Cosmetic Surgery: Beauty as Commodity

Cosmetic surgery stands, for many theorists and social critics, as the ultimate symbol of invasion of the human body for the sake of physical beauty. Interpreted as somehow qualitatively different from other efforts at altering the body, plastic surgery is considered to be so extreme, so dangerous, that it leaves no space for interpretation as anything but subjugation. While such criticisms are compelling, they tend to operate at either the grand level of cultural discourse or the highly grounded level of physiological effect. As a result, they leave out almost altogether the experience of the women who themselves have plastic surgery. This article draws from qualitative interviews with 20 female clients of a Long Island, NY plastic surgeon to explore cosmetic surgery as an occasion for autobiographical accounting and a particular kind of account of the self. Interview data suggest that plastic surgery allows women who undergo these procedures to successfully reposition their bodies as normal bodies. At the same time, it also requires them to create accounts that reattach the self to the surgically-corrected—but potentially inauthentic—body by invoking both essentialist notions of the self and corresponding notions of the body as accidental, inessential, or degenerated from a younger body that better represented who they truly are.     

Buying and selling breasts: cosmetic surgery,beauty treatments and risk

This paper is concerned with the ways in which women are sold cosmetic surgery, and how they ‘make sense of’ their own participation in this market. It draws on ongoing ethnographic research to explore how a group of young women who have paid for breast augmentation surgery narrate their decision to undergo surgery, the choices they make as consumers of cosmetic surgery, and their experience of having surgery. These narratives are compared with the ways in which breast augmentation surgery is sold to them by the companies and medical professionals involved in the rapidly expanding market for breast augmentation surgery. The paper shows how this particular group of young white working‐class women shift between imagining the breast augmentation operation as a simple beauty treatment and recognizing it as medical surgery, and explores how this shapes their perceptions of the risks and benefits of buying new breasts. It also shows how those who market such procedures manage and manipulate perceptions of the process of breast augmentation surgery and the risks that attend on it in an effort to encourage this form of consumption.     

Mind-Reading and Metacognition: Narcissism, not Actual Competence, Predicts Self-Estimated Ability

In this paper, we examine the relationship between people's actual interpersonal sensitivity (such as their ability to identify deception and to infer intentions and emotions) and their perceptions of their own sensitivity. Like prior scholars, we find the connection is weak or non-existent and that most people overestimate their social judgment and mind-reading skills. Unlike previous work, however, we show new evidence about who misunderstands their sensitivity and why. We find that those who perform the worst in social judgment and mind-reading radically overestimate their relative competence. We also find origins of these self-estimates in general narcissistic tendencies toward self-aggrandizement. We discuss evidence from two studies, one involving the Interpersonal Perception Task (the IPT-15) and another focusing on inferences about partners after a face-to-face negotiation exercise. In both cases, actual performance did not predict self-estimated performance but narcissism did.     

Narcissism and Relationship Satisfaction from a Dyadic Perspective: The Mediating Role of Psychological Aggression

The mediating effect of psychological aggression between narcissism and relationship satisfaction was investigated among 128 nonclinical heterosexual couples (N?=?256) in enduring relationships, using the actor–partner interdependence model. The results indicated two mediation paths affecting men’s relationship satisfaction: the higher men’s narcissism, the higher their perpetration of psychological aggression, which, in turn, was negatively linked with their own relationship satisfaction and the higher women’s narcissism, the higher their perpetration of psychological aggression, which, in turn, was negatively linked with their male partner’s relationship satisfaction. The analyses also revealed one mediation path affecting women’s relationship satisfaction: the higher their narcissism, the higher the perpetration of psychological aggression, which, in turn, was linked with lower women’s relationship satisfaction. Recommendations for further research and clinical implications are discussed.     

A Chinese beauty story: how college women in China negotiate beauty,body image,and mass media

This study examines how young Chinese women negotiate beauty and body image in context with mass media, paying particular attention to the relationship between ongoing sociocultural change in contemporary Chinese society and the attitudes and behaviors among young women towards beauty. Qualitative in nature, this study explores the “beauty stories” of 13 college women in mainland China through in-depth interviews. Several distinctive themes were found: (1) These women believed the ideal beautiful Chinese woman should have a tall and thin body, big eyes, a watermelon seed-shaped face, fair skin, and qi zhi (inner beauty); (2) Body image issues were centralized in these women's everyday experiences, and they were under significant cultural, societal, familial, and peer pressure to pursue physical beauty; (3) Cultural and media influences on their perceptions of beauty were complex and multi-layered; and (4) The women were hopeful of both potential positive social change and the liberation of Chinese women, and they were concerned about the superficiality and extreme beauty standards advocated in the media. The findings suggest that the contemporary Chinese beauty story is essentially different from the Western one, extending the existing literature on beauty and body image to include an Eastern and Chinese perspective.     

