Abstract:
Cosmetic surgery is not merely a medical discipline, nor a set of surgical techniques
exercised on human bodies. Rather, it is a series of interlocking practices and
discourses comprising medical and surgical techniques as well as many media forms
such as academic analyses, advertisements, autobiographies, feminist writing, histories,
medical literature, popular magazines, and regulatory/legal texts (Davis, 1995,
1998, 2002, 2003a, b; Haiken, 1997; Gilman, 1999; Blum, 2003; Fraser, 2003). My
wider project-a PhD dissertation that situates cosmetic surgery as part of what I call
our 'Makeover Culture'1-examines the multifarious disciplines, endeavours, industries,
cultural logics, and normative values that shape the ongoing construction of
contemporary cosmetic surgery. It is impossible to attempt a cultural analysis of
cosmetic surgery without paying close attention to the media and cultural products
that comment upon and also produce it. It is these products that express the
deployment of cosmetic surgery as desirable/undesirable or normal/abnormal; its
results as beautiful/ugly; and its experience as excruciating or just mildly uncomfortable.
A close-reading approach to a particular set of texts and images works,
prism-like, to direct light on some of the broad cultural logics that surround
cosmetic surgery. In her excellent book Cosmetic Surgery, Gender and Culture (2003)
Suzanne Fraser reflects on how gender and femininity are intrinsically bound up in
the various discourses around cosmetic surgery: she helpfully identifies a number of
cosmetic surgery genres, including the popular magazine genre (2003, pp.61-96).
Building on Fraser's scholarly findings I locate a sub-genre inside the magazine
genre-the mother/daughter/cosmetic surgery story-and explore it here.
