This is the first in what I hope will be a series of approximately 500 word pieces that I am developing for my thesis.
Throughout
the makeover narrative the lead role switches between the participant (the
leading lady) and a supporting cast of experts. The surgeon-expert plays the
role of advisor, supporter and critic and the makeover ‘subject/participant’
puts themselves in his hands.
The
surgeon-expert, vocally supported by a team of lifestyle experts, wields
authority over the body of the makeover participant in the broadest of senses.
He, (the surgeon in makeover television is almost exclusively male), is both
authoritative – his knowledge and skill lending him the right to make
recommendations on surgical procedures to the participant whose final decision
is controlled by his authority; and authoring – he is the author/(w)riter quite
literally writing the changes onto the body in ink, he authors the new ‘after
body’ (Jones, 2008) with the
tools of his trade: marker, scalpel and anaesthesia. His authority is generated
through his position as a medical professional and reinforced through the
support he receives from the other experts, the recommendations of the
participant’s family that she needs help, his history of successful surgeries
and happy customers, his marketing materials (websites, glossy brochures, TV
appearances) and, significantly, through his own aesthetic presentation and
demeanour.
She,
(the makeover participant is predominantly female), surrenders her body; the
‘old body’, first conscious and then unconscious, which is restrained in its
ability to resist such convincing authority. This ‘surrender’ is in direct
contrast to the importance given in the narration to the active role of the
participant. However, once the participant has seen the possibility of the ‘new
body’, as proposed by the surgeon-expert, and demonstrated through
visualisation technologies, she cannot unsee it. Her authority, that is her
right to write her own body future, is overwritten by that of the
surgeon-expert. From the moment that she walks through his door she is expected
to bow completely to his will. She is bullied/cajoled as necessary to get her
to do so. If she refuses to go through with the surgery her relationship with
her body is always already influenced by the memory of an ideal could-be/should-be
possibility that she will now be unable to achieve.
Many
of us never meet the surgeon-expert face-to-face but his authoritative
vision/visualisation of the participant’s could-be/should-be body, and by
extension all of our could-be/should-be bodies, as presented to us through the
media frenzy of makeover culture, leaves an invisible but indelible mark. The
surgeon is not only writing the participant’s body future, surgical or
otherwise, but also contributing to our own, whether we accept or reject his claim
to authority.
