“So Much More than Pretty”: Body Modification and Boundary Transgression in Melvin Burgess’s Sara’s Face

Following Michel Foucault’s foundational studies on the regulation of the body in modern society in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, scholars working within the realm of embodiment studies often perceive the body as subject to socio-cultural construction. In these analyses, bodies that have undergone various practices performed in the name of self-expression and style—such as dieting, makeup, and fashion—are analyzed as readable texts on which various social norms and structures are inscribed. One of the current examples of such a practice is cosmetic surgery, discussions of which have frequently been couched in terms of gender, since the people who undergo cosmetic surgery are predominantly women.¹ Susan Bordo, for instance, draws on Foucauldian theories of power in order to argue that cosmetic surgery reproduces and performs existing gender norms and male-dominant structures. Extending Bordo’s argument, Sheila Jeffreys claims that beauty practices constitute “women’s oppression” and that cosmetic surgery needs to be understood as “self-mutilation” (2, 4). In contrast, Kathy Davis argues that many women’s negotiations of bodies, surgeries, and complex social norms expose the potential of cosmetic surgery to be a site of empowerment. Her critical stance is taken up by Debra L. Gimlin, who considers body work, including cosmetic surgery, as a “space for personal liberation” (2).

These polemical perspectives, identified as the “structure-agency” dichotomy by Victoria Pitts-Taylor, reached a theoretical impasse and have been deemed unproductive, not least because such binary thinking has been judged generally to be “epistemologically and politically inadequate” and something that must be “moved beyond” (9–10). Recent years have seen an increasing number of studies questioning gender (and other) categories from more radical stances, including scholarly conversations about cosmetic surgery. For example, in her article “Cosmetic Surgery and the Eclipse of Identity,” Llewellyn Negrin, though troubled by Davis’s tendency to underrate the structural constraints faced by many women, expands on Davis’s framework by drawing on scholars who consider cosmetic surgery in terms of its “potential for redeployment for feminist purposes” (28). For the scholars Negrin introduces, cosmetic surgery has the “capacity to highlight the fact that the body is a cultural construct rather than a natural unity, which is fixed and immutable” (28–29); such surgery can therefore be debated by scholars freely without invoking outdated naturalistic notions of the body that would prioritize the ethics of cosmetic surgery in their conversations (29). In her monumental work Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, Donna J. Haraway suggests that the cyborg, a hybrid between organism and artifact, holds within it the potential to break down dualisms that have been “systemic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of colour, nature, workers and animals” (177). Interestingly, scholars such as Pitts-Taylor have linked Haraway’s observations to the issue of cosmetic surgery by suggesting that interventions on the body by means of medical technology can also produce conjunctions that disrupt dualisms. In her book In the Flesh: The Cultural Politics of Body Modification, Pitts-Taylor (writing under her former surname Pitts) argues that surgically modified bodies are “particularly salient places to investigate the cyborgian body,” because the body subject “resists the unified, stable, gendered identity” (72, 153), among other things.

The practices these scholars find subversive fall under a wider conceptual umbrella than that of cosmetic surgery, one that can be characterized as “body modification,” which varies from decorations of the skin to intentional alterations of body shape. The bodies created by these practices, which do not always conform to social standards of beauty and which can sometimes include the introduction of foreign or non-living material such as a prosthesis to the body, can transgress distinctions such as beauty/ugliness, organism/artifact, and even self/other. Such bodies elicit the binary oppositions of these naturalized categories and make clear their status as cultural fictions simultaneously. Emerging “as a cultural movement” around the late 1980s (Pitts 7), body modification is now spreading partly as a function of “the trends of youth...