Description
Book SynopsisImagine yourself without a face - the task seems impossible. The face is a core feature of our physical identity. Our face is how others identify us and how we think of our 'self'. This book examines the cultural meaning and social significance of interventions aimed at repairing faces defined as disfigured.
Trade Review"Saving Face offers a persuasive and sociologically rich portrayal of facial disfigurement. Beauty culture depends more upon the 'normal' and unremarkable - rather than the exceptional - face than is usually acknowledged, and Talley offers a fascinating account of how unremarkability is medically, culturally and socially produced. The ethics and politics of reconstructive surgery are not straightforward; Talley gives the subject an admirably nuanced and sensitive treatment." -- Victoria Pitts-Taylor,author of Surgery Junkies: Wellness and Pathology in Cosmetic Culture
"Saving Face can be read as an intervention into beauty culture and liberal feminism's championing of it, while also striving to shake up contemporary beliefs about ugliness, disfigurement, and the ways in which more and more people are battling 'social death.'" * PopMatters *
"Interested in the question of inequality and gender relations, Talleys most compelling chapter is on a dual analysis of surgeons justifications for facial surgery and various studies concerning transsexuality and bodily gendered expectations." * Sociology of Health and Illness *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction 1 About Face 2 Facial Work: Aesthetic Surgery as Lifesaving Work 3 Making Faces: Life Makeovers through Facial Work 4 Not Just Another Pretty Face: The Social Value of Unremarkability 5 Saving Face: Redeeming a Universal Face 6 Facing Off: Debating Facial Work, Constructing a "Vital" Intervention 7 At Face Value Losing Face: A Postscript Appendix: Methods, Methodologies, and Epistemologies Notes References IndexAbout the Author
