Tonight’s Four Corners featured the burgeoning practice of cosmetic surgery and highlighted the biz aspects and the contestation within the medical profession over who can do it. [You can watch it streamed online here - if you have really good broadband]. I thought it largely missed its mark – aside from some early and interesting comments from social anthropologist Meredith Jones, there was little discussion of what drives people to surgical makeovers, and for that matter it didn’t highlight the fact that men are increasingly getting into the act. Nor were the real issues about the subsumption of medical expertise by the language and law of competition in the market more than touched on. At least for the first set of issues, that’s not so for the fabbo new book Beauty Junkies by American writer Alex Kuczynski. There’s a great review of the book by Toni Bentley at The New York Times, which describes the final frontier for one such Junkie, Mrs X (among other insights):
Mrs. X also visits two or three plastic surgeons about three times a year to discuss what needs fixing. She has been injected with Gore-Tex, Botox and Artecoll, and is a member of a Restylane frequent-user awards program. (How many miles of Restylane gets you a freebie?) She has had liposuction and breast augmentation â in, out, then in again, but bigger â and has âdoneâ? her eyes and brows. âShe is,â? Kuczynski notes, âamong her peer group, considered the norm.â?
Last year, Mrs. X crossed the final frontier with labiaplasty â getting that whole mess down there cleaned up, tightened up and, as it were, re-virginized.
Genital cosmetic surgery is, according to Kuzcynski, one of the most rapidly growing âareas in the field.â? Finally, the doctors have located the original sin and defanged the vagina dentata. This creation of an alternate surface through surgery â the Jungian shadow side taking a walk on the outside â raises interesting spiritual questions. At the pearly gates â and many Americans claim to believe in heaven â will St. Peter turn a blind eye to your body and see your soul? Or will he fail to recognize your reconstructed self and direct you to the unknown-persons department for all eternity?
A number of issues are raised by cosmetic surgery compulsion and addiction.
First, there’s the investments associated with beauty – are these somehow related to postmodern insecurities surrounding choice of intimate partners and/or success at work?
Secondly, there’s the body as an object of consumption.
Thirdly, there are the gender/ed issues. What norms are being rewritten on bodies?
Fourthly, there’s the medicalisation of a “solution” to a body that departs from the beauty norm being rendered an individual and social problem.
Then there are the ethical issues around choice over one’s body.
And that’s just the start. One other random observation I had was to wonder why those like the Catholic prelates and ethicists who are so opposed to human cloning apparently don’t trouble themselves with this attempt by (wo)men to alter what God hath wrought.
There’s lots to discuss. It’s a pity Four Corners didn’t look beyond the almighty dollar and medical screwups (important as both issues are – and as I emphasised, neither got an in depth exploration).
Thanks for taking this one up, Kim.
I only caught the second half of the broadcast, but I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. It was a shame that this was limited to only the ‘buyer beware’ side of cosmetic surgery – namely because, as Meredith Jones pointed out, most women who take elect to have their breasts augmented have done copious research anyway.
In essence, I thought this was a classic Jonathan Harley piece: gets to the nub of interesting political/scientific/governmental/commercial disputes through a good balance of interviews with a view to enhancing the public sphere etc. etc. And Ms. Jones’ interview is definitely worth a look.
“Defanging the vagina dentata”
What a great phrase. That’s certainly something to chew on early in the morning.
Will Saint Peter turn a blind eye to your bodily imperfections? C’mon, that’s not why people have cosmetic surgery. When Anubis leads you down to the underworld for the soul weigh-in (my preferred human mythological interpretation of the afterlife) it’s not going to matter whether you look like Sean Connery or John Gorton.
People have cosmetic surgery because they want to. If they can, why not?
The patient said, “I feel fantastic!
Cranio-facially, I’m mostly plastic,
My boobs (I’m ecstatic)
So bouncily pneumatic;
My hymen is robustly elastic.
meredith is from the CCR, ie cultural studies, i thought it was odd the way she was introduced.
Given that there’s plenty of evidence in the public sphere that cosmetic surgery often doesn’t actually improve beauty (at least not in line with western norms), arguably it’s actually an expression of some kind of yearning for a state of post-humanism. cf: http://www.jetpress.org/volume13/miah.html
I think the issues you’ve raised are the more interesting ones, Kim, but it was a practitioner- and profession-centred story, rather than a consumer-centred story.
