Looking at the Nose: Gender, Jewishness, and the Politics of Visual Mediation

The nose is a multisensory organ and a powerful bodily technology that helps orient the experience of consciousness in the material world, and yet, we have come to a socio-technological context so driven by ocularcentrism, largely as a result of the visual nature of social media and new media, that the nose is often reduced to just an idealised ‘shape’. This article explores how the contemporary construction and representation of the nose, especially on social media, is seated in a very long history of gendered and racialised politics. By examining the cultural and political implications of the nose through critical intertextual analysis, I excavate much deeper anxieties about the body, relationships to the self, and motivations for a variety of behaviours, both public (like posting on social media) and deeply intimate (like rhinoplasty). This work is about the symbolic adventure of the nose across time and culture, in terms of where it has left its mark and, in turn, how marks have been left on it.