Surgery Junkies: Wellness and Pathology in Cosmetic Culture

Chapter 3: Miss World, Ms. Ugly: Feminist Debates

3 Miss World, Ms. Ugly Feminist Debates While Extreme Makeover presents the possibility of whole-body surgical overhauls without a trace of addiction or pathology, many feminists have had difficulty imagining any cosmetic surgery, however major or minor, that is not both pathological and addictive. Most feminist critics of cosmetic surgery have described women’s decisions to have cosmetic surgery as instances of patriarchal coercion, and some have argued that all women who get cosmetic surgery are at risk for surgery addiction. Alternative accounts in feminist scholarship, to varying degrees, defend women’s choices to get cosmetic surgery as rational expressions of women’s agency, and address the narrative work that women do to make their cosmetic surgeries less stigmatized. I want to reconsider the debates in feminism over cosmetic surgery, seeing them as implicated in the construction of the cosmetic surgery subject. I argue that feminist thinking on cosmetic surgery not only needs to move beyond the structure-agency debate but also must be more critical of its own problematizations of cosmetic surgery. 73 Feminist Fears of “Becoming Surgical” The “beauty ideals” perspective is the most wellknown feminist position on cosmetic surgery. This perspective identifies cosmetic surgery as a particularly heinous outcome of beauty culture. In this view, beauty culture encourages women to compare themselves to impossible standards of attractiveness and disciplines women into spending their time, psychic energy, money, and health trying to achieve them. Oppressive cultural ideals pressure women to think of their bodies as objects, primarily in terms of their sexual appeal to men. Although in many ways similar to other beauty practices, cosmetic surgery, because of its physical risks, permanence, and invasiveness , is seen as one of the ultimate practices of self-harm in beauty culture, used by women who experience selfhatred , insecurity, and an unhealthy desire to please men at their own expense. This perspective indicts cosmetic surgery itself as politically corrupt—as an example of the medicalization of gendered beauty norms—and also perceives women who use the practice as having internalized oppression or false consciousness. Feminist writing since the 1970s has identified cosmetic surgery with women’s deep psychic victimization, and the recent cosmetic surgery boom has drawn renewed concern. One example is Virginia Blum’s book Flesh Wounds: The Culture of Cosmetic Surgery. Blum begins by describing her own experience of being taken by her mother to a cosmetic surgeon as a teenager. She underwent a rhinoplasty, which gave her a nose that she thought aesthetically terrible , and she describes a years-long ordeal to correct the surgeon’s damage. Although Blum’s experience seems especially traumatic, she takes the view that hers was not different from other women’s experiences. To her mind, 74 Surgery Junkies any cosmetic surgery is a practice of coercion that preys upon people who are pathologically self-hating. She writes, “Just because culture has normalized our pathology . . . it doesn’t mean that cosmetic surgery isn’t like any other practice that has us offering up our bodies to the psychical intensities that angrily grip us.”1 Blum argues that the source of this pathology is celebrity culture, which instills in women a toxic narcissism. She points out that whereas cosmetic surgery once belonged to celebrities, it now belongs to ordinary women as well. Although we once might have left physical perfection for Hollywood stars to pursue, women now see ourselves in hypermediated form. We relate to our bodies as if we, like celebrities, had to constantly worry about forging “particular looks and impressions” for others.2 “Little by little,” she writes, “we are all becoming movies stars—internally framed by a camera eye.”3 In Blum’s view, women are not so much driven by the stigma of the ugliness of a particular body part, or even the desire to be ordinary, but rather by the promise of what the body could be. “The body is nothing until it’s jolted into being by the image of something it could become—a movie star, a supermodel, a beautiful body. It’s a body you have only when it’s the body. Perhaps we want to possess the body we don’t have to begin with. Working out, having surgery, just dieting— these are acts that give the body a cultural reality. It’s not only the puritanical, subjugated body that submits to the cultural regimes of the beautiful. Rather, we...