Abstract
In his 1972 book, Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order, Erving Goffman noted that “the realm of activity that is generated by face-to-face interaction … has never been sufficiently treated as a subject matter in its own right” (p. 13). In her book Saving Face, the feminist scholar and sociologist of body and medicine Heather L. Talley not only remedies this deficiency but also raises poignant questions regarding the sociological significance of “appearance disabilities” (p. 16), specifically facial differences, exploring their meanings and the ways in which they “influence the work of experts who directly intervene” (p. 16).
Offering important contributions to multiple fields of inquiry, Talley addresses facial difference as a complicated sociocultural phenomenon significant to sociological exploration of facial intervention. Building on Goffman’s term “facial work” to refer to “surgery aimed at repairing the face” (p. 18), the author delves into the social complexities of this practice, exploring the ways “face work” simultaneously relies on and constructs meanings attributed to facial disfigurement within consumer, visual, and celebrity cultures. Demonstrating the “costs” of disfigurement and the status of appearance, Talley offers an in-depth analysis of the ideological links among “aesthetics, disability, and medicine” (p. 18), revealing the biomedicalization of stigma attributed to facial difference, which equates “atypical faces with social death” (p. 19). As she notes, “When the face is positioned as essential to human social life, aesthetic surgery is tacitly framed as lifesaving” (p. 23), placing appearance then, “as a matter of life and death” (p. 38).
Talley bases the analysis on a fascinating research of four case studies: The reality television show Extreme Makeover, facial feminization surgery, the medical not-for-profit Operation Smile, and face transplantation. Positioning each case study within its larger social context, Talley offers a nuanced ethnographic description of the four case studies, employing multiple methods while also offering personal reflections throughout the text. Conceptualizing facial work as “three-pronged intervention” (p. 30), Talley details what she terms the “disfigurement imaginary” (p. 29) through which meanings attributed to faces are assigned, treating them as objects of intervention. In this, the book not only contributes to Goffman’s initial discussion but also challenges the boundaries between “vital” and “nonvital” (p. 19), between “lifesaving” and “life-enhancing” medical intervention (p. 31), between “reconstruction” and “cosmetic” (p. 51), and between “life” and “death,” critically unpacking “social death” as “a discursive formation with embodied consequences” (p. 158).
The book as a whole offers important contributions to feminist theory, addressing the role of appearance and the ideology of aesthetic culture, “ways of seeing” (p. 22) bodies treated as different, considering gendered politics of visual anomaly, and offering a well-crafted methodological description of situated knowledge, critical thinking, and “thick analysis” (p. 209). Alongside the book’s comprehensive analysis of facial differences, several aspects remain on the margins. Although Talley presents an erudite discussion of disability studies, acknowledging disability as “deeply shaped by ideological interest” (p. 30), a more explicit usage of disability studies scholarship would have contributed to the discussion of facial disfigurement as a stigma that “calls into question one’s status as human” and would benefit Talley’s analysis of facial work as “what makes humanness possible” (p. 187). Challenging the assumption that lies at the basis of the question, “what makes appearance impairments, specifically those of the face, different from other kinds of disabilities?” (p. 41), disability studies scholarship would have been helpful in contextualizing disability as a broader notion consisting of visible, invisible, physical, and cognitive differences carrying “vital significance” when juxtaposed with additional factors and identity categories such as age, gender, cultural context, and profession. Examined in this way, disability and the term “social death” become relevant to a broader discussion, revealing “small” deaths people experience within everyday life in an embodied world. Finally, the book raises awareness of the need for future discussion of alternatives to the normalcy and “unremarkability” solutions offered people with facial differences—ways of eradicating the stigma not only by medical intervention but also, following disability culture’s logic, by openly negotiating it. Addressing the work of visual artist Laura Ferguson and Talley’s own experiences in “burn camp,” the book touches on this subject yet offers only a hint of the richness embedded within interactive communication between the “starer” and the “staree” (Garland-Thomson 2009). Saving Face, with its fluent prose, compelling case studies, and intellectual depth, offers an important milestone in research toward a better understanding of the dialogue between the body and society, revealing the ways ideologies are embodied, are emblazoned on, and sculpt our appearance.