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DOI: 10.1177/1357034X02008004002
2002 8: 21Body & SocietyLLEWELLYN NEGRIN
Cosmetic Surgery and the Eclipse of Identity
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Cosmetic Surgery and the Eclipse ofIdentity
LLEWELLYN NEGRIN
Within feminist theory, cosmetic surgery has been viewed largely
as an oppres-sive technology which colonizes women’s bodies in a
quite literal way, directlyintervening in the body to mould it in
accordance with the prevalent ideals offeminine beauty. Those women
who undergo cosmetic surgery for purelyaesthetic reasons are
regarded as victims of a patriarchal ideology in which
theself-esteem of women is primarily dependent on their physical
appearance. Theburgeoning in the use of cosmetic surgery by women
is seen to be symptomaticof the permanent sense of dissatisfaction
that most women have with theirphysical appearance as a result of
being relentlessly bombarded with images ofperfection by the mass
media. As such, the predominant response to such a tech-nology by
feminists has been one of rejection (see, for example, Lakoff and
Scherr,1984: 169–74).
However, in a number of recent writings there has been a
discernible shift inattitude among some feminists towards the
practice of cosmetic surgery. KathyDavis, in her book Reshaping the
Female Body: The Dilemma of CosmeticSurgery (1995), offers a
guarded ‘defence’ of the practice as a strategy that enableswomen
to exercise a degree of control over their lives in circumstances
wherethere are very few other opportunities for self-realization.
Contrary to thosefeminists who condemn the practice of cosmetic
surgery as irredeemably oppres-sive, Davis claims that those women
who opt for cosmetic surgery are not blindlysubmitting to the
dictates of patriarchal ideology but are actively engaging withit,
knowledgeable of its drawbacks as well as its benefits. While they
are aware ofits problematic aspects, nevertheless they see these as
being outweighed by the
Body & Society © 2002 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand
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enhanced sense of self-esteem and power that eventuates. She
believes then, that,under certain circumstances, the decision to
undergo cosmetic surgery canactually be an act of empowerment
rather than of oppression.
Others go even further than Davis in advocating the redeployment
of cosmeticsurgery for feminist purposes. Both Kathryn Morgan
(1991: 44–7) and AnneBalsamo (1996: 78–9) for instance, although
highly critical of the mainstreamemployment of cosmetic surgery,
consider the possibility of its use as a tool bywomen seeking to
subvert the dominant patriarchal ideals of feminine
beauty.According to Balsamo, while cosmetic surgery has been
applied in such a way asto produce bodies that are very
traditionally gendered, there is also the potentialfor it to be
used ‘as a vehicle for staging cultural identities’ (p. 78). In her
view,the surgical re-fashioning of the body opens up the
possibility of highlighting theartificial or culturally constructed
nature of beauty, undermining neo-romanticconceptions of the body
as ‘natural’. Although cosmetic surgery as it is
currentlypractised, presents the surgically altered body as
‘natural’ by disguising all tracesof its intervention, Balsamo
envisages a surgical practice which openly acknow-ledges rather
than disavows its role in the reconstruction of the body.
Similarly, Morgan argues that cosmetic surgery can be employed
in a sub-versive way by demonstrating the artifactual nature of the
body. She proposes theuse of cosmetic surgery to produce what the
culture constitutes as ‘ugly’ so as todestabilize the ‘beautiful’
and expose its technologically and culturally constitu-tive origin
and its political consequences. She also sees cosmetic surgery as
havinga liberatory potential insofar as it can be used to
destabilize notions of the subjectas fixed and immutable. Following
Judith Butler, she regards the disruption ofstable bodily contours
as an important precondition for the undermining ofrepressive
gender constructs.
While such proposals may seem far-fetched, they have been
realized in practiceby the French performance artist Orlan, who has
undergone a series of opera-tions to modify her face and body in
ways that contravene established norms offeminine beauty.
The concern of this article is to critically appraise this
‘rehabilitation’ ofcosmetic surgery within recent feminist theory
and practice and to considerwhether in fact it does provide a
viable means for destabilizing patriarchal idealsof feminine
appearance. I shall begin my discussion with a consideration
ofDavis’s guarded ‘defence’ of cosmetic surgery before examining
the more radicalproposals of Balsamo, Morgan and Orlan.
