The Photograph as Reminder, Evidence, and Promise

THE PHOTOGRAPH AS REMINDER, EVIDENCE, AND PROMISE

“Without the camera, there could be no cosmetic surgery,”¹ Virginia Blum boldly declares. Photography’s hold on identity and appearance is evanescent as well as transformative, and photographs are valuable objects for surface imagination practices and technologies like cosmetic surgery. The photograph is the idealized surface of the cosmetic surgery industry, assuming many functions that principally work to distance the patient from the body part to be transformed. It mobilizes the fantasy of a changeable body by providing evidence that change has occurred. It is an object of visual culture that is ultimately other to the self, and the desire to appear attractive in photographs is a result of this otherness. Not only does the photograph serve as a docket of what happened; it offers inspiration for cosmetic surgery through manipulation of its surface and through the multitude of images from which we have to choose when selecting the perfect body part for ourselves. The flattering photograph in particular can be thought of as an idealized skin that presents our body as intact or whole (because it is beautiful), and adequately protected from the exterior world (because it is beautiful).

I had not thought much about the significance of the photograph when I embarked on this project. Indeed, while I planned to outline the function and importance of the before and after photograph within the culture of cosmetic surgery, I did not anticipate that photography would haunt my research in the way that it has. However, this is precisely what the photograph does. A peculiar object, the photograph alienates us from others through its failure to represent a place, time, or person. Many of us are familiar with the experience of showing photographs to another person only to have them flip by the most important one (to us), or we make a disappointed remark such as, “This one really doesn’t capture the vastness of this mountain, the way looking at it made me hold my breath.” We speak about photography in terms of abduction and killing, as we capture the moment and shoot the picture, apt verbs that point out the deadness inherent within the frozen image. However, the photograph is more akin to the living dead because sometimes there is something within that arrests our gaze and revisits us after the fact. Through the objectification of a moment in time, and as an object in itself, the photograph leads a strange doubled existence. It establishes distance.

A photograph of one’s self leads an especially strange life. As I write, I think about a photograph of myself that is in a box on my desk. I am about six or seven years old, wearing a pink, short-sleeved dress with small white flowers, white socks, and red shoes covered with dried mud. My hair is blonde; while I have no recollection of the moment frozen in this photograph, I do recall giving myself a mullet-style cut one evening after returning from the hairdresser’s house down the road. My mom had been so pleased that all my hair had reached one length. The sun is on my back, and the front of my body and side of my face are in shadows. Riding a tire swing that runs diagonally and parallel to a large tree branch, I flash a gap-toothed smile at the camera. The bare deciduous trees and muddy corn fields indicate that the photo was likely taken in the spring, and the rural highway runs just below the slanted horizon. I do not remember what it felt like to ride that tire swing, though it looks like fun and I do not appear to be frightened.

This photograph cuts into me. How did I become the adult I am now from this child?2 I could tell a story about my archaic proclivity toward having fun, the deep split between wanting to please my parents (the wide smile, the tangible pleasure of posing for them) and defy them (the muddy shoes, cutting my finally evened-out hair), or even a narrative that borrows from the fable of the country mouse and the city mouse. I could perform a scholarly analysis of the gendered, raced, and classed locations of this photograph. None of these would answer my question sufficiently because these stories cannot approach the strangeness of our forever-becoming and the terror that over time, the body will do as it pleases in a way that is not at all like the way we can change the details of a photograph.

Cosmetic surgery requires that the patient do just this: take the photograph and examine its minutiae, wonder how the body has changed or why it is the way it is. Steven Connor connects the glossiness of the photographic surface with an idealized skin, an idealization that cosmetic surgery capitalizes on. He argues that the glossy finish remains popular because it invites the touch.3 The shiny and smooth surface feels good beneath the caress of our fingertips, and we handle glossy photographs with great care. The glossy photograph possesses a “more than human perfection”⁴ of a skin, which, according to Connor, occasions both the loving touch and the impulse to tear or cut the photograph in anger or grief. Like our skins, the photograph is vulnerable to time and bears its marks. Connor develops a more hopeful existence of the photographic image than I would. He argues that the image does not necessarily establish distance between its subject and ourselves, but rather that the loving touch we desire to place upon the photographic surface suggests “contiguity between looking and grasping.”⁵ While I agree that there is a tactile link between the photograph and the skin, I maintain that the distancing effects of the photograph remain paramount, and that this objectifying distance is necessary for cosmetic surgery’s existence.

