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Abstract
This essay analyzes the “plastic body” as it is produced in the discourse of plastic surgery. The contemporary industry has constructed a popular image of plastic surgery as a readily available and personally empowering means to resolve body image issues, on the presumption that any body can become a “better” body. The ideology underlying the industry emerges out of analysis of the rhetoric of surgeons and patients. The rhetorical efforts of amputee “wannabes,” who seek elective amputation and who use arguments similar to those of mainstream plastic surgery applicants, reveal the paradoxes and contradictions in decision‐making about who has access to these procedures. The essay concludes that the concept of the plastic body is based less on medical technology and skill than on rhetorical power and suggests that this body of discourse has important implications for medical and technological advances that have enlarged the possibilities for body alteration practices.
Notes
John W. Jordan is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Wisconsin‐Milwaukee. Correspondence to: 210 Johnston Hall, University of Wisconsin‐Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI 53211, U.S. Email: [email protected]. The author thanks the editor and anonymous reviewers for their help and Melissa Gilbert for access to her excellent documentary Whole.
See Margo Demello, Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Armando R. Favazza, Bodies Under Siege: Self‐Mutilation and Body Modification in Culture and Psychiatry (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Kim Hewitt, Mutilating the Body: Identity in Blood and Ink (Madison, WI: Popular Press, 1997); Victoria Pitts, In the Flesh: The Cultural Politics of Body Modification (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Jennifer González, “The Appended Subject: Race and Identity as Digital Assemblage,” in Race in Cyberspace, eds. Beth E. Kolko, Lisa Nakamura, and Gilbert B. Rodman (New York: Routledge, 2000), 27–50; and John W. Jordan, “(Ad)Dressing the Body in Online Shopping Sites,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 20 (2003): 248–268.
Surgical augmentation procedures are known by a variety of names: plastic surgery, cosmetic surgery, reconstructive surgery, aesthetic surgery, and others. Each describes non‐vital surgical intervention primarily for aesthetic purposes. Throughout this essay, I use the term “plastic surgery” as a general descriptor of these augmentation procedures. I take my cue from the several medical, academic, and popular texts that use the term “plastic surgery” as an umbrella term for the other augmentation techniques. The American Society for Plastic Surgeons, for instance, places cosmetic and reconstructive surgeries under the heading of “plastic surgery,” and emphasized this usage when in 1999 the organization changed its official name from “The American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons” to “The American Society of Plastic Surgeons.” See “History of Plastic Surgery, ASPS and PSEF,” http://www.plasticsurgery.org/History.cfm; Michael Ciaschini and Steven L. Bernard, “History of Plastic Surgery,” http://www.emedicine.com/plastic/topic433.htm; and Elizabeth Haiken, Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 4.
Virginia L. Blum, Flesh Wounds: The Culture of Cosmetic Surgery (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 52. On the history of medical perspectives on the body's malleability, see Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception (New York: Vintage, 1973/1994); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1977/1979), 135–194; Tony Hunt, The Medieval Surgery (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 1999); and Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 47–129. Haiken's Venus Envy is a history of corporeal malleability specific to U.S. plastic surgery.
Carole Spitzack, “The Confession Mirror: Plastic Images for Surgery,” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 13 (1988): 40.
See Kate Kelly and Shelly Branch, “Agony of the Feet: If the Shoe Fits, What's the Point?” Wall Street Journal, 8 August 2003, A1; Clive Thompson, “The Year in Ideas; Umbilicoplasty,” New York Times, 15 December 2002, 131; Lynda Gorov, “The Latest Fad from La‐La Land: A ‘Designer Vagina’,” Boston Globe, 23 August 1999, C1; and Jon Stratton, The Desirable Body: Cultural Fetishism and the Erotics of Consumption (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 128–9.