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Cosmetic Surgery is not an Act of Empowerment
Davis argues in her book Reshaping the Female Body: The Dilemma
of CosmeticSurgery (1995) that it is far too simplistic to regard
cosmetic surgery as a per-nicious horror inflicted by the medical
system upon women’s bodies, and to treatthose women who undergo it
as nothing more than misguided or deluded victims(1995: 56–67,
159–81). In her view, such a conception of the practice of
cosmeticsurgery is problematic for a number of reasons. First, it
fails to take into accountwomen’s active and lived relation to
their bodies, treating them rather as disem-bodied robots who
passively submit to the patriarchal ideals of feminine beautyin an
unthinking and uncritical way. However, her interviews with women
whoelected to have cosmetic surgery revealed that they were
reasonably well-informed about the risks involved and were also
aware of the moral dilemmas towhich such a practice gives rise.
Most were highly critical of the cult of femininebeauty within
contemporary Western society, and of the role that cosmeticsurgery
had played in reinforcing such an emphasis on physical
attractiveness, andsaw themselves as undergoing cosmetic surgery
not in order to conform withpatriarchal ideals of beauty but rather
to re-fashion their bodies so that they weremore in accord with how
they saw themselves. Those women who elected to havecosmetic
surgery did so because they felt a profound sense of estrangement
fromtheir bodies; for them the operation enabled the achievement of
a more embodiedsense of self where the psychic and physical self
were more integrated with eachother. According to Davis:
Cosmetic surgery was presented as part of a woman’s struggle to
feel at home in her body – asubject with a body rather than just a
body. Paradoxically, cosmetic surgery enabled thesewomen to become
embodied subjects rather than objectified bodies. (1995: 161)
On the whole, the women who underwent cosmetic surgery were
sceptical of itas a general remedy for women’s dissatisfaction with
their appearance, regardingit rather as the lesser of two evils in
their own particular circumstances whereother options for dealing
with their problems were not available.
Davis goes on to point out that these women did not undergo such
surgery atthe behest of their husbands or their male surgeon.
Indeed, in most cases thewomen’s decision to have cosmetic surgery
met with strong opposition from theirmale partners. Far from being
an act of submission to outside pressures then, thewomen saw their
decision to have cosmetic surgery as an act of self-assertion –as
one of the few occasions when they exercised some control over
their owndestiny. Many reported experiencing a feeling of elation
after undergoing suchsurgery – an experience radically at odds with
the conception of cosmetic surgeryrecipients as passive victims.
Even when the results of the surgery did not come
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up to expectations, and in some cases produced serious side
effects and dis-figurement, the women did not express regret at
their decision to have cosmeticsurgery but saw it as an act of
self-empowerment undertaken with knowledge ofthe risks
involved.
Davis argues, then, that rather than seeing these women as
blindly followingthe dictates of patriarchal ideology, it would be
more accurate to regard them asactively negotiating with the
practice of cosmetic surgery in ways which arebeneficial to them.
Against the total condemnation of cosmetic surgery by
otherfeminists then, she contends that the practice has a
legitimacy under certaincircumstances. As she writes:
Cosmetic surgery is not about beauty but about identity. For a
woman who feels trapped in abody which does not fit her sense of
who she is, cosmetic surgery becomes a way to renegoti-ate identity
through her body. Cosmetic surgery is about exercising power under
conditionswhich are not of one’s own making. In a context of
limited possibilities for action, cosmeticsurgery can be a way for
an individual woman to give shape to her life by reshaping her
body.(1995: 163)
Rather than adopting an attitude of moralistic condemnation
towards recipientsof cosmetic surgery then, Davis urges a
re-evaluation of the practice of cosmeticsurgery which is more
respectful of the reasons given by the recipients themselvesfor
undertaking it. In her view, cosmetic surgery should not be seen
simply as yetanother instance of the subjugation of women, but as a
more contradictoryphenomenon than this – both ‘symptom of
oppression and act of empowermentall in one’ as she puts it (1997:
169).
