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A different kind of scar treatment brought Dr. Ferdinand Ofodile to plastic surgery. When Ofodile moved to the U.S. from Nigeria in the 1960s to study medicine, he planned to become a vascular surgeon. But a visit home during the Nigerian Civil War convinced him to pursue treatment for those deformed by traumatic injuries, congenital defects, and burns severe enough to impede locomotion, as when scar tissue fuses arms to the torso. Eventually, he returned to the U.S. and became Harlem Hospital’s chief of plastic surgery—and an expert on AfricanAmerican noses. He spent the early ’90s measuring the noses of Harlem Hospital patients, employees, and grad students (and a few cadavers) and discovering that African-American nasal anatomy was more diverse than previously thought. Fewer than half were the shape “formerly called the Negroid nose,” featuring a low or concave bridge and bulbous tip. Ofodile’s signature “ethnic rhinoplasty” involves the insertion of a hard silicone implant. He has a trademarked design called the Ofodile nasal implant, an undulating arc of silicone “suited to satisfy Hispanic and African-American patient needs.” Name-brand nasal implants, it turns out, are a hallmark of the ethnic rhinoplasty universe. “There is a lot of controversy. A lot of competition. People are just fighting for patients,” explains Dr. Oleh Slupchynskyj, inventor of the proprietary SLUPimplant, a squared-off sliver of silicone not much larger than a matchstick. (He calls his mini-face-lift technique the SLUPlift.) Raised by Ukrainian immigrants in the Waterside Plaza towers in Kips Bay, Slupchynskyj has a New York accent, a flair for showmanship, and even less concern for political correctness than the other surgeons. During our interview, he spins in a swivel chair in his basement office, periodically dropping back his head to balance a SLUP implant on the bridge of his nose, followed by Ta-da! hand gestures. As the visibly white owner of AfricanAmericanRhinoplasty.com, Slupchynskyj has been accused of racism. “Patients, they’ll ask me the same question: ‘How did you get into this?’ I’ll say, ‘Well, people started coming to me, early in my practice, and they were getting turned away by other surgeons.’ Nobody wanted to operate on these people. They didn’t care, they had enough Caucasian rhinoplasty patients. stigmatizing a black appearance. Rita Segato (1998, 11) describes a distinct, intimate racism style in Brazil regarding “internal contamination”, “a fear (and a certainty) of being contaminated somewhere”, which she contrasts with the US logic of policing racial boundaries. In beauty work, these contamination anxieties are directed onto the body: some mothers try to project their infants’ nose by pulling it, women straighten and dye their hair blond, and surgery erases contaminating traces of blackness. As one surgeon described, while mixture is potentially beautiful, the patient always wants a nose that is more European than African. In Brazil, race can be depicted either as pathological excess or as absent in harmonious “meta-racial” mixture. The racial feature is thus not a fixed object of medicine. In the US and Korea, it is seen as a product of geography, expressed in biology; in Brazil, it may or may not map onto identity and can be “softened” or whitened. Concluding discussion Plastic surgery draws on multiple techniques and sciences, including anthropology, anthropometry, anatomy, and psychology, to enact race. These techniques and sciences are 11 global, though flows of knowledge do not just move from the metropole to periphery (Safier 2010). For example, much of racial science originated in Europe and North America, but in Latin America elites adapted it to their own purposes (Leys 1992). And while some pioneers of Brazilian plastic surgery trained in Europe and the US, today Brazil – and South Korea -- are high-prestige destinations for surgery that export their own beauty techniques. However, while there has been a global exchange of plastic surgery discourse and techniques, there are important differences in the enactment of race in our three contexts. The moreno (“brown”) Brazilian is in one respect similar to the Jewish or white ethnic American during the era of assimilationist optimism: their race is plastic in that it is environmentally shaped. It is a temporary condition that can be changed in the next generation—or in the present through plastic surgery. Yet, there is also a difference between these two cases. North American plastic surgery was thought to help patients to overcome psychosocial difficulties resulting from their minority status, while in Brazil, the moreno is not seen as a racial other. In Brazil rhinoplasty on moreno patients does not seek to assimilate an ethnic minority but rather to hide “internal contamination,” or the “trace of blackness” that is manifested in facial features. Thus, in the US the Jewish nose job was initially imagined as changing the race of the person, while in Brazil the black nose job aims to change the race of the nose to make it fit the person’s meta-racial condition. Plastic surgery enacts race differently as it adapts to different politics of difference. In contemporary Korean plastic surgery, race is enacted differently again. Racial vision has different reference points. It is directed less at difference within the national population, and more internationally, at European and other Asian countries. For the Korean surgeon, the eye and the person “have” a race and plastic surgery must preserve racial anatomy. This goal requires detailed understanding of the racial eye’s anatomy and the beautiful eye’s characteristics. This contemporary use of race repudiates the earlier Cold War fantasy of racial passing and whitening. Korean surgeons still mobilize racial typologies but have tried to strip them of a hierarchy that rated white above Asian faces. Yet, these surgeons reinforce racial boundaries as they delineate features’ racial dimensions with modern anthropometry. While Korean surgery holds that race must be preserved in the eye, it also aims to “diminish” racial features. This tension raises different ethical questions than the older surgical rationale of Westernization. The discovery that the Asian eye can be improved without Westernizing it has only facilitated the procedure’s rapid expansion. Unlike the Jewish nose job, double eyelid surgery does not aim to allow the patient to blend in with her surroundings but rather stand out as beautiful. Yet, as plastic surgery itself is becoming normalized in Korea, the altered body may become the norm. These versions of race might seem to be social constructions in that they are informed by beauty ideals that are mercurial and dependent on power relations in society. However, this aestheticization of race is not unique to plastic surgery, but has also informed the evolutionary frameworks of scientific racism (Gould 1981). Moreover, plastic surgery, like forensic anthropology, has also made its models of phenotypic difference empirically verifiable, by using techniques such as anthropometry, and by conforming to medicoscientific norms. And just as forensic anthropologists feel that their knowledge of race is confirmed by the practical work they do identifying skeletal remains, plastic surgeons’ knowledge of race seems to them to be materialized in the body of the patient (Edmonds 2010). For example, racial differences in skin elasticity are demonstrated to surgeons when they palpate the patient. Or surgeons observe racial differences in the formation of keloid scars or in the occurrence of congenital abnormalities in patients. On the other hand, the 12 racial trait as a medical object is certainly not a natural kind, or a self-evident
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