The Culture of Cosmetic Surgery - part 3 pptx

Untouchable Bodies /63 ing no to surgery than in saying yes? Is there an outside to the cultural picture from which we can calmly assess the difference between our gen- uine desires and the distortions of consumer capitalism and gender nor- malization? Is the yes to surgery constrained by the “fashion-beauty complex,” as Sandra Lee Bartky calls it, while the no to surgery is the supervening culturally resistant voice? Could the no be equally bound up in cultural fantasy? As Hilary Radner observes, “From a Foucauld- ian perspective, the ‘resistant’ body . . . is no less a product of cultural discipline than the ‘dominated’ body, the body of ‘gender normaliza- tion’” (141). We need to transcend feminist criticisms of body practices that can wind up being as shaming as the physical imperfections that drove us to beautify in the first place—as though some of us are superior to the cultural machinery while others desperately fling ourselves across the tracks of cultural desire. Through an extraordinary analysis of Jane Fonda’s career, Radner shows how difficult it can be for women to be both successful and emancipated. We precariously carve out “a culture of the self in which the subject submits voluntarily to specific practices in return for certain economic and social privileges” (174). It’s not always clear, of course, which practices constitute a kind of submission and which press the outer edges of the given system. Worse yet, some- times the capitulation and resistance happen in the same arena. As Rad- ner points out, Jane Fonda’s incitement to women to overcome their anorexic /bulimic practices and take control of our bodies through working out ultimately became yet another disciplinary regime. Most important, it is not always clear who is doing the choosing and what is being changed. Throughout this book I will be questioning just this order of events. To separate mind and body and designate mind as an agent over the body’s material shape is to imagine we’re all quite clear about the distinction. Moreover, as I will reiterate throughout, the very act of surgery, the expressed reasons for undergoing surgery or performing it, renders impossible that cartography. Despite its self- 64 / Untouchable Bodies characterization as creating a harmonious interaction between mind and body, in reality the very practice of plastic surgery both represents and facilitates in a dramatic way the erasure of the mind /body dualism. When identity formation takes place in relation to two-dimensional images, then we cannot help but partake of some of their characteristics. It’s not as though children are raised in isolation within their nuclear families and then (once personality and ego are fully in place) suddenly rush across the family threshold into the potentially dangerous landscape of television and magazines and movies. No, these have been our shaping guides from the very beginning. I’m certainly not encouraging us to toss our televisions out the window and return to a prior, more “human” form; we’re past that. We are immersed in visual culture to the degree that we become its embodied effects, so instead of condemning the images that are now constitutive in a more elemental way than, say, making us want to diet when we see skinny models, I would encourage us to consider the meanings, for both individuals and their culture, of these recent modes of identity formation. 32 To identify with two-dimensional images by no means involves merely passive imitation. Psychoanalysts Jean Laplanche and J B. Pon- talis define identification thus: “Psychological process whereby the subject assimilates an aspect, property or attribute of the other and is trans- formed, wholly or partially, after the model the other provides. It is by means of a series of identifications that the personality is constituted and specified” (205). In other words, what we call the self comes into being through a range of identifications. While it may seem as though we are being “taken over” in some way by the external object of our identification, we are also actively engaging that otherness and making it our own—assimilating it as part of our selves. As I will discuss throughout this book, because of certain characteristics of media images (their two- dimensionality, their transformability, their constitutive technologies), identifying with them may put us at risk for a lifetime of transformational identifications. Psychoanalysts have for some time been address- ing the rise of narcissistic personality disturbances in the twentieth cen- Untouchable Bodies /65 tury. 33 As I will discuss in chapter 5, it is of importance that these disturbances are linked to the actor-psyche itself in a culture where actors are among the most venerated of public types. In a culture fixated on becoming a celebrity, where we find an indi- vidual’s “inner truth” through the apparatus of the filmic close-up, it’s increasingly impossible to impugn perfect images as though they are en- tirely distinguishable from the ground-zero level of the self. It may well be that the only bodies that seem real to us are those witnessed by mil- lions of people in movie theaters or on national television. 