Cosmetic surgery is unusual in that patients identify the need for intervention, not practitioners, so the role of the practitioners is more relevant/interesting than in some other types of medical practice. I also agree with my old boss Merrilyn Walton, that the proliferation of invasive procedures being carried out under sedation in unregulated doctors’ “rooms” is a big concern.
In respect of the comment made by Meredith Jones/dk.au – I think we need to be careful of relying on the “copious research” done by prospective patients, given that their research is likely to be conducted on the websites and magazines the practitioners pay for and advertise in, and also given the convoluted structures and fancily named organisations which plague cosmetic surgery.
Zoe has latched on to the same issues the 4 Corners program highlighted – ones of regulation and risk mandagment. But I agree the cultural questions about why people do this to themselves is more interesting, and the program didn’t focus on that.
Clearly there are addicts for this stuff – people who actually enjoy the pain and/or attention that comes with surgery. Similar to extreme body piercers, actually. The badly mutilated old lady they interviewed might be a good example.
But they are a minority group. The interesting thing is its popularity among people who clearly are already quite physically beautiful and who think their lives will somehow be transformed by just becoming “perfect”.
I took my cue partly from the program intro warning of some disturbing content and departed the room at the first botched op. I listened to the Jonathon Holmes? script and agree with Kim that it would have been more interesting getting beyond professional enrichment and personal vanity Incidently did anyone hear ABC radio national Health Report host Norman Swan ‘mis-speak’ earlier Monday. Got out ‘vulture capitalists’ instead of ‘venture capitalists’ when talking about commercialising local medical discoveries.
Maybe he’d been watching a 4Corners promo. New ABC boss Mike Scott will not be pleased.
To clarify, I’m not dissing it for doing the practitioner/profession focus, just that I think that a focus on the cultural and social aspects would be in many ways more interesting. Perhaps a bit harder to research for the program!
The other thing that could usefully be looked at, and I think Meredith alluded to this, is how cosmetic surgery sits within a bigger “makeover culture”…
I’ve ordered the book from Amazon, Kim. Look forward to reading it.
Kim, it’s my understanding that the Catholic Church strongly condemned body alteration surgery when it emerged (or re-emerged) in the nineteenth century. Pius XII condemned plastic surgery driven by vanity, seduction or criminal intent in 1958. Secular ethicists are the new kids on the block, as usual.
In other Church gets it right news, “Using human embryonic stem cells, researchers have cured a Parkinson’s-like disease in rats. Unfortunately, the Parkinson’s cure causes brain tumors”.
I’m not so certain Pius XII’s teaching on this is widely articulated these days, C.L.
You’re right, Kimmie. Certainly hasn’t led to any kind of sub-corpus of theological scholarship. I say “sub-corpus” because there is ample theology on the body but probably not on this transformative culture in particular. Interestingly, some people say the historical and socio-cultural context of the declaration of the Dogma of the Assumption by Pius XII was the violence that had been done to human bodies during WWII. Pius therefore re-emphasised, as it were, the sacredness and holistic beauty of the body. The disaster of Pacelli’s embalming adds a further, ironic twist.
Hello,
I’m the Meredith Jones who was interviewed on 4Corners. I’m at UTS, not the CCR anymore, and I’m a cultural theorist, not a social anthropologist like they said (not that it really makes much difference, but the social anthropologists might not be happy!)
Sorry to be coming a little late on this – Laura from Sorrow at Sills Bend just let me know this conversation was happening.
I think the discussion around cosmetic surgery and religion is a very interesting one. You could argue that cosmetic surgery has parallels with practices like self-flaggelation… it is an act of self-harm that ties you into a larger community and shows your dedication to that community. For my purposes, that community is called Makeover Culture and is one we all inhabit to some degree.
Some of you might also be interested in Cressida Heyes’ blog at http://thirtysomethingnorth.blogspot.com/ – it has a couple of interesting long posts about cosmetic surgery from a philosophical feminist point of view.
Yes indeed Meredith,
And the fetishisation of stigmata wraps masochism, perfervid embrace of the numinous, and transformational body image into a squishy bundle that oozes body fluids.
I’m guessing you’re taking the piss… but if not, Please Explain?
The connection is indeed interesting and worth exploring, Meredith. I think comparisons of fasting among female saints and the phenomenon of anorexia, for example, have been explored already. The cosmetic surgery of which Galen was familiar – it having existed before him in Egypt and India – was opposed by the Catholic Church of antiquity, thus marginalising such procedures for more than a thousand years. So opposed was the Church to the sixteenth century plastic surgery of Gasparo Tagliacozzi that after he was dead and buried his body was dug up and re-buried in un-consecrated ground.
