NotNormativelyHuman 205
businessworld,you'regoingtobefivetimesaheadofhim.That'swhyI
thank Almighty God you're both built like Adonises" (A. Miller 25).
Loman'smisguidedhopesanddreamsconcerninghissonsarepartofhis
other-directed personality, and clearly they are culturally induced: in a
culture obsessed with images, forms of the living body (and their
surgicalalterations)canindeedchangefeelingsandpersonalities.
It is no surprise, therefore, as Blum reports, that most patients
undergoing cosmetic surgery seek not physical transformation so much
but self-transformation so that, they hope, enhanced appearances will
enhance also their sense of themselves. Obviously, the obsession with
images, and the link between appearance and identity cannot be easily
thrown off. American women's troubled relationship to their bodies,
particularly in contemporary culture, is, as Blum also suggests, to be
regarded as the result of a history of victimization by the mass media
and patriarchal culture. In this Foucauldian perspective, norms are
indeed the ways of all flesh, leaving little if no alternative. Against that
background, Virginia Blum asks a truly important question: "When
identity itself is fashioned... in relation to these transient cultural
images... how can we speak of any kind of premedia, premediated
body?"(54),and,Imightadd,where(ifanywhere)isthereaspacefora
pre-normativebodyinsidetheculturalmanifold?
However we might respond to such a question, investigations into
thenormativescrutinyofthevisiblebody—especiallyofwomen—shed
light not only on the contemporary cultural politics of beauty, bodily
shape,andweightorahostofothersitesofbiology-basednormativities
butalsoonthecomplexrelationshipsbetweenappearance,identity,and
the cultural norms of modern America. In her review of these matters,
SamanthaBarbascallsfor"newmethodologicalapproachestothestudy
of altered, 'normal,' and deviant bodies, [to] unravel the nexus of
economic, cultural, and social forces that have made physical
appearance one of the primary contemporary indexes of individual
identity and worth" (Barbas 1116). In the perspective of a materialist
critique,theanti-essentialiststancewidely sharedbyAmerican Cultural
Studies and its habitual focus on the cultural constructedness of all
formsofbodilynon-normativitymayhavetheperhapsunintended(side)
effect of redirecting attention away from social and cultural
determinants and shifting the debate from causation to signification,