Making faces racial: how plastic surgery enacts race in the US, Korea and Brazil

ABSTRACT

Engaging with debates about the re-emergence of the race concept in science, this article opens up facial plastic surgery’s expertise of racial phenotypes to inquiry. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and analysis of medical discourse, it analyses how this expertise is made and put into practice in three nations with large cosmetic surgery markets: the US, Korea, and Brazil. Plastic surgery has drawn on the scientific knowledge of race from fields such as anthropology and anthropometry to make racial features (nose and eyes) into an object of medical intervention. Race has been enacted differently, however, in the three national contexts we discuss according to the changing politics of difference and beauty ideals. While contemporary surgery attempts to sidestep the ethical problems raised by earlier scientific racism and whitening practices, it continues to pathologize non-white racial features by operating on traits it sees as “excessive” or merely typical, rather than beautiful.

KEYWORDS:

• Plastic surgery
• race
• facial features
• beauty
• phenotype
• international comparison

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 South Korea, though, has the world’s highest per capita rate of cosmetic operations (Heidekrueger et al. 2017).

2 Another problem with the social constructionist perspective on race is that it rests on an oversimplified account of the earlier “disappearance” of race from science (Reardon 2005).

3 We focus on the US, but also discuss the influential work of a Toronto-based plastic surgeon, Leslie Farkas.

4 Unlike in the Brazil case, Farkas assumed that the race of the facial feature would match the racial identity of the patient, an identity that was defined by the patient (i.e. a “Caucasian” patient would have a “Caucasian nose.”)

5 Cosmetic surgeons also observe that patients of some African ancestry are more likely to form keloid scars, which they believe they have to take into account in order to benefit patients (since such scars can “ruin” cosmetic surgeries) (Edmonds 2010).

6 Surgeons’ and customers’ voices in this section were collected during Leem’s fieldwork at a plastic surgery clinic, Seoul, Korea between 2008 and 2010. Details about the field-site and fieldwork have been provided elsewhere (Leem 2016a).

7 The aim of Westernizing the Korean body also reflected a new racial vision of the Korean body as being anthropometrically distinct—and superior—to the Japanese body (Holliday and Elfving-Hwang 2012, 69).

8 One of Seoul’s twenty-five districts, Gangnam has a high density of plastic surgery clinics and also symbolizes South Korea’s fashionable and modern lifestyle (Leem 2017).

9 They identify the race of person by social ascription in this research.

10 Plemons (2017) also makes this point in relation to facial feminization surgery performed on Asian trans- women in North America

11 See Etcoff 2000 for a review of this emerging field.