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important social dimension in a society where norms and images are broadcast widely by the media. The trend towards body-modification by cosmetic surgery at an early age is increasing dramatically. What demands critical thinking and further investigation are the consequences of cosmetic surgery for physical and mental health. ©2010 Reproductive Health Matters. All rights reserved. Keywords: cosmetic surgery, female genital mutilation, female genital cosmetic surgery, body image, adolescents, Brazil T HIS paper arises from an inter-disciplinary research project, crossing political science, anthropology, and psychology, on the subject of female genital mutilation (FGM) and cosmetic surgery as “normalising practices”. Both phenomena have gained public attention in recent times. FGM is now practised globally as a result of the international migration of people from cultures where it is endemic. It has become widely known through the media, and is criticised internationally as interference in the bodies of girl infants and children. Western countries are in the forefront of expressing concerns about the practice of FGM and many have passed legislation to ban it within their borders, e.g. Great Britain and Austria.1,2 At the same time, new technologies for cosmetic surgery have been and are being developed in Western countries, and more and more people are undergoing these procedures, the great majority of them women. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons divides these procedures into four categories, based on the extent and reason for the surgery involved. In the USA in 2009, they report that there were 12.1 million cosmetic procedures, 1.7 million cosmetic surgical procedures, 10.4 cosmetic minimally invasive procedures, and 4.9 million reconstructive procedures.3 The central working thesis of our research is that both FGM and cosmetic surgery are forms of disciplining and normalising the female social body 74 and strategies of adjustment to social norms and ideals of being a woman. This thesis is based in the analysis of both these practices of Canadian anthropologist Janice Boddy, who argues that: “[They] derive from the presumption that female bodies are in need of improvement and continuous monitoring; both enlist women as agents of their self-modification and enjoin them to selfsurveillance and restraint; both work to instill in women a desire to conform, to become what they ‘ought’ to be.”4 Women who are the subjects of these practices are not forced to engage in them by any external power but are schooled to participate in them by themselves; that is, the disciplinary power works by itself. Foucault’s concept5 that “the self and the body are normalised by society through social techniques and institutions” underlies Boddy’s use of the concept of “normalisation” in her work. Furthermore, she points to the dominance of a Western perspective within the discourse on female genital mutilation and argues that “Western practices of body-modification or body mutilation” are contained in that discourse. Thus, she thinks that bulimia, anorexia and depilation (hair removal), as well as cosmetic surgery, are forms of body-modification that have parallels with the discourse on FGM and should be considered as having an analogous function in the reproduction of social and gendered subjects. Thus, even though the two sorts of practices differ in their own contexts, female genital mutilation conforms to the same kind of normalising of women’s bodies as cosmetic surgery in the West, creating and defining femininity. Authors like Mohanty in 19916 and Sheldon and Wilkinson in 19987 comprehend FGM as a manifestation of the abuse of women in a male-dominated system of ideals and norms of beauty. However, they also criticise the rejection of FGM by those who at the same time accept cosmetic surgery in Western countries. Other authors, for example Gruenbaum,8 do not disagree that FGM can have negative consequences for women’s health, but argue that social customs like FGM should not be treated as pathologies because the people whose customs are under attack will not share such an analysis. Feminist perspectives on cosmetic surgery circle around the following considerations: on the one hand, cosmetic surgery may be grasped as an expression and reproduction of hierarchical gender relations, whereby women are subject to beauty norms to a much higher extent than men.9 On the other hand, the decision of the individual to use cosmetic surgery may be understood as an expression of agency or autonomy and self-determination regarding a person’s own body.10 Our research, then, aimed to question and scrutinise the comparability of both practices at a political, cultural, social and individual level within one inter-disciplinary research process, where experience and self-awareness of the body and social norms and ideals interrelate. To this end, from the discipline of psychology, I conducted empirical research in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on the social and cultural relevance of body norms and the current significance and practice of cosmetic surgery. Why Brazil? Brazil (and specifically Rio de Janeiro) was chosen for field research on cosmetic surgery because it has the highest number of cases of cosmetic surgery per capita in the world. Only the USA exceeds Brazil in the total number of
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