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And yet this new wave of such plastic surgeries has produced something of a principled outcry from people of all races and ethnicities. “Did I give in to the Man?” The Talk host and broadcastnews veteran Julie Chen asked last year, displaying photos from before and after the doubleeyelid surgery she got after weathering workplace racism in the ’90s. So many people replied “yes” that Chen took time to defend her choice the following week. Reports about Asians overseas getting surgery to resemble “pretty Western celebrities” have a tendency to go viral in Western outlets ranging from The Daily Mail to BuzzFeed to “This American Life.” None of this should be too surprising: White standards still anchor our beauty culture, in part because white people still anchor our privileged classes. Procedures to “white-ify” minorities are not altogether new, nor have their politics been resolved: Just this April, the U.S. Army banned many natural African-American hairstyles for women (an outcry produced only a promise of review). But walk down the street in New York, Miami, Chicago, or L.A.—or Macon, or Clovis, or Dearborn, or Kailua—and you’ll see people exhibiting a vast array of personal and cultural aesthetics, some overlapping, others starkly polarized. A tour of the cosmetic-medicine clinics shaping those bodies and faces paints a more complicated portrait of beauty, too—one that includes “white” ideals like thin noses and arched eyes, yes, but also alternative archetypes like childlike chins and exaggerated butts. The patients display an equally wide array of motivations. As they traffic in all these modified body parts, even the most esteemed surgeons in the field can come across as almost blasphemously politically incorrect in casual conversation. (I had never thought Mongoloid was anything other than an insult until a black surgeon used it to praise a mouth, and even the term “ethnic plastic surgery” confuses most accepted distinctions between ethnicity, which is tied to culture and language, and race, which includes physical appearance.) These exchanges can be jarringly retro but also oddly refreshing—discussions of race with strangely post-racial specialists who choose to see beauty as something that can be built, à la carte, with features harvested from peoples all over the world. It feels like science fiction—but utopian or dystopian, I can’t decide. Because, as we all know, race is hugely more complicated than a handful of traits on a face. And many of these new procedures come with horror-show backstories, stretching from the ugly days of phrenology and eugenics to contemporary cultural flash points like hair-straightening and skin-lightening. Practitioners have long defended those treatments, too, as personal beauty choices and not deracination. But the stakes for ethnic plastic surgery are higher than those for a hairdo—most are alterations to the identity-giving part of the body, the face, and often permanent. Still, even as phrases like nice Caucasian features sneak into their language, the practitioners and recipients insist that ethnic plastic surgery isn’t about looking white. along with Western Europe, played a central role in the development of the modern specialty. Moreover, due to its ethnic and racial diversity, plastic surgeons there produced a detailed knowledge of the racial trait as they sought to offer aesthetic “improvement” to non-white and non-Anglo patients. This knowledge shifted over time, in dialog -- and sometimes tension -- with the science of race beyond the medical speciality and with a wider politics of difference. Modern plastic surgery arose in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries alongside two human sciences that influenced its enactment of race: anthropology and psychology. According to this anthropology, the “racial” nose – e.g. the Jewish “hook nose” and Irish “pug nose” -- indexed lower evolutionary development. Historian Sander Gilman (1998, 1999) has shown that plastic surgeons drew on this 4 anthropological knowledge of race, but introduced the possibility that the nose was a mutable, not fixed, racial index. In that period, however, the prospect of using plastic surgery to enable racial others to “pass” or “vanish into the crowd” was received with alarm (Gilman 1999). However, in the US, cosmetic surgeries to improve racial features became more therapeutically legitimate, beginning in the 1930s, in part due to racial anthropology’s decline (Haiken 1997). This goal needed a therapeutic justification, however, which was supplied partly by the work of Freud and his one-time disciple Alfred Adler (1870–1937). Adler popularized the “inferiority complex,” which held that defects in appearance can cause psychological problems and social adjustment difficulties (Haiken 1997, 95). Correcting defects offered a means of gaining social acceptance. Thus, New World ideologies of assimilation and self-improvement made it possible—even therapeutic—to alter racial markers (Haiken 1997). However, such alterations were seen as aesthetic improvements owing to the assumed inferiority of non-white, Semitic and other “white ethnic” facial features. These patients did not necessarily use surgery to move into an Anglo or white identity (though this was a possibility), but surgery was thought to lessen visible ethnic and racial differences that caused unhappiness or social problems (Gilman 1999). The nose job in this context thus aligned the medical knowledge of race with prevailing white beauty norms and a politics of difference in North America that valued the assimilation of ethnic minorities. This alignment of knowledge, beauty, and politics, however, began to disintegrate, beginning in the 1970s with the rise of multiculturalism that challenged the earlier assimilationist ethos. The black is beautiful and wider ethnic pride movements challenged white beauty norms, though the old aesthetic hierarchies persisted in everyday life – and in plastic surgery (Haiken 1997). Ethnic and racial surgeries did not decline, but in fact found a larger market, in part due to the growth of credit plans (Essig 2011) and the rise of a larger “makeover culture” (Jones 2008) that made cosmetic surgery more accessible. As the use of surgery to pass or whiten became more ethically problematic surgeons began advocating more natural-looking surgeries by the 1980s that promised to enhance beauty, not transform race. Here is a typical statement of this turn in racial thinking: “Surgical philosophies have also changed, shifting from the perspective of racial transformation…toward a view of racial preservation” (Sturm-O’Brien et al. 2010, 69). Yet, as plastic surgery distanced itself from passing fantasies, the specialty paradoxically returned to the old quest of racial anthropology: to empirically describe the racial feature. To “preserve yet improve” Asian, black, and other racial features, the medical specialty needed to know what distinguishes the feature as racial. In response some surgeons undertook a more rigorous and extensive use of anthropometric techniques to describe racial features, the most well-known example of which is the work of Leslie Farkas and colleagues (e.g. Farkas et al 1986). Farkas (1915-2008), a Hungarian-born plastic surgeon who emigrated to Canada in 1968, is known as a pioneer of modern craniofacial anthropometry. Early in his career he became convinced that surgeons could not rely on their visual assessment in correcting congenital anomalies or facial injuries. He began a lifelong quest to develop a sophisticated anthropometric system for the medical specialty. In his 244 publications he generated a large database of craniofacial norms, which could be used by surgeons to define more objective surgical goals in operations such as correction of the cleft palate. However, Farkas believed that these craniofacial norms varied in different racial and ethnic groups. Collaborating with physical anthropologists, he generated 5 databases of race-specific “normative measurements” of the skull and face for surgeons to use in reconstructive surgeries (Anderson and Habal 2009). But Farkas was also active in the field of aesthetic surgery, and he used anthropometry to identify, not just norms, but also ideals that ostensibly could be used to achieve cosmetic improvements in patients of different races. Rejecting the use of the neoclassical canon to define ideal proportions in the face, a common practice in plastic surgery in the past, Farkas created a new knowledge of norms
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