Cbp Bec Acspt

8/13/2019 Cbp Bec Acspt

1/11

Becoming=Being a Cosmetic Surgery Patient: SemanticInstability and the Intersubjective Self

Victoria Pitts-Taylor, Ph.D.

City University of New York

Against approaches that center the subjectthe cosmetic surgery patientas the primary site of

inquiry regarding the truth of cosmetic surgery, I argue that we must rethink the positioning ofthe subject in considering cosmetic surgerys meanings. Here I offer a brief discussion of various

feminist theories of the cosmetic surgery patient, as well as an account of my own experience of

cosmetic surgery, to explore how the cosmetic surgery patient is semantically unstable, named

and identified through a variety of discourses and social relations. This semantic instability suggests

a need to examine the ongoing processes by which cosmetic surgery comes to have meaning and by

which the subjectivity of the cosmetic surgery patient is produced.

Much investigation of cosmetic surgery, including a good deal of feminist scholarship, has

focused on examining the deep motives, mental health, or political consciousness of women

who undergo cosmetic surgery. If one looks to what various critics have said about the cosmetic

surgery patient, she can be historicized as an individual with deep psychoanalytic problems,

various psychiatric disorders, a variety of moral weaknesses, or a politically oppressed con-

sciousness. These approaches have often centered the subjectthe cosmetic surgery patient

as the primary site of inquiry regarding the truth of cosmetic surgery. Feminist researchers

have contributed to this discussion partly by debating the agency of the cosmetic surgery patient.

But I believe that we must rethink the positioning of the subject in considering cosmetic

surgerys meanings. Here I offer a brief discussion of various feminist theories of the cosmetic

surgery patient, as well as an account of my own experience of cosmetic surgery, to explore how

the cosmetic surgery patient is semantically unstable, named and identified through a variety of

discourses and social relations. This semantic instability suggests a need to examine the ongoingprocesses by which cosmetic surgery comes to have meaning and by which the subjectivity of

the cosmetic surgery patient is produced.

My broader project has investigated the interrogations of female subjectivity in contemporary

discourses on cosmetic surgery, including feminist, psychiatric, and medical discourses

(Pitts-Taylor, 2007). I argue that these, along with other discourses interested in the deep identity

of the cosmetic surgery patient, are epistemologically problematic to the extent that they have

generated what Foucault (1989) called a hermeneutics of the self. That is, they are not simply

Correspondence should be sent to Victoria Pitts-Taylor, Ph.D., Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology,

Graduate Center, City University of New York, 365 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10016. E-mail: [email protected]

Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 10: 119128, 2009

Copyright# Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 1524-0657 print=1940-9206 online

DOI: 10.1080/15240650902979202


2/11

revelatory but rather productive and inscriptive, lending a deep interiority to cosmetic surgery

that locates its meanings as adhering in significant ways in the individual. For example, for

decades, psychiatrists and psychotherapists have argued that cosmetic surgery patients wereprone to a whole range of mental health problems. These range from a variety of sexual

neuroses, when Freudian analysis was more in vogue, to body dysmorphic disorder, the latest

psychiatric label for cosmetic surgery addiction. I have argued elsewhere that in psychiatric

discourse, the cosmetic surgery patient is not simply being understood; rather, the truth of her

identity is also being produced (Pitts-Taylor, 2007).

Feminist discourse can also constitute a hermeneutics of the self in the Foucaultian sense. In

feminism, the female cosmetic surgery patient has been the object of an intense debate over the

possibility of her agency. While linking cosmetic surgery directly to the social problem of patri-

archy, feminists have also questioned the mental health of individual female cosmetic surgery

patients. This approach was largely unchallenged until 1995, when Kathy Davis (1995) soughtto use the voices of cosmetic surgery patients themselves to explain why women undergo it.

Davis argued that womens decisions to get cosmetic surgery were rational given the extensive

social pressures women faced. Despite Daviss work, feminists like Virginia Blum (2003) and

Eve Ensler (2004) have continued to portray women who get cosmetic surgery as self-hating

and self-mutilating.

