A01=Sharrona Pearl
Author_Sharrona Pearl
bioethics
Category=MNQ
cinema studies
cultural studies
disability studies
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
face transplants
gender
history of medicine
journalism
makeover culture
television studies
the body
Product details
- ISBN 9780226461229
- Weight: 482g
- Dimensions: 16 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 12 Apr 2017
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Are our identities attached to our faces? If so, what happens when the face connected to the self is gone forever or replaced? In Face/On, Sharrona Pearl investigates the stakes for changing the face and the changing stakes for the face in both contemporary society and the sciences. The first comprehensive cultural study of face transplant surgery, Face/On reveals our true relationships to faces and facelessness, explains the significance we place on facial manipulation, and decodes how we understand loss, reconstruction, and transplantation of the face. To achieve this, Pearl draws on a vast array of sources: bioethical and medical reports, newspaper and television coverage, performances by pop culture icons, hospital records, personal interviews, films, and military files. She argues that we are on the cusp of a new ethics, in an opportune moment for reframing essentialist ideas about appearance in favor of a more expansive form of interpersonal interaction. Accessibly written and respectfully illustrated, Face/On offers a new perspective on face transplant surgery as a way to consider the self and its representation as constantly present and evolving.
Highly interdisciplinary, this study will appeal to anyone wishing to know more about critical interventions into recent medicine, makeover culture, and the beauty industry.
Sharrona Pearl is assistant professor of communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain and editor of Images, Ethics, Technology.
