Poli/Tuck. Berlusconi, la chirurgia estetica e la stampa italiana

The article intends to explore how Silvio Berlusconi’s body was represented by the media after he underwent cosmetic surgery in January 2004. Through a frame analysis of Italian print, The author tries to identify the conditions of production and re-production of a body that, while complying to a continuous self-care process, has not only succumbed to the constraints of a biopolitic of the body politic, but has turned them to its own advantage into a propaganda spectacle extending to the very folds of its flesh. In full compliance with the so-called media logic, and at the moment when television insists on the inner beauty of the body as it undergoes plastic surgery (from the reality show Extreme Makeover to the fiction Nip/Tuck), also the natural body or rather, the mediated body of the body politic par excellence, i.e. Berlusconi’s body, has submitted itself to the forever young aesthetic creed, literally embodying the ancient motto, le Roi ne meurt jamais. Yet the photographs selected from the Italian print show the different images of Berlusconi’s body: the eternally young body gives way to the sick and unhealthy body, and, finally, to the grotesque body.

Federico Boni, Poli/Tuck. Berlusconi, la chirurgia estetica e la stampa italiana in "COMUNICAZIONE POLITICA" 1/2007, pp 117-127, DOI: