EBOOK
About
Sander L. Gilman is Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences and Professor of Medicine, University of Illinois at Chicago; he is also Director of the Humanities Laboratory there. He is the author or editor of over fifty books, including Seeing the Insane, Jewish Self-Hatred, The Jew's Body, Hysteria: A New History, and Freud, Race, and Gender (Princeton).
Nose reconstructions have been common in India for centuries. South Korea, Brazil, and Israel have become international centers for procedures ranging from eyelid restructuring to buttock lifts and tummy tucks. Argentina has the highest rate of silicone implants in the world. Around the globe, aesthetic surgery has become a cultural and medical fixture. Sander Gilman seeks to explain why by presenting the first systematic world history and cultural theory of aesthetic surgery. Touching on subjects as diverse as getting a "nose job" as a sweet-sixteen birthday present and the removal of male breasts in seventh-century Alexandria, Gilman argues that aesthetic surgery has such universal appeal because it helps people to "pass," to be seen as a member of a group with which they want to or need to identify.
Gilman begins by addressing basic questions about the history of aesthetic surgery. What surgical procedures have been performed? Which are considered aesthetic and why? Who are the patients? What is the place of aesthetic surgery in modern culture? He then turns his attention to that focus of countless human anxieties: the nose. Gilman discusses how people have reshaped their noses to repair the ravages of war and disease (principally syphilis), to match prevailing ideas of beauty, and to avoid association with negative images of the "Jew," the "Irish," the "Oriental," or the "Black." He examines how we have used aesthetic surgery on almost every conceivable part of the body to try to pass as younger, stronger, thinner, and more erotic. Gilman also explores some of the extremes of surgery as personal transformation, discussing transgender surgery, adult circumcision and foreskin restoration, the enhancement of dueling scars, and even a performance artist who had herself altered to resemble the Mona Lisa.
The book draws on an extraordinary range of sources. Gilman is as comfortable discussing Nietzsche, Yeats, and Darwin as he is grisly medical details, Michael Jackson, and Barbra Streisand's decision to keep her own nose. The book contains dozens of arresting images of people before, during, and after surgery. This is a profound, provocative, and engaging study of how humans have sought to change their lives by transforming their bodies. "A [wide-ranging] and enjoyable work. . . . Gilman has an eye for detail, yet remains aware of the wider perspective. He also raises important questions. . . . In [this] rich, elegant and beautiful [book] he shows that the history of aesthetic surgery is too important to be left to the surgeons."---Jonathan Cole, Times Literary Supplement "There is one theme that links all [Gilman's] work: how human beings construct images of others to define themselves. . . . [He] has been unafraid to examine areas that academics have traditionally shied away from." "[A] readable and useful book. . . . Through Mr. Gilman's long lens, the search for beauty and the fashion for plastic surgery are not a contemporary ill, but something older and more universal." "[Gilman] tells a strange, macabre, and often richly comic story of shifting desires. His book shows a dazzling European erudition. . . . There is now less furtiveness attached to aesthetic surgery. But the question remains--and Gilman asks it cleverly, humanely, and persistently--whether new appearances just gloss over old problems and often create new ones." "Far from the body representing immutable essences of beauty or horror, the history of aesthetic surgery confirms that the body bears witness to public ideologies of sexual and racial difference. And the body has its o
Nose reconstructions have been common in India for centuries. South Korea, Brazil, and Israel have become international centers for procedures ranging from eyelid restructuring to buttock lifts and tummy tucks. Argentina has the highest rate of silicone implants in the world. Around the globe, aesthetic surgery has become a cultural and medical fixture. Sander Gilman seeks to explain why by presenting the first systematic world history and cultural theory of aesthetic surgery. Touching on subjects as diverse as getting a "nose job" as a sweet-sixteen birthday present and the removal of male breasts in seventh-century Alexandria, Gilman argues that aesthetic surgery has such universal appeal because it helps people to "pass," to be seen as a member of a group with which they want to or need to identify.
Gilman begins by addressing basic questions about the history of aesthetic surgery. What surgical procedures have been performed? Which are considered aesthetic and why? Who are the patients? What is the place of aesthetic surgery in modern culture? He then turns his attention to that focus of countless human anxieties: the nose. Gilman discusses how people have reshaped their noses to repair the ravages of war and disease (principally syphilis), to match prevailing ideas of beauty, and to avoid association with negative images of the "Jew," the "Irish," the "Oriental," or the "Black." He examines how we have used aesthetic surgery on almost every conceivable part of the body to try to pass as younger, stronger, thinner, and more erotic. Gilman also explores some of the extremes of surgery as personal transformation, discussing transgender surgery, adult circumcision and foreskin restoration, the enhancement of dueling scars, and even a performance artist who had herself altered to resemble the Mona Lisa.
The book draws on an extraordinary range of sources. Gilman is as comfortable discussing Nietzsche, Yeats, and Darwin as he is grisly medical details, Michael Jackson, and Barbra Streisand's decision to keep her own nose. The book contains dozens of arresting images of people before, during, and after surgery. This is a profound, provocative, and engaging study of how humans have sought to change their lives by transforming their bodies. "A [wide-ranging] and enjoyable work. . . . Gilman has an eye for detail, yet remains aware of the wider perspective. He also raises important questions. . . . In [this] rich, elegant and beautiful [book] he shows that the history of aesthetic surgery is too important to be left to the surgeons."---Jonathan Cole, Times Literary Supplement "There is one theme that links all [Gilman's] work: how human beings construct images of others to define themselves. . . . [He] has been unafraid to examine areas that academics have traditionally shied away from." "[A] readable and useful book. . . . Through Mr. Gilman's long lens, the search for beauty and the fashion for plastic surgery are not a contemporary ill, but something older and more universal." "[Gilman] tells a strange, macabre, and often richly comic story of shifting desires. His book shows a dazzling European erudition. . . . There is now less furtiveness attached to aesthetic surgery. But the question remains--and Gilman asks it cleverly, humanely, and persistently--whether new appearances just gloss over old problems and often create new ones." "Far from the body representing immutable essences of beauty or horror, the history of aesthetic surgery confirms that the body bears witness to public ideologies of sexual and racial difference. And the body has its o