THE STRUCTURE-AGENCY DEBATE AND BEYOND

The so-called structure-agency debate, centered on the character of womens subjectivity, has

shaped a great deal of feminist scholarship on cosmetic surgery in the past several decades.The cultural or radical feminist responses to cosmetic surgery, where the cosmetic surgery

patient is enacting bodily self-hatred as an outcome of patriarchal pressures, represents one

side of the debate. Writers like Blum, Ensler, and Sheila Jeffreys offer contemporary examples

of the decades-long view that womens desires to get cosmetic surgery are evidence of

self-hatred. Some of these writers, like Blum (2003), have identified women cosmetic surgery

patients as self-mutilators and have theorized that female patients have body image problems

that can be comparable to, if not equated with, mental illness. Blum describes a process of

becoming surgical, where women begin to see themselves through the narcissistic, techno-

logical lens of perfectionism. Once they experience one cosmetic surgery, they will want

others because they will have become obsessed with the promise of a perfect body. Addictionto cosmetic surgery is part of the practice, she argues, and women cosmetic surgery patients

are always in danger of being perversely addicted. Other radical feminists, including Eve

Ensler, have emphasized problems with the consciousness of female cosmetic surgery patients

on a political level, depicting them as male-identified or as having false consciousness. In her

play The Good Body, for example, Ensler (2004) depicts a woman who undergoes numerous

plastic surgeries as a surgery junkie entirely under the influence of her husband, a cosmetic

surgeon. The woman undertakes surgery after surgery in order to keep him interested in

her. Although she appears to be indifferent to her health, she sees her body as a zone of

perfectibility.

Liz Frost (1999) points out, however, the essentialism implied in such treatments of

cosmetic surgery. The idea that womens bodies are authentic only when they are left

120 PITTS-TAYLOR


3/11

aloneEnsler, for example, wants women to love the body . . . stop fixing it (Ensler, 2004,

p. xv)problematically constructs a natural, essential, authentic body to be contrasted to a

technologized, unnatural body. Further, Frost sees an essentialist idea of an authenticconsciousness at work: an authentic subject would not undergo cosmetic surgery, and cosmetic

surgery cannot be seen as an authentic choice. As many critics of radical feminism have pointed

out, such views of the body=self are falsely dichotomous and homogenizing. They universalizeand fix womens embodied subjectivity and treat cosmetic surgery patients monolithically. In

this logic, cosmetic surgeries are pretty much all the same, and so are the women who get them:

to greater or lesser degrees victimized, self-hating, and estranged from their authentic selves and

bodies.

Kathy Daviss seminal 1995 work, Reshaping the Female Body, represented a departure

from what was then the expected feminist condemnation of cosmetic surgery, and in particu-

lar, from the view that there was something wrong with the subjectivity of female cosmeticsurgery patients. She has been called an agency feminist for this view, and her work

sparked a structure-agency debate that had already been, or would be, rehearsed in relation

to other controversial practices like pornography, sex, work, and body art. What motivated

Davis to examine womens experiences with cosmetic surgery is what she calls her moral

dilemma as a feminist, wherein she felt a need to criticize the practice of cosmetic surgery

without treating women cosmetic surgery patients as cultural dupes. Based on her inter-

views with cosmetic surgery patients in The Netherlands, Davis argued that cosmetic surgery

does not modify the body as a passive object. For her, practices like cosmetic surgery are

expressions of the selfs dynamic relation to and with the body rather than instances of

extreme bodily objectification. They are instances of womens negotiations of their embodi-

ment and of the social pressures regarding appearance. Moreover, she suggested that womenwho chose cosmetic surgery were exercising rationality rather than self-hatred. Women saw

their surgeries as reasonable given their awareness of how much beauty and youth are socially

valorized.

Although Daviss (1995) work created a considerable stir at the time, more recently a

number of feminist scholars writing on cosmetic surgery, including Frost (1999), Rebecca

Ancheta (2002), Suzanne Fraser (2003), and others have identified this debate as a dead

end, oversimplifying and polarizing the matter, in Anchetas terms. One of the problems

shared by both sides of the structure-agency divide is that they insist on the centrality of

womens subjectivity in problematizing cosmetic surgery. For instance, she is either rational

or she is self-hating; the status of a female cosmetic surgery patients subjectivity offers theanswer to most of the questions we are asking about the practice. Either way, this debate

assumes a fixed individual subject, the truth of whom can explain the real essence of

cosmetic surgery. I make the case that we ought instead to think of the subject of cosmetic

surgery as shaped in and through the process of becoming and being a cosmetic surgery

patient (Pitts-Taylor, 2007). Similarly, Suzanne Fraser has pointed out that aiming to figure

out the true interior of the subject reifies and fixes her (Fraser, 2003, p. 28). Instead,

