ABSTRACT
With diet and exercise bodies are routinely shaped and sculpted to adhere not only to standards of health and medicine but also, and perhaps more regularly, to sociocultural appearance norms. Likewise, we can just as routinely observe how bodies are subject to the regimented norms of posture, somatic rules for how they smell, and both written and unwritten rubrics of exposure—especially how much flesh may be revealed, under what circumstances, and with whom. Bodies are clothed with garments, both visible and veiled, that simultaneously conceal as much as they expressively accentuate. Everywhere, and at all times, bodies are actively inscribed with any one or more of the physical markers of powerful social institutions including age, gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and religion. Bodies are habitually maintained, and chiefly not for functional but aesthetic qualities in acts including the various means of growing hair in some parts of the body while, elsewhere, cutting, shaving, plucking, or chemically removing it. Similarly, other body maintenance regimens include things such as altering the color and texture of hair, skin, eyes, finger or toe nails. Teeth are straightened, whitened, polished, and replaced if necessary. Bodies are stylized with piercings, tattoos, hairstyles, and procedures for tanning, bleaching, and painting. Bodies are perpetually on display although, as we learn through the course of socialization, one must be cautious about whose bodies we gaze upon, where specifically we affix that gaze, for how long, and at what proximity. In all of these ways and a multitude of others, the body is clearly the site of enormous expressive and impressive appearance management as well as a focal point for significant ritual activity—two dynamics that are, without question, foremost to dramaturgical analysis.
