Saving Face

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.

In Saving Face, sociologist Heather Laine

Talley examines the cultural meaning and social significance of interventions

aimed at repairing faces defined as disfigured. Using ethnography,

participant-observation, content analysis, interviews, and autoethnography,

Talley explores four sites in which a range of faces are “repaired:” face

transplantation, facial feminization surgery, the reality show Extreme Makeover, and the international charitable

organization Operation Smile,. Throughout, she considers how efforts focused on

repair sometimes intensify the stigma associated with disfigurement. Drawing

upon experiences volunteering at a camp for children with severe burns, Talley also

considers alternative interventions and everyday practices that both challenge

stigma and help those seen as disfigured negotiate outsider status.

Talley delves into the promise and

limits of facial surgery, continually examining how we might understand

appearance as a facet of privilege and a dimension of inequality. Ultimately,

she argues that facial work is not simply a conglomeration of reconstructive

techniques aimed at the human face, but rather, that appearance interventions

are increasingly treated as lifesaving work. Especially at a time when

aesthetic technologies carrying greater risk are emerging and when

discrimination based on appearance is rampant, this important book challenges

us to think critically about how we see the human face.