What do you think?
Rate this book
Making the Body Beautiful
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 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.
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 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.
424 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
5 people are currently reading
445 people want to read
About the author
Sander L. Gilman
124 books39 followersSander L. Gilman is an American cultural and literary historian. He is known for his contributions to Jewish studies and the history of medicine. He is the author or editor of over ninety books. Gilman's focus is on medicine and the echoes of its rhetoric in social and political discourse.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 12, 2017
Incredibly poignant book on the meaning of beauty and the desire to belong. Everyone should read this book.
January 3, 2024
Sander Gilman has quickly become one of my favourite cultural historians. Making the Body Beautiful is a rich and challenging work, which skillfully grafts the beautiful onto the grotesque, blurring any distinction between the two.
Broadly speaking, the book explores the changing techniques and meanings associated with aesthetic surgeries across the globe. Although the text is ‘macro’ in scope, Gilman is fundamentally concerned with Western conceptions of beauty, race, and gender. More specifically, his text pays special attention to the unique relationship between anti-Semitism, rhinoplasty, and the Jewish nose. The result is compelling, to say the least.
In every decision to go under the knife, Gilman locates the human need to belong – that is, the desire to “pass” from one group to another. Mutilating one’s own body for the sake of an imagined ideal is certainly a strange practice. Yet it is a practice which exists in varying degrees all across the world. As a global phenomenon, then, perhaps aesthetic surgery is – to borrow the words of Nietzsche – a practice that is “human, all too human.” Gilman certainly thinks so.
Making the Body Beautiful convincingly argues that the history of aesthetic surgery offers one of the clearest examples of the convergence between the practices of modern medical science and the Enlightenment ideals of human perfectibility. A thought-provoking (and squirm-provoking) work that will reward a close-reading.
Broadly speaking, the book explores the changing techniques and meanings associated with aesthetic surgeries across the globe. Although the text is ‘macro’ in scope, Gilman is fundamentally concerned with Western conceptions of beauty, race, and gender. More specifically, his text pays special attention to the unique relationship between anti-Semitism, rhinoplasty, and the Jewish nose. The result is compelling, to say the least.
In every decision to go under the knife, Gilman locates the human need to belong – that is, the desire to “pass” from one group to another. Mutilating one’s own body for the sake of an imagined ideal is certainly a strange practice. Yet it is a practice which exists in varying degrees all across the world. As a global phenomenon, then, perhaps aesthetic surgery is – to borrow the words of Nietzsche – a practice that is “human, all too human.” Gilman certainly thinks so.
Making the Body Beautiful convincingly argues that the history of aesthetic surgery offers one of the clearest examples of the convergence between the practices of modern medical science and the Enlightenment ideals of human perfectibility. A thought-provoking (and squirm-provoking) work that will reward a close-reading.
April 6, 2017
Gilman, is an important cultural historian. In this book he looks at the history of plastic surgery and how it relates to larger cultural trends.
"Dare to use your own reason-is the motto of the Englightenment." The ability to remake one's own self is the heart of the matter." 18
"It is not that the reconstructed body was "invented" at the end of the nineteenth-century, but rather that questions about the ability of the individual to be transformed, which had been articulated as social or political in the context of the state, came to be defined as biological and medical." 19
"Each physical category must be so constructed that it has a clearly defined, unambiguous anthithesis (hairy/bald, fat/thin, large-breasted/small-breasted, large nose/small nose, male/female). These categories are all socially defined so as to make belonging to the positive category more advantageous than belonging to the negative category." 22-23
"Body imagery follows the lines of political and cultural power." 105
"Indeed, "passing" is never vanishing, but rather merging with a very visible group." 206
"Dare to use your own reason-is the motto of the Englightenment." The ability to remake one's own self is the heart of the matter." 18
"It is not that the reconstructed body was "invented" at the end of the nineteenth-century, but rather that questions about the ability of the individual to be transformed, which had been articulated as social or political in the context of the state, came to be defined as biological and medical." 19
"Each physical category must be so constructed that it has a clearly defined, unambiguous anthithesis (hairy/bald, fat/thin, large-breasted/small-breasted, large nose/small nose, male/female). These categories are all socially defined so as to make belonging to the positive category more advantageous than belonging to the negative category." 22-23
"Body imagery follows the lines of political and cultural power." 105
"Indeed, "passing" is never vanishing, but rather merging with a very visible group." 206
June 13, 2019
Parts of this were definitely interesting, and I learned some things, but I also found the discussion of trans people deeply painful to read because the author consistently misgenders them (calling trans women "he" and trans men "she") and spends a lot of time considering whether he things trans people are valid. He also says that all trans people are obsessed with the gender binary, because they want to pretend that they are real men or women, when really, gender-affirming surgeries make them "into transexuals" rather than men or women.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews