Saving Face: Disfigurement and the Politics of Appearance
Heather Laine Talley, "Saving Face: Disfigurement and the Politics of Appearance"
English | 2014 | ISBN: 0814784119 | PDF | pages: 270 | 1.4 mb
English | 2014 | ISBN: 0814784119 | PDF | pages: 270 | 1.4 mb
Winner, Body and Embodiment Award presented by the American Sociological Association Imagine yourself without a face—the task seems impossible. The face is a core feature of our physical identity. Our face is how others identify us and how we think of our ‘self’. Yet, human faces are also functionally essential as mechanisms for communication and as a means of eating, breathing, and seeing. For these reasons, facial disfigurement can endanger our fundamental notions of self and identity or even be life threatening, at worse. Precisely because it is so difficult to conceal our faces, the disfigured face compromises appearance, status, and, perhaps, our very way of being in the world.