Fraser argues that we ought to look at the political and ideological underpinnings to any

understanding of agency and think through the agency of the subject as something that

is shaped in the processes of the subject being created. Meredith Jones (2008), too, displaces

the subject of cosmetic surgery from the center of analysis. She looks at cosmetic surgery

through the lens of actor-network theory, displacing the patient as the center of inquiry

BECOMING/BEING A COSMETIC SURGERY PATIENT 121


4/11

and positioning her as only one of multiple actors, including the surgeon, the technolo-

gies, the media, and other aspects of cosmetic culture. For her, the world of cosmetic surgery

is one in which agency moves through various relationships between humans and technolo-gies. All of these approaches might be termed postessentialist in that they refuse to valor-

ize an authentic, natural female body or a proper female subjectivity, and they insist that we

must think of the meanings of bodily practices like cosmetic surgery as neither solely internal

nor external but rather as intersubjective.

I see the urgent need for such a move. Although they identify patriarchy and heteronorma-

tivity as the root problems of cosmetic surgery, the meanings of cosmetic surgery in

structure-agency analyses ultimately rest on making sense of the cosmetic surgery subject.

But this is problematic to the extent that both sides assume a cosmetic surgery subject that

precedes the experiences of surgery itself. She is either rationally seeking empowerment, as

in Daviss (1995) account, or irrationally pursuing suffering, as in Blums (2003) account.Along with Suzanne Fraser and others, I argue that instead of looking at an oppressed or

liberated cosmetic surgery patient, we ought to think about cosmetic surgery in process to

understand its significance. As Fraser (2003) puts it, we must shift the object of analysis

from the true interior of the subject to the ideological and political implications of

the subjects use of language (p. 28). Further, as Jones (2008) suggests, the patient=subjectubject should be considered only one of many involved in producing that language. The

meanings of cosmetic surgery and of the patient are produced by multiple actors and forces

and unfold through the processes of cosmetic surgery.

In personal narratives of cosmetic surgery, such as those found in interviews, we can find

evidence of deep social interaction between the subject and the cultural and social context.

For example, in recent interview accounts by Debra Gimlin, Liz Frost, and RebeccaAncheta, womens narratives reveal complex grappling with stigma, pathologization, and

the judgment of others, and they suggest that women use narrative strategies in order to

be heard (Frost, 1999; Ancheta, 2002; Gimlin, 2002). The broader social and medical con-

text might influence these strategies. For example, women desiring coverage from a national

health service (like Daviss interviewees) might emphasize how much they suffer from feel-

ing ugly or abnormal, and women speaking in an American context might emphasize liberal

goals like personal empowerment and equal opportunity.1 The ways in which cosmetic sur-

geries are represented and sold to women in these different contexts may also be significant

factors influencing their meanings, as are other prominent discourses circulating around

what cosmetic surgery means and about whom cosmetic surgery patients are. These contextscan shape not only the social climate in which they are undertaken but also the personal

significance of cosmetic surgery for women themselves.

My own cosmetic surgery experience underscored the need to think about the narrative of the

self in such temporally complex and intersubjective ways. From my patients-eye view, cosmetic

surgery is a very personal experience, but it is also incredibly social, public, and semantically

unstable, one that is not static but unfolds through various processes of imbuing the body and

self with symbolic meaning.

1Gimlins current project compares her U.S. interviews with those in the UK; she has found significant differences.

122 PITTS-TAYLOR


5/11

BECOMING=BEING A PATIENT

I became a cosmetic surgery patient in the midst of researching my book Surgery Junkies:Wellness and Pathology in Cosmetic Culture (2007). After having spent many months in

cosmetic surgery clinics as a researcher, I decided become a patient.

