Altered Bodies, Shifting Masculinities: Men, Aesthetic Surgery, and the Neoliberal Image

In 2019, over 200,000 men underwent aesthetic surgery in the United States, representing a 29% increase since 2000. The rising popularity of a typically feminine practice among men does not signal the dissolution of gender norms in American society. Rather, it reflects an era in which the body has become a key site of the convergence of gender and market in both ideology and practice. This study assesses how men, situated within economic conditions that commodify the body, undergo, perform, and depict aesthetic surgery. Drawing from interviews with patients and providers and a qualitative content analysis, I explore the digitization of the clinical gaze, the market logic of masculinity, the gendered causes of male breast tissue enlargement, and the moral policing of natural versus extreme forms of treatment. These analyses suggest that the neoliberalisation of the body in modernity imbues gender presentations with discourses of efficiency, competition, and individual autonomy. I conclude by considering the intertwined notions of value-added masculinity and the neoliberal image