ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the makeover's insistence on good choices, individualism, aspirationalism, and personal capacities for competition in a global marketplace, it is also steeped in the teas of neoliberalism. It focuses primarily on what might be considered Christian reading of the makeover, its malleability and porousness make it adaptable to many faith systems, from New Age spirituality to pantheism. Within the market-based logic of neoliberalism, governmentality colludes with other hegemonic factors to create the terms for a docile body, which is willing to write on itself the codes of success that will enable competition within a larger global marketplace. Each respective makeover text also had its own pantheon of gods – style coaches, plastic surgeons, interior designers, life coaches, and personal trainers – all with the power to put the suffering soul on the path to better living. So, though the makeover traffics in big themes of shame, selfhood, and salvation, it resolutely avoids a direct address of social discrimination.