I was significantly motivated by my curiosity about cosmetic surgery. I was fascinated by the

physical processes of cosmetic surgerywould a rhinoplasty really transform my whole face,

for example?and even more by the social contests that stormed around the cosmetic surgery

patient. Having spent considerable time in cosmetic surgery clinics, I had already felt sympathy

for the women and men I encountered there. Most of them seemed to be enthusiastic about their

surgeries and the results they achieved, with the exception of those who were still in bandages,

who were generally miserable. Some were thinking of having another surgery at some point. But

they did not seem to be the crazy junkies one might expect from media accounts, nor did theyseem to be the self-hating victims depicted in some feminist descriptions. They were in many

ways unremarkable, but their world was filled with social tensions, scrutiny, and advice that each

of them had to negotiate. With magazines, advertisements, television and media accounts pre-

senting strong opinions about cosmetic surgery, and family, friends, and colleagues debating

each of theirs in particular, they seemed to be surrounded on all sides with conflict. When I

became a patient, so was I.

Although the experience of having cosmetic surgery was fraught with social conflict, which

I describe in more detail later, the personal decision to transform my face was not an agonized

one. The technological achievements of cosmetic surgeons are impressive, even if they do not

live up to the exaggerated promises of the industry. I was attracted to the possibility of being

better looking, normatively speaking. My nose seemed a good candidate for transformation;submitting it to aesthetic judgment, it was not what I would have called a beautiful nose.

And I did not feel the moral weight of the decision as many do; as a scholar of body practices

for the past decade, I frankly disagreed with the reigning moral imperatives surrounding

the natural body. Bodies, it seems to me, have always been transformed, in every culture

and period, including indigenous ones; there simply are no naturalin terms of pristine

bodies to emulate.

Surely, it is useless to argue on my own behalf against theories that would describe my deci-

sion as an act of self-hatred; my own ability to speak for myself is rendered mute by theories of

false consciousness. At the same time, I hesitate to use the liberal terms of empowerment and

choice employed by so-called agency theorists. This language is sometimes used by manywomen describing the decision to undergo major body transformation, but it makes me uneasy

that the same language, borrowed wholesale from liberal feminism, is used by the cosmetic sur-

gery industry to trumpet their products and procedures. It is a language that is easy at hand and

that is culturally legible in a society like ours. Moreover, it is often offered after being asked to

give an account of oneself, to defend ones decision. Altering my face through surgery may have

been an act of agency, in the sense of my having willfully acted, but I cant argue that it was an

attempt to empower myself any more than getting a new hairstyle is. I neither hated myself nor

thought I might truly have more power.

Although many will disagree with me, I want to argue that there was no central or fundamen-

tal cosmetic surgery patient inside of me waiting to be given the opportunity to express herself

through surgery; my being a cosmetic surgery patient can be understood only through examining



6/11

the various processes involved in getting cosmetic surgery. It seems obvious when put this way,

but only in getting cosmetic surgery was I a cosmetic surgery patient.

In January 2005, I shopped for surgeons; was interviewed by doctors and nurses to determinewhether I was a good candidate for surgery; read books, magazines, and brochures about rhi-

noplasty; debated with my friends and family about permanently altering my face; and went

under the knife in an ambulatory clinic in Manhattan. When I emerged, my face was bandaged,

one eye was swollen shut, and the pain seemed unbearable for 8 t or 9 hr. Over the next few days

I dealt with bleeding, swelling, and bruising. I went to my doctors appointments in taxis wear-

ing a scarf around my head, which was the best I could do to camouflage the state of my face.

Otherwise I spent a lot of time in bed and also looking in the mirror examining my new face,

with which I was eventually pleased. In a week or so I went outside, met strangers and friends,

and taught my first class of the semester wearing a bandage on my nose. I wore bandages of

various sizes for several weeks and watched my face transform over months of healing.The physical aspects of cosmetic surgery are worth relating, but the social experience of

becoming and being a cosmetic surgery patient is more to the point. Cosmetic surgery is coded

on the one hand as a sign of empowerment and self-enhancement and on the other hand as a sign

of moral, political, or mental weakness. In getting cosmetic surgery myself, I saw firsthand how

in cosmetic surgery, the body and self become a zone of social conflict. The media and the

advertisements I read urged me to transform myself, to constantly improve, and presented

images of cosmetic surgery that were saturated with heteronormative promise. The doctors to

whom I presented myself as a prospective patient expected a certain set of attitudes about me

and my body. Others I met liked to identify cosmetic surgerys junkies and fools, the Joan Rivers

and Jocelyn Wildensteins of cosmetic surgery. My students, my friends, and a few of the stran-

gers who stared at me on the subway asked for explanations, and many of them offered strongopinions that implicated me in one way or another.