A few participants referred to a particular photograph, or set of photographs, as they illuminated their stories of cosmetic surgery. However, more commonly, the interviewees discussed their bodies photographically, or to put it more simply, they used visual language that referenced the photograph’s promise of transformation. These photographic descriptions surprised me since my interview questions were not written to elicit such commentary. This objective and objectifying language was in sharp contrast to the many emotions the interviewees expressed. While the language of emotions and interiority is a significant and legitimate way to explain one’s decision to have cosmetic surgery, my interviews demonstrated that the purportedly objective photographic image is also an important support to cosmetic surgery narratives.

This chapter explores the photograph as the objective and idealized surface of cosmetic surgery. Photography is a medium that connects and distances us from others (and we can say this of the visual realm more generally). However, it also makes our own self an other that we can scrutinize at close range. The photograph is an idealized skin, with its glossy or matte surface, and a metaphorical space that can contain our bodies in a way that we can only dream our skins will.

I divide my consideration of photography and the realm of visual culture into two interrelated themes that emerged from the interview narratives. The first section concerns photography and visual language. I explore the objectification of the body in cosmetic surgery through this discourse, and how this objectification facilitates one’s engagement with surgery. In particular, I focus on light as a social phenomenon; discourses of proportion and symmetry; and the split between looking and being looked at as conceptualized through the focal point. I have titled the second section “Snapshots,” which refers to the use of actual photographs in narrating cosmetic surgery. In this section, I am concerned with the actual photographs that the interviewees discussed during our conversations. In both sections, I am interested in how the photograph contributes to one’s sense of what I am calling an “embodied history” through the concept of surface imagination. What does the photograph accomplish in surgical stories? How does the photograph help the patient fragment and objectify the body in preparation for surgery? When we examine relations of looking in narratives of cosmetic surgery, how might we conceptualize cosmetic surgery in imagistic ways?

The photographic surface operates as an ideal that the patient identifies with, and through this identification the patient self-objectifies and negates the embodied suffering caused by cosmetic surgery in order to more closely identify with the disembodied ideal photograph. The use of the photograph in cosmetic surgery – employing photographic language, in addition to the photograph itself – is an effect or technique of surface imaginations.6

Photographic Objectification and Visual Language

When I listened to the interviewees’ narratives of cosmetic surgery, I was struck by how the descriptions of their bodies travelled back and forth between establishing a distance from their bodies through the objectivity of photographic language, and drawing closer through referring to their emotional histories of embodiment. The interviewees conceptualized their bodies primarily using the sense of vision, because vision is critical in considering cosmetic surgery as an option to deal with bodily dissatisfaction. Using visual language borrowed from sources as diverse as art history and women’s magazines, they distanced themselves from their bodies. This distancing enabled them to consider a physically painful procedure to correct something they perceived as a visible flaw. Considering cosmetic surgery as a route to address grievances with one’s body requires the patient to remember, reconstruct, and forget her embodied history. The body’s history holds former embodiments that offer proof that the surgeon has done his work to transform the body’s surface. Bodies also hold intergenerational histories, including violence and trauma. And yet the patient also has to forget previous bodily traumas and pain in order to agree to have surgery voluntarily and without an authorized medical reason.

