Extreme Makeover Research Articles

Fairy tales and funhouse mirrors: Frameworks of assimilation and conformity in Extreme Makeover, The Swan and What Not To Wear

Numerous researchers have commented unfavourably on the classist, sexist and assimilationist nature of contemporary American makeover programs; this article examines Extreme Makeover, The Swan, and What Not To Wear in order to identify the narrative paradigms most commonly used to cloak such conformist pressures in more socially acceptable guises. A close analysis demonstrates how frameworks such as initiation rituals, aesthetic ideals, market values, self-empowerment, and fairy tales ultimately overlap to deflect attention from feminist concerns about larger social issues and serve to demonstrate how these pervasive cultural ideas have been reworked to serve political and commercial ends.

Extreme makeover – Anatomy Edition: How a paradigm shift in pedagogy reshaped an anatomy program

Much has been said about, and speculated on, the effect medical sciences curriculum changes have had, and will continue to have, on gross anatomy pedagogy. In the ten years since major curriculum change was implemented at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, gross (and microscopic) anatomy pedagogy have transformed from isolated courses into themes integrated into systems based units. Although administrative policies provided the initial impetus for pedagogical transformation, in recent years, incorporation of clinical instructors into the laboratory experience has fostered multi‐disciplinary teaching partnerships that provide contextual learning experiences for students. The paradigm shift from dissection to prosection pedagogy, the integration of clinically relevant anatomy through radiology and acute care, the development of interactive, online learning tools, and an upgrade in classroom technology have influenced our ability to provide advanced anatomical sciences instruction throughout all four years of undergraduate medical education. We discuss our experiences of pedagogy transformation in the last decade, and how these are informing efforts to improve pre‐medical anatomy pedagogy.

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction

Medical records extreme makeover

When was the last time you gave a drug information handout to your patient that was so easy to read, easy to understand, and visually appealing that even their friends or family would want to read it? It may have been a long time since you've seen such a user-friendly item—if ever.

Clement’s New Clothes. The Destruction of Old S. Clemente in Rome, the Eleventh-Century Frescoes, and the Cult of (Anti)Pope Clement III

In the early 1100s, the fifth-century church of S. Clemente in Rome was buried beneath an entirely new basilica. Inspired by suggestions published by Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri (1998) and Valentino Pace (2007), the present article considers the possibility that this radical intervention constituted an act of damnatio memoriae or, better, of deletio memoriae, an obliteration of memory prompted by the nascent cult of miracles associated with Pope Paschal II’s enemy and rival, (anti)pope Clement III. Clement III (Wibert of Ravenna) died in 1100, not long after the execution of an extensive fresco cycle in the early Christian basilica celebrating the miracles and cult of the first-century pope and martyr St. Clement I of Rome. Resonances between these images and the prodigia attributed to Clement III may have invited analogies between the two Clements, especially during the turbulent early years of Paschal II’s pontificate, when Paschal, alarmed by reports of his adversary’s miracles, had Clement III’s corpse exhumed and thrown into the Tiber. The perceived correspondences between the first-century pope and his eleventh-century namesake may have extended to their postmortem resting places – Clement I was martyred by being thrown into the Black Sea – as well as to their shared attributes, particularly the pontifical vestments and white hair prominently displayed in the frescoes. These attributes disappear in the early twelfth-century mosaic of Clement I on the apsidal arch of the new, upper church, where the saint is instead represented as a young man with dark hair, a dark beard, and an apostle’s clothing. This extreme makeover in a work securely associable with Roman reform-party sponsorship effectively dissociated Clement I from the painted images in the earlier church and, very probably, from his eleventh-century namesake in the Tiber.

