Surgery Junkies: Wellness and Pathology in Cosmetic Culture

Chapter 6: The Self and the Limits of Interiority

6 The Self and the Limits of Interiority The analysis I have presented here challenges various attempts to understand and identify the subjectivity of the cosmetic surgery patient. I argue that the hermeneutics of the self around which cosmetic surgery culture turns are themselves expressions of power relations . In this chapter, I address the implications of this view for thinking about agency and the self in cosmetic surgery. I take up the problem of how we can know the self at all in the wake of the poststructural critique of subjectivity that I have applied here. I argue that we must decenter the subject of cosmetic surgery, without losing grasp on how central she is to its power relations. I offer my own story of having cosmetic surgery, in order to explore how we might approach the self of cosmetic surgery under these difficult epistemological circumstances. Techniques of the Self The culture of cosmetic surgery can be understood as dominated by what Michel Foucault termed the 158 hermeneutics of the self, the culturally driven, institutionally supported need to interrogate, interpret, and assert the truth of individual subjectivity. The interrogation might use an interview questionnaire, a diagnostic screening, an application, a biographical history or medical records, or be less direct than any of these instances, but in all of these cases the subject of cosmetic surgery—the patient or potential patient—is called upon to tell or otherwise reveal the truth of her self. Alongside the discursive work of others, then, the subject of cosmetic surgery is produced by the work of the self. But the self is not isolated from, or indifferent to, the social pressures surrounding her. For example, as Debra Gimlin suggests, cosmetic surgery patients use narrative strategies to make sense of their decisions to have cosmetic surgeries and to render them more intelligible to others. The meanings of cosmetic surgery get articulated in anticipation of the listener’s response, as Judith Butler might put it, and in a larger context of the field of the possible.1 Thus the interaction between the external and internal meanings of cosmetic surgery shapes the subject’s attempt to account for herself. The strategic aspect of narration, which is surely not limited to the interview encounter but extends to many aspects of the lived experience of cosmetic surgery, points to the intersubjectivity of even the most personal of cosmetic surgery’s meanings. This insight troubles attempts to find the truth of cosmetic surgery in any account of the self; one cannot take a person at her word without considering how that word is inherently communicative, social, and intersubjective, and indeed how the self is. The self narrating the meanings of cosmetic surgery, the self whose identity it is that cosmetic surgery affirms or expresses , or the self who is or wants to be deemed normal (or in Lynn G.’s case, pathological) is a self that is acting and The Limits of Interiority 159 reacting in the field of possibilities, of intelligibility, already in play. Michel Foucault described modern Western society— what he called “disciplinary” society—as marked by the secular confession, in which we continually seek to discover the truth of the individual. Foucault saw the confession , originating in Christian ritual, as the model for Western techniques of self-constitution in psychiatry, medicine , and other institutions. In The History of Sexuality Vol. I, for example, Foucault described how scientific knowledge of sexuality aimed both to discover the truth of individual sexuality and to assert the significance of that sexuality as a primary marker of identity. The purpose of sexology, and later, psychoanalysis, was to uncover the repressed or hidden character of an individual’s sexuality as a way to understand and treat the individual’s self. Similarly, the purpose of treatment in the asylum was to render the madman aware of his unreason, to “recognize himself in a world of judgment that enveloped him on all sides,” as Foucault writes in Madness and Civilization.2 Ultimately, to be cured, the mentally ill person required self-renunciation; she must see herself as mentally ill in order to be so no longer. The confession is thus a technique of the self; it is used not only in formal interactions with psychiatrists and other experts but also in the self ’s relation with itself. Foucault addressed techniques of the self in his later work, including the third...