The interviewees established this objective distance through objectifying their own bodies using discourse borrowed from the study of art and aesthetics. They employed visual language to understand the benefits of their surgeries in a variety of ways. They described their bodies through relations of looking, which encompassed looking at other bodies, being looked at, and looking at one’s self, in addition to applying the aesthetic principles of lighting, proportion, and symmetry to their analyses of their bodies. This visual language smoothed the way for the interviewees’ discussions of their body images. In a culture that is paradoxically obsessed with the idealized photographic image (in magazines, for example) and, at the same time, with the detrimental effects of the idealized photograph on body image, talking about the body image in relation to one’s cosmetic surgery is practically a requirement for these narratives. In the following chapter, I elaborate on how the skin contributes to one’s sense of body image, and I note here that my definition of body image fits more closely with the work of psychoanalyst Paul Schilder. This is because Schilder takes body image more seriously from the perspective of the individual experience than does a feminist analysis of body image, which holds that the individual experience is mistaken or the result of false consciousness.7 However, the interviewees frequently discussed body image through a feminist-informed lens, and so they undermined their own body images as unimportant because they were not “real.” These connected themes demonstrate that, for many of the interviewees, the photograph is a critical surface imagination support in establishing a body image.

Light

Presence or absence of light enables or hinders our ability to look. Light is an elusive and essential quality in art, used to emphasize and conceal features in the subject of an artwork in techniques like chiaroscuro, and even as a medium in light art. The quality of a light can make a setting appear stark and cold (fluorescent lighting in a hardware store, for example) or warm and soft (the light of the setting sun). A light can either cast shadows on the body that obscure features we want to hide, or it can emphasize these features to make them more grotesque than in our worst nightmares.

One of the questions I asked interviewees was, “What memories and emotions do you associate with this part of the body?” Most discussed particular incidents that brought to mind the shame, discomfort, or sadness they felt about those parts of their bodies, but Tigerlily’s response was different. I distributed the interview questions by email prior to the interviews so that the interviewees would know in advance what I was interested in discussing, and in order to encourage a more thoughtful response. Tigerlily indicated prior to our meeting that she did not understand this question and did not think she had anything to contribute regarding the subject. I offered some clarification through my emails, reminded her that she could choose to answer or not answer any question, and at the time of our interview, I asked the question to see if she had thought of anything since she had last emailed me. She began her response in a tentative way, as though searching for some memory of her face that she could share with me, and that would be useful for my project. Then she told me that she lives in three homes throughout the year, depending on the season. She explained that the light in each home is quite different, and that she prefers the light in her home in the Caribbean because “it’s just the way the window is in relation to the sun and maybe the colouring in the room,” which make her “feel good in the morning.” She continued, “Your own reflection works back into how you feel about yourself, and how you present yourself to the world … but it’s strange when you think of the lighting factor. And I’m talking more about daylight, the addition of artificial light doesn’t seem to make that much difference, it’s the, like, when you look in the morning, in the light, in the early afternoon.” Tigerlily evocatively conveys the importance of light to how she perceives her face, and describes what kinds of light make her feel good (the ideal light in the Caribbean) and bad (the unflattering light in Canada). Artificial light does not matter to Tigerlily’s perception of how she looks; it is rather the natural sunlight that affects her mood. And so it is not surprising that Tigerlily was in one of her Canadian homes when she decided to have a face and eye lift. Tigerlily’s narrative presumes that cosmetic surgery enables her to feel the same way about her face in Canada as she does in the Caribbean.

Tonya also references light during our interview discussion. For Tonya, though, the abundance or lack of light connotes exposure and concealment. Since she was embarrassed about her large breasts, Tonya said that she never went topless in front of other people until her appointment with her surgeon. At her consultation appointment, it was “very odd … to have someone so casually manhandling you … with the lights on” “when [your breasts are] such a heavy source of shame.” When I asked her how her relationship with her body changed after her surgery, Tonya replied that she felt “way more comfortable to have sex with, like, with lights[, a]s opposed to in pitch black.” In contrast to Tigerlily, who viewed light as having a flattering or unflattering effect on the overall appearance of her face, for Tonya the darkness operated as a secure cloak, and the light left her feeling uncomfortably exposed.

