The Symbolic Boundaries of Surgical ‘Otherness’

Abstract

The final section of Chapter 4 addressed several similarities in British and American women’s utilization of global discourses in their accounting practices. This chapter will focus on another point of convergence in the two groups’ narratives — namely, the figure of the ‘surgery junkie’ (Pitts-Taylor, 2007) or, as I am calling her, the ‘surgical other’. I use the term to refer to an individual and, most commonly, a woman, whose relationship with cosmetic procedures is seen as problematic and, in some cases, pathological. Notions of surgical otherness are culturally prevalent today. The image appears in a range of texts, from movies such as Brazil and Death Becomes Her to Eve Ensler’s play The Good Body, and novels such as Carl Hiaasen’s Skin Tight, as well as in numerous magazine articles and television talk shows. The surgical other is also personified in the bodies of celebrity ‘surgery addicts’, women such as Cher, Joan Rivers and Farrah Fawcett,¹ who are characterized as having ‘gone too far’ in their pursuit of beauty and/or eternal youthfulness, and those like the so-called ‘cat lady’, Jocelyn Wildenstein, who have gained celebrity status due largely to their ‘extreme’ cosmetic modification.