Embedded Files
Page 12
But I saw a niche market.” Ethnic rhinoplasty “requires a lot more surgery, a lot more technique” than “the Caucasian girl from Long Island coming to get a hump reduced.” His rhinoplasties are priced in the ballpark of $10,000, plus a few thousand more if he’s fixing someone else’s work. He directs my attention to one of his YouTube videos, in which Slupchynskyj yanks another doctor’s mangled nasal implant from the sliced-open face of a sedated black woman. Her facial expression is eerily peaceful. Why do white people fixate on the “Westernizing” elements of ethnic plastic surgery? While working on this article, I found that people of all races had principled reservations about and passionate critiques of these practices. But the group that most consistently believed participants were deluding themselves about not trying to look white were, well, white people. Was that a symptom of in-group narcissism—white people assuming everyone wants to look like them? Or is it an issue of salience—white people only paying attention to aesthetics they already understand? Or is white horror at ethnic plastic surgery a cover for something uglier: a xenophobic fear of nonwhites “passing” as white, dressed up as free-to-be-you-and-me political correctness? Regardless of whose face the patient idealizes, modern plastic surgery is often a matter of fitting in. First, each feature must “fit in” with the rest of the face; every surgeon I spoke to emphasized attention to proportions. Second, there’s the matter of any one face “fitting in” with the rest of the population. But fitting in where, exactly? There is a term of art for the attraction to that which is average: koinophilia. In nature, averageness tends to be a sign of health, and studies consistently find that composite images of multiple faces are rated as more beautiful than the individual faces composing each image. Blend 50 and it becomes even better. This phenomenon was first discovered by inventor and eugenicist Sir Francis Galton, who also happened to be Charles Darwin’s cousin. In an attempt to determine which facial traits correlated with criminality, he created composites of mug shots—and discovered that the more mug shots he combined, the more attractive the criminals became. In the end, Galton failed completely at his stated goal of studying the criminal face, but he did make an elaborate map denoting towns in Great Britain where hotties could be found. A modern map of composite hotties would probably show them floating, vaguely, in the oceans between continents, as the cult of mixed-race idealism promotes racially ambiguous stars like Jessica Alba and Kim Kardashian as avatars for post-racial beauty. In 2011, an Allure survey found that 85 percent of respondents believed increases in diversity had changed America’s beauty standard; 64 percent considered mixed-race women “the epitome of beauty.” category that presents itself to an observer without mediation. We have used the concept of enactment to show how surgeons do not socially construct, but rather biologize race and beauty by using techniques and sciences to describe them in anatomical, physiological, and statistical terms (Edmonds 2013). Our analysis has shown that while there are differences in plastic surgeons’ uses of race, in all three cases they continue to enact the racial feature as a medical object needing improvement. They no longer treat the racial feature itself as the pathology, however, but instead see typical or excess race as the problem. In the US and Korea surgeons claim they can improve such “defects,” not by aiming at whiteness, but rather at race-specific beauty ideals. In Brazil surgeons believe they can improve racial features by harmonizing the face, echoing a national discourse that aestheticizes brown mixture and stigmatizes a “too black” appearance. In all three cases surgeons enact race as an average quality, which can be made unproblematic, even less visible, through aesthetic improvement via surgery. Plastic surgery thus creates a tension between race and beauty: a racial feature is most visible when it is merely typical. As surgery nudges the average towards the ideal, it seeks to transform race into beauty. This is one dystopian scenario raised by plastic surgery: normality—the unaltered body—becomes pathological and beauty a norm that must be obtained through medical intervention. While race is made into a valid medical object, we have argued that it is also a multiple one. By showing the different ways race can be measured, modelled, and “diminished” in the face, we aimed to problematize the assumption of racial phenotype. If there in one race for cosmetic surgery, another one for reconstructive surgery; one for assessing beautification possibilities, another for scarring risks; one for Brazil and one for Korea; one for the 2000s and one for the 1950s; then there are likely many more that can and will be made. If facial features’ race is contingent, then so too is racial defects’ ugliness. What can be made—the racial feature as a surgically improvable object—can also be unmade through other techniques, politics, and knowledge. 1 South Korea, though, has the world’s highest per capita rate of cosmetic operations (Heidekruger et al 2017). 2 Another problem with the social constructionist perspective on race is that it rests on an oversimplified account of the earlier “disappearance” of race from science (Reardon 2005). 3 We focus on the US, but also discuss the influential work of a Toronto-based plastic surgeon, Leslie Farkas. 4 Unlike in the Brazil case, Farkas assumed that the race of the facial feature would match the racial identity of the patient, an identity that was defined by the patient (i.e. a “Caucasian” patient would have a “Caucasian nose.” 5 Cosmetic surgeons also observe that patients of some African ancestry are more likely to form keloid scars, which they believe they have to take into account in order to benefit patients (since such scars can “ruin” cosmetic surgeries) (Edmonds 2010). 6 Surgeons’ and customers’ voices in this section were collected during Leem’s fieldwork at a plastic surgery clinic, Seoul, Korea between 2008 and 2010. Details about the field-site and fieldwork have been provided elsewhere (Leem 2016a). 13 7 The aim of Westernizing the Korean body also reflected a new racial vision of the Korean body as being anthropometrically distinct—and superior—to the Japanese body (Holliday and Elfving-Hwang 2012, 69). 8 One of Seoul’s twenty-five districts, Gangnam has a high density of plastic surgery clinics and also symbolizes South Korea’s fashionable and modern lifestyle (Leem 2017). 9 They identify the race of person by social ascription in this research. 10 Plemons (2017) also makes this point in relation to facial feminization surgery performed on Asian trans- women in North America 11 See Etcoff 2000 for a review of this emerging field. Figure Captions Figure 1 “Average or attractive composite faces from different races. ” (Rhee et al. 2012, 1237). The seven composite faces used in this figure are an average Korean face (AVK), an attractive Korean face (ATK), an attractive Asian face (ATA), an average Caucasian face (AVC), an attractive Caucasian face (ATC), an average African face (AVB), and an attractive African face (ATB). Figure 2 “Five girls from Guarantinguetá,” Emiliano di Cavalcanti, 1926. Seeking to create a uniquely Brazilian art form, di Cavalcanti celebrated the aesthetics of mixture in his portraits of Brazilian women. References Anderson, Warwick. 2014. “Racial Conceptions in the Global South.” Isi Questions about group identity are fundamental to political science. Studies attempting to estimate effects of race and ethnicity, however, inevitably encounter methodological problems. Could a scientist conduct an experiment in which subjects were randomly assigned to be of different races? The simple answer—clearly not—has led many to warn against estimating the effects of “immutable characteristics” like race or ethnicity (Gelman & Hill 2007; Holland 1986, 2008; Winship & Morgan 1999). More specifically, scholars have argued that race poses two challenges. First, any kind of treatment should be manipulable by a researcher—for example, by varying administration of a vaccine or enrollment in
Google Sites
Report abuse