Reshaping the Female Body: The Dilemma of Cosmetic Surgery (review)

If the question for the 1970s was, in cartoonist Nicole Hollander’s words, “Ma, can I be a feminist and still like men?” the question for the 1990s may be, “Ma, can I be a feminist and still get a breast job?” Kathy Davis’s answer—yes, albeit a carefully qualified yes—will trouble those who demand nothing less than “a utopian revisioning of the world where cosmetic surgery and the problematic desires which keep it in place are a thing of the past” (p. 179). But the challenge she poses in this clearly written and illuminating book is worth engaging, even—perhaps especially—for those whose “best of all possible worlds” excludes cosmetic surgery.

Reshaping focuses on the Netherlands, where Davis lives and teaches, and is based on interviews, a clinical study of breast-augmentation patients, and participant observations in national health insurance consultations. Because cosmetic surgery is a comparatively recent phenomenon in the Netherlands, this is a contemporary book, less rich in historical perspective than one might wish. At the same time, however, these are unique and valuable sources. Davis’s respectful treatment ensures that patients’ voices receive serious attention, and the insurance question, which requires consideration of both the “discourse of need” and the “discourse of rights,” generates more revealing discussion than occurs elsewhere.

The most significant—and controversial—aspect of Davis’s work is the “feminist balancing act” (p. 5) that she attempts. She engages a wide range of theorists in her quest to construct a framework that will enable her to criticize “cultural discourses and practices which inferiorize the female body and—literally—cut women down to size—without treating the recipients themselves as the misguided victims of false consciousness” (p. 159). In this, she succeeds admirably. “Cosmetic surgery can be an informed choice, but it is always made in the context of limited options and circumstances which are not of the individual’s own making” (p. 13), she argues. It “can only be a viable option in a context where medical technology makes the surgical alteration of the body . . . readily available and . . . socially acceptable. . . . Women’s willingness to calculate the risks of surgery against its benefits can only make sense in a context where a person is able to view her body as a commodity, as . . . a business venture of sorts” (p. 157).

Some readers will take issue with Davis’s conclusion, but her book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the place that cosmetic surgery holds in the Western world. In a broader sense it offers a compelling model for those who seek to understand “the contradiction between agency and the circumstances which constrain it” (p. 117) on the historical and contemporary stage.