Cosmetic Surgery and the Eclipse of Identity

By L. Negrin. 2002

128 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recently, there has been a shift in attitude among some feminists towards the practice of cosmetic surgery away from that of outright rejection. Kathy Davis, for instance, offers a guarded `defence' of the practice as a strategy that enables women to exercise a degree of control over their lives in circumstances where there are very few other opportunities for self-realization. Others, such as Kathryn Morgan, Anne Balsamo and Orlan, though highly critical of the current practice of cosmetic surgery, go even further than Davis in advocating its redeployment as a tool to subvert the dominant patriarchal ideals of feminine beauty. In this article I critically appraise this `rehabilitation' of cosmetic surgery, arguing, in the case of Davis, that she leaves unchallenged the social structures of inequality responsible for women's dissatisfaction with their bodies. The proposal to use cosmetic surgery as a tool of political critique is equally problematic insofar as it shares with the cosmetic industry its instrumentalization of the body as mere matter, which is almost infinitely transformable, and also effaces the economic inequalities within which such body transformations occur.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Gender Studies, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4dc73c4efc7f4e2ba7bf6bd8bc025e75ccd77b0a

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Clinical Psychology

1. J. Twigg
2. L. Clarke
3. Meridith Griffin
4. Liat Ayalon

In Gender Studies

1. J. Twigg
2. L. Clarke
3. Meridith Griffin

In Social Psychology

1. J. Twigg
2. L. Clarke
3. Meridith Griffin

Citations in the corpus

• The body, gender, and age: Feminist insights in social gerontology (2004, background): “It is reflected also in the expanding industry of cosmetic surgery, a major part of which is concerned with the denial of age (though significantly the debate so far has largely turned around interventions on younger bodies (Davis, 1995, 2002; Negrin, 2002).”
• Visible and invisible ageing: beauty work as a response to ageism (2008, background): “Participating in beauty work is thereby seen as a requirement of the powerful and ubiquitous gender norms of an inescapable and oppressively patriarchal and ageist society (Bartky 1998; Gagne and McGaughey 2002; Morgan 1991; Negrin 2002).”