In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

>> 179 7 At Face Value The process of coming to terms with facial injury or deformity —what I have called “changing faces”—is ultimately about showing to the world that your face alone is in no way indicative of your real worth as a human being. Just because you have been unlucky enough to suffer facial damage is no reason to suppose that you are less of a person. —James Partridge, Changing Faces: The Challenge of Facial Disfigurement (1990) While writing this book, I noticed a small blemish on my face. My complexion is not one that could be described as “clear.” In fact, every day I spend time monitoring my skin, applying acne treatment, lathering on sunscreen, and, honestly, picking and prodding in exactly the way the dermatologist tells you not to. But unlike other blemishes, this spot was warm to the touch, extraordinarily sensitive, and over several days it tripled in size. Some years earlier, I’d watched a scrape on my brother’s abdomen swell exponentially until he was put on an intravenous antibiotic regimen. The diagnosis was MRSA. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus is bacteria most often spread through skin-to-skin contact, but it is notoriously treatment resistant. MRSA is one of the “superbugs” that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention increasingly warns us about. The red spot on my face, warm to the touch, growing in size, and increasingly painful, appeared to be MRSA. The general practitioner who looked it over suggested that we lance it right there, in the office. “He wants to cut my face,” I thought. Outwardly, I remained stoic (my tried and true strategy for advocating for myself in doctor-patient interactions), but inwardly, I panicked. 180 > 181 of global economics and politics. By comparison, the faces that circulate in the narrative of Extreme Makeover belong to those whose very participation is premised on their inability to cope. While their faces do not look altogether different from those of the audience, extreme makeover candidates are presented as desperate, inappropriately so. Facial feminization is marketed to trans women, a group who remain the object of widespread cultural mockery and, in some cases, loathing. Face transplantation is aimed at repairing severe disfigurement—cases in which public personhood is significantly compromised because of appearance. The common thread amongst these cases is that potential recipients are positioned as socially dead, albeit for different reasons. Only the interventions aimed at especially vulnerable children seem to be immune from noninterventionism. How is it that the children of Operation Smile unequivocally deserve intervention and the “psychopathological”, the “transsexual”, and the “severely disfigured” do not? It is not simply that functionality works to justify some forms of normalization and invalidate others; or that the degree of disfigurement operates as the key determinant of what intervention goes unchallenged. Rather, the most devalued, the most stigmatized , and the most abject are positioned as not deserving. As I describe in chapter 2, noninterventionism rests on valuing social change more than the change an intervention might produce in a single human life. When intervention is aimed at a life that is fundamentally devalued, its promise is more likely to be dismissed in favor of broad-scale progress, even if nonintervention extends individual suffering. In some cases a single life seems to matter, and in other cases it does not. Ultimately, the push for nonintervention rests on privileging some lives at real costs to others. Clearly, we need to restructure how we look at bodies and assign them differential value, redefine what constitutes the normal body, and interrogate how people are expected to navigate bodily differences. Radical social change is needed, but it is deep social revisioning that may be long and hard in the making. And what shall be done in the meantime? What of the first FT recipient, Isabelle Dinoire, who has a life made possible, in part, by receiving a new face? What of the woman who approached me at the International Foundation for Gender Education describing how her life was infinitely better after facial feminization surgery? What of Thanh Ngan, whose crying face occupies the 182 > 183 ignores the possibility that we might envision ways to harness biomedical intervention in the service of a more just world. Instead of subscribing to noninterventionism, I critically interrogate facial work in order to consider how these practices could work otherwise —specifically, better. Most importantly, aesthetic intervention could operate outside of a vocabulary of social death. Aesthetic interventions that aid basic physiological functions...

Share