Reconstructing race and gender in American cosmetic surgery

ABSTRACT

While scholars have examined how cosmetic surgery can reinforce gender norms, the development of racially specific standards is a more recent phenomenon that has received less scrutiny. This article examines how cosmetic surgeons conceptualize race and its intersection with gender. Through analysis of eighty surgeon-authored procedural guides, I find that surgeons engage in what I term the biological construction of social difference, mixing discourses of biology and physical difference with social and cultural discourses to describe patient beauty ideals. Surgeons develop an expert discourse on race and gender that is simultaneously about difference and beauty. The development of “ethnic” specific cosmetic surgery standards enshrines a “white” default referent even as it opens the door to other configurations of physical appearance. Cosmetic surgery implies that physical markers of race and gender are mutable – literally, via the surgeon’s scalpel – even as it relies on and reinforces established notions of racial difference.

KEYWORDS:

• Cosmetic surgery
• race
• ethnicity
• gender
• standardization
• whiteness

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Steve Epstein and Wendy Espeland for guidance and Marcel Knudsen, the Culture & Society Workshop, and the Science in Human Culture Colloquium at Northwestern for suggestions on this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCiD

Alka Menon http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7420-751X

Notes

1. To avoid confusion and fatigue, I use my respondents’ terms without quotation marks for what they call “ethnicity”, including their more specific descriptors such as “Caucasian”, “Asian”, etc. My preferred analytical term is “race”, as it highlights hierarchy and relative comparisons.

2. Surgeons in my sample use the word “ethnicity” almost exclusively, rarely “race”. This deserves analysis in its own right but is beyond the scope of this paper.