34 To imagine that there are people who could change the images if they wanted to is to misunderstand the embeddedness of the image producers in a cultural machinery that they don’t run but instead merely service. For them, as well as us, the image and beauty are coextensive. The product becomes an excuse for the production of beauty; in advertising, beauty may seem to function as the lure toward the product, but at the same time the product is simply a road toward beauty. More important, the power of the aggressivity released in response to idealized and impossible images leads to a deadly social side effect. People not reflected by the idealized images (practically everyone) imagine that if we were so reflected we would necessarily feel better about ourselves. Imagine the aggressivity multiplied by knowing that, for example, one’s race is rarely represented and only insofar as it is main- streamed for white aesthetic consumption. For many nonwhites in the United States, the reality of their missing bodies (especially the range of bodies) from the media landscape could lead one to believe that one reason it’s easier to be /look white is that whiteness is more widely represented as aesthetically desirable. But this predicament is simply a reduplication of the central splitting between material bodies and two- dimensional lures. No one measures up—no one at all—this is the whole point, and it is exactly what leads to what I term transformational identifications. The racist aesthetic of media bodies only intensifies our faith in a two-dimensional solution. Cosmetic-surgery patients and plastic surgeons seem to replay the 66 / Untouchable Bodies only roles available in a fairly circumscribed plot. But just what is the plot these days, and how have its elements and characters shifted with- out our even knowing? While gender remains pivotal to the story, it’s less important than it used to be. Even though the desire for physical perfection seems extreme, we seem to be more bound up in the trans- formative act itself than we are in the end result. When and why did we become surgical? Although so many of us clamor for change in the current cultural cir- cumstances that render human bodies inadequate and send us rushing to the plastic surgeon, we need first to determine what it is exactly that we need /want changed. In other words, what is the combination of social conditions and imperatives that have stranded us in a culture of cosmetic surgery? Is it interminable pursuit of the beauty myth? Is it a persistent acting out of gender? Is it disgust with and intolerance for the material body as such? In order for a cultural practice to grip us with such tenac- ity, it has to be fed, I will argue, from multiple directions—some prag- matic, like the profit motive of plastic surgeons in conjunction with wide-scale cultural fantasies: that a new body is something you can buy, that you even want a new body to begin with, that appearance changes your life. This book is in inquiry into the fantasies and practices that have forged such a culture. three The Plastic Surgeon and the Patient A Slow Dance AESTHETIC LANDSCAPE The surgery lasted seven hours. The patient was a woman in her midfifties—in for a face-lift along with an endoscopic brow-lift, upper and lower blepharoplasty, and fat injections to her lips. She complained that her eyes seemed increasingly deep-set, and she disliked her forehead creases. She told her surgeon that she wanted to “soften her look.” I en- tered the room just as the patient was going under. It’s easier that way. Linking the surgical process to someone I’ve met makes it impossible for me to achieve an emotionally neutral, aestheticized distance during the operation. Each time, I anxiously watch the monitor, scanning heart rate and blood pressure. I shudder when they are wrenched from their anesthetic sleep, the whole body heaving up and arching when the ventilator is pulled from the mouth. I worry that they won’t be able to reconnect consciousness to their surgical bodies, that they will die. And then after, in recovery, left alone with the patient and family, I feel responsible, telling them the surgery went well—as though I have any idea, really. I 67 68 / The Plastic Surgeon and the Patient suspect, with experience, I would get over this and would be able to separate more readily the human from the surgical field. This patient’s procedure took place in a large surgery room in a hospital. The staff was very concerned to keep me far away from any of the sterile areas, and nurses were busily relocating me. Two huge Sony television sets faced the operating table. These would be used for what is called an endoscopic procedure. The endoscopic unit, as Oscar M. Ra- mirez describes it, consists of “a camera, xenon light source, two video monitors,” an endoscope along with “special [periosteal] elevators and manipulators” (639). The sheets were lifted from the patient, then re- draped very carefully to avoid any pressure points of fabric, which could lead to blood clotting. During long surgeries like this one, blood clots are the greatest concern. Another surgeon told me that she wouldn’t operate for longer than five hours because of the degree of risk. “I just don’t think it’s a good idea. I think you put the patient at higher risk when you put them under general anesthesia for a longer time. They have risks to their lungs, they have risks of blood clots, so I really limit the surgery. I’ve had patients ask me if I’ll do their breast implants and abdominoplasties at the same time, and I’ve said no.” One of the problems surgeons face is that patients tend to prefer combining procedures— one big surgery, in other words. Cost is often the primary concern. If a patient were to have implants and a tummy tuck at separate times, she may not be able to afford the additional funds required for hospital and anesthesiologist charges; indeed, the total cost could increase by several thousand dollars, not to mention the additional recuperation involved, extra time off work. The surgeon began by suctioning out fat from her belly for injection into her lips. He explained to me that there is some anecdotal evidence that the fat from some areas of the body is more volatile than fat from others, meaning that if you gain weight, the newly augmented lips might expand as well! The process of suctioning out the fat seemed so violent, plunging back and forth with the suction tube into her soft abdominal The Plastic Surgeon and the Patient /69 skin. “She’s straining against me,” the surgeon complained to the anesthesiologist, who was instructed to sedate her further. The anesthesiologist, in perusing the patient chart, was not especially pleased to note that the patient had claimed to imbibe between four and five alcoholic beverages a day. I spoke with the anesthesiologist about her experience with this surgeon, for whom she had great respect. Two years earlier, there had been a fatality. The evening following her breast augmentation, a young woman rose to go to the bathroom and died from a blood clot. “Every now and then, these things happen,” she com- mented, but I sensed that the memory continued to agitate her, this death of a young woman for no good reason. As he plumped up her mouth, the surgeon explained that the patient suffered from what he calls incomplete oral closure, meaning that the teeth touch each other before the lips meet. He believes this config- uration ages the face by forcing certain muscles to compensate; thus he plumps up the lips to supplement the deficiency. He turned to the brow. The lights in the room dimmed when the two large television screens flared awake. I felt as though I were viewing an art installation, not surgery. A tight circle of light beaming down from the surgeon’s headlamp contained the faces of the surgeon and the patient, and the paired screens glowed blue. The surgeon made two incisions in the patient’s hairline, each approximately an inch and a half long. He gently pried the skin apart from the periosteum and, with a drill, made what he called a bone tunnel to define the endoscope’s route; he then inserted a wire to make sure the tunnel went all the way through. A periosteal elevator raised the skin from the forehead. Hearing the scalpel rasp against bone unnerved me. In this aestheticized technolog- ical space of television screens and monitors soothingly flickering or- ange data and a table full of harmoniously arrayed metal instruments in an unrecognizable variety of curves and angles, body sounds seemed out of place. He then inserted the endoscope, a long thin instrument with a camera at the end, which gives one visual access to what would otherwise 70 / The Plastic Surgeon and the Patient be out of visual range. Use of the endoscope allows doctors to make smaller incisions, because the scope reveals to them the underside of the face, otherwise visible only by rolling back the whole forehead. Many surgeons consider the technique revolutionary, but others think the results are less impressive than the old-fashioned coronal brow-lift or even aesthetically undesirable. 