Abstract
Medical, scientific and ‘popular medical’ literature on cosmetic surgery is overwhelming in volume. This chapter incorporates material drawn from books, medical journal papers, articles found in cosmetic surgery advertising and material intended to inform the public. The resulting corpus represents technical work in the area as well as material written by experts but intended for the public. I use this collection to identify and map the analytic repertoires traced in previous chapters; that is, nature, agency and vanity. This chapter seeks to address a set of questions also posed for the project as a whole: can shared terms and assumptions be identified across discourses which deal with cosmetic surgery? If so, what do those shared terms and assumptions mean for gender? The becomings of the biomedical imaginary body will be investigated through this material, as will any intertextual processes at work between medical, feminist and magazine discourse. I ask, how much do these quite different, sometimes conflicting discursive arenas share, and how does this relate to contemporary notions of gender?
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Notes
See Kevin Smith (MD), ‘Rhinoplasty for African-Americans on the Rise’, The Crisis, vol. 101, no. 1, 1994, p. 14. Interestingly, 80 per cent of these patients undergoing rhinoplasty to modify the ‘ethnicity’ of the nose are women. Also see ‘Plastic Surgeons’ Ethnic Challenges’, USA Today, vol. 121–2, no. 2572, January 1993.
See Donald Marshall’s Your Face in Their Hands, Hill of Content, Melbourne, 1998; Darryl Hodgkinson, ‘A Place for Cosmetic Surgery: Part 1. The Face’, Modern Medicine ofAustralia, vol. 36, no. 3, March 1993, p. 37. On another tack, Libby Harkness, in Skin Deep: A Consumer’s Guide to Cosmetic Surgery in Australia, Doubleday, Sydney, 1994, provides a short section on cultural differences in preferences for surgical procedures, though here the question is not related specifically to altering those features understood to be cultural markers.
Julian Reich, ‘The Surgical Improvement in Appearance of the Female Body’, MJA, vol. 1, 23 November, 1974, p. 771.
Randolph H. Guthrie, The Truth AboutBreastlmplants, John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1994.
Thomas Pruzinsky, ‘Psychological Factors in Cosmetic Plastic Surgery: Recent Developments in Patient Care’, Plastic Surgical Nursing, 1993, vol. 13, no. 2, p. 64.
Julian Reich, ‘The Aesthetic Surgical Experience’, in J.W. Smith and S.J. Ashton (eds), Plastic Surgery, Little, Brown and Co., Boston, 1991, p. 136.
Julian Reich, ‘Aesthetic Plastic Surgery: Development and Place in Medical Practice’, MJA, 27 May 1972, p. 1156.
Benjamin C. Cohney, ‘Silicone Breast Implants’ (letter), MJA, Vol. 156, 2 March 1992, p. 365.
Marcia Angell, ‘Shattuck Lecture — Evaluating the Health Risks of Breast Implants: The Interplay of Medical Science, the Law and Public Opinion’, New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 334, no. 23, 6 June 1996, p. 1515.
Cholm Williams, ‘Litigation, Hysteria Cloud Truth over Silicone Implantation’, The Australian Surgeon, August 1991, p. 17.
Diana Brahams, ‘Greater Duty to Warn of Risks’, The Lancet, 17 December 1988, vol. 2, p. 1434.
Peter M. Brooks, ‘Silicone Breast Implantation: Doubts about the Fears’, MJA, vol. 162, 17 April 1995, p. 433.
Cholm Williams, ‘Silicone Breast Implants’ (letter), MJA, vol. 156, 6 April 1992, p. 508.
Kathy Davis’s findings support this view. She states that ‘[p]hysicians systematically withhold information or downplay the risks of surgery’. See Kathy Davis, Reshaping the Female Body: The Dilemma of Cosmeric Surgery, Routledge, New York and London, 1995, p. 157. Informed consent, for Davis, is the evaluation of information provided and considered under less than ideal conditions. See pp. 157–8.
See Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality, Routledge, London and New York, 1996, which demonstrates the status of femininity as posed against rationality, for instance, in ‘Corporeal Representation in/and the Body Politic’, p. 26; and ‘Towards a Feminist Philosophy of the Body’, p. 50. See also Janna Thompson, ‘Women and Political Rationality’, in Carole Pateman and Elizabeth Gross (eds), Feminist Challenges: Social and Political Theory, Allen and Unwin, Sydney 1986, pp. 99–111.
Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1987, p. 3.
Leila Henderson, Cosmetic Surgery: Your Questions Answered, Gore and Osment, Sydney 1993, p. 29.
Stuart Renwick, ‘Silicone Breast Implants: Implications for Society and Surgeons’, MJA, vol. 165, 16 September 1996, p. 338.
Marsha F. Gold, ‘Image of Perfection once the Goal — Now Some Women Just Seek Damages’, JAMA, vol. 267, no. 18, 13 May 1992, p. 2439.
See Steven Vogel, Against Nature: The Concept of Nature in Critical Theory, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1996, p. 9; also Jeffrey Weeks, Against Nature: Essays on History, Sexuality and Identity, Rivers Oram Press, London, 1991, p. 102.
Marcene Goodman, ‘Social, Psychological and Developmental Factors in Women’s Receptivity to Cosmetic Surgery’, Journal of Aging Studies, vol. 8, no. 4, 1994, pp. 380 and 388.
See Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in her Visual and Other Pleasures, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1989.
Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1981, p. 116.
See, for example, Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine Between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1989.
Biggs, Thomas et al., ‘Augmentation Mammaplasty: A Review of 18 Years’, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgety, vol. 69, no. 3, March 1982, p. 448.
Julian Reich, ‘The Surgical Improvement in Appearance of the Female Body’, MJA, 23 November 1974, p. 774.
John Van Duyn, ‘Psyche and Plastic Surgery’, Southern Medical Journal, vol. 58, October 1965, p. 1255.
Nikolas Rose, Inventing Our Selves, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 1996.
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© 2003 Suzanne Fraser
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Fraser, S. (2003). The ‘Art’ of Cosmetic Surgery: Medicine, Metaphor and Meaning. In: Cosmetic Surgery, Gender and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230500228_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230500228_6
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