‘What can I do next?’: Cosmetic Surgery, Femininities and Affect

Abstract

This article is based on a study of young people's understandings and experiences of body work (or body modification) in relation to gender and health. Drawing on feminist and Deleuzian–Spinozan approaches to the body, the article explores the embodied sensations, or affects, associated with the body's physical modification through cosmetic surgery as one practice of body work. This approach pursues a non-dualist analysis of the body and contributes to new understandings of body-modification practices such as cosmetic surgery as processes influenced, and informed, by affect. Through examples of differing experiences and trajectories relating to the practice of cosmetic surgery, which has long been a contentious issue in feminism, the article makes evident what a feminist Deleuzian approach means in practice and what it can contribute to analyses of the body in/and society. This approach can assist in exploring the complex ways in which gendered embodiments assemble, and in understanding the dynamics and processes informing differing bodily possibilities related to gender.

Keywords:

• cosmetic surgery
• femininities
• body
• gender
• Deleuze
• feminism
• affect

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹Deleuze's theorization of affect and bodies is largely based on the work of Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza proposed the body as a ‘philosophical model’ through which to understand existence: ‘We speak of consciousness and its decrees, of the will and its effects, of the thousand ways of moving a body, of dominating the body and the passions—but we do not even know what a body can do’ (Spinoza, cited in Deleuze 1998: 17; original emphasis). Affect ‘involves an increase or decrease in the power of acting’ for both body and mind, and implies a process of change ‘from one state to another’ as the body is affected by other bodies (Deleuze 1998: 49).