#plasticsugery

 In Craig’s article, “Race, beauty, and the tangled knot of a guilty pleasure”, she draws upon examples of African-American utilization of beauty discourse and practices in collective efforts to resist racism. She points out that our “bodies provide us with a principal means of expression.” Expression is what you use to tell the world how you feel or who you are and it is also the way people perceive you. We use our bodies as targets and subjects of advertisement for what the norm is and should be. This is why beauty is looked at as gendered, racialized, and symbolic. The symbol of women beauty is “racially unmarked, implicitly heterosexual, and of unspecified class.”

In Weber’s article, “Visible Subjects”, she talks about the image of beauty. Television makeovers are all over this bringing life transformations and belittling the original contestant. They portray that they are “mistreated and ill-loved” because of their exterior looks. This makes the belief that you are not happy unless you look like this nevertheless how you might think that you feel. It is also shown in these television makeovers that your loved ones will always come out loving the new you more than the original which shames the contestant before the show. This includes when friends and family participate in the “outing” of the contestant. She also states that, “ways of managing gender apparently having changed much, since a good deal of the regulatory discourses continues to operate on makeover shows where the natural body is depicted as both the source of shame and a potential threat that needs to be neutralized if it is to be socially acceptable.”

These authors have very valid opinions and arguments towards beauty. Even though they come from different arguments, I think that Craig and Weber have some ideas in common. They both agree that beauty and feminism plays a huge role it what is considered ideal and normal. They also both agree that the principles of women’s beauty is gendered and racialized. Craig talks in her article about “black people taking down the pictures of white women from their walls”; this to me is to stop idealizing this idea of what beauty should be and shaming yourself for not being that. I think that this goes along with Weber’s point of view that plastic surgery and makeover shows are shaming those for not being “perfect” and trying to persuade them to the idealized beauty.