Conclusion

CONCLUSION

A culture that counts cosmetic surgeries within its scope of legitimate medical procedures is a culture in which the landscapes¹ of all of our bodies are fundamentally altered. In this milieu, bodies come to be seen as mutable and plastic raw material, to be shaped by our own fantasies, desires, and imaginations. The cosmetic surgery industry markets itself as limitless in its scope and talent, relying on photographic representations to do the work of convincing the viewer that her own skin will mirror the photograph’s surface. This is surface imagination in operation: the dual surfaces studied in this book – the photographic and the dermal – are collapsed into each other to fantasize dramatic personal change through transforming the body’s surface. Whether or not one has the means to access cosmetic surgeries, the pervasiveness of representations and narratives of cosmetic surgery means that we can still imagine transforming our own bodies, as well as the bodies of others. These exterior interventions are conceptualized as interventions into identity, a narrative that is enabled by the primacy of surface imaginations. The body that is open to transformation imagines identity as subject to modification according to current social, economic, and political trends. The transformation of identity is also expected to align with projects that make the self more marketable and appealing to others in the public sphere. The intractability of the body is disavowed and becomes a source of frustration and personal failure. To conclude this deliberation on cosmetic surgery, photography, and skin, I want to think through the implications of surface imagination for contemporary conceptualizations of embodiment.

My concept of surface imagination is connected to Eva Illouz’s concept of emotional capitalism, which also troubles the boundaries between interior/exterior and private/public. Emotional capitalism challenges the assumption that capitalism is fully rational and a-emotional, and instead maintains that “an intensely specialized emotional culture” emerged concurrently with capitalism.2 Illouz argues that emotional styles and techniques of relating to others generated within capitalist discourses came to be employed both in the middle-class nuclear family and in the workplace. These emotional styles and techniques were similar and strongly emphasized the conscious management and discipline of emotions.³ Thus, the private self was self-fashioned through public performance and tethered to understandings of everyday life generated from the public sphere, particularly the realms of economics and politics. This intimate affiliation between the public and the private spheres, bonded together through common emotional techniques and styles, relies on the conceptualization of the self as a project to be worked on in the workplace and the home. Learning techniques of controlling and demonstrating appropriate emotional expression, sometimes in conflict with one’s actual emotional expression – particularly when that expression is conceived of as “negative,” in the cases of anger, frustration, and sadness – is conceived as a marketable skill inside the workplace and the home. Emotional capitalism thus coincides with surface imagination, because in a culture shaped by surface imagination and emotional capitalism, the emphasis is on the self-presentation of emotions to others as an ongoing life project. Contemporary cosmetic surgery, structured by surface imagination fantasies that revolve around the self as capital in the public and the private spheres, can be understood as a corporeal way of managing emotions within an emotional capitalist culture that produces subjects conceived of as marketable products. Within the culture of cosmetic surgery, emotions are negotiated and managed on the surface of the body and through surface representations like photographs.

In its early stages, this book emerged from a persistent concern that feminist research about beauty and femininity consistently failed to speak to the myriad investments women held in feminine beauty practices, including cosmetic surgery. To conflate the ideologies of the beauty and cosmetic surgery industries with the motivations of individual women to participate in beauty and cosmetic surgery practices is to make a dangerous and flawed assumption. This type of analysis leads to narrow and unsubtle understandings of the meaning of cosmetic surgery in women’s lives. The assumption that women who undergo cosmetic surgery are wholly, unproblematically, and uncritically in support of the cosmetic surgery industry trivializes their experiences, as well as an interest in beauty. It is easy to dismiss beauty as politically insignificant, and to portray women who have cosmetic surgery as ridiculous and vain; many will embrace such a critique enthusiastically because of overt or internalized misogyny, whether they identify as feminist or not. Further, this critique misses the opportunity to consider what it might mean for contemporary understandings of embodiment that, in cosmetic surgery cultures structured by surface imagination, emotions are negotiated through the skin and the photograph, rather than through the subject’s interior.

I have been presenting my research on cosmetic surgery at academic conferences since May 2005. Time and again, I am approached by my feminist colleagues with comments that express disgust and disbelief over the existence of cosmetic surgery procedures: for example, “I just don’t understand how someone could do something like that to their body!” This response fascinates me in its blurring together of repulsion and empathy, and its deep-rooted gut origins in an imagining of the painful embodied experiences of the cutting, penetration, and burning of skin, flesh, and bone for an aesthetic result. This response establishes difference and distance between the cosmetic surgery patient and the speaker 4 through rendering the cosmetic surgery patient pathological due to her willingness to bear corporeal suffering for physical beauty. This response, finally, is entrenched in a critique of cosmetic surgery that is wholly social and cannot comprehend what surgery might do for an individual who suffers from her bodily morphology.⁵ This social critique suggests that if we can adequately gain mastery over our minds, we will no longer require surgery because we will be sufficiently enlightened and able to change others to think as “we” do. While I recognize that this is a bit of a caricature of social critiques of femininity, beauty, and cosmetic surgery, at its broadest level of inquiry this book project seeks to challenge this critique using individual narratives of cosmetic surgery and psychoanalytic theory to theorize attachments to beauty and femininity from a feminist perspective.

I agree with Alessandra Lemma that we are deceiving ourselves if we assume that a distance exists between the horrified speaker and the cosmetic surgery patient. Lemma suggests that Botox injections and antiwrinkle creams exist on a continuum, rather than in separate fields.6 What links together these various practices is the seductive quality of these possible responses, a seductive quality connected to the ongoing project of daily body modification (wearing makeup, for example) and episodic body modification (undergoing cosmetic surgery, for example). The development of surface imagination as a concept is a method of showing the connections between the practices that exist along Lemma’s proposed continuum, as well as a response to these types of horrified reactions from feminists. Surface imagination explains the fantasy of self-transformation – a body that can be controlled and manipulated according to one’s desire, with a result that will sink into the skin and lead to long-lasting psychical change as well. This is a highly seductive fantasy in a culture of emotional capitalism. Being able to comprehend and distinguish surface imagination fantasies and seductions can, as Lemma says, contribute to “know[ing] something about our own experience of being-in-a-body and of being, inevitably, the object of the other’s gaze.”⁷ I would go further, however, to say that these recognitions and understandings are not just individual projects, but a project of understanding and recognizing our society and culture.

As I argued in the introduction to this book, surface imagination is a concept well suited to analyse cosmetic surgery and other body modification practices, yet it goes beyond these because the idea that we create identity through transforming surfaces in our lives can be applied to many different cultural phenomena. My hope is that theorizing surface imaginations can allow researchers and other observers and critics of contemporary cultures to remain deeply critical of cosmetic surgery as an industry yet sympathetic with and connected to the patients’ experiences of cosmetic surgery. I maintain that ethically, we must take cosmetic surgery patients seriously when they claim that transforming their body’s surface has had a profound impact on their identities and lives.

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