1 I could not take my eyes off the screens. As the endoscope traveled beneath her brow, against the bone and periosteum, it first seemed to be speeding through a tunnel and then came out into a chamber of lumi- nous wet colors—reddish pink tissue and yellow fat and white slivers of nerves. It looked as though they were filming under the sea. Art histo- rian Barbara Maria Stafford, in claiming that the eighteenth-century “anatomical ‘method’” of inquiry into the secrets of nature persists in the present, worries that “one result of the new noninvasive imaging technologies in the area of medicine is the capability of turning a person inside out” (48). She wonders: “Will this open-ended trend toward complete exposure give rise to the same sense of vulnerability, shame, and powerlessness that the eighteenth century associated with anato- mization?” (48). Curiously, the displacement of the patient’s body onto the television screen had the effect, not of turning her inside out exactly, but rather of disembodying her, transforming her into a visual landscape—not for beautification per se, instead for the sake of transformation itself. Thus, viewing the projection of her body into two di- mensions in the very process of being surgically manipulated on the three-dimensional plane (after all, his scalpel was indeed beneath her skin) seemed to enact the process of the body becoming an image, becoming televisual even. 2 While the television screens in the room certainly amplified this effect, I had a similar experience of the body’s transformation into a two- dimensional aesthetic landscape when I observed a breast augmentation. The surgeon turned to a resident who was assisting and invited him to palpate the location of the nerve in the pocket he had created under the The Plastic Surgeon and the Patient /71 chest muscle. As the assistant inserted his fingers, nodding when he felt the nerve, I imagined what it would feel like—rubbery? dense? kind of like a coaxial cable? In that moment of my wanting to explore the surgical field further, the patient herself disappeared for me. Her chest was no more than a plane on which a surgical event took place. As the implants were filled with saline, they rose from the chest, reconfiguring its to- pography. This in itself was fascinating and seemed to have nothing to do with her bra size or what kinds of clothes she would wear postim- plant. This had nothing to do with anything human. 3 Surgery doesn’t really seem to be about the body’s interior, because the process, during which the inside becomes another outside, is ultimately topographical. There’s no sense of revelation, the stunning moment of making visible what was hidden; rather, there’s a realignment of what constitutes the surface. The current patient’s brow-lift was more difficult than expected and went very slowly. She had many little perforating vessels, prompting the surgeon to explain, “Even a drop of this [blood] in a scope looks like a river.” Painstakingly he cauterized all the little vessels that were leak- ing into the tissues, forming rivulets. The room filled with the smell of burning blood. Epinephrine locally injected into the face is supposed to stop most of the bleeding, but this patient bled continuously throughout the operation. During the face-lift proper, it took a long time for the surgeon to unmoor the skin from the fascia. At the end of this, almost her entire face had been undermined. He worked on one side at a time. Scrupu- lously he progressed through her face, rearranging tissue, restoring the substructure, in order to create a more youthful contour—but it wasn’t until the end, when he pulled the skin back and stapled it shut, that I could actually register the result. The skin was taut and smooth; there was now a jawline where before there had been a swell of double chin. He turned over her face to the untouched, older side, like the painting in the closet. 72 / The Plastic Surgeon and the Patient TIMING A few years ago, all 13 of the Lexington, Kentucky–area plastic surgeons (13 serving a population of just 250,000) joined in advertising the benefits of preventive face-lifts. “If you prefer a more harmonic relationship between your self-perception and outer image, you may prefer to tackle these concerns before they become too obvious. You may benefit from a facelift performed at an earlier age” (“A Case for Undergoing Face- lift”). They urged people to consider treating facial aging earlier than before—as early as thirty-five in fact. They claimed that such early in- terventions will improve the result (younger skin is more elastic) and guarantee future results (future face-lifts). Moreover, the most recent surgical innovations are designed especially to effect changes on rela- tively young faces. One surgeon told me: “I think what’s going to happen with this is you’re going to see more of it being done but in a lesser amount. People are going to start having cosmetic surgery done like going to the dentist, because you know, every two or three years, you’ll have a little endoscopic tightening done to keep up. Frequent smaller procedures done.” Face-lift surgery has traditionally been an option for well-to-do women in their midfifties and over. But, as this surgeon observed, things are changing and rapidly, especially given the increasing geographic and economic availability of these procedures. Equally important is the mar- keting of the “smaller” procedures that identify localized pockets of facial aging. When a patient is wooed with an eyelid lift claimed to erase five years from her face for only four thousand dollars and a short recovery period—in contrast to twelve thousand for the whole face and a longer convalescence—this patient is necessarily more motivated to start early. Add this divide-and-conquer and pay-on-the-installment- plan approach to the fact that women are trained from early on to experience our bodies in fragments, and one can see how easy it was for surgeons to tap into this market. 