Living for the other half: Slum specials on reality TV

This article examines the transvaluation of urban poverty in neo-liberal India through a reading of Endemol’s reality television show The Big Switch (Season One, UTV Bindass, 2009). Formatted as Survivor for Indian D-list celebrities and Extreme Makeover for Mumbai’s slum dwellers, who were then teamed together in a simulated slum, the show promised to make one out of ten ‘slumdogs’ a millionaire. Paying attention to the quick fix that reality television provides to the shortage of living space, I frame my critique of the Switch House within what A. Appadurai calls Mumbai’s Great Housing Dream and what Michel Foucault has defined as heterotopia. I propose that The Big Switch (Hitesh Bhatia, 2009), as it stages the fantasy of millionairedom and celebrityhood for all, becomes a symptom of the antagonisms between global corporate formalism and the informal street economy at the heart of the illegal slum city. I situate the television text within the larger history of the Indian television industry, as well as the current turn towards ‘slum culture’ in global reality-based television programming, especially through shows like Famous, Rich, and In the Slums (Joyce Trozzo, 2011) and Slumdog Secret Millionaire (Rod Williams, 2010). Building on the media urbanism theory of Ravi Sundaram, I also suggest that a material analysis of the TV set in the slum is important in articulating the specificities of slum citizenship and spectatorship. I argue that slum tourism (and its visual capture in photography, cinema and television) is not only an archive of the ephemeral kinetic city but of an illegal yet necessary dwelling in constant threat of demolition, whose moment of exhibition to the world cannot be separated from the moment of its destruction by that world.

Fin-de-siècle Vienna and the Challenge of Family Biography

Fin-de-siècle Vienna and the Challenge of Family Biography Paul Reitter (bio) I In 1851, a middle-aged German wool trader named Hermann Christian Wittgenstein entered into a partnership of sorts with his Austrian in-laws, who also dealt in raw materials, only on a greater scale. Hermann moved to Austria, where he began giving, in today’s parlance, extreme makeovers to estates local aristocrats had neglected, with the understanding that his in-laws would help him sell the wool, coal, wood, and corn the estates produced. The arrangement worked brilliantly. Frugal and hard driving—and eager to use industrial methods in a country that had been slow to industrialize—Hermann transformed poorly tended lands into robust enterprises. Meanwhile, his in-laws not only did their part, but they thought, as well, to direct the money that came streaming in toward lucrative holdings in Viennese property. Within a few years, Hermann was able to install himself, his wife, and several of their eleven children in a palace outside Vienna. They soon left it, despite Hermann’s parsimony, for an even grander residence, a castle in which one of Empress Maria-Theresa’s prime ministers had lived. Never mind that Hermann leased the place: he had built a House of Wittgenstein. It would be hard to think of a family more deserving of a group biography. After all, Hermann Christian was far outpaced by the son from whom he expected the least—namely, Karl, who failed out of high school and ran away to America as a teenager. Not long after his return, Karl, the third of Hermann Christian’s sons, followed his father in marrying well; then, thanks to good instincts, an appetite for risk, booming [End Page 665] markets, and probably some manipulation of them, he made a fortune in the steel and banking businesses. It was a fortune of Carnegie-like dimensions that dwarfed most others in his country. After retiring at fifty-one, Karl spent the majority of his remaining days in his marble palais, which spanned more than fifty yards along Vienna’s Alleegasse. When he took his last breath, in 1913, he may have been the richest man in Austria. Imperious and hot-tempered, Karl wasn’t known for behaving gently, and neither did he die that way. He suffered much the same fate as Freud: they were both prolific cigar smokers whose health was ravaged by cancer of the jaw, though in Karl’s case the proximate cause of death was an operation that was likely to have lethal effects. That he chose to spend the evening before the surgery making music with his wife, Leopoldine, would have surprised no one. For to say that Karl and Leopoldine were deeply devoted to the arts would be as much an understatement as calling them very rich. As worshippers of culture, they were zealots. Karl’s house was so full of Kunst that he began referring to his eldest daughter (Hermine), who never married and became a kind of secretary to him, as his “art director.” The house also had seven pianos, as well as one of the world’s greatest collections of musical manuscripts. Schoenberg and Mahler were regular guests. Brahms was a family friend. Then, of course, there are the dramas and soaring accomplishments of the next generation. Three of Karl and Leopoldine’s five sons committed suicide. Precocious in music and possibly autistic, Hans, the eldest, vanished during a trip to America in 1903, and is thought to have drowned himself, though where exactly this happened remains unclear. Rudi, who was gay, poisoned himself in a Berlin bar a year later, perhaps because he believed his sexual orientation was about to be made public. Like quite a few Austrian officers, Kurt shot himself during the final days of World War One. At the time, Paul was busy resurrecting his career as a concert pianist—this despite the fact that he had lost his right arm on the Eastern Front. His younger brother Ludwig had already written his epochal Tractatus, which would appear in the early interwar period. But even as Ludwig was winning new and, as it would turn out, enduring...

