. While any performance is discursive in the sense that it is always in response to a citational legacy—such as a baptism, marriage, or legal proceeding where a legitimized precedent is set and that precedent defines social order in some way—it is also highly rhetorical in its own right; that is, where discursive analysis involves reading conversations and competing rhetorics, rhetorical analysis is particularly useful for reading any performance in terms of its unique rhetorical positionings and its potential for revision of existing interpellations. Weight loss and cosmetic surgery pose an interesting case of performativity because they complicate the subject/object binary. As performatives, cosmetic surgery and weight loss (whether through surgery or not) confer a binding power on the action performed in that they transform the body, and are often performed as a response to a chain of binding conventions that have arisen out of cultural and social definitions of health, thinness, beauty, youth, and normalcy. But the critical question remains: in a Butlerian formulation, are acts of bodily transformation, specifically cosmetic surgery and weight loss, acts of revision?

Postmodern theorists have attempted to address the question of revision by fully rejecting biologically deterministic structures of science and medicine. Inspired not least by Donna Haraway’s groundbreaking 1980 “Cyborg Manifesto,” other women have been exploring the realm of cybernetics as a promising site of agency for women and disenfranchised individuals. Katherine Hayle’s How We Became Posthuman has been a foundational resource in theories of the posthuman, new media, and cybernetics. She has been especially influential in defining embodiment. Jean Baudrillard, while he remains relatively antagonistic in relation to women’s studies, has been equally influential in theorizing postmodernity and its subtleties. His theories of simulation speak to the tension between reproduced images and the signified materiality. The relationship between the body and technology, including plastic surgery, depends on these theorists as well. Kim Toffoletti, in Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls: Feminism, Popular Culture and the Posthuman Body, positions the Barbie doll as a center of feminist debate. Barbie has commonly been attacked as a negative influence on young girls, an unnatural and unattainable vision of a Western beauty ideal. She most often is an emblem of scorn in the field of women’s studies, but has been, at the same time, a positive symbol in queer studies and some areas of cultural studies. Toffoletti, whose goal is to show Barbie’s contribution to posthuman theory, includes studies that have defended Barbie, including accounts by gay men who played with Barbies as kids and transgendered individuals who embody Barbie’s femininity and style. She also describes the cultural influence of Barbie historically, both as a representative of various female roles and cultural trends, but also as a popular collectible that embodies the history of women in fashion and industry. As an example of a positive interpretation of Barbie, she cites one study that examines Barbie collectors who sew clothes for Barbie to create relics of past eras. Barbie, she argues, has been unfairly attacked and taken too seriously as an example of a real body, when in fact Barbie’s plasticity promotes creativity and flux. She then develops a theory of body transformation based on Barbie’s fluid iconic representation.

Relying heavily on Baudrillard, Toffoletti relates posthuman theories to theori...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface
• 1 Survival of the Fittest
• 2 Mass Media and the Perfection Market
• 3 Reality Television Transformation
• 4 Fabricating Fatness and Transformation in Cinema
• 5 Gaining and Losing in Real-life Transformations
• 6 Resistant Bodies and the Politics of Perfection
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index