Review: Deborah Caslav Covino: Amending the Abject Body: Aesthetic Makeovers in Medicine and Culture.

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review: The booming makeover industry, especially its intersections with reality-television programming, has captured much feminist academic interest as of late. Deborah Caslav Covino's Amending the Abject Body: Aesthetic makeovers in medicine and culture, narrowly predates a flurry of publications exploring the American penchant for aesthetic transformation (Heller forthcoming 2006, 2007; McGee 2005; Wegenstein, under review; Weber 2005). Her work identifies the importance of the study of the makeover in popular culture, and sets a high standard with which to compare more recent investigations into makeover culture. Using Julia Kristeva's theoretical conceptualizations of the abject from her Powers of Horror (1982), Covino traces the impetus behind the explosion of aesthetic surgical procedures. The cosmetic surgery industry markets its services almost exclusively to women, relying on Western ideologies of beauty and femininity for self-justification and product-promotion; thus, Covino focuses primarily on female subjects. She situates her work among feminist theory of cosmetic surgery, but determines that a new a mode of analysis is necessary in order to move beyond previously reductive interpretations of female cosmetic-surgery patients (as either victims or agents of makeover culture).