Extreme Makeover: Short- and Long-Term Effects of a Remodeled Servicescape

Using survey and transaction data from a natural experiment in a fast-food chain, the authors investigate the effects of store remodeling. They test (1) short- and long-term effects on customers’ cognitions, affect, and behavioral intentions; (2) the moderating impact of spontaneous versus planned and group versus single-customer store visits; and (3) the differential effects on two store performance measures: average customer spending and store traffic. The results show that, in line with adaptation-level theory, short-term remodeling effects lose strength in the long run (i.e., after six months). Furthermore, customers on a spontaneous trip or in a group tend to be more responsive to store remodeling than customers on a planned trip or alone. Finally, whereas average spending increases in the short run and then returns to the baseline, store traffic initially remains unaffected and even shows a dip in the long run. These findings imply that ignoring the time-variant character of remodeling effects, the nature of customers’ store visits, or the impact on store traffic may lead to inappropriate allocation of marketing resources.

Miami: mistress of the Americas

Preface 1 Early Liaisons 2 Shades of a City 3 Extreme Makeover 4 The Miami Growth Machine 5 The Birth of a World City 6 Transience and Civil Society 7 Locals, Exiles, and Mobiles 8 Elusive Subtropical Urbanism 9 The First Hemispheric City Appendix 1. The Transience Index Appendix 2. Mapping Locals, Exiles, and Mobiles Notes Index

Redesigning Continuing Education: Extreme Makeover Edition

Redesigning Continuing Education: Extreme Makeover Edition

Extreme Human Makeovers: Supernanny, the Unruly Child, and Adulthood in Crisis

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Karen Corteen and Phil Scraton argue that the notion of childhood is inherently flawed: “No issue reveals the contradictions within the politics of childhood as starkly as that of sexuality, its definition and regulation. As ‘non-adults,’ children are assumed to be asexual. While they are socialized into gender-appropriate roles from birth, a universal feature of patriarchal societies, they are expected to retain a sexual naivety. Yet the images which surround them, implicit and explicit, of hegemonic/dominant masculinity and emphasized/subordinate femininity are all pervasive and all persuasive. The daily experiences of children and young people are contextualized by constructions of masculinity and femininity which are both gendered and sexualized” (76). Because of the large number of episodes broadcast, we examine only seasons one and two of Supernanny (both the UK and U.S. versions). These seasons were chosen largely for their availability: US seasons one and two are available on DVD. The UK episodes were purchased directly from Ricochet. Please note: the episodes contained on the DVDs may differ from those broadcast on television. Here we draw upon Ron Becker's observation that “regardless of the family, all problems are rooted in incompetent parenting” (184). The U.S. version utilizes split screens so that the viewers are able to see the parents' reactions as they watch the footage. Deery argues that the participants of makeover television “capitulate … to the rule of the expert and the power of the camera.” We will discuss the latter when we turn to the shifts in point of view that underpin the learning journey of Supernanny. See Hoyles, Postman, and Jenks. See Zelizer, Hays, and Stearns. Additional informationNotes on contributorsCatherine FowlerCatherine Fowler is a Senior Lecturer in Film at Otago University, New Zealand. She is editor of The European Cinema Reader, co-editor of Representing the Rural: Space, Place and Identity in Films about the Land, and author of a monograph on the British filmmaker Sally Potter.Rebecca KambutaRebecca Kambuta is a Ph.D. student in the Media, Film, and Communications Department at Otago University, New Zealand. Her doctoral dissertation traces the figure of the unruly child through film, news media, and reality television. She has also written on the makeover genre in her MA thesis, “Televising Transformation: A Close Analysis of Extreme Makeover and The Swan.”

