ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the claim that face transplants reconstruct the face while aesthetic surgery enhances the way medical students want to look. The idea that there is an "authentic" body and face is a cultural truism, contradicted by the simple realization that most cultures permit or indeed require our bodies to be altered. Theodor Herzl was mocking the claims of the new surgery and also commenting on the claim that a new authenticity could be achieved by Jews through the means of physically vanishing into European society. In Bernard Devauchelle's account, the authenticity of the face is based on the anonymity of its biological properties. The chapter offers a case study spans the history of the nose job in nineteenth-century Berlin to face transplants in the twenty-first century—and a look at the meanings ascribed to Michael Jackson's face following his death.
