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He’d been filing down an Asian patient’s cheekbones to narrow her face, which the patient believed was too wide and flat, when the delicate zygomatic bone snapped off in his hand. “I said, ‘Oh my God! I broke the bone!’ ” he recalls. During his fellowship in the facial-trauma unit, he’d learned to reconstruct faces shattered in car accidents; this time he’d shattered one himself, but knew exactly what to do. “The patient came back and said, ‘I love it!’ ” Facial contouring is popular in Korea and includes procedures like V-line jaw shaving, which turns round faces into hearts in pursuit of an ideal more manga than Playboy, softening the angles of a square jaw and creating a daintier chin. “Double-jaw surgery” is a procedure sometimes used to treat severe underbites and other deformities, now being used for a cosmetic purpose, in which the jawbone is broken and pulled back while the maxilla (or palate) is broken and pulled forward, to yield a fetishized mini-chin. To Westerners, facial contouring is among the most mysterious of Asian procedures. When I looked at before-and-after pictures of women with sharply jutting cheekbones who’d had their faces narrowed and smoothed via zygoma reduction, I inevitably thought they were prettier before. Without looking up from the pictures, Kwan replied, “Cheekbone reductions are just ethnic. Asians hate this kind of cheek.” But white people never seem as fascinated with this surgery as they are with double eyelids, he added. Maybe that’s because the eyelid surgery provides a neat parable for those who believe race can be erased with a scalpel. Reality, of course, is rarely so neat. Monolids are mostly unique to Asians—but that means cosmetic alterations to them are a uniquely Asian cultural phenomenon, too. As has been the case for hair extensions, chemical straighteners, and wigs, beauty rituals that once seemed designed to oppress sometimes turn into symbols of group membership or the foundations of a new aesthetic. Adopted from Korea into a white family in Queens, Mee Young Mendler befriended Koreans at her school in Fresh Meadows; her brother, also adopted, had mostly white friends. To the extent that Mendler was self-conscious about race growing up, it was that she wanted to be more Asian so she could fit in with her friends. Imitating other girls, she sometimes taped her eyelids, a DIY crease-creating strategy akin to wearing false eyelashes. Mendler didn’t fully understand blepharoplasty until she saw it on the news at age 19: “They were talking about the surgery and how sad it is that young girls wanted to change their identity. It may sound weird, but that’s what made me go look into it.” So she took a credit card and made her first big purchase: 20 minutes under the knife with Dr. Edmund Kwan. Her white adoptive mother did not support the choice—but plenty of her Asian friends did. “I think we’re kind of losing ethnic niches. Caucasian crease has a semilunar shape (Nyugen et al 2009). Surgeons argue that they thus must use Asian, not white, anatomical models when performing facial surgery to achieve better, more natural results. This is a subtle shift in plastic surgeon’s version of race. Rather than abandon the race concept in the face of critiques of surgery as whitening, they have instead used anthropometry to enact racial phenotypic differences in ways that buttress their clinical expertise and make surgeries desirable to patients. Surgeons recognize that for many 8 would-be patients, whitening is either irrelevant or repulsive. Rather than a whiter eye, they offer an enhanced, but authentically Asian, eye. [Figure 1 here] However, plastic surgery still pathologizes the racial trait in that it identifies racespecific qualities as targets of intervention when they are seen as excessive, or sometimes merely “average,” as opposed to attractive. For example, surgeons claim that Asian eyes are characterized by more fat deposits, which are not seen as a problem unless they are excessive. Similarly, the Korean nose only becomes operable when surgeon or patient claim it has dimensions that are not simply “racial,” but “too racial,” that is, “too wide” or “too flat.” This point is also illustrated by a newer racial procedure now gaining popularity in Korea: jaw reshaping. This radical, bone-cutting surgery, which risks major complications and was once only performed for reconstructive purposes, is now offered as a cosmetic surgery. It posits the “too-wide” jaw as both a typically female Korean feature and an unaesthetic excess. These surgeries also show the interdependence of race and gender as they present such racial “excess” as creating an overly masculine face.10 The new anthropometrics is altering the relationship between beauty and race. Korean surgeons began to use anthropometry more extensively to document so-called attractive facial anatomy. For example, Rhee et al (2012) measure a range of landmarks and angles in “attractive” faces created from composites of female celebrities, and compare them with measurements of “average” faces in each race. These images replace earlier racial sciences’ vertical racial indices with a schema that aligns races horizontally (Figure 1), aesthetically judging within races, not across them. For surgeons the racial feature becomes less visible or problematic in ideal female faces. They claim that female above-average faces of any race have common traits, such as wider-spaced eyes and smaller chins. As the female patient’s face moves from average to ideal proportions, it takes on these attributes of universal feminine beauty and supposedly becomes less racialized in appearance. This use of anthropometry and digital modelling to measure attractive faces is part of a “science of beauty” practised by other disciplines such as psychology (Etcoff 2000).11 As plastic surgeons take up these techniques, their enactment of the racial trait has shifted. The racial trait becomes more present—and pathologized—in faces with average anatomical values. The racial feature thus in a sense only becomes racial when it is deemed to be ugly or less than ideal. Surgery enacts race as an ordinary quality, eclipsed by extraordinary beauty that is globally appealing, scientifically measurable, and medically attainable (Leem 2017). This subtle distinction allows surgeons to continue to operationalize race in facial surgeries, whilst appearing to sidestep the aesthetic problem of unnatural results and the ethical problem of whitening. Enacting the Negroid nose in “meta-racial” Brazil We move now to Brazil, a society with a history of the racial body that differs significantly from those in our first two cases. Anderson (2014, 782) argues that the race concept in Europe and North America sharply contrasted with the “greater interest across the Southern Hemisphere…in racial plasticity, environmental adaptation, mixing or miscegenation, and blurring of racial boundaries”. In Latin America race is often not seen as simply a matter of ancestry, but is a relational category, shaped by the “accumulation” of traits, such as social markers, hair type, and the shape of facial features (Weismantel 2001, Wade 2010). This literature underlines that phenotypic differences should not be taken as 9 “given facts” (M’Charek forthcoming): rather their perception is mediated by situated knowledge, medical practices like plastic surgery, and lay classifications of appearance (Edmonds 2010, Sansone 2003). In the semiotics of phenotype in Brazil, facial features and hair can be more important racial markers than skin colour (Twine 1998). Racial and color terms in that country are sometimes seen as more fluid or relative in that they are not necessarily determined by ancestry, and can be altered by the acquisition of social status or beauty work (Edmonds 2010). At the same time, white or “whitish” hair and facial features are valorised aesthetically and socially rewarded. Conversely a “too black” appearance is stigmatized societally, and even within families (Hordge-Freeman 2013). How does plastic surgery enact the racial trait in this context? The most common cosmetic surgery procedure that is explicitly racialized in Brazil is rhinoplasty. Many patients request to have their nose afinado (thinned but also “refined”) or to project the tip by inserting cartilage. The
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