The theology at work here was one based on the sinfulness of presuming to make new (usually faces – mainly noses) when restoration was thought to be the resurrectional/salvific mission of God par excellence, not man. When modern medicine dealt with the worst ravages of such diseases as tuberculosis and syphilis, that left the question of elective, vanity-related procedures. Pius XII condemned these as immoral. In more recent times, the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992) – under “Respect for bodily integrity” – teaches that “Except when performed for strictly therapeutic medical reasons, directly intended amputations, mutilations, and sterilizations performed on innocent persons are against the moral law” (CCC.2297). Opponents of circumcision cite this for their particular purposes, thus giving another well-known ancient conundrum about religion and bodily transformation new legs (so to speak).
Comment in moderation or did I lose it?
It was in moderation, C.L. Not sure why – possibly naming diseases since so many spam comments offer cures!
Not that the efforts to do so have been very successful to date, C.L., but what about arm transplants for amputees? How does that fit in the schema?
Thanks Mark.
Well, there’s no Church opposition to prosthetics – is that what you meant?
No, C.L.
There have been several actual arm transplants – ie the arm of a dead person grafted onto the stump of an amputee. None have turned out very well, but potentially the science might improve.
It’s an interesting one – because it’s an alteration to the body but one done to benefit the person.
Oh, OK. No, that would have been opposed in the ancient Church – were it possible – because of the older theology. But nowadays limb transplants would be comparable to organ transplants and there would be no theological opposition to that I wouldn’t think. As Kim pointed out, though, this whole area seems to be somewhat moribund in the thinking of modern Christian ethicists.
Yes, and oddly so, you’d imagine that “bio-ethicists” would see it as part of their central concerns.
It should be one of their concerns, Mark. I think it’s an exaggeration to say it should be a “central” concern. Playing God with genes is a bit more important than women having their boobs done. What happened to sisters doing it for themselves? Why the sudden need for Christian guidance? As Zoe might say, if you don’t like facelifts, don’t have one.
Piss is a bodily fluid.
But quite apart from that, what could be more profoundly transformational than messianic memesis?
The stigmatic is associated through his/her wounds simultaneously with both a faith community and with a mythos which is supposed to encompass both origins an end-times.
Stigmatics gather coteries of acolytes who derive gratification through witnessing the manifestations of piercing of flesh.
These acolytes validate the suffering of stigmatics. Their presence imposes expectations upon stigmatics. They must continue to bleed. they must continue to lose bodily integrity in the cause of spiritual wholeness.
A community of blood and suffering develops. The stigmatic is at once star, sacrifice and invalid. Voyeurism, sadism and nurturance are a heady and tension-filled mixture.
Cl what about women who have breast reconstructions after mastectomies? Not important?
What Christian ethicist has said women should or shouldn’t have breast reconstructions after mastectomies?
Didn’t the Catholic Church used to employ castrati?
Is there any Christian writing specifically about cosmetic surgery – ie liposuction, breast implants etc? I know that the Grand Ayatollah Saanei in Iran has informed Shiite Muslims via an advisory website that if a specialist says that breast implants and liposuction are not harmful to the patient, then they are permitted within Islamic law.
I’ve read in Sander Gilman’s histories of cosmetic surgery abotu how Tagliacozzi’s work was ignored or forgotten for two centuries because the Catholic Church disapproved of minimising the signs of divine retribution thought to be evidence on the bodies of syphilis sufferers, but he doesn’t mention the bit about his body being dug up & reburied in unconsecrated ground – thanks for that wonderful bit of information CL!
Katz – thanks for clarifying. When I read “These acolytes validate the suffering of stigmatics. Their presence imposes expectations upon stigmatics. They must continue to bleed. they must continue to lose bodily integrity in the cause of spiritual wholeness.
A community of blood and suffering develops. The stigmatic is at once star, sacrifice and invalid. Voyeurism, sadism and nurturance are a heady and tension-filled mixture. ” I thought of Michael Jackson. He’s always represented himself as a bit of a martyr and often presents what looks like a body in pain. I think his interpretations and uses for cosmetic surgery are very similar to stigmatics’ use of blood…
I argue in my work that people like Jackson, Pete Burns, Jocelyn Wildenstein – who wear their cosmetic surgery so clearly and painfully – are the heroes/martyrs of makeover culture.