Becoming a cosmetic surgery patient begins with, among other things, being positioned as a

prospective patient, where ones looks, motivations, and psyche are examined by cosmetic doc-

tors. For me this included an evaluation of my nose and my profile. I did not enjoy subjecting

my face to intense scrutiny. I had thought that my nose was unremarkable. It was ordinary;

I didnt love it or hate it. Even though I suspected that falling on it once while learning to

ski might have changed it a bit, no one had noticed. In any case, Id never heard anyone com-

ment on it in a negative way. It seemed to me that even so, it was not a perfect nose, in normative

terms. Rather than a straight nose, which seemed to me to be the ideal, it was shaped with a

bump on the bridge. All but one of the five doctors I consulted was ready to pathologize it.The exception, an otolaryngologist originally from Central Europe, said, Your nose is fine.

It has character; you shouldnt change it. He said that he would do the surgery if I really

wanted it, giving me the feeling that he would be indulging me.

The four others, however, insisted that my nose needed to be changed. They saw a clear case

for cosmetic surgery. Following are some of my notes after seeing a doctor on Long Island, who

wanted to operate not only on my nose but also my chin:

Me: I was thinking about the bump on my nose, getting a straighter nose. But I dont want a

turned-up nose. Nothing obvious.

Dr. J: You need a smaller nose with more definition at the tip. Not turned up but refined. You

could get a chin implant, too. Its something to think about. Your profile could be more balanced.

124 PITTS-TAYLOR


7/11

Me: Just my nose. I dont want anything implanted.

Dr. J: Its often the case that we suggest a chin implant with a rhinoplasty because were

looking at the whole profile. But its just something to think about. Your chin is not bad.

Another doctor, the one I picked to do the surgery, was a man in his 60s who treated me pater-

nalistically. He was likeable, matter-of-fact, and arrogant about his role as a beauty doctor. More

than anyone, he disliked my nose. He said that he needed to straighten out the bump, refine the

tip, make it look nice, and added that your nose is wrong for your face.

The sorting of patients into good and bad candidates is now a significant part of the cosmetic

surgery process. Although it was disagreeable to hear someone describe my nose as wrong, I

understood that in his view, the aesthetically problematic status of my nose rendered my desire

for cosmetic surgery reasonable. This is important because in addition to my face being scruti-

nized, so was my psyche. Although cosmetic doctors champion the practices as life-empowering

and self-caring, prospective patients are not automatically embraced as empowered. Patients

aesthetic aims must correspond to doctors opinions. In addition, patients generally need to

appear to be pliant, amenable to suggestions, and, above all, willing to accept cosmetic surgerys

risks. All the surgeons I consulted screened me psychologically to varying degrees, usually

informally. In one case, I was also given a written survey that included psychological questions.

All of them asked me to define what might be a good result. Some also asked if I had ever been

on antidepressants or been depressed. As I learned from the research interviews that I had done

with cosmetic surgeons, these informal conversations were occasions for the surgeon to get a

gut feeling about my personality and psyche, to quote one New England doctor. They wanted

to know whether Id be a happy patient or an unhappy one, likely to pleased or likely to be

picky, difficult, or even litigious.There are many other people, beyond doctors, who are ready to make a series of distinc-

tions between good and bad surgery patients. I had countless conversations with friends and

acquaintances about cosmetic surgery junkies. For example, there was a woman named

Andrea who had a conversation with me about breast implants. She wanted to discuss how

common it is for women to get huge breasts that are inappropriate for their size, includ-

ing her sister-in-law, who has a tiny body but chose DD implants. The contradiction between

Andreas criticisms of her sister-in-law and her general approval of cosmetic surgery was by

now to me familiar. In the clinic, we were surrounded by fashion magazines depicting surgi-

cally modified celebrities and brochures advertising Botox and breast implants. The rhetoric in

these advertisements suggests that cosmetic surgery is something a woman does to treat her-

self well. On television, we are shown countless examples of positive, life-fulfilling extreme

makeovers. But we are also inundated with warnings about bad or botched cosmetic surgery,

discussions of cosmetic surgery addiction, and images of supposedly ugly or overprocessed

consumers of cosmetic surgery. Thinking of Andreas sister-in-law, I pondered how much

pressure lands on the shoulders of the patient: she must not be a junkie or too extreme,

but she should recognize how much her body needs improvement. The discourses of cosmetic

surgery operate in part pedagogically, training women about which aesthetics and attitudes are

acceptable and which are not.

