Beauty, Women's Bodies and the Law: Performances in Plastic

400 Pages·2020·4.776 MB·English

by  Jocelynne A. Scutt

Beauty, Women’s
Bodies and the Law
Performances in Plastic
Jocelynne A. Scutt
Beauty, Women’s Bodies and the Law
Jocelynne A. Scutt
Beauty, Women’s
Bodies and the Law
Performances in Plastic
Jocelynne A. Scutt
University of Buckingham
Buckingham, UK
ISBN 978-3-030-27997-4 ISBN 978-3-030-27998-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27998-1
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020
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Contents
1 Introduction—The Body Plastic 1
1 Brain & Body, Brain vs Body 1
2 The Body Perfect/Imperfect 5
3 The Body as Image 11
4 My Body, Your Opinion 16
5 The Body as ‘I’ 20
2 The Body Beneath the Knife 29
1 The Body in the Beauty Parlour 30
2 The Body on the Operating Table 42
3 The Criminal Body and the Body in Crime 58
4 The Criminal, the Civil and the Role of the Law 66
3 Above the Shoulder Blades 79
1 Her Crowning Glory 79
2 Oh! My Face … a Retroussé Nose & Pinned Ears 88
3 Around the Eyes & Rounded Eyes … 97
4 For Bee-Stung Lips, Whiter-Than-White Teeth, Receding
Chins & Measures Under the Neck 102
5 Plastic Faces or ‘The New Normal’? 109
v
vi CONTENTS
4 All Above the Waist 119
1 Over and Above the Bosom 120
2 Bust, Bosom, Breasts … 134
3 Reclaiming Our Bodies, Our Selves—Beginning
with Breasts & Chests 150
5 Below the Belt and Under the Waist … 165
1 Muffin Top Madness 165
2 Around the Fatty Abdomen 171
3 Within the Fatty Abdomen 180
4 What Lies Beneath … 187
5 Bad Body Hair … Comes Good? 198
6 Our Rounded Bits … 211
1 Rounding Up vs Rounding Down 212
2 The Bottom as Bustle … 219
3 Bottoms, Hips, Thighs … 222
4 Exposing My Midriff or Where Are My Abs? 232
5 Suction Up, Suction Down 236
7 Extremities: From the Tips of Her Fingers to the Tips
of Her Toes 249
1 The Moons of My Nails, O’er My Elegant Hands … 249
2 Upon Raising Her Arms to the Sky 257
3 From My Elbows to the Bush Within My Armpits 262
4 Legs, Knees, Ankles & Feet … 269
5 Feet, Ankles, Knees & Legs … 274
6 To the Tips of Her Toes— 279
7 Fingers, Hands, Nails, Toes—The Extremities That
Count 283
8 Conclusion: Beyond the Body … 297
1 Recovering the Body … 298
2 My Body, My Self— 307
Bibliography 325
Index 373
CHAPTER 1
Introduction—The Body Plastic
Desiring normality
she was labelled with vanity
Whilst some said she chose
every change to her body
In plastic
1 Brain & Body, Brain vs Body
The painter Gwen John was both gifted artist and muse to the sculptor
Rodin. She painted and she posed, exercising cerebral artistry and phys-
ical dexterity in her own work whilst responding intellectually and bodily
to Rodin’s creativity. For an artist, painting is creative and physically
demanding. This is nowhere better exhibited than through Gwen John’s
Self-Portrait in a Red Blouse.1 In the biography Gwen John—A Life,
Sue Roe explains that the picture ‘would have required endless, metic-
ulous concentration’.2 Finding it physically strenuous, even exhausting,
Gwen John herself ‘likened painting in oils to doing housework’.3 Her
words are echoed by women working in the arts, including sculpture,4
ceramics,5 photography,6 craft,7 filmmaking8 and directing.9 As director
and filmmaker Karen Buczynski-Lee says:
© The Author(s) 2020 1
J. A. Scutt, Beauty, Women’s Bodies and the Law,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27998-1_1
2 J. A. SCUTT
Making a film is like constructing a jigsaw puzzle, moving, thinking and
communicating multidimensionally to translate artistic vision into the film
medium. Without physical and mental multitasking, filmmaking cannot
happen.10
This epitomises Gwen John’s life. In her work, as in the work of the
sculptor Camille Claudel,11 another of Rodin’s muses, she exemplified
the reality that women are both brains and body, body and mind.
Yet the way women’s bodies have been regarded over time tends to
undercut this truth. It is not simply that many looking upon the work of
artists or sculptors may fail to realise that the figure of the woman there
represented is more than body, more than emotional energy or inspi-
ration for the man (as it usually is)12 who painted or sculpted her. In
all life’s realms, woman-as-body rather than woman-as-mind or, better
still, woman-as-mind-and-body, has a propensity to dominate. Thus, the
inventionofphotographyandfilmheraldednewwaystorepresentwomen
in the same old way. Woman-as-body was confirmed and promoted
through these new mediums, harbingers of the twentieth-century inven-
tion of the beauty contest13 and the film actor as star, then as celebrity.
In the Countess de Castiglione, Abigail Solomon-Godeau provides an
example of the way photography solidified the traditional notion of
woman-as-object, despite the Countess’ engagement as a director of her
own images, bringing ingenuity, creativity, skill and knowledge of the
camera and what it could do. As Solomon-Godeau recounts, from the
mid- to the end of the nineteenth century, Countess de Castiglione was
photographed relentlessly by Louis Pierson of Mayer & Pierson.14 On
some accounts, in her younger years, then as she aged, photographers
Adolph Braun and Gaston Braun respectively trained their lenses untir-
ingly upon her, too. Yet she was equally untiring. This woman who has
historicallybeendepictedasawillinglyaccommodatinghumanobjectwas
anything but. However apparently compliant in the eye of the camera
(and the cameraman) she might appear, the Countess was at work, mind
and body. Both famous and infamous in her pursuit of the celluloid
image,shewasphotographedinposesunconventionalforoneofherclass,