While these stories diverge, both demonstrate what Mikkel Billie and Tim Flohr Sørenson call the sociality of light. While a more conventional analysis of light might focus on its materiality, or light as a metaphor for moral superiority, the sociality of light suggests that light exists as a part of social life that is culturally specific.8 Thus, light is not only shed on our environments but creates them; reflects our identities, cultural backgrounds, and morality; and can expose or conceal features of our social life. Tigerlily’s narrative expresses the emotional qualities of light that depend on geographical location. In the northern hemisphere, many people cope with a lack of energy and depression due to seasonal affective disorders (SADs), which are primarily the result of the quantity and quality of daylight during the northern winter. I am not suggesting that Tigerlily herself is expressing symptoms of SADs; however, she is conveying an affective quality of light that causes her to regard her face in a critical and negative manner. Tonya, on the other hand, discusses light in terms of revealing and disguising, and tries to avoid the intimate glare of the light. Tonya’s refusal to allow fully lit access to her body might be considered a response resulting from the dominant visual culture’s strategies of illuminating the idealized body to highlight its beauty and camouflaging the de-idealized body to hide its defects. This is a social relation of light that is culturally specific to surface imagination-oriented cultures. For example, in a cultural context that privileged touch, Tonya might be more inclined to deny physical, rather than visual contact with her breasts; in such a context she might not experience any discomfort about the size of her breasts. In a visually dominated surface imagination culture, however, the impressions that can be obtained from the surface are taken to be representative of the self.

Proportion and Symmetry

Another lesson from art history present in the interviews is the importance of proportion and symmetry. The demand for balance in the discourse of aesthetics has been a critical support for many surgical procedures for as long as modern cosmetic surgery has existed. A commonly held belief is that humans evolutionarily prefer symmetry of the face and body and proportionate bodies (leading to the view that, for example, a 0.7 waist to hip ratio is a universal ideal for women’s bodies). The appeal to proportion and symmetry fuses together the surgeon-artist and surgeon-scientist, since it weds beauty and measurement.

I asked Leah to describe her reasons for seeking out cosmetic surgery on her breasts, and she gave me a very detailed account based on her body’s disproportion.

THEY Never Really Did Anything for Me (Leah, breast reduction and lift)

I’m looking in the mirror.

Body image-wise I was never really thrilled, everything started really big on top.

Then you get to my stomach,

Small legs,

Like an upside-down pear.

The way my body was proportioned,

THEY

just never really did anything for me.

Like I was noticeably bigger on top,

I was never really thrilled,

and it was something I was self-conscious about when I was younger.

The way my body was proportioned, I was never really thrilled.

Leah’s account of her body’s proportions explains her decision to seek surgery in the terms that the surgeon might also employ to justify it, whether as a surgeon-artist or a surgeon-scientist. This is particularly so in Leah’s case, where the doctor would have had to justify the surgery to a provincial health insurance board in order to obtain coverage. Through recourse to a scientifically articulated aesthetics based on a combination of classical aesthetics and sociobiology, Leah’s body is shown to be out of proportion. However, this is only half of the account Leah gives of her proportions. The other half borrows from women’s magazines, which suggest that all faces and bodies can be categorized as one type or another, and that knowledge of your type can help you select the correct cosmetics, hairstyle, and clothing. Women’s faces are divided into shapes (oval, square, rectangle, circle, heart, triangle), and bodies are divided into fruits (apple, pear, banana). Leah’s description of her body as shaped like “an upside-down pear” demonstrates probable knowledge of these systems of classification, and she alternates this framework with a medical aesthetics.

Diana, who had just four pounds of fat removed from her body, explained to me that one of her reasons for wanting liposuction was that the fat was not equally distributed. When describing her first appointment with her surgeon, she said,

[The surgeon’s nurse] looked at my stomach and my love handles, and this is out of order but um, I was also really asymmetrical, like there was a lot more fat on the one side of the love handles than the other and that also bothered me. But she looked at that, and there was … definitely was enough fat there and she said, you know, like we can take care of that, we can take it right down basically to like where you want it to be. And then I asked her about my thighs and she looked at my thighs and she said, we wouldn’t do them, because there’s, like there’s not, there’s not really a problem and there’s a chance that they would end up lumpy so we wouldn’t like, do that.