In my academic milieu, cosmetic surgery carries a charge of victimization, pathology, or

vanity. Most of my friends and colleagues tried to talk me out of the surgery. One said that I

would lose all my character if I changed my face. Some said that if my nose had been ugly, they



8/11

may have understood my decision more. Several suggested that I had been seduced by spending

too much time in cosmetic surgery clinics. Others worried that I would become addicted. Before

and after the surgery, I was asked to explain and defend my surgery a great deal. Some of mystudents, who immediately noticed the bandage on my nose, were aghast at the idea that some-

one they saw as a feminist would have cosmetic surgery. They openly debated my surgery.

Some of them wanted to defend me against suspicions of vanity or false-consciousness. Of

course, in many social milieus, cosmetic surgery is acceptable and even expected; some of

my more affluent students knew many people who had had cosmetic surgery, and they were

morally indifferent.2

My own sense of self has changed, of course, as my body has. Without endorsing cosmetic

surgery in general, I can say that am more pleased with the look of my face than I was before.

This is an aesthetic issue but it also matters; it is, I could say, deeply superficial, with all of the

contradictions that term might imply. I also now have a different biography. I am a person whohas had cosmetic surgery, which changes the way people who know this might view me and

influences the way I evaluate myself and my choices. For example, the process of surgery

rendered me even less sentimental than I might have been about the material fact of my body

as an indicator of self while paradoxically underscoring the social investment in my body as

an indicator of self. Despite the horror with which some people received my surgery, it left

me less worried about the existential and moral implications of self-transformation.

What surprised me most about my experience was the following irony: people were so bent

on finding a deep reason for my interest in cosmetic surgery that they overlooked the practices

inherent superficiality. Both the superficiality and fluidity of cosmetic surgeryits skin-thinness

and its changing meaningsseem to violate our collective desire to understand our inner selves

as stable and fixed, true and authentic. Cosmetic surgery raises not only the issue that the bodyhas become, in a postmodern world, a primary sign of ones identity but also that our bodies are

malleable sites for change. That malleability is discomforting.

COSMETIC SURGERY AS SEMANTICALLY UNSTABLE

Cosmetic surgery is semantically unstable. It is aggressively advertised and championed by cos-

metic surgeons and others involved in the industry. It is represented in the media as fabulous and

necessary and also as horrifying and potentially sick. It is seen by people in various social mili-

eus as unacceptable, immoral, and risky and in others as normal and ordinary. The woman who

becomes a cosmetic surgery patient does so in the context of popular and medical pedagogies,moral pressures, and medicalized scripts that create a contested social and symbolic terrain. My

experience, for example, points to the influence of beauty culture and gender norms. It shows a

wrestling with the political debates about cosmetic surgery, both conceptually and interperson-

ally, with my friends and students. It suggests the influence of doctors, their ability to accept or

reject my cosmetic desires and to judge the quality of my body image. It shows the specter of

2Although an analysis of class is beyond the scope of my work here, class is a significant issue in cosmetic surgery

and I believe that it may significantly affect its intersubjective relations. That some of my students found my cosmetic

surgery ordinary attests to the regularity with which they see people who have had cosmetic surgery. Despite the recent

surge of cosmetic surgery by members of all economic classes, cosmetic surgery remains less unusual in some more

affluent circles; conversely, it remains extraordinary in many working-class cultures.

126 PITTS-TAYLOR


9/11

pathology haunting my interactions with doctors, who are screening me, as well as with others

who make distinctions between good patients and bad.

