Abstract
Of course, magazines are not the only context in which the powerful concepts of nature, agency and vanity are played out. In this chapter, I review scholarly feminist discussion of cosmetic surgery. A brief account of the various approaches to cosmetic surgery and beauty found in the texts is provided, then the three analytic repertoires of nature, agency and vanity are examined in detail, in order to identify intertextual connections between feminist writers and women’s magazines in their treatment of cosmetic surgery. Part of this process involves identifying the ways in which the repertoires draw on and contribute to the sexual imaginary. As I noted in Chapter 2, Gatens conceptualises the sexual imaginary as plural. This plurality was evident in the last chapter and emerges again in what follows, revealing various contradictions, most clearly in the section on nature.
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Notes
Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality, Routledge, London and New York, 1996, p. viii.
See, for instance, Alison Jaggar, ‘Human Biology in Feminist Theory: Sexual Equality Reconsidered’, in C. Gould (ed.), Beyond Domination, Rowman and Littlefield, 1983; and Bob Connell, ‘The Body and Social Practice’, Gender and Power, Polity, Oxford, 1987. As was demonstrated in the Introduction, Donna Haraway’s work continually grapples with the concept of nature, refusing to deny the validity of (a version of) the category altogether. See her ‘The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others’, in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler (eds), Cultural Studies, Routledge, New York, 1992, pp. 295–337 and more recently, ModestWitnessC>Second_ Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_Oncomouse T. “Feminism and Technoscience”, Routledge, New York and London, 1997, p. 108.
Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth, Vintage, London and New York, 1991. As an illustration of this influence, The Beauty Myth, then nine years old, was referred to repeatedly and at length by several participants (including a lawyer and a media analyst) at the 1999 NSW Health Care Complaints Commission Inquiry into Cosmetic Surgery, for example in the presentation made by media analyst Anne Ring, in drawing attention to pressures women face around beauty. The book is also referred to in magazine and newspaper critiques of beauty culture, for example, see Deborah Bogle, ‘Vain?’ Weekend Australian Review, 11–12 April 1992, review 1. More recently, a pamphlet distributed at the 1999 Sydney Reclaim the Night feminist rally also referred to Wolf’s book.
See Harmon R. Holcomb, Sociobiology, Sex and Science, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1993, for a discussion of sociobiology’s account of sexual selection and the ‘double standard’.
Germaine Greer’s The Whole Woman, Doubleday, London, 1999, exhibits a strikingly similar view in relation to cosmetic surgery. Greer states, ‘If the womanmade woman is never good enough, the man-made woman is no better than a toy, built to be played with, knocked about and ultimately thrown away’ (p. 34). She echoes many of Wolf’s arguments, stating that ‘[n]owadays none of the varieties of natural is good enough’ (p. 28) and characterising breast implants as ‘something more pneumatic than nature intended’ (p. 29).
Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1993, p. 104.
Ibid., p. 248.
Ibid., p. 165.
Annette Corrigan and Denise Meredyth, ‘The Body Politic’, in Kate Pritchard Hughes (ed.), Contemporary Australian Feminism, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1994, p. 46.
Ibid., D. 43.
Ibid., p. 39.
Ibid., p. 40.
Ibid., p. 41.
Anne Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body, Duke University Press, Durham, NC and London, 1996, p. 5.
Ibid., p. 58.
Ibid., p. 63.
Ibid., p. 74.
Steven Vogel, Against Nature: The Concept of Nature in Critical Theory, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1996, p. 9. This is not to say that the natural has never been used to defend homosexuality.
Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes towards an Investigation’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, New Left Review of Books, London, 1970.
Ibid., p. 140.
Ibid., p. 162.
Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, ‘Intellectuals and Power’, Language, CounterMemory, Practice, D. Bouchard (ed.), D. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (trans.), Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1977, p. 212.
Ibid., p. 215.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, The Will to Knowledge, Robert Hurley (trans.): volume 1, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1978, p. 86.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Alan Sheridan (trans.), Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1991.
As was suggested in Chapter 3 in my discussion of Nikolas Rose’s insights into agency in Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power and Personhood, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996.
Kathy Davis, ‘Remaking the She-Devil: A Critical Look at Feminist Approaches to Beauty’, Hypatia, vol. 6, no. 2, Summer 1991, p. 22.
Ibid., p. 32.
Ibid., p. 23.
Ibid., p. 29.
Ibid., p. 33.
See Lynne Segal, ‘Sexual Liberation and Feminist Politics’, in her Straight Sex: The Politics of Pleasure, Virago, London, 1994; and Carol Smart, ‘Collusion, Collaboration and Confession: On Moving beyond the Heterosexuality Debate’, in Diane Richardson (ed.), Theorising Heterosexuality: Telling It Straight, Open University Press, Buckingham and Philadelphia, 1996 for contributions to this discussion.
Iris Marion Young, ‘Breasted Experience’, in her Throwing Like A Girl and Other Essays, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1990, p. 202.
Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1987, p. 24.
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© 2003 Suzanne Fraser
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Fraser, S. (2003). Feminist Imaginary Bodies. In: Cosmetic Surgery, Gender and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230500228_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230500228_5
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