4 The contradictory information from the surgeons can feel alarming, [...]... line—such is the nature of the debate The problem seems to be that the surgically lifted brow is almost invariably higher than the authentically youthful one.6 There are submental fat pads on either side of the mouth and malar fat 76 / The Plastic Surgeon and the Patient pads on top of the cheek “Toward the end of the third decade,” a surgeon writes, “ the fat starts to slide forward and down, as the overlying... than other surgeons) that they unthinkingly transgress the most hallowed codes of the medical establishment? But I have no reason to believe this is so Rather, when the male surgeon operates on his female partner, it has more to do with the inherent gender dynamics of the plastic surgery encounter itself The Plastic Surgeon and the Patient / 81 What do the patient and the doctor find in each other? Their... what he once was; (3) what he would like to be; (4) someone who was a part of himself What men love in women, claims Freud, is the vicarious experience of their own forfeited narcissism, or self-love, that they felt as a child along with the attention they received from their caregivers when they experienced themselves as the center of the world.8 Women, in contrast, as a result of their “castrated,”... narcissism.” 9 They become fixated, in other words, at the level of the damaged body; their investment in personal beauty is compensatory Consequently, instead of finding fulfillment in the active form of the object relation, in loving another, Freud argues that women love best to be loved If we follow Freud’s model, then women experience their love lives on the surface of their bodies (passive objects of a man’s... another) a combination of disavowed traits and repudiated goals Crucially, Jacobson’s account would suggest that the male version of loving and being loved happens on the surface of the body as well the love for the penis supplanting the object relation The deception at the heart of Freudian accounts of sexual difference, then, would be that the overvalued penis has nothing whatsoever to do with the. .. overall percentage of men seeking surgery including such procedures as abdominoplasty, botox injections, and upper arm lifts Since then, however, the numbers have remained approximately the same Women still constitute the overwhelming majority of cosmetic surgery patients The distinction between the mastery and activity of the male surgeon and the prone materiality of the female patient who offers up her... imprinting their momentary footsteps on beams of light” (271–72) Emphasized implicitly is the contrast between Georgiana’s mortal embodied substance and the “unsubstantial beauty” of her husband’s realm The scenery and the figures of actual life were Figure 3 Advertising the benefits of surgery a modern-day Galatea Courtesy of American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery 96 / The Plastic... and therefore instructive example of the relationship between the sexes Eighty-five percent of boardcertified plastic surgeons in this country are men; in 2000, 89 percent of the cosmetic- surgery patients were women Male cosmetic procedures treat mainly hair loss and prominent ears, although the statistics are changing The 1998 gender distribution for cosmetic procedures shows significant increases in the. .. “read” the inside of a person: “I try to envision the inner person, the inner beauty, and the potential that are lying so close to the surface When I look at her, I visualize a finished work of art that truly expresses how she feels inside” (Man and Shelkofsky 34 ) This transposition of the site of “appearance” from the generally female patient to the generally male surgeon makes sense in light of a culture. .. (dangerously) masked by the seductive appearance of beauty The audience knows, however, that such a turn of events is unlikely when the surgeon is the progenitor of the woman, the “good” father in contrast to the bad father, who caused her injuries in the first place As her former lover complains, the surgeon has “changed my partner into a dove soft and weak and full of love for her fellow man .” In Freudian . happens on the surface of the body as well the love for the penis supplanting the object relation. The deception at the heart of Freudian accounts of sexual difference, then, would be that the overvalued. / The Plastic Surgeon and the Patient be out of visual range. Use of the endoscope allows doctors to make smaller incisions, because the scope reveals to them the underside of the face, otherwise. pads on either side of the mouth and malar fat 76 / The Plastic Surgeon and the Patient pads on top of the cheek. “Toward the end of the third decade,” a surgeon writes, “ the fat starts to

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