Anthony Elliott - Making the Cut: How Cosmetic Surgery is Transforming Our Lives

Anthony Elliott

reaktion books

For Charles Lemert

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd

33 Great Sutton Street London ec1v 0dx, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published 2008

Copyright Anthony Elliott 2008

All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cromwell Press, Trowbridge, Wiltshire

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Elliott, Anthony Making the cut : how cosmetic surgery is transforming our lives

1. Surgery, Plastic - Social aspects

I. Title

306.4'613

isbn-13: 978 1 86189 371 0

In the new economy nothing is more sexy than surgery. From Botox and lipo to tummy tucks and mini-facelifts, the number of cosmetic surgery operations undertaken around the globe has soared recently, as consumers spend more and more on themselves in the search for sex appeal and artificial beauty. In a society in which celebrity is divine, information technology rules, new ways of work ing predominate and people increasingly judge each other on first impressions, cosmetic enhancements of the body have become all the rage.

Increasingly, cosmetic surgical culture goes all the way down in our society. One recent European survey found that most women now expect to have cosmetic surgery at some point in their lifetime. Another survey, this time American, discerned that more than half of businessmen would undergo the surgeons knife in order to advance their professional careers. Makeover culture for the rest of us, it seems, is now just part and parcel of daily life. Cosmetic surgery is simply another lifestyle choice, alongside fashion, fitness and therapy.

In Making the Cut, I want to examine how society goes about the making and remaking of cosmetic surgical culture. In chapter One I begin by analysing the dynamics of cosmetic surgical culture in relation to society, culture, economics and politics. A life lived in the shadow of the pursuit of lipo, I argue, is one deeply conditioned by three crucial forces and each is as cultural as it is structural. The first concerns celebrity: the impact of changing notions of fame is more and more central to peoples decisions to undertake cosmetic procedures and surgical alterations of the body. From the endless media scrutinizing of celebrity bodies such as Paris Hilton, Angelina Jolie and Nicole Kidman to the mesmerizing cultural influence of reality tv programmes such as Extreme Makeover and The Swan, increasing numbers are following the cult of celebrity straight to the operating theatre. This development is the outcome of a complex set of transformations from fame to celebrity, and its conditions and consequences are examined in chapter Two.

The second factor driving cosmetic surgical culture is consumerism. Buying beauty changing ones looks, personal makeover, body enhancements is now a central part of life in the expensive cites of the West, primarily undertaken by women but also increasingly by men. From age-reversing skin creams and cosmetic dentistry to Botox and breast augmentation, the marketing and packaging of artificially enhanced beauty are now fundamental to the selling of the successful life. In this respect, an acquisitive individualism concerned with the buying of more and more goods has been intensified. Today savvy consumers are not only focused on the purchase of select goods or services, but they also compulsively purchase the improvement of the self through the buying of enhanced body parts. In this sense, todays consuming identities of cosmetic surgical culture have taken on an addictive cast. The combined weight of the consumer industry and rampant consumerism has shaped cosmetic surgical culture to its roots. Chapter Three explores some of the ways in which the development of consumerism and the consumer industries has affected peoples conceptions of their bodies and identities as experienced in cosmetic surgical culture.

The third factor driving cosmetic surgical culture follows from the others, but is rarely explicitly considered in discussions of the topic. It concerns the new economy heralded by globalization; that is, how the rapid pace of economic change today shapes wider cultural imperatives concerning employment adaptability as well as flexibility of identity. My argument is that the new economy spawned by globalization intrudes traumatically in the emotional lives of people with many scrambling to adjust to todays routine corporate redundancies. Chapter Four focuses on the dramatic changes now occurring in the global electronic economy and on the ways in which corporate lay-offs, downsizings and offshorings are affecting peoples sense of identity, life and work. For the price of jobs potentially downsized or lost as a result of the new economy, as Louis Uchitelle and N. R. Kleinfield comment, is the most acute job insecurity since the Depression. And this in turn has produced an unrelenting angst that is shattering peoples notions of work and self and the very promise of tomorrow. Many have reacted to this sense of social dislocation and economic insecurity

what I term todays pervasive sense of ambient fear by turning to forms of extreme reinvention in general and cosmetic surgical culture in particular. Many are calculating that a freshly purchased face-lift or suctioning of fat through liposuction is the best route to improved lives, careers and relationships.

For the most part, it has been the media that have drawn attention to these transformations in a general way. Newspaper headlines report the rising tide of job insecur ity in the new economy, and of practices of extreme reinvention that individuals are undertaking as a consequence. The Wall Street Journal runs the headline Plastic Surgery Wooing Patients Hoping To Move Up Career Ladder. The New York Times leads with Sometimes, Nips and Tucks Can Be Career Moves. The Boston Globe reports A New Wrinkle in the Rat Race. The magazine Canadian Business notes Knife Guys Finish First. Personnel Today highlights Plastic Surgery Could Be the Key To Rejuvenating a Sagging Career. And an Australian newspaper recently ran the headline $20,000 Face Buys a New Job, with the sub-heading Its Better than Renovating the Kitchen. All these media reports note the broader connections between business and beauty, commerce and the cosmetic. All place an emphasis on artificial beauty and the surgical enhancement of the body as a means of adapting to the pressures of corporate life and the global economy. In each case the analysis is broad, the detail sketchy. By contrast, the aim of this book is to analyse cosmetic surgical culture and its relation to the new economy of advanced globalization rigorously and in detail.

Reference to the new economy has become a stereotype within recent discussions of globalization, and I should at the outset clarify its meaning as used throughout this book. The new economy, as I deploy the term, refers to the emergence of computer-based production technology, especially in the service, finance and communication sectors; the spread of new information technologies that underpin spatially dispersed global production and consumption; and new ways of organizing work, primarily around the imperatives of adaptability and flexibility. All these features of the new economy have spelt rapid change throughout both public and private life, and probably nowhere more so than in peoples fears over self-worth, the splintering of personal identity and the fragmentation of family life. Indeed, it is in the shift from the traditional work contract (long-term job security, orderly promotions, longevity-linked pay and pensions) to the new work deal (short-term contracts, job hopping and options shopping, high risk-taking) that a new kind of fear nests. Fear of future uncertainties work, relationships, life itself is what drives many in contemporary societies, I argue, to make sense of such social dislocation through cosmetic surgical culture. Of course, such reactions to current global transformations are still relatively small in scale; and I do not contend that the new economy represents the whole economy. But the new economy, as Richard Sennett rightly argues, does exert a profound moral and normative force as a cutting-edge standard for how the larger economy should evolve. For this reason alone, there ought to be value in setting out the idea of cosmetic surgery culture in a rather more novel context, one that might loosely be portrayed as both creation and reaction to the global electronic economy.