Embedded Files
Page 14
A blue-eyed blonde whose last name means berry in Russian, Yagoda once dreamed of being a painter, but traded portraiture for plastic surgery. Her practice is across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and includes “integrative beauty” treatments like homeopathy, stress management, and dietary supplements. “If you want it done right, she’s the doctor Ya-goda!” the staff likes to joke. Incisionless blepharoplasty can be performed with local anesthesia and a needle in under an hour. The doctor flips the eyelid inside out (“everts” it) and connects one part of the eyelid to another. The upside is no incision or scarring; the downside is that the procedure tends to be less permanent. When Euny Hong got incisionless blepharoplasty, her then-husband didn’t even notice. She had it done while visiting family in Korea. “When I came back I kept waiting for him to say something. After a couple of days I said, ‘You know what I did?’ He almost didn’t believe me, even after I explained and pointed. He’s Caucasian, but even some of my Asian friends didn’t notice.” In the midst of Julie Chen’s eyelid controversy, Hong, an American-born journalist who appeared frequently on television, wrote a column for The Wall Street Journal arguing that eyelid surgery isn’t about looking white, to mixed response. “I felt that small eyes were just not adapted to TV technology,” she said, characterizing hooded eyes as a televisual distraction on par with wearing eyeglasses. “It’s kind of a race issue and definitely an explosive issue for some, but it doesn’t indicate self-hatred.” Yagoda told me about a black man who had his lips reduced; an Asian family that pressured all female members to get blepharoplasty so their artificial faces would match; and a Latina who had “a nice nose with a small bump and very nice tip,” but insisted on having it “scooped” into a ski-jump shape. Yagoda tried to persuade her to choose a less drastic surgery, but the woman replied that she wanted to look like her family—then displayed photos of a family of highly plastic women. “All had rhinoplasties. Bad ones, I think, overly scooped. But all looking pretty identical.” Yagoda stalled, urging the woman to think carefully about the difficult-to-reverse procedure. After a year, the woman still wanted it. Yagoda performed the surgery, reasoning that it’s not her job to dictate taste. Dr. Steve Lee shares space with a chiropractor and a hand therapist in a neon-lit building in Flushing, Queens. This would seem to place him a world away from Kwan’s office in the Upper East Side, but until recently, both had stock photos of the same Asian model with translucent skin and enormous eyes on the home pages of their websites. And both have made forays into controversial off-label procedures more commonly seen overseas. That off-label spectrum also includes, at its extremes, tabloid body-horror tales grouping elaborate Korean surgery with black-market scam artists who inject butts with cement and baffling fads like Japan’s “bagelhead” phenomenon, inviting readers to gawk at faces unlike their own. (The reading experience is what I imagine attending a 19th-century freak show would have been like, conflating foreignness with deformity in the pursuit of titillation.) Essentialism tends to view race in largely biological terms and to categorize populations by regions of ancestry and phenotype. The concept may have arisen from 15th-century Europeans’ efforts to rationalize slavery and colonialism (Zuberi 2001) and developed as 18th-century naturalists sought to classify populations from around the world ( James 2011). From that work emerged the idea that members of groups shared “‘essence(s)’ that are inherent, innate, or otherwise fixed” (Morning 2011, p. 12), also described as “beliefs that a given social category is discrete, uniform, informative, ... natural, immutable, stable, inherent, exclusive, and necessary” (Haslam et al. 2000; Morning 2011, p. 12). In the late 18th century, social Darwinists and eugenicists adopted ideas of race and advocated concepts of racial hierarchy that profoundly influenced how race was understood to work across science, politics, and society at large. In the 19th and 20th centuries, movements for and against white supremacy, as well as other forms of race-based nationalism, generated many of the inter- and intranational conflicts that defined those centuries (Du Bois [1903] 2007). Although explicit arguments for racial hierarchy have moved from the mainstream of society to the margins, racial essentialism continues to inform how both lay people and scientists understand group differences (Mendelberg 2001, Morning 2011). Further, scholarly debates continue over how race and genetics determine intelligence, health, and other major life outcomes (Devlin 2This approach complements but is distinct from the concept of “intersectionality” (Crenshaw 1991). Whereas intersectionality examines the joint effect of multiple identities, e.g., the intersection of race and gender, the “bundle of sticks” approach seeks to disaggregate broad categories such as race into their narrower constitutive elements. 3Although we focus on race and ethnicity, much of this analysis and both research designs could also be used to estimate effects of other seemingly immutable characteristics (see, e.g., Boker et al. 2011). www.annualreviews.org • Estimating Effects of “Immutable” Characteristics 501 Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci. 2016.19:499-522. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org Access provided by Harvard University on 05/12/16. For personal use only. 1997, Duster 2005, Hernstein & Murray 1994). Some contemporary genetic research supports the idea that people with similar geographic ancestry also share clusters of common genes that correspond roughly to modern racial categories (Blank et al. 2004, Kitcher 2007; for a more thorough treatment, see James 2011). The second theory of race emphasizes the weak scientific basis for racial categories and argues that race is best understood as a social construction (Appiah 1985, Omi &Winant 1994, Zuckerman 1990). In contrast to essentialism, the constructivist approach holds that distinctions between socalled races and the importance ascribed to various genetic or phenotypic traits are the products of social forces including cultural, historical, ideological, geographical, and legal influences (Holland 2008, Junn & Masuoka 2008, Lopez 1994, Loury 2002, Rutter & Tienda 2005). How societies ´ categorize difference typically reflects social structures that reinforce group-based hierarchy (Omi & Winant 1994, Sidanius & Pratto 2001). Although most popular conceptions of race tend toward the essentialist, a considerable body of work suggests that a constructivist theory better fits how race actually operates in the world. For example, a 1974 US federal ad hoc committee on racial and ethnic definitions struggled with how to categorize people of South Asian ancestry who, earlier in the century, were categorized as Hindus or Hindoos (Hochschild & Powell 2008). The ad hoc committee initially recommended a designation of White/Caucasian but then selected the classification of Asian or Pacific Islanders (Nobles 2000). Penner & Saperstein (2008) find that in a 19-year survey of 12,686 Americans, 20% of the sample changed race in terms of either self-identification or classification by interviewers. Numerous other examples arise in the changing conceptions of what constitutes an interracial marriage or how children of mixed-race unions should be categorized (Kennedy 2012). Many social scientists assume constructivism has become the standard academic approach, but research suggests otherwise. A 2011 survey of faculty in anthropology and biology departments across public and private universities found that only among more elite anthropology departments did a majority of the faculty define race as socially constructed (Morning 2011, figure 8, p. 182). Among biology faculty, race was defined as socially constructed by Is Race Plastic? My Trip into the ‘Ethnic Plastic Surgery’ Minefield By Maureen O'Connor “You’ve got some nice Caucasian features,” Dr. Edmund Kwan says, inspecting my face at his Upper East Side plastic-surgery practice, where the waiting room includes an ottoman larger than my kitchen table. “You’re half-Asian mixed with what?” Chinese mom and white dad, I reply. “You inherited a Caucasian nose. Your nose is nice. Your eyes have a little bit of Asian mixed in.” He proposes Asian blepharoplasty, a surgical procedure to create or enlarge the palpebral fold, the eyelid crease a few millimeters above
Google Sites
Report abuse