Saving Face: Disfigurement and the Politics of Appearance

4 Not Just Another Pretty Face: The Social Value of Unremarkability

76 > 77 enhancement method. Because the material has not been manufactured for cosmetic use and because “pumpers” are not trained or licensed, silicone may produce the desired effects at first, but eventually the plasma often amalgamates into surreal globules and migrates to other regions of the body. In my early twenties, I was tangentially immersed in drag culture, filling the role of “dresser” for a friend who was a rising performer. Regularly , backstage conversation drifted to “pumping” and “pump girls,” slang for women who participate in the underground silicone market. Some entertainers guesstimated how many “Dixie cups,” a measure referencing the three-ounce disposable cups sometimes stocked in bathrooms for use with mouthwash, it took to produce a range of effects— from startlingly defined “cheek bones” to lips so plump they would put Angelina’s Jolie’s pouty mouth to shame. One commonly told story involved a performer who was allegedly a pump girl and a compulsive tanner. Supposedly, tanning beds raised the temperature of her silicone such that she had to hold her face in place to minimize “pump” migration caused by the heat.3 While I could never be sure if the story was an urban legend or some amalgamation of fact and defamation, it served as a warning about the downsides of do-it-yourself aesthetic intervention. The disadvantages of industrial silicone are not simply visual. Recent arrests for “murder by silicone” speak to the insidious consequences of using industrial silicone for aesthetic purposes.4 Migrating silicone can result in a number of chronic autoimmune illnesses and fatal conditions , including pulmonary embolism caused by free-floating silicone entering the bloodstream and pooling in the lungs.5 This begs the question : Why would individuals seek out body modification with highly toxic materials injected into their bodies by nonmedical personnel? Tracie Jada O’Brien of the Transgender Community Coalition of San Diego, in an interview for the San Diego Union Tribune article, suggests one answer: “It’s about being able to get up in the morning and walk down the street without being ridiculed or physically abused.”6 Pumping, as it is practiced by trans women, is not simply about creating a beautiful visage; it is, first and foremost, about crafting a reliably female-appearing face. As O’Brien suggests, this is high-stakes aesthetic transformation. Silicone is one avenue for changing the gendered appearance of the face. Facial feminization surgery is another. 78 > 79 are common. Some patients experience changes in the face’s range of motion, reducing the facility with which one moves one’s jaw, for example . Others report a loss in facial sensation, typically a sort of numbness that leaves a face unable to perceive human touch or a searing burn. Like all forms of surgery, infection and death loom as potential side effects. And of course, the results may not resemble what one had hoped for. Facial feminization is an invasive, expensive, dubiously successful intervention, and yet it remains a highly sought after technology of gendering the face.11 Passing from the Neck Up: Faces versus Genitals In Vested Interests: Cross Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, Marjorie Garber ’s classic cultural analysis of transsexuality, she asks, “Does a transsexual change subjects? Or just bodies—or body parts?”12 Garber uses trans identity to pose questions about the category crisis precipitated by living at odds with sex and gender binarism. To be sure, querying gender writ large by way of transgender identity is an objectifying and politically problematic practice. Yet other scholars have followed suit and overlooked complicated questions of lived experience and gender politics, instead focusing narrowly upon the implicit meanings of surgical transformation of the genitals through “bottom” surgery. For example, Janice Raymond’s scathing account of transgenderism, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (1979), positions sex reassignment surgery as the crucial act. Her argument, which is rampantly transphobic, is that genital surgery is fetishized by trans women during the process of transitioning.13 In Sander L. Gilman’s Making the Body Beautiful (2001), “transsexual surgery” is reduced to surgery aimed at the genitals (and breasts, in his discussion of trans women).14 Similarly, social scientific research often queries the “success” of transitioning, focusing on genital surgery as the crux of change.15 In the aforementioned texts there are occasional references to the bodily effects of hormone usage and even nonsurgical gendered practices of embodiment like dress, but relatively...