Extreme Makeover: Library Orientation for Postgraduate Dental Residents

Bibby Library at the University of Rochester provides a library orientation to new post-graduate dental students. The original class utilized a lecture format and included content that was no longer relevant. Students were bored and did not retain the information. This article describes the design and implementation of a new orientation class. The class includes a series of exercises designed to familiarize students with pertinent resources. Student response to the class and implications for the library are discussed.

(Re)Creating a World in Seven Days: Place, Disability and Salvation in Extreme Makeover: Home Edition

At its most superficial rhetorical level, ABC’s hit television show, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, equates the condition of the family home with the condition of the bodies inside the home. If the home is ‘fixed’, then the people who live in that home will be 'fixed', as well. In this essay, I consider the ways that Extreme Makover: Home Edition constructs the human body as disabled through the medium of architecture, helped along by reality television’s version of Christian sacrificial atonement.

An Extreme Makeover for the Employer's House of Health Benefits

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgments Larry S. Boress is President and CEO of the Midwest Business Group on Health (MBGH), one of the nation's leading non-profit business coalitions. The Chicago-based MBGH is a 501(c)(3) organization with over 100 major, self-funded public and private employers, providing benefits for close to 2 million lives and paying over $2.5 billion for health care benefits annually. For more information on MBGH go to www.mbgh.org.

Pink (review)

Reviewed by: Pink Karen Coats Wilkinson, Lili. Pink. HarperTeen, 2011. [320p.] ISBN 978-0-06-192653-2 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 9-12. Ava's parents are a little, um, unusual: they regard the color pink as a signifier of patriarchal oppression and they threw Ava a coming-out party when she was seduced by an avant-garde lesbian classmate. Now, however, Ava wants to branch out from her identity as a quasi-goth emo lesbian and explore what it might be like to be a pink-cashmere-wearing girlie girl. She transfers to a posh private school and attempts to begin her extreme makeover by hanging with the popular crowd. Her tryout for a musical ends in disaster, though, so she opts for stage crew, where she finds herself reluctantly at home with the misfits who hang out in the undercroft. While she tries valiantly to straddle identities, she screws up in fairly spectacular ways; fortunately, her new friends are more forgiving than she expects, and she emerges on the other side of social disaster girlfriendless, but not without prospects. Ava's explorations are spot-on timely for the confusing possibilities and expectations teen readers face today as they negotiate gender identity and teen rebellion; her parents' unconditional support for her lesbianism makes for an ironic and sometimes quite amusing send-up of traditional expectations as they question her shift to a more conventional wardrobe. Characterization is sharp: Chloe, Ava's first girlfriend, is revealed to be the kind of snide bully who'd fit in nicely in a crowd of catty cheerleaders, while Alexis, Ava's new role model for all things pink, proves much more accepting as she refinds her inner geek under Ava's guidance. Nuances of LGBTQ differences and the prejudices they engender are hilariously explored through stage-crew-member Jules' resistance to being identified with theater gays ("ghey-with-an-h") but also more seriously considered through the sophisticated Chloe's open and shallow social rejection of the frumpy Jen. Various flavors of sexual difference thus complicate Ava's understanding of the self she was and the self she's becoming; readers with questions of their own will appreciate the balance of humor and confusion with which she plots her new course. Copyright © 2011 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Risk management in clinical practice. Part 5. Ethical considerations for dental enhancement procedures

