Amending the Abject Body: Aesthetic Makeovers in Medicine and Culture

CHAPTER 4. "I'm Doing It for Me"

CHAPTER 4 “I’m Doing It for Me” The transformation of abject realities into tidy materializations of conventional , individualistic, bourgeois desire and belief finds a willing medium in turn-of-the-century television, which, while it has always been absorbed with the packaging of reality,1 turns increasingly to “reality” shows during the first part of this century, in which the camera watches nonactors living out parts of their lives.The televised reality of the aesthetic surgical imaginary occupied its first regular time slot on October 25, 2001, with the debut on cable television’s Learning Channel of A Personal Story. This thirty-minute program, which continues to air every weekday at this writing, primarily presents women who, because they are discontent with their bodies, elect to have aesthetic surgery. From a Kristevan perspective, we observe that each story is about the desire to defeat or overcome abjection. Though each episode is about the aspiration to bring the body under control and within conventional beauty norms, the program masks the cultural determination of the personal, and sidesteps the question of desires generated outside the “self.” In other words, although each patient is enacting the process of objectification, abjection, and identification, the cultural ideology that directs this process is both denied (by the patient) and disguised (by the production). To explicate this proposition, I will describe some of the I-centered narratives that comprise the typical Personal Story, during which a prospective patient moves from dissatisfaction with the body, to consultation, to surgery, to a newfound satisfaction with the body, and indicate the ways in which the patient’s repeated declarations that self-image is purely a matter of personal feeling and choice (“I’m doing it for me”) are located in a culturally determined sense of what is “best” for the body. By 65 ‫ﱠ‬ insistently separating the personal from the cultural, A Personal Story delivers the aesthetic surgical industry from responsibility for its patients’ desires and does not let us see that such cultural institutions set the parameters of abjection and its remedies. The Learning Channel (TLC) is a subsidiary of Discovery Communications, whose Discovery channel first aired in 1985, with approximately 156,000 U.S. subscribers,2 and had grown by 2002 well beyond live coverage of world news events, support of educational initiatives, and enhancement of school readiness, into retail sales, online programming, and production of home and leisure programs. With a strong international presence, the Discovery Channel in 2002 had more than 650 million subscribers in 155 countries and territories worldwide. As its website claims, “Few media companies have the distribution, impressions and cross platform capability that Discovery has around the world” (August 24, 2002).3 TLC, in particular, which first appeared in 1991 and began as a network aimed primarily at enhancing school readiness for children, was distributed in 2002 to more than 87 million homes, and has developed a programming approach that expands the sources of learning well beyond the classroom, pursuing a prevailing sense that information—of all sorts—is education. Ready, Set, Learn!, TLC’s original offering for preschoolers, remains on its schedule; the rest has been radically transformed: Ranked as one of cable television’s top 20 networks,4 TLC’s programming runs the gamut from medical to modern marvels and dating to babies. On weeknights, TLC features some of cable television’s most successful series, including the breakout hit Junkyard Wars and the Emmy Award-winning Trauma: Life in the ER. TLC’s original daytime series, including A Wedding Story and A Baby Story are among the top-rated daytime series among women 18–34. Redefining the idea of “how-to,” TLC launched the series Trading Spaces, where friends and neighbors swap houses to redecorate a room. (http://tlc.discovery.com, August 24, 2002) The TLC web page invites the prospective surgical patient to have her or his “personal story told on national television”: A Personal Story is a heart-warming 30-minute TLC program featuring real people undergoing re-constructive and elective cosmetic surgery. Each show will document the patient’s personal experience as they approach and undergo surgery and how the outcome impacts the quality 66 Amending the Abject Body of their life. We are looking for stories about adults, teens, children and even babies. Family and friends and the surgeon must be available for videotaping. Patients or parents who want to apply must obtain permission from...