Conclusions

Abstract

My aim in this book has been to explore the rhetorical resources that women in different nations use to explain their decision to have cosmetic surgery. To that end, I have examined British and American consumers’ narratives of the practice, with particular attention to what those narratives tell us about the contemporary status of cosmetic surgery and ‘local’ ideas about its appropriate and inappropriate uses. I have shown that while British and American women draw on distinctive criteria of evaluation, the narrative strategies employed by both groups normalize aesthetic procedures in the first instance by aligning them with nationally specific notions of legitimate medical treatment. These strategies are also informed by globally available discourses that portray cosmetic surgery as a lifestyle choice, a method of self-improvement and a tool for holding one’s own in the competitive marketplace of employment or heterosexual romance. Such meanings are in turn reworked by women in their own accounting, at the same time that those accounts are constrained by culturally specific narratives and institutional structures. Where the general and specific are incompatible — as is more often the case in the British context — women respond by stressing the power of externally imposed appearance mandates or their entitlement to self-care, while demonstrating the latter through narratives of physical/emotional suffering and personal sacrifice.