James Kavanagh defines ideology as “a social process that works on and through every social subject,” and shapes human understanding and meaning making; I use the terms “ideology” and “ideological” in that sense. As John M. Sloop explains, ideology “refers to the process by which knowledge of self and of the world is created, maintained, and assumed.” Different people, institutions, and communities can participate in and generate ideological perspectives on a given subject, and these perspectives often interact in the public sphere. Some rhetorical scholars, such as Trevor Parry‐Giles and Shawn J. Parry‐Giles, have written about “ideological rhetoric” that “helps shape and order the cultural meaning” of social institutions, concepts, and artifacts. In Trevor Parry‐Giles and Shawn J. Parry‐Giles, “The West Wing's Prime‐Time Presidentiality: Mimesis and Catharsis in a Postmodern Romance,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 209. See James H. Kavanagh, “Ideology,” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 311; and John M. Sloop, “Ideology,” in Unspun: Key Concepts for Understanding the World Wide Web, ed. Thomas Swiss (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2000), 88
Josephine Johnston and Carl Elliot, “Healthy Limb Amputation: Ethical and Legal Aspects,” Clinical Medicine 2 (2002): 431.
On the importance of textual assemblage to rhetorical criticism, see Raymie E. McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis,” Communication Monographs 56 (1989): 101.
Rhetorical criticism is well‐suited to discussing the ways in which symbolic and material borders influence public action. As Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop argue, rhetoric shifts the ideological positions of borders, “changing what they mean publicly, influencing public policy, altering the ways borders affect people…. Rhetoric shapes understandings of how the border functions; taken further, because of its increasingly powerful role, rhetoric at times even determines where, and what, the border is.” See Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, Shifting Borders: Rhetoric, Immigration, and California's Proposition 187 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2002), 5.
Wallace H. J. Chang, “Plastic Surgery—A Brief Perspective,” in Fundamentals of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, ed. Wallace H. J. Chang (Baltimore, MD: Williams and Wilkins, 1980), 3. See also Haiken, Venus Envy, 5.
Thomas C. Shevory, Body/Politics: Studies in Reproduction, Production, and (Re)Construction (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000), 175; Marilyn Yalom, A History of the Breast (New York: Ballantine, 1997), 159.
As Thomas J. Darwin points out, “The way a body is articulated in a given paradigm of healing has direct entailments for the treatment of patients.… [A] paradigm of medicine or healing must ground itself in a coherent rhetoric of the body which explains how the body works, what the nature of disease is, and thus how best to care for the body.” Thomas J. Darwin, “Intelligent Cells and the Body as Conversation: The Democratic Rhetoric of Mindbody Medicine,” Argumentation and Advocacy 36 (1999): 35.
Plastic surgery is a ubiquitious discursive phenomenon in contemporary culture, constituting the primary topic of several television shows, books, and the lead stories of many popular press magazines. See Domeena C. Renshaw, “Body Dysmorphia, the Plastic Surgeon and the Psychiatrist,” Psychiatric Times (July 2003): 64.
See Adalbert G. Bettman, “Plastic and Cosmetic Surgery of the Face,” Aesthetic Plastic Surgery 12 (1920/1988): 5; Jennifer Herendeen Brown, “The History of Plastic Surgery: From Ancient India to Modern America,” Bulletin of the American College of Surgeons 71 (1986): 21; and Ciaschini and Bernard, “History of Plastic Surgery.”
Quoted in Deborah A. Sullivan, Cosmetic Surgery: The Cutting Edge of Commercial Medicine in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 35.
Tagliacozzi's exuberance was viewed by the Roman Catholic Church as heretical effrontery, and after his death his corpse was exhumed and reburied in unconsecrated ground as a sign of his disgrace. Brown, “The History of Plastic Surgery,” 22.
One individual who confounds this narrative, mentioned in the American Society of Plastic Surgeon's history, is Dr. John Peter Mettauer, who in 1827 performed the first cleft palate surgery in the United States, using surgical instruments he had made. He seems to have been isolated in his accomplishments, as the next moment discussed in the ASPS history is World War I, which is acknowledged as the moment when plastic surgery became legitimized. See “History of Plastic Surgery, ASPS and PSEF.”
See Haiken, Venus Envy, 44–90.
Haiken, Venus Envy, 259. Gardner notes that some medical practitioners attempted to develop means for restoring physical appearance, such as surgical repairs and specialized prosthetics, but their efforts were not widespread. See Kristen E. Gardner, “Hiding the Scars: History of Breast Prostheses after Mastectomy since 1945” in Beauty and Business: Commerce, Gender, and Culture in Modern America, ed. Philip Scranton (New York: Routledge, 2001), 310.
