Vanity: 21st Century Selves PDF
Preview Vanity: 21st Century Selves
Vanity: 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 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-32305-0 ISBN 978-1-137-30850-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137308504 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 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
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