On the Cutting Edge:
Cosmetic Surgery & the Technological
Production of the Gendered Body
by Anne Balsamo
Some Statistics
• 90% of all cosmetic procedures are performed on
women, 10% on men.
• 87% of Caucasians undergo some form of plastic
surgery
• 6% of Hispanics (less than 1% of total population)
• 4 to 5% of African Americans
(0.5 % of the population – an increase, since new
scar prevention technologies)
• 3% of Asian
(0.1 % of the population)
Health Column 5/9/2005
http://www.s2smagazine.com/CONTENT/healthc
olumn/healthcolumn02.asp
What is “gender”? How is it different from “sex”?
•
Balsamo says that even though gender is cultural, we tend to “naturalize” it
(mistake it as being “natural” or “biological” (686).
Gender Behavior as Performance
• Judith Butler describes
the gendered body as “a
set of repeated acts
within a highly rigid
regulatory frame that
congeal over time to
produce the appearance
of substance” (686).
Feral Children (approx. 100 known)
•
•
Victor – raised by wolves when his
family was murdered and found at age
seven in Southern Russia by oil explorers
– was never able to learn human behavior
or language.
•
Kamala (8 years old) and Amala (18
months old) -- raised together by wolves
in India. Amala died during the attempt
at socialization, but Kamala lived and
became fairly socialized.
Oxana Malaya from the Ukraine was
able to learn human behavior and live a
“normal” life after being raised by dogs •
from age 3-8.
Their physical bodies became much
more adept at running on all fours—even
after Kamala was socialized and her
limbs retrained, Kamala would drop to
all fours when she needed to run fast.
An Experiment
• For the next three days, walk around assuming that
gender is a performance. What observations are you
making about people’s behavior?
Why perform gender at all?
• If it’s expensive, painful,
and time-consuming, why
do it?
• What are the
consequences of refusing
to perform or failing to
perform to expectations?
• To what extent are
expectations regional?
Class-driven? Etc.?
Article’s central question:
• What effects do biotechnological advancements have
on culturally constructing the body? On gender?
(685).
Padaung women of Burma
Examples of Technologies Used to Reinforced Gender
•
The goal is often to increase
fragility / instability of women
(considered sexy) and strength in men
“The Ideal Female Face”
•
White, Western
•
Nose:
“The Model Triangle”
•
Source: The Nose Clinic
Johannesburg, South Africa
African Nose
• African Noses (and
those of other
ethnicities) do not
have the “model
triangle”
• Balsamo points out
that Black faces are
evaluated
in terms of
proportions
determined by the
measurement of the
Caucasian form (689)
“Asian Rhinoplasty” “restores” balance?
Asian Cosmetic Surgery
•
“Our goal is to enhance your
appearance, while preserving
your cultural identity. We
never try to westernize the
Asian face and body through
cosmetic surgery. Instead, we
aim to help our Asian
cosmetic surgery patients
attain harmony and balance.”
www.asiancosmeticsurgery.com
•
Left: the procedure still known as
“Westernization blepharoplasty”
for “Correction of the Asian Eye”
•
Also, Asian Rhinoplasty,
Jaw Reduction,
Calf Reduction
http://www.asiancosmeticsurgery.com/html/
beforeandafters.html
African-American Cosmetic Surgery
• “. . . the goal of plastic surgery in African
Americans is to enhance the natural beauty that
brings out our individual ethnic traits.”
(Unable to find web photo of before and after)
Health Column 5/9/2005
http://www.s2smagazine.com/CONTENT/healt
hcolumn/healthcolumn02.asp
“Designer Vaginas” (vs. FGM)
The “Medical Gaze” (read 686-C)
•
Carole Spitzack says:
. . . the physician’s clinical eye functions
like Foucault’s medical gaze; it is a
disciplinary gaze, situated within
apparatuses of power and knowledge, that
constructs the female figure as
pathological, excessive, unruly, and
potentially threatening. This gaze
disciplines the unruly female body by first
fragmenting it into isolated parts—face,
hair, legs, breasts—and then redefining
those parts as inherently flawed and
pathological. When women internalize a
fragmented body image and accept its
“flawed” identity, each part of the body
then becomes a site for the “fixing” of her
physical abnormality.
Cosmetic Surgery: 3 Mechanisms of Control
• Carole Spitzack suggests that
cosmetic surgery deploys
three main mechanisms of
cultural control of the female
body (686). What are they?
• 1) Surveillance
• Foucault model
• 2) Inscription
• (pathology & fragmentation:
the female body is always
seen as flawed and “needing
repair”--691)
• 3) Confession
• (woman admits she is in need
of surgery)
“Divining” Truth (687)
• Is age a disease?
• Breastfeeding requires “reconstructive”
surgery?
• Anthropologists discovered that not all cultures
view an adolescent body type as preferable /
sexy.
• Balsamo says the body is no longer thought to
hold its own truths; “truths” become
technologically constructed.
Men vs. Women:
Cosmetic Surgery Representation
What are some of the differences?
From Cosmetic Surgery Consultants, London
“. . . cosmetic surgery is not necessarily all about desperate attempts at repairing faded
glamour, but often essential in dealing with difficult health problems. With this
shift in opinion, men in the UK have particularly benefited, taking a newfound
confidence to the exploration of what cosmetic and plastic surgery can do to
enhance their lives and, most importantly, improve their health.”
Physical qualities as Signifiers
• Quote on p. 692:
“ . . . the meaning of the presence or
absence of any physical quality varies
according to the gender of the body on
which it appears.”
• Signification is largely determined by
the power structures that socialize us
Flesh Markets?
• Balsamo’s conclusion: Gender (and ethnicity)
norms are being marketed by the medical
profession as “corrections” of medical
conditions.
• What drives the trend of the medical
community to pathologize non-Western
features?
• Are there conflicts of interest when the medical
community profits from pathologizing a
healthy body? Is it an abuse of power?
Questions to Ponder:
• When people say: “I’m not doing
this for other people—I’m doing
it for myself,” is this even
possible? Are there choices we
can really make “for ourselves?”
• “That my agency is riven with
paradox does not mean it is
impossible. It means only that
paradox is the condition of its
possibility.”
(Judith Butler,
Undoing Gender—3).
• Altar-ations
• Pieces of Herself
• Polystyrene Dream