Peter A. Adamson and Warren M. Kraus, “Management of Patient Dissatisfaction with Cosmetic Surgery,” Facial Plastic Surgery 11 (1995): 102.
Foucault argues that the medical gaze is not reductive, ignoring elements of a subject until it finds an essential core; instead, it is a generative capacity that produces the body as a whole subject that admits to no other epistemological possibilities. It is the sole means by which patients' bodies become visible, and therefore knowable, to medicine. In order for surgeons to see the body differently, their knowledge of the body itself must be changed. See Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, xiv.
See Robert M. Goldwyn, “Forward,” in Fundamentals of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, ed. Wallace H. J. Chang (Baltimore, MD: Williams and Wilkins, 1980), viii; and Haiken, Venus Envy, 259.
“History of Plastic Surgery, ASPS and PSEF.” See also Haiken, Venus Envy, 15, 29–43; and Sheila M. Rothman and David J. Rothman, The Pursuit of Perfection: The Promise and Perils of Medical Enhancement (New York: Pantheon, 2003), 103‐4.
Sullivan, Cosmetic Surgery, 40.
Charles Illingworth, “Forward,” in Ian A. McGregor, Fundamental Techniques of Plastic Surgery and Their Surgical Applications (Baltimore, MD: Williams and Wilkins, 1965), v.
Illingworth, “Forward,” v. As Gilman points out, disreputable knowledge often gains legitimation by adopting a “more complex and ‘scientific’” rhetorical style. See Sander L. Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 11.
The first line in the American Society of Plastic Surgeons' “History of Plastic Surgery” states that “Mankind's [sic] essential nature entails self‐improvement.… Because human beings have always sought self‐fulfillment through self‐improvement, plastic surgery—improving and restoring form and function—may be one of the world's oldest healing arts.” This history significantly omits references to outlaw surgeries in ancient India as well as the 19th century quack doctors, offering instead a linear narrative of enlightened scientific progress. See “History of Plastic Surgery, ASPS and PSEF.” An additional example demonstrates plastic surgery's rhetorical legitimization within medicine. The same hubristic rhetoric that warranted Tagliacozzi's desecration has been reframed as a progressive statement about individual entitlement and the plastic surgeon's desire and capacity to do good works. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons displays Tagliacozzi's (in)famous quotation, cited previously, as the introduction to their informational webpage on reconstructive surgery techniques. See “Reconstructive Surgery,” http://www.plasticsurgery.org/public_education/procedures/ReconstructiveSurgery.cfm.
Kathy Davis, Reshaping the Female Body: The Dilemma of Cosmetic Surgery (New York: Routledge, 1995), 16.
Sullivan, Cosmetic Surgery, 45.
Davis, Reshaping the Female Body, 18.
Lois Mattox Miller, “Surgery's Cinderella,” Independent Woman (July 1939): 202.
Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful, 294.
Carl Elliot, Better than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2003), 47.
Shevory, Body/Politics, 171.
Davis, Reshaping the Female Body, 28–9.
Debra L. Gimlin, Body Work: Beauty and Self‐Image in American Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 78. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) estimates that 6.6 million people underwent cosmetic enhancement procedures (both surgical and non‐surgical) in 2002, and paid fees in excess of seven billion dollars. Although the majority of these procedures, 4.9 million, were non‐surgical (such as Botox injections and chemical peels), 1.6 million people had surgical cosmetic procedures, an increase from 2001. The top five surgical procedures were nose reshaping, liposuction, breast augmentation, eyelid surgery, and facelift. The trend over the past decade shows a significant increase in the number of plastic surgeries performed. From 1992–2002, the number of people who had plastic surgery nearly tripled, the number of breast augmentation surgeries increased sevenfold, and liposuctions quadrupled. The ASPS tracks only those procedures performed by member plastic surgeons, making a comprehensive account of the total number of cosmetic surgical procedures virtually impossible to obtain. See American Society of Plastic Surgeons, “National Clearinghouse of Plastic Surgery Statistics,” http://www.plasticsurgery.org/public_education/statistical_trends_92to01.cfm.