Homework: Routine,social aesthetics and the ambiguity of everyday life

Routine is a central feature of everyday life, yet its peculiar rhythms, and the range of experiences associated with it, are often neglected within cultural studies and sociology. Simmel’s attempt to provide a sociological aesthetics is seen as a project that needs reanimating for the study of everyday life routines. This does not mean, however, that Simmel is the only, or the best, guide to the aesthetic dimensions of everyday routine life. In an attempt to provide some co-ordinates for instigating a socio-aesthetic approach to routine, this paper discusses a number of writers who couple aesthetics and the everyday, and who might provide frameworks for the study of experiential aspects of routine life. It also suggests that an inverted reading of John Dewey could provide socio-aesthetic study with the ‘formless’ forms required to bring everyday background routines into the foreground. The socio-aesthetic study of cooking undertaken by Luce Giard provides an example of the complexity of such an approach. Lastly the article looks briefly at new directions for ‘everyday life aesthetics’, more specifically at Henri Lefebvre’s unfinished project of rhythmanalysis.     

The aesthetics of rock construction work: the beauty of sprayed concrete,rock reinforcement and roof bolting

The concepts of aesthetic and aesthetic knowledge have recently been appropriated and discussed in the organization theory literature. In this broader recognition of human skills and capacities complementing the conventional rational and logical modes of thinking prioritized in scientific thinking, a few studies reports how aesthetic knowledge is employed in areas not regularly associated with aesthetics, for instance computer programming or financial analysis. This paper reports how the concepts of aesthetic and aesthetic knowledge can be used to examine the work of qualified rock construction workers. Rather than being a skill that can be accommodated through training, the best rock construction workers have tacit know‐how that are not easily learned or transferred between co‐workers. Such skills are here referred to as aesthetic knowledge. The paper concludes that more studies of everyday work and aesthetic knowledge may be helpful when rethinking the nature of human and individual knowledge.     

The dialectics of politics and aesthetics in the Chinese Korean dance drama,the spirit of Changbai Mountain

This article explores the relationships between the political aspirations and aesthetic endeavours expressed in the Chinese Korean dance drama, The Spirit of Changbai Mountain, and how they relate to the political, cultural and ethnic identity of this migrant community. The nationality policies and socialist ideology of cultural production in China give shape to this dance drama, which depicts a collective history of the Korean minority as full members of the Chinese multi-ethnic socialist state. While political conformity is explicitly stated in the accompanying Chinese prose, more subtle, poetic expressions of different emotions are articulated through the non-verbal medium of dance and music whose meanings are drawn from the shared experiences specific to this ethnic community. Additionally, the aesthetic differentiation made by the Chinese Korean artists between their dance and those of their homelands illustrates how Korean tradition is identified and interpreted in this diaspora to define their cultural hybridity. It is suggested that the performance of The Spirit of Changbai Mountain is simultaneously a political and aesthetic event in which a variety of aspirations and identities are expressed in dialectics. These dynamics can also be understood in terms of a discursive field of power which underpins the production and consumption of minority/diaspora performance in general.     

Between art therapy and disability aesthetics: a sociological approach for understanding the intersection between art practice and disability discourse

What emerges as art and how it is categorised are parts of a collective process taking place in art worlds and involving a wide array of social actors. In this article, the relation between four ways of framing the intersection of disability and art is discussed. These frames are art therapy, outsider art, disability art, and disability aesthetics. The article suggests the frames and the way they relate to each other as important discourses in organising the relation between disability and art. The discourses’ relevance is demonstrated by discussing three cases of art practice among disabled people. The discussion of the cases demonstrates the importance of including more than one of the four identified discourses when analysing art practice involving disability. The concluding part discusses how the intersections of disability and art can be more closely linked to the mainstream art world through the concept of social practice art.     

The gendered contours of North Korean Migration: sexualized bodies and the violence of phenotypical normalization in South Korea

This article examines the gendered and sexualized contours of North Korean experiences in South Korea at a time when nearly 70% of the North Korean emigrants are women. South Korean television shows – e.g. reality programs – and marriage matchmaking organizations seek to portray North Korean women in a ‘positive’ way to the South Korean public, although, as this article will illustrate, these representations are of a very particular, sexualized kind. These representations are sometimes negative, and there is stigma attached to North Korean women, in which South Koreans assume, for example, that they are victims of human trafficking or that they have had relations with Chinese men during their migration. Furthermore, poor nutrition and other forms of structural violence in North Korea have molded North Korean bodies; there are often physical disparities between North and South Koreans. In South Korean society where short height is viewed as undesirable and where idealized, surgical notions of beauty dominate, the violence of gendered phenotypical normalization mark North Korean bodies as smaller, foreign, and strange. Based on ethnographic research in South Korea, this article argues that these gendered contours of North Korean migration amount to a different sort of structural violence in South Korea.