Rousseau, Maternity and the Politics of Emptiness

Fake breasts and power: Gender, class and cosmetic surgery

“…This appears to disregard the fact that markets for particular commodities may decline as well as grow, and the fact that the powerful set of discourses and practices that surround and support any given market change over time. Things and services can be decommodified as well as commodified (the history of wet-nursing providing one example, see Brace, 2007), and the practices and forms of consumption that represent a meaningful part of daily life at one historical moment will not necessarily appear meaningful or normal at another (consider changes to the discursive association between tobacco consumption and pleasure, leisure and relaxation through the twentieth century). It also disconnects questions about cosmetic surgery from questions about gender.…”

Improving the Inside: Gender, Property and the 18th-Century Self

“…It was an imaginary that came into being by attaching itself to gender relations and to the morality of the market. The article explores what I have called elsewhere ‘the politics of emptiness’ (Brace 2007) or the fragility of self-ownership and its connections with the division between the private and public spheres. It seeks to draw attention to the unpredictability and riskiness of property as the basis for understanding and envisioning the self, in particular for women (and some men) who do not fit into the spaces created for them within a moral economy of rational improvement and a disciplined self.…”