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CHAPTER 5 Making Over Abjection In 2000, the Oprah Winfrey Show had been the most popular program on daytime television for thirteen years (Twardowski 30, Squire 98), with its star an established cultural icon who, like Elvis and the Beatles, has become the subject of university courses studying her influence.1 At the same time that Oprah Winfrey, as a black woman, belongs to the gender and race groupings of abject constituencies, she is also an emphatic representative of the aesthetic surgical imaginary in her dedication to the physical and psychological transformation of abjection into fulfilled selfhood. Within the Oprah philosophy, race and associated socioeconomic elements are curiously irrelevant to the pursuit of a makeover, which requires that one address the elements of powerlessness and despair by refusing all associations with victimage, and by extension, with abjection. Representing body-inner self integration as the continual theme of a tremendously popular television series, the 2000–2001 programs discussed in this chapter, along with the aphorisms and self-help exercises inculcated by O, The Oprah Magazine, feature the makeover as an explicit and preceptive goal, as the achievement of greater psychic health through body and attitude adjustments consistent with a total self-concept that emphasizes individual choice and responsibility. Thus, while Oprah Winfrey represents the continued popularity of the outside-in harmonic and the power of the autonomous individual, both valorized by the aesthetic surgical imaginary, she also skirts the desire for identification—the goal and result of objectification and abjection—as a culturally-sanctioned motive force in this process. 83 ‫ﱠ‬ For Oprah, psychic health is associated with (1) maintaining a positive attitude, (2) living in the present, and (3) taking responsibility for one’s choices. Each of these precepts is correlated with the care of the body and the development of a healthy body image, and supports the values and premises maintained by the aesthetic clinic.2 By 2000, the Oprah Winfrey Show had come to sermonize, in the voice of a major pop culture icon, the features of the aesthetic surgical imaginary that we have surveyed to this point, idealizing the I-centered, positive-thinking, socially secure woman that the aesthetic surgical industry had been developing as its poster girl since the middle of the twentieth century in its efforts to bring the abject body into the marketplace. POSITIVE THINKING Positive thinking grounds the ongoing makeover project, to the extent that makeovers are necessarily motivated by trust in the possibility of improvement. O, The Oprah Magazine, which debuted in spring 2000, becomes aggressively aphoristic on this score, with large, multiarticle sections titled “Dream It, Do It” and “Enjoy Yourself” (September 2000), “Trust Yourself ” (October 2000), and “Live Your Best Life” (November 2000), each issue including an “Oprah to Go” section that features brief sayings printed on illustrated cards that are perforated to allow for readers to tear them out and carry them around. As the “Oprah to Go” title suggests, the sayings are associated with the consumption of Oprah’s own spirit by her readers, and become species of the host (in both the religious and media-oriented uses of that term). The “Oprah To Go” menu includes Shirley MacLaine; “I could be whatever I wanted to be if I trusted that music, that song, that vibration of God that was inside of me” (“Words You Can Trust,” October 2000, 141); Marcel Proust: “Let us be grateful to people who make us happy: They are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom” (“A Place for Thanks Giving,” November 2000, 122); and one of Oprah’s personal discoveries, Ron Rathburn, who writes, “What you find in your mind is what you put there. Put good things in there” (“Words To Grow On,” September 2000, 141). These aphorisms coincide with injunctions to synchronize inner self and outer and the idea that body image is self-constructed. The October 2000 feature in O called “Mirror Image” (Breathnach) typifies Oprah’s belief in the reciprocity of inner and outer self. Proposing, “If you say nice things to your mirror, your mirror will say nice things to you,” this article describes the daily ritual of standing before a full-length mirror and giving oneself compliments (“I love the color of my eyes. I love how my hair curls behind my ear. I love my long neck. I love my toes.”) in order to develop an acceptance and appre84 Amending the Abject Body [3.135.213.214] Project MUSE (2024-04-20 04:05 GMT...

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