For Diana, this confirmation of her asymmetry is especially important. Diana is recovering from an eating disorder, and she presented herself to me as someone who was hyper-aware of the possibility for an unrealistic assessment of her body. Throughout the interview she oscillated between presenting her interest in her love handles and abdomen as (in her words) “neurotic” and as justified. She acknowledged that while she might not have the most objective outlook on her body, she nevertheless wanted liposuction and felt that it would alleviate some of the negative feelings she had about her body. Symmetry is a device that connects Diana’s assessment of her body with another person’s (the surgeon’s nurse) and justifies some of Diana’s concerns about her fat distribution as neutral observations. While the nurse and surgeon informed Diana that she would not turn out “perfect” (by which they meant perfectly symmetrical), Diana’s surgery promised to at least make her more symmetrical. Here symmetry is an objective qualifier. In contrast, when Diana told the surgeon’s nurse that she wanted to have liposuction on her thighs, the nurse responded that because there was nothing wrong with her thighs it would be impossible to obtain surgery on them. It is interesting that Diana presented this event as a test and affirmation of the quality of the surgeon and her screening process, even though Diana was genuinely asking for liposuction for her thighs. In this way, Diana’s decision to have liposuction on her back was corroborated by the surgeon’s nurse through the standard of symmetry, and surgery on her thighs was dismissed as unnecessary – a “neurotic” worry, as Diana characterizes it.

Looking and Being Looked At

The criteria discussed above possess conspicuous neutrality because of their references to aesthetic categories such as light, proportion, and symmetry. While these experiences of looking at the body happen in relation to the world, the interviewees also individually assess them. In contrast, the interviewees also talked about their visual experiences of their bodies by directly addressing the complicated pact between looking and being looked at. While the former assume an implicit looker, the latter focus more directly on the conditions of being looked at.

John Berger reflects on looking and being looked at in his classic book Ways of Seeing (1972), a discussion of the representation of women throughout art history. Berger’s critique focuses on the subjective elements of looking (at art), and he argues that the contemporary visible world is centred on the looker. The present model of perspective in the history of Western painting positions the viewer as the omnipotent centre of the visible world. The effect of this model is that vision is conceptualized as non-reciprocal.9 Berger argues – on the basis of a curious confluence of psychoanalytic and Foucauldian theory that has been rehearsed countless times by other theorists since – that in the Western world, to be a woman means to be an image. Women must watch themselves (becoming the surveyed), and are “continually accompanied by an image of [themselves].”¹⁰ Women’s interior surveyors are gendered as masculine and women turn themselves into objects (specifically objects of vision). Forty years later, it is considered more productive to think of modes of vision as occupying masculine and feminine positions of power (rather than biologically determined roles); however, Berger’s argument is significantly more complicated than the common understanding of objectification, circulating in popular media, as something that happens unilaterally to women by men. Further, it anticipates the prevalence of surface imaginings of the body through photography found in contemporary North American cultures.

Leah said that when she looked at her body immediately following surgery, she noticed that her breasts were no longer the “focal point.” Prior to her breast reduction, Leah thought of her breasts as the first thing that others’ eyes were drawn to. In particular, Leah was concerned about other people staring at her stretch marks. Thus, Leah described her breasts in exactly the same way that the focal point in art is defined: as a point where lines of sight converge or diverge, in the same way that our eyes are drawn to the vanishing point in perspectival painting. What Leah appreciated about her body after the surgery was that it was made visually whole since there was no longer a particular point (stretch marks or breasts) that others stared at before looking at the rest of her body. Leah presented the narrative of her breasts before surgery in terms of how she appeared to others. Interestingly, she also said that after surgery she did not want others to notice that her breasts were smaller, suggesting that Leah wanted her breasts to blend in with the rest of her body so that she no longer had to deal with the attention of others upon her breasts.