Elizabeth Grosz defines Cartesian duality in the context of the body as “the assumption that there are two distinct, mutually exclusive and mutually exhaustive substances, mind and body, each of which inhabits its own self‐contained sphere.” She also points out that this duality favors the mind as the superior partner that dominates the body. See Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), 6.
Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful, 270.
See Anne Balsamo, “On the Cutting Edge: Cosmetic Surgery and the Technological Production of the Gendered Body,” Camera Obscura 28 (1993): 207–37; Blum, Flesh Wounds; Susan Bordo, “‘Material Girl’: The Effacements of Postmodern Culture,” Michigan Quarterly Review 29 (1990): 653–77; Gimlin, Body Work; Kathryn Pauly Morgan, “Women and the Knife: Cosmetic Surgery and the Colonization of Women's Bodies,” Hypatia 6 (1991): 25–53; Spitzack, “The Confession Mirror” and Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women (New York: William Morrow, 1991).
Nathan Stormer, “Embodied Humanism: Performative Argument for Natural Rights in ‘The Solitude of the Self’,” Argumentation and Advocacy 36 (1999): 51.
On the difficulty of communicating bodily trauma as a source for rhetorical articulations of the body, see Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 161–80.
Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 5.
Gerard A. Hauser, “Incongruous Bodies: Arguments for Personal Sufficiency and Public Insufficiency,” Argumentation and Advocacy 36 (1999): 1; Kevin Michael DeLuca, “Unruly Arguments: The Body Rhetoric of Earth First!, Act Up, and Queer Nation,” Argumentation and Advocacy 36 (1999): 10. See also Davis W. Houck and Amos Kiewe, FDR's Body Politics: The Rhetoric of Disability (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2003), 4; and James C. Wilson and Cynthia Lewiecki‐Wilson, “Disability, Rhetoric, and the Body” in Embodied Rhetorics: Disability in Language and Culture, ed. James C. Wilson and Cynthia Lewiecki‐Wilson (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001), 2–4.
DeLuca, “Unruly Arguments,” 10.
Hauser, “Incongruous Bodies,” 2; DeLuca, “Unruly Arguments,” 20.
DeLuca, “Unruly Arguments,” 12. See also Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 298.
Darwin, “Intelligent Cells,” 35.
Hauser, “Incongruous Bodies,” 5.
Donald C. Bryant, “Rhetoric: Its Functions and Its Scope,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 39 (1953): 413.
Blum, Flesh Wounds, 271.
Andrew Herman, The “Better Angels” of Capitalism: Rhetoric, Narrative, and Moral Identity among Men of the American Upper Class (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), 6.
Vincent Mosco, “Webs of Myth and Power: Connectivity and the New Computer Technopolis,” in The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory, ed. Andrew Herman and Thomas Swiss (New York: Routledge, 2000), 42.
Christine L. Harold, “Tracking Heroin Chic: The Abject Body Reconfigures the Rational Argument,” Argumentation and Advocacy 36 (1999): 66.
Grosz, Volatile Bodies, xiii.
As my concern is the public representations of plastic body rhetoric, my sources for statements from surgeons, patients, and other members of the discursive community are taken from published or publicly available texts.
See Sullivan, Cosmetic Surgery, 131–54.
Balsamo, “On the Cutting Edge,” 216; Blum, Flesh Wounds, 83.
Adalbert G. Bettman, “Plastic and Cosmetic Surgery of the Face,” Aesthetic Plastic Surgery 12 (1920/1988): 5, 7.
Quoted in Morgan, “Women and the Knife,” 31.
Gimlin, Body Work, 74; Mary Ruth Wright, “The Elective Surgeon's Reaction to Change and Conflict” in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery of the Head and Neck, Vol. 1: Aesthetic Surgery, ed. Paul H. Ward and Walter E. Berman (St. Louis, MO: C. V. Mosby Co., 1984), 525.
James W. Smith and Samm Sinclair Baker, “Doctor, Make Me Beautiful!” (New York: David McKay Co., 1973), 16, 3; Morgan, “Women and the Knife,” 32.
