Surgery Junkies: Wellness and Pathology in Cosmetic Culture

Chapter 1: Visible Pathology and Cosmetic Wellness

1 Visible Pathology and Cosmetic Wellness Cosmetic surgery transforms the outer, physical body, and this very fact renders it controversial. But I want to argue that the cultural, medical, and political relations of cosmetic surgery reach a great deal further than the physical, to what we think of as the self ’s interior, to the identity and psyche of the subject. In this chapter, I outline a range of treatments of cosmetic surgery, emerging from psychiatry, feminism, cosmetic medicine, and television, which are explored in this book. My project is to examine the ways in which they discursively establish the subjects of cosmetic surgery. Drawing from insights in contemporary social theory, I describe cosmetic surgery not only as a technology of body modification but also as a technology of psychic inscription. Cosmetic surgery instigates practices and discourses that define the self as well as the body, the personal interiority of the subject as well as its high-tech physique. 16 Visible Pathology Cosmetic surgery is historically seen as a corruption of the natural body-self relation. The body that has undergone cosmetic surgery has been criticized for creating an untruthful representation of the inner self, for allowing an impression of the self that passes as someone else. This was one of the moral objections to cosmetic surgery reigning in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—that it was highly unnatural not just because it involved physical transformation but because it corrupted the normal, and even biologically driven, coding of a person’s character on the body. Historian Sander Gilman describes how cosmetic surgery was feared for helping marginalized people pass into dominant groups, particularly with respect to race and criminality. “One great social fear in early twentieth century Europe and the United States,” he writes, “was that the criminal, especially the Jew or black as criminal , would alter his appearance through the agency of the aesthetic surgeon and vanish into the crowd.”1 Such fear, of course, is highly essentialist, assuming that a person’s essence is fixed by race, ethnicity, or some other category. This essentialist logic still endures. We have seen it, for instance, in the relentless social fascination with Michael Jackson’s cosmetic surgeries. With his increasingly pale skin and thinning nose, Jackson is variously seen as post-Black, as a denier of his racial heritage, and—combined with his gender- and age-defying body modifications—as a freak. Jackson’s cosmetic alterations have become heightened to such spectacle that it has been difficult for us to avert our collective gaze. This is partly because he is seen as using technology to mask what we take to be his more authentic, biologically determined self, which would be Black, male, and middle-aged. In the late twentieth and twenty-first Visible Pathology, Cosmetic Wellness 17 centuries, our collective unease may be informed not only by traditional attitudes about race transgression but also by a more modern public consciousness about the psychological effects of racism. As Kathy Davis puts it, “Ethnic cosmetic surgery evokes ambivalence. As a kind of surgical passing, it can be viewed as a symptom of ‘internalized racism’ or as a traitorous complicity with oppressive norms of appearance.”2 Both historical and contemporary arguments against cosmetic surgery have generally assumed that the given body is authentic and the altered body is unnatural. But although the surgically transformed body has been seen as both immoral and politically incorrect, it is now also interpreted as pathological. Pathologizing discourses interpret the body of cosmetic surgery as a record of symptoms of psychological disorder. Jackson has been understood this way: as cultural studies scholar Nikki Sullivan describes, his surgeries have been repeatedly analyzed in the media, where his face is decoded by a range of experts. Jackson’s modified face is, as Sullivan puts it, “read not only as the effect of an abusive childhood, but also as evidence of escalating psychological problems.”3 By repeatedly displaying images of his increasingly modified face as a visual illustration of his psychological biography, the media positions his physical transformation as indicative of increasing internal disorder. His modified face is interpreted as a code of his inner self that can be read easily by experts, if not by the public at large. While his seemingly weird tastes and unorthodox attitudes and actions are also pathologized, the surface body is—tautologically—offered as the material...