More often than not, what appear at first glance to be instances of choice turn out to be instances of conformity. The women who undergo cosmetic surgery in order to compete in various beauty pageants are clearly choosing to conform. So is the woman who wanted to undergo a facelift, tummy tuck, and liposuction all in one week, in order to win heterosexual approval from a man she had not seen in twenty? eight years and whose individual preferences she could not possibly know.
In some ways, it does not matter who the particular judges are. Actual men brothers, fathers, male lovers, male beauty “experts” and hypothetical men live in the aesthetic imaginations of women. Whether they are male employers, prospective male spouses, male judges in the beauty pageants, or male-identified women, these modern day Parises are generic and live sometimes ghostly but powerful lives in the reflective awareness of women.
A woman’s makeup, dress, gestures, voice, degree of cleanliness, degree of muscularity, odors, degree of hirsuteness, vocabulary, hands, feet, skin, hair, and vulva can all be evaluated, regulated, and disciplined in the light of the hypothetical often-white male viewer and the male viewer present in the assessing gaze of other women. Men’s appreciation and approval of achieved femininity becomes all the more invasive when it resides in the incisions, stitches, staples, and scar tissue of women’s bodies as women chooses to conform.
And women’s public conformity to the norms of beauty often signals a deeper conformity to the norms of compulsory heterosexuality along with an awareness of the violence that can result from violating those norms. Hence the first paradox: that what looks like an optimal situation of reflection, deliberation, and self creating choice often signals conformity at a deeper level.
In recommending various forms of appropriation of the practices and dominant ideology surrounding cosmetic surgery, it is important to distinguish this set of disciplinary practices. I suggest, is that although submitting to the procedures of cosmetic surgery involves pain, risks, undesirable side effects, and living with a heightened form of patriarchal anxiety, it is also fairly clear that, most of the time, the pain and risks are relatively short-term.
Furthermore, the outcome often appears to be one that generally enhances women’s confidence, confers a sense of well-being, contributes to a greater comfortableness in the public domain, and affirms the individual woman as self-determining and risk-taking individual.
References:
Dally, Ann (1991) Women under the knife: a history of surgery London: Hutchinson Radius Kathy Davis (2003) Dubious Equalities & Embodied Differences: Cultural Studies on Cosmetic Surgery. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.