Plasticizing Bodies: Rape Fantasy and Autocannibalism in You'll Be Happier

Abstract

Through the literary and theoretical frameworks of Plastic studies, Medical Humanities, Foucauldian biopolitics, biopower, anatomo-politics, panopticon and heterotopia, feminism, ableism, neoliberal patriarchal capitalism and the Posthuman discourse of the cyborg, this paper aims to examine two aspects in the documentary You’ll Be Happier: (a) evaluate the clinically-sanctioned, plasticized, aesthetic reconstruction of bodies legitimised by the ableist, neoliberal patriarchal capitalist system in its attempt at body standardisation and (b) analyse the different camera angles that generate a scopophilic voyeurism and a voyeuristic penetrative gaze. This study reveals the aesthetic reconstruction of the body as a cyborgian spectacle of autocannibalism fixed by a reverse panopticon. The autocannibalism is synthetically constructed and technologically assisted, and not executed via natural physiological means. The plastic reconstruction of the body exemplifies the neoliberal culture of disposability and incessant self-upgradation. At the same time, it also satiates the rape fantasy of the penetrative gaze via epistemic and intellectual means.