Bodies of work: Cosmetic surgery and the gendered whitening of America

This study examines the roles ethnicity/race, sex/gender and compulsory heterosexuality play in the practice and experiences of facial cosmetic surgery. First it reviews professional literature on cosmetic rhinoplasty, from the years 1966 to 1996, in order to assess how socio-economic and medical changes have affected the psychological and surgical discourses of aesthetic rhinoplasty. Second, it analyzes open-ended interviews with fifty post-operative facial cosmetic surgery patients, men and women of various ethnic/racial backgrounds, focusing on how these individuals interpret their decisions to have surgeries as well as the operations\u27 effects on their lives. My findings indicate that the medical discourses on cosmetic rhinoplasty function as disciplinary regimes that essentialize sex/gender and promote an idealized (Northwest European) whiteness. On the surface, medical writings appear to have responded to the multi-cultural discourses of the past thirty years, but a closer reading reveals that they have merely incorporated the superficial elements of this rhetoric. As a result, they either remain imbued with sexist and racial stereotyping or keep silent on the topic of ethnicity/race, pathologizing; anyone who expresses feelings of difference. Individuals who choose to undergo facial cosmetic surgeries are classified according to three types: Avatars, aesthetes, and advancers. These categories combine the social, personal and occupational pressures that respondents identify as motivating their decisions for aesthetic surgeries. While respondents usually admit that they seek aesthetic surgeries as a way to become more conventionally attractive, patients deny the their operations have had anything to do with ethnic passing. A more critical review of their accounts indicates that it is, in fact, the tenor of medical writings on ethnicity, along with contemporary media portrayals of ethnicity, that have, to a significant extent, made ethnic passing no longer an admissible justification for seeking surgeries, even though it is quite real as an unconscious motivation. Ultimately patient narratives and medical writings suggest that facial cosmetic surgery is about cultural mainstreaming. Given the popularity of aesthetic surgery, the future promises to be one of continued homogenization