Blum, Flesh Wounds, 272.
Blum, Flesh Wounds, 52; quoted in Blum, 4.
Renshaw, “Body Dysmorphia,” 64.
Blum, Flesh Wounds, 275.
Blum, Flesh Wounds, 106.
Smith and Baker, “Doctor, Make Me Beautiful!”, 14.
Bordo, “Material Girl,” 656, 657.
Goldwyn, “Forward,” vii.
Renshaw, “Body Dysmorphia,” 64.
David Silverman. Communication and Medical Practice: Social Relations in the Clinic (London: Sage, 1987), 162.
Michael A. Bolton, Thomas Pruzinsky, Thomas F. Cash, and John A. Persing, “Measuring Outcomes in Plastic Surgery: Body Image and Quality of Life in Abdominoplasty Patients,” Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, 112 (2003): 619.
Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, 8.
Davis, Reshaping the Female Body, 2.
Goldwyn, “Forward,” vii.
Adamson and Kraus, “Management of Patient Dissatisfaction with Cosmetic Surgery,” 99.
Blum, Flesh Wounds, 13.
Gimlin, Body Work, 11. See also Balsamo, “On the Cutting Edge,” 209; and Blum, Flesh Wounds, 275.
Gimlin, Body Work, 78.
Bolton et al., “Measuring Outcomes in Plastic Surgery,” 619.
Renshaw, “Body Dysmorphia,” 64.
Blum, Flesh Wounds, 291.
Blum, Flesh Wounds, 274.
One role science plays in society is that of educator, using rhetorical communication not only to translate science into everyday language but also to communicate scientific values about how the world ought to be and how people should comport themselves. See Thomas Lessl, “The Priestly Voice,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 75 (1989): 183–97.
See Spitzack, “The Confession Mirror.”
See Bolton et al., “Measuring Outcomes in Plastic Surgery.”
Davis, Reshaping the Female Body, 72.
Spitzack, “The Confession Mirror,” 39.
Elliot, Better than Well, 13.
See Balsamo, “On the Cutting Edge,” 216; and Haiken, Venus Envy, 6.
Gimlin, Body Work, 81. See also S. Anthony Wolf, John W. Devine, Jr., and D. Ralph Millard, Jr., “Cosmetic Surgery,” in Fundamentals of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, ed. Wallace H. J. Chang (Baltimore, MD: Williams and Wilkins, 1980), 262. Foucault also notes that medicine historically has used psychiatric considerations as a means to police “public hygiene.” Michel Foucault, Abnormal (New York: Picador, 2003), 199. These warnings, although medically and legally prudent, contradict surgeons' self‐proclaimed egalitarianism and reassert their own authority over an applicant's body.
Sullivan, Cosmetic Surgery, 64.
Quoted in Blum, Flesh Wounds, 72.
Gimlin, Body Work, 97.
Quoted in Davis, Reshaping the Female Body, 71.
Quoted in Sanjay Gupta, “Ethnic Makeovers,” Time (6 October 2003): 88; quoted in Davis, Reshaping the Female Body, 71.
Davis, Reshaping the Female Body, 74.
Quoted in Davis, Reshaping the Female Body, 77.
Quoted in Davis, Reshaping the Female Body, 77.
Quoted in Extreme Makeover, ABC Television, September 18, 2003. Chuck Bangert, Lou Gorfain, and Howard Schultz, producers.
Davis, Reshaping the Female Body, 76.
Quoted in “Nipped, Tucked, Talking,” People (1 September 2003): 102. See also Patricia Heaton, Motherhood and Hollywood: How to Get a Job Like Mine (New York: Villard, 2002), 157–158.
Gimlin, Body Work, 95.
Blum, Flesh Wounds, 2.
Elliot, Better than Well, 30.
Adamson and Kraus, “Management of Patient Dissatisfaction with Plastic Surgery,” 100.
Balsamo, “On the Cutting Edge,” 209.
Blum, Flesh Wounds, 38. For some surgeons, the yearning to resculpt seems almost compulsory. During an interview, one surgeon suggested that the researcher should have plastic surgery because “the skin you were meant to have is buried underneath the surface and unfortunately people cannot see it.” See Spitzack, “The Confession Mirror,” 47.