Tonya and Melinda, the other interviewees who had breast surgeries, shared similar stories about breasts as a focal point of looking. Tonya stated that she hoped her breast reduction surgery would take away the attention she received because of her breasts:

You know, and I knew exactly how much space I sort of took up because of my boobs, and I didn’t like it, like I just wanted to be more, fly on the wall, more anonymous, less noticed and all that kind of stuff, because you get noticed when you have big, like big boobs like people check you out and whatever … Even though, it was oftentimes in a positive way I still felt like, you know, pain.

Her breasts prohibited her from occupying public space in an unexceptional way, and the attention she received, while often positive, was not welcomed because it was based on a non-reciprocal look. Melinda wanted her breasts augmented because she appreciated the way they looked when she was nursing and pregnant; however, she had concerns about breast augmentation:

And I actually got them done but they’re just like, similar to when I was nursing, small, and natural, they’re similar, I didn’t want it to look you know, huge or unnatural but I just, you know, it’s not like I wanted everybody to be looking at me, like looking at my boobs or anything, it was more of a private thing for me.

While Melinda did not complain about having breasts that are noticed because of their size, she emphasized that wanting more attention was not one of the reasons she sought breast augmentation.

Leah, Tonya, and Melinda each resisted being looked at in a sexualized manner that fetishized their breasts into fragmentary pieces of their bodies. Their motivations for breast surgeries focused on considering their bodies as an entirety through making the breasts disappear in one way or another. While Tonya and Melinda both described experiencing great pleasure through their breasts, they wanted that pleasure to be private and not exhibitionistic (Leah, on the other hand, did not describe pleasure originating from her breasts at all). Here, looking at the breasts is an amalgamation of a mode of looking that privileges the seer (who possesses the power to determine what is looked at) and the logic of the photograph (which fragments the body as a scene that can be broken into its component pieces and restructured). The problems that Tonya and Leah experienced because of their large breasts, and the problem that Melinda anticipated, originated not in their own perceptions of their bodies, but in how others perceived their bodies. They did not challenge what they saw when they looked at their own bodies, or what they thought others were looking at when regarding their bodies. The visual apprehension of their breasts was considered inevitable, even if unjust.

Diana’s narrative, on the contrary, presented her internalized look as significantly less objective than Leah, Tonya, and Melinda’s narratives, and she stated that the way she looks at her body is not the same as the way others perceive her body. She presented her concerns about the fat she had removed as “obsessions,” suggesting an irrational fixation, and relied on the objective gaze of the nurse to determine what parts of her body did or did not require liposuction. Diana also stated that she keeps a very different standard for her own body than she does for others. While she associated the fat that was removed with not being fit, she also said that she does not have “associations of … laziness with … overweightness” (as a common stereotype), and that she would “absolutely never look at someone who’s overweight and think they, they should feel that way.” Diana was very knowledgeable about the discourse of eating disorder recovery, and as a result treated her own evaluation of her body as suspect. She talked about her body in a way that emphasized the subjective characteristics of looking and the impossibility of seeing one’s own body as others see it. Diana privileged her own perception of her body in spite of its subjectivity, and was more concerned with addressing her “obsessions” than accepting the perceptions of others as valid.

After she had liposuction, Diana was unable to look at her body.

I was like really nervous to look at my own body when I first woke up like, the nurse came in and [she] had to like [change] bandages or whatever and she changed them and like, and I was kind of looking at the nurse and she, she told me that I could look, and I was like, this is weird, like I felt like I needed permission to look at my own body, actually I was just really nervous about it.

