Table Of ContentVanity: 21st Century Selves
Also by JaneMaree Maher
THE GLOBALIZATION OF MOTHERHOOD: Deconstructions and
Reconstructions of Biology and Care ( co-e dited with W. Chavkin)
THE FERTILE IMAGINATION: Narratives of Birth, Fertility, and Loss ( co- edited
with M. Kirkman and K. Souter)
Also by Suzanne Fraser
MAKING DISEASE, MAKING CITIZENS: The Politics of Hepatitis C (with
K. Seear)
THE DRUG EFFECT: Health, Crime and Society ( co- edited with D. Moore)
SUBSTANCE AND SUBSTITUTION: Methadone Subjects in Liberal Societies
(with k. valentine)
COSMETIC SURGERY, GENDER AND CULTURE
Vanity: 21st Century Selves
Claire Tanner, JaneMaree Maher and Suzanne Fraser
Centre for Women’s Studies and Gender Research,
School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University, Australia
© Claire Tanner, JaneMaree Maher and Suzanne Fraser 2013
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First published 2013 by
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13
Contents
List of Illustrations vi
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction
Vanity: Language, Bodies and Material Conditions 1
1 Modern Vanity: Consumption, the Body Beautiful and
the New Political Subject 21
2 Fitness, ‘Wellbeing’ and the Beauty–Health Nexus 60
3 Anti-A geing Medicine and the Consumption of Youth 88
4 Enacting ‘Reality’: Fat Shame, Admiration
and Reflexivity 116
5 Digital Narcissism: Social Networking, Blogging
and the Tethered Self 150
Conclusion 178
Notes 186
References 187
Index 204
v
List of Illustrations
1.1 Charles Allan Gilbert, All is Vanity, 1902 34
1.2 Eugen Sandow 1902, State Library of Victoria,
Australia. Creator: Henry Goldman 42
vi
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the Australian Research Council
for funding the study on which we have based some of our analysis
(Discovery Project DP110101759). The chief investigators on this study
were Suzanne Fraser, Jan Wright, JaneMaree Maher and Alan Petersen.
Our thanks also go to the participants in this study, whose words appear
in Chapters 2 and 4. We very much appreciate the time they took in
taking part in our research, and their candour. In addition, we thank
those who helped us recruit participants for the research: the staff at the
three childcare centres in Melbourne, Australia, in which our research
was conducted.
All three authors are based in the Centre for Women’s Studies and
Gender Research, School of Political and Social Inquiry, Faculty of Arts,
Monash University. We thank our colleagues and students for creating
a stimulating environment in which to write. Claire would especially
like to thank Marian Quartly for her infectious love of the t urn- of-
the- twentieth-c entury period, historical wisdom and eye for spectacle
and detail. She would also like to thank Sam Cadman for lengthy
discussions by the sea and bottomless cups of peppermint tea.
JaneMaree would like to thank Amy Dobson in particular for many
great c onversations about young women, online presences and new
femininities. Suzanne would like to thank David Moore for his much
appreciated support during the course of this project, as well as her
family for generally keeping life so interesting.
The image in Illustration 1.2 (Creator: Henry Goldman) was sourced
from the State Library of Victoria, Australia. Creator: Henry Goldman.
vii
Introduction
Vanity: Language, Bodies
and Material Conditions
It has become something of a cliché that Western culture is obsessed
with celebrity, glamour, and with the opportunities ordinary people
are now given (reality television, social networking sites, blogging) to
become famous. These new engagements between fame and obscurity
have been accompanied by energetic debates about the self, image
and vanity. Similar debates are also underway in a domain apparently
quite different from this digital realm – the corporeal domain of health,
fitness, beauty and a nti- ageing. Vanity, it seems, can be mobilised to
account for both our least obvious and our most obvious corporeal
modes of constituting the self. Despite these growing areas of debate,
little or no sociological or cultural studies research into vanity has
been conducted to date. Apart from two popular monographs – John
Woodforde’s The History of Vanity (1992), published two decades ago,
and Christopher Lasch’s even earlier The Culture of Narcissism (1991) –
no book- length works of commentary on vanity have been published
in the last 30 years, and very little exists in the way of scholarly journal
articles. This absence is surprising, especially given concurrent major
developments in the theorisation of the self – most obviously in govern-
mentality theorists’ critical engagements with neoliberal individualism
and reflexivity, and processes of subjectification – which offer tools
capable of redefining vanity, or at least illuminating its functions and
the tensions and paradoxes within it. This book explores this new
ground by taking a w ide- ranging look at vanity. Drawing on a variety
of literatures, including public health, information technology, media
studies and feminist approaches to the body and beauty, it conducts a
broad analysis of a key concept shaping contemporary Western socie-
ties and their ways of understanding selfhood. In doing so, the book
addresses a pressing question in critical studies of the subject in society
1
2 Vanity
and culture: how should subjectification, the process by which we
become functional, intelligible members of society, be understood so
that both the problems and pleasures associated with normalisation are
recognised and fully accounted for?
Vanity has a history and a career. Over time it has been defined,
valued and gendered in very different ways, and has manifested in a
diverse array of contexts. Particularly since the rise of cosmetic surgery
over the past three decades, questions about individual vanity have
closely shadowed public interest in bodily beauty practices, especially
in balancing these practices against safety and cost (Fraser, 2003). These
questions have played out vividly in regulatory contexts affecting
individual access to an array of medical procedures and forms of treat-
ment as diverse as hormone replacement therapy, Viagra and fitness/
bodybuilding. Indeed, all these have come to operate as important
sites in which consumption, s elf- image, motivation and risk meet, and
cultural understandings of vanity are negotiated.
While the (medicalised) material body has developed as a key site
of s elf- expression and therefore of debates about s elf- regard and the
dangers of vanity, a countervailing development has also taken place in
which the self, identity and expression have been harnessed to the
(digitally) n on- material – to the internet via social networking sites
and blogging. This development has also inspired popular discussions
of vanity, reflecting anxieties about the boundaries between s elf-
expression, self- promotion and s elf- absorption. Related debates have
emerged in the context of ‘reality television’ – an entertainment genre
often seen to mirror or extend the possibilities for s elf- promotion and
self- absorption offered by online life. In short, emerging technologies
of corporeality and of social communication have opened up new
possibilities for the constitution of vanity, and criticisms based on the
accusation of vanity.
At the same time that ideas of vanity have begun circulating in
new ways, new constructions of the ‘proper’ self have also emerged.
In their mobilisation of neoliberal ideas of s elf- expression, autonomy
and reflexivity (Rose, 1996), these constructions complicate traditional
ideas of vanity in that they promote a focus on the self open to confu-
sion with that often denigrated in accounts of vanity and narcissism. The
attribute of reflexivity is of particular relevance to debates about vanity,
and in some important ways the relationship between vanity and reflex-
ivity is the subject of this book. We ask: How do ideas of vanity play out
in key areas of contemporary life? How do they mesh with competing
idealisations of reflexivity, s elf- contemplation, self-k nowledge and
