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To them, this new expanse of procedures is not a sign of ethnic self-loathing but proof that the loud-andproud club of American narcissists has admitted a new set of members—and with them new ideas of what qualifies as beautiful. The people I interviewed differed in their aesthetics, politics, and medical preferences. But they passionately agreed on one thing: No matter what white people say, this isn’t about them. Plastic surgery doesn’t have to be a sign of deference to some master race, they told me. In fact, it could be the opposite. So why won’t outsiders take them at their word? The most obvious answer is history. The first known Asian eyelid surgery was performed in 1896 in Japan, to create symmetry in a woman born with one creased eyelid and one monolid. Thirty years later, it had reached the States. “Changes Racial Features: Young Japanese Wins American Bride by Resort to Plastic Surgery,” the New York Times announced, in 1926, of a man named Shima Kito who fell in love with a white woman named Mildred. She agreed to marry him only after he “cut the eye corners so that the slant eye so characteristic of the Japanese race was gone. He lowered the skin and flesh of the nose so that the upturned trait disappeared, and he tightened the pendulous lower lip.” Then he changed his name to William White and got engaged to Mildred. The modern history of double-eyelid surgery is short enough that it can be told through the careers of two linked men—Edmund Kwan, the man who thinks my eyes need work, and his mentor, Dr. Robert Flowers, a white surgeon who began performing the operation in the 1960s. Growing up in Fairfield County, Dr. Kwan heard about family friends who had their eyelids and noses “done.” In medical school he gravitated first to surgery, then plastic surgery, thinking he’d one day serve Asian clientele. But in 1994, after training at Georgetown, Cornell, and Johns Hopkins’s renowned facial-trauma surgery unit, he still hadn’t performed a single Asian blepharoplasty. (Anti-aging eye lifts are also called blepharoplasties; the scars are similar but the procedures distinct.) Though the operation was known among Asians, and would grow more so in the decades ahead, it was less known in the general population, and thus in the corridors of medical schools and teaching hospitals. So Kwan moved to Hawaii to apprentice under Flowers. Flowers’s technique, which requires sedation and an incision between the lashline and brow, is still predominant. Flowers, who was raised in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, was a military surgeon when he first arrived in Hawaii in 1960. “I got over there just when we were stirring up a little mischief in Southeast Asia,” he said through a southern drawl in a recent phone interview. and ideals that was exceptionally detailed. For example, in one article, titled “The geography of the nose,” he described 16 nasal measurements, 15 other craniofacial measurements, and 29 different “proportion indices,” derived from relationships between facial measurements (Farkas et al 1986). Farkas used such anthropometric data to define differences between racial features, such as the “Caucasian,” “Asian,” and “black” nose.4 But he also included comparisons between groups of “average” and “attractive” patients, who are always specified by gender, and are usually women. Attractive faces in this literature are defined by the judgments of observers or the surgeon’s own judgment (Farkas et al 1986). This use of detailed anthropometry to define race-specific ideal proportions was a crucial development in the specialty because it enabled surgeons to present surgery on the racial trait as cosmetic improvement, but one which does not aim at whiteness, which plastic surgeons had implicitly used as a norm. Indeed, colleagues heralded Farkas for creating “diverse data” and personally “travelling the world to measure Chinese and African American faces” in order to avoid ethnocentrism (Anderson and Habal 2009, 714), a goal that was undermined by the fact that surgeons continued to target similar “problems” in non-white facial features as they had in the past. On the one hand, plastic surgery’s version of the racial trait cannot be seen as a “social” construction in that it drew on some existing medical and scientific practice and knowledge. For one, it used anthropometric data that could be replicated by other researchers. It did involve aesthetic judgment, but it defined beauty ideals again through anthropometry, using methods that surgeons at least consider valid, and which are used by other sciences of beauty, such as evolutionary psychology (Etcoff 2000). Moreover, plastic surgery’s version of race drew on racial knowledge in the field of reconstructive surgery, which seemed to boost the medical legitimacy of the race concept since reconstructive surgeries have a more clear healing rationale, compared to cosmetic surgeries. Farkas’ own use of anthropometry was grounded, not just in his background in cosmetic surgery, but also in his extensive work with craniofacial trauma (Anderson and Habal 2009). Some reconstructive surgeons, moreover, use the race concept to explain differing congenital deformity rates amongst different populations. North American surgeons have found, for example, that “blacks” experience lower rates of isolated cleft lip than do “whites,” but greater rates of pre-auricular appendages (Rogers 1998, 31–32). Reconstructive surgery’s version of race does not seem to explicitly pathologize non-white features since it describes statistical probabilities of congenital abnormalities, which in some cases are higher in whites than in non-whites.5 Such uses of race – even if out of synch with the “non-existence” of race view in genetics -- lend some authority to the scientificity and materiality of race and were accepted as valid by experts in the fields of plastic surgery and anthropometry. However, plastic surgery’s version of the racial trait is also informed by the old racialized aesthetic hierarchies and cannot be seen simply as the description of morphological differences created by “geography.” Many North American cosmetic surgeons continued to offer the same “improvements” to racial traits as they had in the 6 past, which raises the question of whether they are not profiting from, or contributing to, internalized racism in ethnic minority patients (Kaw 1993). Moreover, while plastic surgery created a “new” anthropometry, it reproduced some of the old and (for much of biological sciences) outdated racial anthropology of the nineteenth century. Farkas and colleagues (1986) even present a diagram of “typical nostril shapes” alongside a nearly identical image taken from Topinard’s Elements of General Anthropology (1885), an influential text from the height of scientific racism that ranked each race’s level of evolutionary development according to its nasal index, with “Hottentots” and “Mongols” below “Parisians.” North American surgeons’ enactment of the racial trait thus holds together different techniques and forms of knowledge: the old racial anthropology and the new anthropometry; race-specific norms and probabilities in reconstructive surgery as well as race-specific, aesthetic ideals for cosmetic operations. It is also an enactment that developed in relation to a specific politics of difference. Racial surgeries in North America target “internal others” within a society where the passing and assimilationist ideals were in decline, but which remained white-dominated. The following two sections describe how different alignments of beauty, racial knowledge, and identity politics emerged in the rapidly growing South Korean and Brazilian cosmetic surgery markets. The Asian, above-average face in Korea6 The two most common types of procedures that target racial features in South Korea (and East Asia more widely) are surgeries to project and narrow the nose and surgery to create a double eyelid. We focus here on the latter procedure, double eyelid blepharoplasty, which is the most commonly performed cosmetic surgery in South
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