This nervousness stood in contrast to Diana’s concern prior to her surgery with how the liposuction would look (rather than being concerned with the possibility for adverse side effects, for example), and instead had to do with her body image. She continues:

I think … for me the most interesting thing about it was … if … psychoanalysts say that … your image of your body is, like your ego is largely an image of your body, and then, so I knew there was going to be, like I kind of, I just kind of didn’t look really closely, and that night, that night I was supposed to, you go home, and I was supposed to change the bandage and I did, but I didn’t kind of do it in front of a mirror, like I kind of still was really nervous about looking at it, and then, it got swollen and I was still really nervous about looking at it, and I would, I would kind of like, you wear this, this thing that um, like it’s kind of a stiff thing that, holds everything in place, I guess … and so, I kind of didn’t really like to take that off, I kind of just wanted it all to heal before I looked at it. And I think that, like, if you have an image of, like if you’ve had an image of your body, and I kind of had an absence of an image of my body because I didn’t, because I was nervous to look at it, and also, it was going to get, it was getting swollen soon after, so I didn’t really know what it would look like. So I had this absence of an image of my body … which I found really strange [my emphasis].

In this lengthy passage, Diana is working through several concerns that originate from her firm adherence to her particular conceptualization of her body, which is a purely surface imagination understanding. After the surgery she was worried about what the changes in her body would turn out to be, and also what they would mean. While all participants shared similar concerns in terms of what their changed body meant to them, Diana was especially concerned because she had not previously established an objective foundation upon which to base her judgment. This is not to say that Diana does not also resort to professional justification of her complaint; it is clear from this excerpt that Diana explains her subjectivity through her understanding of the psychoanalytic concept of the bodily ego. To have an absence of an image of her body is strange to Diana, but we can imagine that it would also signal a time of respite. Due to the insistence on her subjective evaluation of her own body, Diana attempts to manage the unpredictability of the surgical outcome by resisting the formation of a new visual incarceration until the traumatic healing process has finished. Immediately following her recovery period, Diana was quite pleased with her outcome; however, even though we spoke less than three months after her surgery, she was already beginning to feel dissatisfied with her body again. These “body image issues,” as Diana classifies them, can be thought of as a constellation of images of her body that Diana carries and that are related to the way that she visually perceives her body. Diana’s story in particular captures the difficulties of negotiating identity through images and the infinite demands expressed in images.

Since Diana didn’t want to look at her body after her surgery, her story might be characterized as not looking enough at the body because of the intense intimacy between her body and mind: looking at the body would also be taking a chance that the surgery had not had its desired effect. Contrarily, Tonya’s story could be thought of as too much looking that led to a depersonalization of her body. A key concept in this interview is Tonya’s non-ownership of her breasts, which is linked specifically to the appearance of her breasts and the practice of looking. She introduced this concept when she described going to the “boob specialist” who demonstrated the breast reduction procedure by “folding them under” and manipulating them “like they weren’t [hers].” She thought that it was very “odd” for the surgeon to be looking at her breasts because they were “a heavy source of shame,” and this shame was evoked when the surgeon looked at her breasts in full light. The doctor took front and side photographs to send to a provincial review panel (a “faceless panel of doctors” who are nonetheless quite capable of looking) that would determine whether Tonya was eligible for provincial health insurance coverage (proving that the reasons were medical, not aesthetic), another factor contributing to Tonya’s feelings of not possessing her breasts. These feelings of estrangement from her breasts appear as a defence against the highly invasive nature of the consultation and subsequent surgery.

After the surgery, Tonya’s feelings of non-ownership were particularly pronounced. She said that her surgical breasts were “not in any way [hers].” She compared her situation to that of an amputee in a novel and what she erroneously calls “false memory syndrome.”11 Tonya compared the itch of a ghost limb (amputated leg) with her chest: she said, “[I] felt like they had removed my entire chest and put on someone else’s breasts.” She imagined that if someone had attached a new arm, she would feel like that arm was not her own arm and would not really care about the fate of the new arm. Tonya described this strange phenomenon as “kind of amazing,” and she correlated this feeling to her breasts. All of her anxiety and shame focused on her breasts vanished, since she did not experience her breasts as belonging to her. Even though she felt like her breasts were “scarred,” “disgusting,” and “ugly,” and she had to do things she found difficult, like being topless with her mother as she applied crème to the scars, she felt fine because she did not perceive her breasts as her own. This feeling remained for a long time, making the possibility of brushing her breasts up against someone else no longer a worry because they felt like “phantom breast[s].”

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