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“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 the lashline that many Asians lack. “You’ve got nice big eyes,” he admits, but eyelids more like my father’s would make them look bigger. To some, Kwan’s assessment may seem offensive—an attempt to remove my mother’s race from my face as though it were a pimple. But to others, it will seem as banal as a dietitian advising them to eat more leafy greens—advice having nothing to do with hiding one’s race or mimicking another. Asian blepharoplasty belongs to a range of niche cosmetic procedures known colloquially as ethnic plastic surgery, the popularity of which has spiked in recent years—and is prone to heated arguments, major misunderstandings, alternating whiplashes of sympathy and disgust, and some intensely uncomfortable reckonings. (Including, perhaps, the ones in this article.) The issues at stake are loaded: ethnic identity, standards of beauty, the politics of diversity, what constitutes race, and whether exercises of vanity can reshape it. From 2005 to 2013, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons estimates that the number of cosmetic procedures performed on Asian-Americans increased by 125 percent, Hispanics by 85 percent, and African-Americans by 56 percent. (Procedures on Caucasians increased just 35 percent.) This is, in part, simply a mark of rising purchasing power: Plastic surgery is nothing if not a sign that one has money to burn and status anxiety to spare. And doctors comfortable advertising their expertise in ethnic plastic surgery are growing wealthy creasing Asian eyelids, pushing sloped foreheads forward, and pulling prominent mouths back. These are procedures outsiders generally view as deracinating processes, sharpening the stereotypically flat noses of Asians, blacks, and Latinos while flattening the stereotypically sharp noses of Arabs and Jews. Some are refinements of formerly rare procedures like the ones that deformed a generation of Jackson-family noses, while others arrived Stateside from the bonebreaking, muscle-shrinking, multi-procedure extremes of Korean and Japanese plastic surgery. And, in fact, many procedures under the “ethnic” umbrella have no Caucasian model at all, as the Asian women asking surgeons to reduce their cheekbones can attest. prevailed in the social sciences and humanities (El Haj 2007, M’Charek 2013). This constructionist view, though it encompasses a broad range of approaches, holds that racial categories are made by society and an outdated racial science, and do not inhere in nature. It was a view that seemed to be supported by changes in the science of race after WWII, a time when scientific racism became discredited. During this period many scientists began using the clinal model of continuous variation to argue that race cannot be used to draw hard boundaries between populations. Some even declared that the race concept was “biologically meaningless” (e.g. Livingstone 1962, 279). However, with advances in genetics and genomics research in the twenty-first century, the race category, though still contested, re-emerged in the biological sciences. This “molecularization” of race (Fullwiley 2007) has caused reassessment of the ontological status of race for scholars in various fields (M’Charek 2013). Hartigan (2008) argues that if the race concept is described as a social construction, yet is shown to inhere in DNA, critiques of the scientific use of race may become irrelevant.2 While the race category declined in importance in research on genotype in the postworld war II period, it has been used routinely to describe phenotype in some medical and scientific fields, such as plastic surgery, biological anthropology, and forensic science (M’Charek, Schramm, and Skinner 2014). One forensic anthropologist (Sauer 1992), an expert who maps skeletal remains onto conventional North American races, wondered, “If races don’t exist why are forensic anthropologists so good at identifying them?” The comment underlines that changes in the scientific status of race in genetics do not affect all areas of scientific and medical research. Current scientific knowledge of racial phenotype may eventually be dismissed on scientific grounds. However, to dismiss this version of race as a “social construction” would ignore the fact that it rests on scientific criteria of validity, such as replicable experiments and peer review. Our response to this dilemma is to examine how plastic surgery enacts racial phenotype. We use the term enact here to open up plastic surgery’s knowledge of phenotype to inquiry, not as a social fiction, but as a medico-scientific fact, though one made differently across our three national contexts (M’Charek 2013). The view of race as biologically meaningless did not seem to reach many plastic surgeons, who continued to 3 perform surgeries on features that they described in racial terms (e.g. the “Negroid nose” or “Asian eye”). In doing so they catered to patients’ demands for particular surgeries. But they did not simply reproduce cultural common sense about racial phenotypee. Rather, they drew on a range of techniques and scientific knowledge, such as the (eventually obsolete) racial anthropology, anatomy, psychology, anthropometry, and digital modelling, in order to constitute a valid and operable medical object: the racial trait. This medical object, however, is not stable and single, but rather is “multiple” (Mol 2003): it has changed over time and varies in the different national contexts under discussion here. These versions of race were developed in relation to changing politics of difference and beauty ideals. Most contemporary plastic surgery aims to sidestep earlier scientific racism and beauty hierarchies as it enacts the racial trait in ways that reflect each nation’s histories of the racial body. For example, in the US, as assimilationist ideals began to decline, surgeons substituted the goal of “racial preservation” for the once acceptable aim of “passing.” In Korea surgeons performing double eyelid surgery have replaced past white reference points with Asian ones as the nation’s beauty industries and wider consumer society have grown. Brazilian surgeons, on the other hand, speak of “harmonizing” racial features within an ethical climate where whitening practices remain widely acceptable since they are not seen to violate racial authenticity. However, in all three cases, surgery continues to pathologize the racial features it enacts by aiming to correct racial traits seen as “excessive” or as merely typical, rather than beautiful. In this article we focus on procedures performed on women, because the majority of patients are female, but also because contemporary surgery enacts the racial trait as more problematic and operable in women than in men. Our comparison across sites does not seek to underline diversity for the sake of it, much less celebrate it. Rather, we seek to problematize the apparent given-ness and unmediated legibility of racial phenotype. This approach aims to contribute to critiques of the new scientificity of race: by analysing the unstable configuration of social and medical knowledge that makes the face racial, we hope to show that such knowledge is contingent, and thus might be otherwise. A note on terminology: we do not presume that the racial feature is a naturally occurring category and the terms “race” and “ethnicity” here refer either to their use in scientific and medical discourse, or to social ascriptions of identity made by surgeons or patients. From racial passing to race preservation in the United States In this section we analyse historical shifts in the enactment of the racial trait in plastic surgery in North America.3 The region,
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