Surgery as Transgressive Tactic of the Grotesque? (Reading/Screening Response)

In her analysis of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, Mellencamp presents surgical alteration as both a manifestation of biological and social practice, constructions of the body are inherently produced through social conditioning and are never static.(296) Her discussion of Ruth’s physical/surgical transformation only goes so far as to equate this behavior with the masquerade, seemingly unable to negotiate the negative reactions to the final segment of the miniseries. A reengagement with the Berry might produce a viable way to interact with some of these limitations. Berry discussed the performative transgression inherent in imposture, the making-over process revealing the often naturalized labor behind the production of upper class style. How can we extend this idea to account for the potentially libratory effects of examining the surgical production of femininity? The extensive process of Ruth’s “make-over” is extensively chronicled through multiple consultations and surgeries, the intermediary recovery periods are revelatory in their depiction of the excessively manipulated (mangled?) facial tissue and bone structure. It is important to consider the process not as a mystification of the production of the classical body but as one that accounts for the often grotesque labor involved, femininity as the result of socially/physically constructed codes of beauty.

This recognition of the “body becoming” is aligned with Russo’s discussion of the carnivalesque and the grotesque body as a site of “insurgency, and not merely withdrawal” as “carnival refuses to surrender the critical and cultural tools of the dominant class”.(218) How can we then consider the plastic surgery as a tactic of this insurgency through its denaturalizing of the cultural construction of the classic body? How can Ruth’s surgery be seen as the ultimate performative masquerade meant to criticize the masculine investment in demure femininity and exact some kind of revenge?

Bordo examines how the need for manipulation and control of the female body is often a symptom of the masculine, historical “fear of women as ‘too much’”. (163) Ruth is coded as the site of visual and aural excess throughout the miniseries. She, both pre and post surgery incarnations, enacts the codes of the grotesque body in different ways, a body that is both “protruding” and “extending”(her roles as unsatisfied wife, business owner, masochistic seductress) but also “secreting” and “open” (her role as societal/surgical experimentation).(Russo, 219)