déshabillé, legs akimbo and flying, head winsomely leaning towards the
camera.
Stylingheressay‘TheLegsoftheCountess’,AbigailSolomon-Godeau
reclaims the Countess as actor and director of herself as subject. She
draws attention to the three types of women who publicly populated the
period of the Second (French) Empire and the Third (French) Republic
when the Countess figured in the eye of the lens. These three were the
1 INTRODUCTION—THE BODY PLASTIC 3
prostitute, uniting (to paraphrase Solomon-Godeau) in her person both
the commodity and the seller; the dancer or actress being ‘the spec-
tacle within the spectacle – who is perceived as a type of circulating
goods’; and the ‘beautiful, worldly woman’, both idea and ideal ‘end-
lessly hypostatized, scrutinized and dissected’.15 It was at this time that
Karl Marx wrote ‘The Fetishism of Commodities’.16 Solomon-Godeau
remarksandreflectsuponthis,drawingattentiontotheincreasingfetishi-
sation and commodification of women and women’s bodies during this
period. Simultaneously, the industrial revolution led to a downgrading of
skills on which women prided themselves and for which they had had
some acknowledgement. Industrialisation homogenised production and,
hence,theworkandtheworkerscreatingtheproduct.Womenasworkers
took on the role of automaton in the factory, or body on the street.
Women who did not work in the world of industry became celebrated
as ‘the lilies of the field’.17 Idealised as neither toiling nor spinning, they
gracedsocietyasobjectstobelookedupon,theirvaluelyinginthebodies
they inhabited and the clothes they wore.18
The following century, the focus on women’s bodies, and women as
bodies, if anything deepened. Women’s attention to their own bodies
as if they were canvases to be worked upon and titivated, transformed
and changed at the hands of women themselves, or through the hands
of others employed to renovate their person, intensified. Writing in
1993, Susan Bordo examined this phenomenon. She expressed concern
that in the 1980s, ‘a decade marked by the reopening of the public
arena to women’, women were ‘spending more time on the manage-
ment and discipline of our bodies than we have in a long, long time’.19
For Bordo, the principal influence in this is not ‘chiefly … ideology’,
but ‘the organization and regulation of the time, space, and move-
ments of our daily lives’. This, she said, ‘trains, shapes and impresses’
women’sbodieswith‘thestampofprevailinghistoricalformsofselfhood,
desire, masculinity, femininity’.20 Women’s bodies, rather than brains,
wereforegrounded,thetrapsetbyever-increasingcosmeticsandperfume
production—alongside a growing aesthetic, cosmetic and plastic surgery
industry.
Today’s women, Susan Bordo posits, are engaged in the pursuit of
‘an ever-changing, homogenizing, elusive ideal of femininity’, a pursuit
without end.21 Women are required constantly to ‘attend to minute and
often whimsical changes in fashion’. Women’s bodies thereby become
‘docile bodies—bodies whose forces and energies are habituated to
4 J. A. SCUTT
external regulation, subjection, transformation, improvement’. The ‘cen-
tral organizing principles’ of women’s daily lives, from when we rise in
the morning to going to bed at night, are the ‘exacting and normal-
izing disciplines of diet, makeup, and dress’.22 And, faced with this daily
regime, where our bodies are a focus of our everyday living—not from
vanity,norfromnarcissism,butbecausethisisthewaylivesatleastinthe
Western world are ordered, our bodies are never good enough.
In Flesh Wounds—The Culture of Cosmetic Surgery, Virginia L. Blum
also highlights women’s connection with their physical selves and,
through this, identifying their own physical imperfections. She refers to
‘the perceived flaws of the female body’,23 providing an opening for
plasticsurgeonswhoviewthemselves‘as“healers”ofcosmeticdefects’.24
Theyseetheirwork,too,ashealingthe‘emotionaldesperation’ofwomen
who detect flaws in their bodies writ large—sufficiently large, that is, to
seek the surgeon’s scalpel. Surgeons, Blum writes, conceive of their work
not as damaging healthy bodies, but as ‘helping’ women to reconstruct
not only their bodies, but their lives. Albeit on the one hand appre-
hended as miracle work, making and remaking the ideal, the work they
doonwomen’sbodiesis‘maintenance’,saysonesurgeon.Theobligation
falling upon women is that akin to the good householder who paints the
house regularly, as required.25 In the same vein, the good householder
would ensure that the gutters are kept free of weeds and bird droppings,
leaves and other detritus, or repair bulging window frames and shutters,
orreplaceorreordersaggingbrickworkandtilesgoneawry.Unabletodo
this alone, the householder must call upon the skilled services of special-
ists. When maintenance of women’s bodies is required, therefore, the
skilled specialist provides the answer.
Virginia Blum identifies a moralism creeping in. Middle-class morality
requireshomeupkeep.Thissegueseffortlesslyintoamoralimperativefor
the ageing woman. Here, Blum apprehends the work of Robin Tolmach
Lakoff and Rachel L. Scherr who in Face Value: The Politics of Beauty
observethatsometimes‘inthepopularmediaitissuggestedthatawoman
has a virtual moral duty – to herself and those who must behold her …’.
Thisrequiresthatshe‘removethosewrinklesandbags,tuckthattummy,
raise those breasts’.26 Or, rather, that she seek out an aesthetic, cosmetic
or plastic surgeon to do so.
Theimperativeofnormalityinfusesthesurgeon’sexpositionandjusti-
fication,too. Iftwenty-five years classifiesas maturity andif, at this age,a
woman‘hadexactlytherightamountofskincomingfromthebrowdown