Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity (Console-ing Passions) by Weber Brenda R

Author:Weber, Brenda R. [Weber, Brenda R.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2009-10-29T16:00:00+00:00

Moms: “She’s got mommy syndrome, bad.”

Even when manly women have turned feminine and tomboys fully girly, the woman is not out of danger, for motherhood enters her into the makeover’s most insistent category of need: what Clinton and Stacy call the “lumpy, dumpy, frumpy, schlumpy” mom. Given the makeover’s near total commitment to heteronormative narratives, it never considers that a woman might not choose to be a mother, echoing what Diane Negra in What a Girl Wants connects to a postfeminist trope that necessitates marriage and glorifies pregnancy for young women. And yet, motherhood is here posited as a universal condition of womanhood, much like aging, that must be altered in order to be endured. If gender-change surgeries and style interventions insist, as I’ve argued in this chapter, that gender and sex converge, the makeover overdoes its own logic, writing a code of feminine and female aberrance on the very women who are most firmly located in sexed bodies—moms. On plastic surgery shows, these are makeover subjects who possess the stretch marks and excess skin that testify to the body’s experience of pregnancy.10 Most subjects are displeased with their breasts, which after nursing babies have shrunk. As a doctor on Extreme Makeover says about Tricia’s breasts, “kids sucked the life right out of ‘em.” Dr. Rey from Dr. 90210 notes about Jenny’s breasts: “Breast feeding really damages the body. It’s amazing.” Subject Jenny can thus affirm: “Having breast augmentation is like a new beginning for me. I feel like I can close the book to the ugly duckling story.” On style shows, “mom targets” are those whose time, energy, and imagination are given over to children. As a consequence, these women have grown dowdy, their appearance signaling they have “let themselves go.”

Although the ravages of motherhood to the physical body are a consequence of childbirth, makeovers suggest that the mommy blues can happen to almost anyone: biological mothers, adoptive mothers, married women, single women, pregnant women, even infertile women and fathers (single-dads who are feminized through their care of children). For the makeover, moms are the perfect symbol of a subject in distress, and if enormous catastrophes, such as a hurricane or limb amputation, are the tickets to admission for such shows as Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, then motherhood indicates that most women need rejuvenation before they can enter Makeover Nation.

Whether on surgery, style, home, or kid shows, mother makeover subjects acknowledge that they are no longer on their own list of priorities. Consequently, the makeover’s objective is to help these women reclaim themselves as worthy sites and subjects of attention, as yummy mummies rather than dowdy moms. Such messages about self-reclamation open a productive conversation about female selfhood outside of the domains of socially scripted roles, but the makeover is clear that its aims are corrective, not celebratory. This isn’t about women putting themselves first from the very beginning of their lives; it’s about encouraging women to pay attention to themselves only after their other-oriented-ness has been fully established.

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