Haiken, Venus Envy, 300.
Smith and Baker, “Doctor, Make Me Beautiful!”, 17.
Gregg M. Furth and Robert Smith, Amputee Identity Disorder: Information, Questions, Answers, and Recommendations about Self‐Demand Amputation (Bloomington, IN: 1st Books, 2002), 66. I draw my use of the notion of “oppression” from Butler's argument that “discourse becomes oppressive when it requires that the speaking subject, in order to speak, participate in the very terms of that oppression—that is, take for granted the speaking subject's own impossibility or unintelligibility.” See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 116.
See Renshaw, “Body Dysmorphia,” 64; and Sarah S. Jain, “The Prosthetic Imagination: Enabling and Disabling the Prosthesis Trope,” Science, Technology, and Human Values 24 (1999): 31–54.
Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (New York: Verso, 1995), 143.
See Paul K. Longmore, “Screening Stereotypes: Images of Disabled People in Television and Motion Pictures,” in Images of the Disabled, Disabling Images, ed. Alan Gartner and Tom Joe (New York: Praeger, 1987), 66–72.
See Bruce Feldman, “Amputee Parry Makes Historic Return,” ABCNews.com, http://abcnews.go.com/sections/sports/DailyNews/ESPNFeature1.html?0919855; and Katherine M. Skiba, “Optimism Sustains Local Soldier Who Lost Legs,” JSOnline.com, http://www.jsonline.com/news/state/sep03/167076.asp.
See “Lessons Learned,” ABCNews.com, http://abcnews.go.com/sections/GMA/US/climber_030608.html.
See Whole, produced and directed by Melody Gilbert, Frozen Feet Productions, 2003. James H. Burnett III, “South Side Man Uses Homemade Guillotine to Sever Arm,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 7 October 1999, 3; and Jennifer Trueland, “Investigation After Limbs Amputated on Demand,” The Scotsman, 31 January 2000, 1.
Johnston and Elliot, “Healthy Limb Amputation,” 432. See also Cherry Norton, “Disturbed Patients Have Healthy Limbs Amputated,” The Independent, 1 February 2000, 13; and Furth and Smith, Amputee Identity Disorder, 6.
Furth and Smith, Amputee Identity Disorder, 29. See also Richard L. Bruno, “Devotees, Pretenders and Wannabes,” Sexuality and Disability 15 (1997): 257.
Quoted in Whole. All quotations from the documentary Whole were obtained from a transcription made by the author from a videotape copy of the original film.
Quoted in Elliot, Better than Well, 213; quoted in Whole.
Quoted in “Complete Obsession,” BBCi, http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/1999/obsession_script.shtml.
Quoted in Whole.
Quoted in Whole.
Quoted in Whole; Furth and Smith, Amputee Identity Disorder, 44.
Quoted in Whole.
Johnston and Elliot, “Healthy Limb Amputation,” 432.
Quoted in John Money, “Paraphilia in Females: Fixation on Amputation and Lameness; Two Personal Accounts,” Journal of Psychology and Human Sexuality 3 (1990): 167.
Furth and Smith, Amputee Identity Disorder, 68. See also Richard L. Bruno, “Devotees, Pretenders and Wannabes: Two Cases of Factitious Disability Disorder,” Sexuality and Disability, 15 (1997): 257.
Furth and Smith, Amputee Identity Disorder, 5.
Quoted in Whole.
Blum, Flesh Wounds, 280.
Johnston and Elliot, “Healthy Limb Amputation,” 433.
See Balsamo, “On the Cutting Edge,” 220–1; Bordo, “Material Girl,” 656; Davis, Reshaping the Female Body, 5; and Sullivan, Cosmetic Surgery, 65.
Quoted in Whole.
Elliot, Better than Well, 216. See also Furth and Smith, Amputee Identity Disorder, 30–35; and Johnston and Elliot, “Healthy Limb Amputation,” 431.
Shevory, Body/Politics, 194.
Quoted in Whole.
Quoted in Whole.