This context needs to be examined when we try to understand how women might variouslyexperience and describe themselves and their surgeries. The cosmetic surgery patient is a sub-

jective role that unfolds through being a prospective patient, an operated-upon body, a person

in recovery, and as someone with a cosmetically transformed face or body part. Such unfolding

happens in deeply social and intersubjective ways. Women are becoming and being patients in

the face of forces that both sell the practices to them and that seem to demand explanation of

cosmetic surgery. We are expected to employ methods of description that make sense to others,

thus complying with already scripted codes of meaning that are set out before us. We are asked

to address what are established as generic aspects of cosmetic surgery and the issues that are

already raised as significant: the pain, the beauty norms, the political debates, and the

doctor-patient relationship, among others.The subjectivity of the cosmetic surgery patient is not fixed but rather fluid and created in the

process of becoming and being one. I call myself a cosmetic surgery patient, but this identity has

no meaning outside its continual creation by the interactions between me, others, and the social

world. It is an identity that is produced as the cosmetic surgery is happening, as it is planned and

undertaken and narrated. The self of cosmetic surgery is continually coconstituted by the self and

others, even though stories of selves often mask this temporal and ontological complexity.

Feminist scholarship on cosmetic surgery that focuses on womens interiority is problematic

when it, too, masks the temporal and ontological complexity of the cosmetic subject. Along with

psychotherapeutic perspectives, feminists have often pursued the notion that the status of a

womans psyche, her consciousness, or some other aspect of her interiority will help explain

the cosmetic surgery patient along with cosmetic surgerys apparent problems. But theseapproaches ignore the processes by which one becomes and is identified as a cosmetic surgery

patient and the various ways in which the meanings of her cosmetic surgery are contested.

I argue for decentering the subject of cosmetic surgery. Repositioning the subject is partly a

matter of thinking differently about how the personal is implicated in the larger social relations

of cosmetic surgery. An alternative, intersubjective approach does not mean that we are limited

only to macrolevel analyses of cosmetic surgerys power relations or of abstract, discursive con-

structions of meanings. Neither does it mean that we cannot consider the personal experiences of

women themselves. What we can do is understand womens experiences, and their subjectivities

as cosmetic surgery patients, as being created in and through the interactive experiences of cos-

metic surgery. We can look at the ways cosmetic surgery comes to have meaning in a complexset of social and symbolic interactions rather than having meaning that is primarily generated out

of the patients (fixed, predisposed) sense of self. In pursuing cosmetic surgery this way, we may

avoid the kind of hermeneutics of the self about which Foucault warned us, and we can be more

critical of the power relations that work to produce the cosmetic surgery subject.

REFERENCES

Ancheta, R. W. (2002). Discourse of rules: Women talk about cosmetic surgery. In: Womens Health: Power, Technol-

ogy, Inequality and Conflict in a Gendered World, ed. K. Strother Ratcliff Boston: Allyn & Bacon, pp. 143149.

Blum, V. (2003). Flesh Wounds: The Culture of Cosmetic Surgery. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Davis, K. (1995). Reshaping the Female Body. New York: Routledge.



10/11

Ensler, E. (2004). The Good Body. New York: Villard Books.

Foucault, M. (1989). How much does it cost for reason to tell the truth? In: Foucault Live: Interviews 19611984, ed.

S. Lotringer (trans. J. Honston). New York: Semiotext(e), pp. 348362.Fraser, S. (2003). The agent within: Agency repertoires in medical discourse on cosmetic surgery. Australian Feminist

Studies, 18(40), 2744.

Frost, L. (1999). Doing looks: Women, appearance and mental health. In: Womens Bodies: Discipline and

Transgression, eds. J. Arthurs & J. Grimshaw. London: Cassell, pp. 117136.

Gimlin, D. (2002). Body Work: Beauty and Self-Image in American Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Jeffreys, S. (2005). Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West. New York: Routledge.

Jones, M. (2008). Skintight: An Anatomy of Cosmetic Surgery. Oxford, UK: Berg.

Pitts-Taylor, V. (2007). Surgery Junkies: Wellness and Pathology in Cosmetic Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers

University Press.

AUTHOR BIO

Victoria Pitts-Taylor is Professor of Sociology and (as of July 2009) Coordinator of the

Womens Studies Certificate Program and Director of the Center for the Study of Women

and Society. She is Coeditor of the journal Womens Studies Quarterly. She is author of books

and articles on the sociology of the body, including Surgery Junkies: Wellness and Pathology in

Cosmetic Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2007).

128 PITTS-TAYLOR


11/11

Documents

Cbp Bec Acspt