After the demise of the Industrial Age, we currently live in an 'Information Age' fuelled mainly by the Internet, with an ever-increasing medically and dentally literate population. The media has played its role by reporting scientific advances, as well as securitising medical and dental practices. Reality television such as 'Extreme makeovers' has also raised public awareness of body enhancements, with a greater number of people seeking such procedures. To satiate this growing demand, the dental industry has flourished by introducing novel cosmetic products such as bleaching kits, tooth coloured filling materials and a variety of dental ceramics. In addition, one only has to browse through a dental journal to notice innumerable courses and lectures on techniques for providing cosmetic dentistry. The incessant public interest, combined with unrelenting marketing by companies is gradually shifting the balance of dental care from a healing to an enhancement profession. The purpose of this article is to endeavour to answer questions such as, What is aesthetic or cosmetic dentistry? Why do patients seek cosmetic dentistry? Are enhancement procedures a part of dental practice? What, if any, ethical guidelines and constraints apply to elective enhancement procedures? What is the role of the dentist in providing or encouraging this type of 'therapy'? What treatment modalities are available for aesthetic dental treatment?

Comforting the Comfortable: Extreme Makeover Home Edition's Ideological Conquest

The United States prides itself on being a classless society where economic determinism can be transcended by the right amount of merit, determination, and luck. At the same time, however, the U.S. has the second highest wealth inequality rate of any developed nation and the second lowest intergenerational mobility. Explaining the contradiction between the myth of the American Dream and the economic reality is no easy task. This article attempts to explain the role ideology and cultural myth play in mediating this contradiction by analyzing the ABC reality television series Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. Extreme Makeover: Home Edition is a wildly popular program in which a team of home builders and designers travel around the country building new homes for desperate and deserving families. I use the portrayals of seven of these families to explain the specific way Extreme Makeover portrays each families as deserving and meriting spectacular material assistance. This ideology offers support for the reinforcement of existing economic power structures and the myth of the American Dream.

Beneficence, non-maleficence, distributive justice and respect for patient autonomy – reconcilable ends in aesthetic surgery?

Respect for patient autonomy, as a fundamental principle in contemporary bioethics, guides the process of informed consent through which, it is hoped, patients' wishes are determined and executed. However, when procedures are exclusively cosmetic, questions as to the ethical legitimacy of such requests and enhancements arise. The purpose of this article is a thorough evaluation of the notions of and tensions inherent to the practice of autonomy and informed consent as they apply in aesthetic surgery. The question of motivation to undergo enhancement will be discussed, as well as the significance of risk and competence in determining the legitimacy of choice. The final conclusion is that the complexity of the moral issues involved requires conceptualization of an expanded notion of responsibility, which recognises that we need to progress beyond a 'legal' to a 'moral' conception. The implications of this expanded notion of responsibility are discussed.

Extreme makeover of pancreatic α-cells

Most insulin-secreting pancreatic β-cells are irreplaceably lost in type 1 diabetes. In a mouse model, pancreatic α-cells seem to sacrifice their identity to replenish the low stock of β-cells1. Two experts discuss what this means for understanding the basic cell biology involved and its relevance to treating diabetes.

Domesticating Citizenship: The Kairotopics of America's Post-9/11 Home Makeover

This essay analyzes how Extreme Makeover: Home Edition is making over democratic citizenship in post-9/11 America. Seeking to counter a temporal bias that displaces attention to the spatial in communication scholarship, I conduct a kairotopic, or temporal-spatial, analysis of this program to illustrate how it mediates citizenship through a particular material space-time: the contemporary American home. Overall, I argue that this show operates to domesticate political practices by relocating social responsibility from public institutions to private corporations and redirecting political agency into familiar (nuclear) familial space-times. In so doing, the program paradoxically combines the economic and governmental imperatives of neoliberalism with the moral and social norms of neoconservativism to build a new national home that is both post-dissident and postfeminist.