Elliot, Better than Well, 209; see also Furth and Smith, Amputee Identity Disorder, 74.
The condition is frequently referred to by medical specialists as either “body dysmorphic disorder,” which is a harmful psychological fixation on a particular body part that the person feels is defective or deformed, or “apotemnophilia,” which describes individuals who desire to have a body part amputated, although usually for reasons of sexual gratification. See Furth and Smith, Amputee Identity Disorder, 5; Elliot, Better than Well, 209–10. Those who have studied the phenomenon argue that neither term is particularly apt as a descriptor for the wannabes' condition. Similarly, the use of the term “apotemnophile,” although common in the literature, has been criticized because of its connotations of sexual disorder or fixation, such as its closely related term “acrotomophilia,” which is used to describe those who have a sexual attraction to amputees. See Elliot, Better than Well, 210; Johnston and Elliot, “Healthy Limb Amputation,” 431; and John Money, Russell Jobaris, and Gregg Furth, “Apotemnophilia: Two Cases of Self‐Demand Amputation as a Paraphilia,” Journal of Sex Research 13 (1977): 115–25. Popular press accounts often conflate the two without discussing the possibility of desiring amputation for non‐sexual reasons. See Tracey Lawson, “Therapist Praises Doctor's ‘Bravery’,” The Scotsman, 1 February 2000, 11. Because of these associations, some have offered alternative terms to describe the phenomenon, such as “body integrity identity disorder” and “amputee identity disorder.” In the existent literature, however, the more accepted linguistic path has been a redefinition of apotemnophilia to describe “a syndrome in which individuals believe they belong in a body that is missing a limb or a digit, or, in other words, a body different from their four normal limbs.” See Furth and Smith, Amputee Identity Disorder, v, 29.
Johnston and Elliot, “Healthy Limb Amputation,” 434.
See Johnston and Elliot, “Healthy Limb Amputation,” 432; Pennie Taylor, “'My Left Foot Was Not Part of Me',” The Observer, 6 February 2000, 14.
Furth and Smith, Amputee Identity Disorder, 43.
Quoted in Norton, “Disturbed Patients have Healthy Limbs Amputated,” 13.
Clare Dyer, “Surgeon Amputated Healthy Legs,” British Medical Journal 320 (5 February 2000): 332.
See Taylor, “‘My Left Foot Was Not Part of Me’,” 14; Trueland, “Investigation After Limbs Amputated on Demand,” 1.
Taylor, “My Left Foot Was Not Part of Me',” 14.
Dyer, “Surgeon Amputated Healthy Legs,” 332.
See Furth and Smith, Amputee Identity Disorder, 10.
See Furth and Smith, Amputee Identity Disorder, 6, 10; Elliot, Better than Well, 221; Johnston and Elliot, “Healthy Limb Amputation,” 433–4; Suzanne J. Kessler, “The Medical Construction of Gender: Case Management of Intersexed Infants,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 16 (1990): 3–26; and John M. Sloop, “‘A Van with a Bar and a Bed’: Ritualized Gender Norms in the John/Joan Case,” Text and Performance Quarterly 20 (2000): 130–49.
Bruno, 251.
Bruno, 257–259; Furth and Smith, 70; Elliot, 230; and Johnston and Elliot, 432–434.
Johnston and Elliot, “Healthy Limb Amputation,” 432.
Grosz, Volatile Bodies, x.
Furth and Smith, Amputee Identity Disorder, 30; Johnston and Elliot, “Healthy Limb Amputation,” 432.
On empathy as a critical rhetorical lens, see Celeste M. Condit, “The Critic as Empath: Moving Away from Totalizing Theory,” Western Journal of Communication 57 (1993), 178–90.
Grosz, Volatile Bodies, xi.
Edward Schiappa, Defining Reality: Definitions and the Politics of Meaning (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), 169.
Wilson and Lewiecki‐Wilson, “Disability, Rhetoric, and the Body,” 17.
See Glenn McGee, The Perfect Baby: A Pragmatic Approach to Genetics (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc., 1997), 118; and Rothman and Rothman, The Pursuit of Perfection, 208–12.
Rothman and Rothman, Pursuit of Perfection, 207.