ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that the rise of cosmetic surgery throughout the West is such that cultural sociology must engage with cultural forms of self-reinvention and bodily plasticity in terms of newly emerging practices of identification with celebrity. It examines the power of celebrity culture in relation to the rise of cosmetic surgery. Celebrity culture is intimately interwoven with the spread of new technologies for making private life a public spectacle. The chapter explores provisional and tentative fashion, celebrity-inspired practices of cosmetic surgery. It emphasizes aspects of personal and cultural life that are beyond cognition and thus emotionally conflictual, contradictory and ambivalent. Celebrity has been sociologically analysed as of key significance to the increasing concern with self, identity and the body in contemporary consumer culture. Personal subjectivity in the media age is more and more fashioned in the image of celebrity culture, and the most palpable representation of that culture is arguably cosmetic surgery and its technologies of plasticity.
