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Architecture of the Body

Cosmetic Surgery and Postmodern Space

University of Western Sydney University of Technology, Sydney

This article offers a contribution to ongoing philosophical, sociological, and feminist debates about osmetic surgery 1 and is part of a larger project that examines the spatial and temporal aims and effects of cosmetic surgery, using media analysis and interviews with recipients and surgeons. The mother project argues that cosmetic surgery is part of a suite of anti-aging tools—medical, lifestyle, and beauty technologies— that, contrary to popular belief, do not aim to recreate youth but rather are deployed to create a new phase of life identified as the "stretched middle age." However, this article diverts to theorize—experimentally and heuristically—about cosmetic surgery in relation to postmodern architecture. Re-reading Fredric Jameson’s 1984 piece about Los Angeles’ Westin Bonaventura Hotel while immersed in the larger project led to speculation about how his description might be adopted as an analytical template for an alternative way of approaching cosmetic surgery. Furthermore, criticisms he makes of the Bonaventura as user-unfriendly and superficial are adapted to describe cosmetic surgery as it is currently enacted. This analogy is then extended in regard to another (later) postmodern structure, Melbourne’s Federation Square.2 Analysis and description of the site are projected onto cosmetic surgery with the aim of showing that the technology has the possibility of a developmental trajectory similar to the one between the Bonaventura and Federation Square. Rather than snag on the wholly literal—which might attempt to practically describe the experiences of cosmetic surgically–altered has the potential to altered women in various postmodern spaces—this exercise is mainly speculative and metaphoric. The standpoint is intertwined with that of Kathryn Pauly Morgan, arguing that cosmetic surgery could contribute to a celebration of the fully participatory grotesque body as defined by Mary Russo. Some "extreme practitioners" of cosmetic surgery are used as examples of how it has the opportunity to progress in interesting and diverse directions, and these ideas are married with Federation Square’s aesthetics in order to imagine a future, possibly utopic, cosmetic surgery.

Key Words: Cosmetic Surgery • plastic surgery • postmodernism • hyperspace • the body

Space and Culture, Vol. 7, No. 1, 90-101 (2004)
DOI: 10.1177/1206331203256583


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