There is a crucial difference between stigmatics and freak show celebs like Jackson, Burns and Wildenstein. Each of these celebs has dedicated him/herself to realising in flesh a caricature of an admired norm.
Jackson says: I yearn to be white.
Burns says: I yearn to be female.
Wildenstein says: I yearn to be hyperandrogenous, as plastic as a barbie doll.
Being archetypal is their claim for attention. Now, when you think about it, this is a self-defeating objective if more than a tiny sliver of the population ever attempts it. Such makeover celebs are noteworthy only because they are extreme. And they achieve attention only because they adhere to admired archetypes. Thus, voluntary amputation is more extreme than anything that Jacko would contemplate. But voluntary amputation excites only puzzlement and revulsion in all but a tiny part of the population. Theirs is a gesture of extreme individualism.
Stigmatics, on the other (pierced) hand, adhere to strictly formulaic manifestations of specialness. It would be utterly destructive of the central claims to specialness if a stigmatic were periodically to display the marks of a tiny crown of thorns on the end of his penis.
However, in secular culture, such a penile display would be very marketable indeed.
Surely what Jackson, Burns & Wildensteing ARE performing are “strictly formulaic manifestations of specialness”. There is definitely a formula to mainstream cosmetic surgery (which, despite their differences these three all adhere to): pale-face, big eyes, high cheekbones, large chin… a stigmatic may not display his wee crown of thorns, but surely there’s some audience (even if it’s only God). Both stigmata and cosmetic surgery are complex mixes of public and private matters.
Most stigmatics do not “gather coteries”. If they did, the Church would probably regard their behaviour as contraindicative of sincerity, if not orthodoxy. The most renowned stigmatic of recent times was St Pio and he considered attention humiliating. He frequently expressed the desire for the wounds – after they became visible – to disappear. Most stigmatics in history have been women religious and therefore, generally speaking, not on show to a pressing, gawking public at all. Many of them were “invisible stigmatics” who didn’t actually bleed – for example, St Catherine of Siena and St Catherine de’ Ricci who, according to their hagiographies, requested invisible stigmata out of humility.
Finally, I have never heard of a cultus surrounding a genuine stigmatic being imbued with a spirit of communal “blood and suffering”. Nor that the central figure became the personification of an apparently hybridised neologism combining both nemesis and mimesis (“memesis”). All this would certainly come as a surprise to the gentle and jolly Franciscans. Pio’s theological maxim – “pray, hope and don’t worry” – doesn’t sound like blood-drenched, doom-laden messianism either.
No, J, B, and W are adhering to somewhat formulaic manisfestations of genericness.
God may have somewhat contradictory responses to the stigmatic’s teensy crown of thorns. I won’t speculate.
The point is that the stigmatic so marked could never acknowledge his “special stigmata” without utterly destroying his claims that his other, more acceptable, marks are talismans of a special providence.
WTF are you talking about?
It is often said that Francis of Assisi was the first person, more than 1000 years after Christ’s crucifixion, to display stigmata.
Incorrect. He displayed them two years after a man was prosecuted in Northern Italy for bearing and displaying phoney stigmata. This case was notorious.
Now, it may be a complete coincidence that these two events took place within two years of each other. Reason would suggest otherwise.
But the point is that stigmata were first manifested as a deliberate attempt at display or perhaps even self-promotion.
Francis of Assisi’s stigmata appeared in the cultural context of display. His stigmata, it is true, remained secret during his lifetime. Nevertheless Francis’s stigmata achieved enormous fame after his death. His beatification and canonisation can be seen as marks of the acclaim which may well inspire other stigmatics, a rather extreme form of deferred gratification, perhaps.
If a leg transplant were available to me, I’d never go for it. It would be alien and strange, and I like myself as is. And my body is a record of my lived experience – probably why I’d never go for cosmetic surgery either.
Just askin’ by the way (I know I could google it but I’d gain more from a conversation), who exactly was Gasparo Tagliacozzi and what was he up to?
Here’s something, Kimmie.
Thanks, C.L.
It seems a rather harsh condemnation!
Indeed. I think one of the upsides of the Church’s old theology of the body/person was that it tended to be OK about dissection – notwithstanding what seems to be the misunderstood Bull De Sepulturis promulgated by Pope Boniface VIII. (Still in the news apparently!).