Davis’s qualified defence of the practice of cosmetic surgery,
however, is prob-lematic in a number of respects. First, in her
concern to grant at least a partiallegitimacy to cosmetic surgery
as a means of overcoming women’s problems ofidentity, Davis tends
to lose sight of the fact that such a ‘solution’ leaves
unad-dressed the causes for women’s dissatisfaction with their
bodies in the first place.Although Davis is not unaware of the
social structures of gender inequality thatgive rise to women’s
sense of estrangement from their bodies, these are bracketedout of
consideration in her analysis of the reasons why women undergo
cosmeticsurgery. Consequently, she individualizes the problem of
women’s self-identity,focusing on how particular women cope with
this dilemma within the parametersof the given system without
considering how the parameters themselves can bechallenged or
undermined. Indeed, she tends to be dismissive of strategies
whichseek to challenge the systemic and structural causes for
women’s experience ofdisembodiment as being utopian, and for
failing to address in any immediate waythe problems confronted by
individual women. As she writes:
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While feminist visions of a surgery-free future are comforting,
they can also close our eyes tothe less dramatic instances of
resistance, compliance, or discursive penetration which are partand
parcel of any social practice. Our alternatives become nothing more
than utopian – leavingus little to say of relevance concerning
women’s lived relationships to their bodies . . . (1995:180)
Against this, however, it needs to be pointed out that, while
cosmetic surgery mayappear to offer some sort of short term
‘remedy’ to women’s problems of self-estrangement, it can actually
hinder the progress towards any lasting solutions bydeflecting
attention away from the underlying causes for women’s
dissatisfactionwith their bodies. As long as women can find solace
in surgical solutions to theirproblems of self-identity, there is
the very real possibility that they will be lessinclined to tackle
the social and cultural factors responsible for the experience
ofalienation from their bodies in the first place. The limitation
of cosmetic surgeryis that it offers a technological solution to a
social problem. As Sander Gilmanpoints out (1999: 19), with the
development of cosmetic surgery at the end of the19th century, the
Enlightenment belief in the ability of individuals to
transformthemselves, which had originally been articulated as a
social and political task,came to be redefined in biological and
medical terms. This had the effect ofshifting the locus of change
from the transformation of social structures to trans-forming the
body itself. To quote Gilman:
The political ‘unhappiness’ of class and poverty, which led to
the storming of the Bastille, cameto be experienced as the
‘unhappiness’ found within the body. . . . In the former, it was
revol-utionary change that would cure the body; in the latter, it
was the cure of the individual bywhich the unhappiness would be
resolved. (1999: 19)
From this perspective then, far from providing instances of
piecemeal resistanceto the dominant ideology, the practice of
cosmetic surgery can actually be seen toreinforce it by providing
women with a solution to their problems of self-identitywhich does
not necessitate any challenge to the social and political
parameters ofthe beauty system itself. Thus, while individual women
themselves may not seetheir resort to cosmetic surgery as a
submission to patriarchal ideology but as anact of
self-empowerment, it is a conservative practice insofar as it
leaves un-addressed the underlying causes for women’s poor body
image. The decision tohave cosmetic surgery is an individualistic
‘solution’ that does nothing to tacklethe broader social problem as
to why women should feel dissatisfaction with theirappearance in
the first place. While one can understand how, under
certaincircumstances, plastic surgery may appear to be the most
rational solution for awoman, it is important not to lose sight of
the limitations of this solution, andalso to consider ways of
tackling the social and cultural factors which are
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responsible for women’s estrangement from their bodies rather
than treating themas unchangeable givens.
In pointing to the ultimately conservative effects of cosmetic
surgery, theintention is not to be dismissive of the reasons why
individual women undergoit. Rather, it is to make clear the
disjuncture between the individual and socialconsequences of such a
practice. What may be a solution for a particular indi-vidual in
certain circumstances may not be so at the social level, insofar as
it stillleaves intact the structures of gender inequality that
present women with fewoptions but to have plastic surgery. The
criticism of the practice of cosmeticsurgery, then, is not directed
at the individual women who undergo it, but ratherat the social and
cultural system which engenders in women a state of
permanentdissatisfaction with their physical appearance. The point
is not to morallycondemn those women who choose to have cosmetic
surgery, but rather, toexpose the inequities of a society which
necessitates such a practice in the firstplace.
The source of Davis’s neglect of the structural/systemic factors
underlyingwomen’s dissatisfaction with their bodies is her concern
to give due weight to theagency of individuals – a concern which
she shares with a number of recent post-structuralist theorists who
have found unsatisfactory the previous models ofpower as monolithic
and oppressive. However, while she is correct to point outthe
inadequacies of a conception of human subjects as totally passive
victims, shetends to overstate the degree to which individuals are
able to actively intervene inthe system and construct meanings that
run counter to those of the dominantideology. While individuals
certainly do reinterpret cultural practices in wayswhich are at
odds with their dominant meanings, the fact remains that
somemeanings continue to have predominance over others because not
everyone hasequal access to or control over the resources needed to
realize their interpre-tations.
Susan Bordo makes a similar point in the introduction to her
book Unbear-able Weight (1993). Critical of the tendency by a
number of recent post-structuralist theorists to over-emphasize the
degree of creative agency exercisedby individuals, she points out
that, while it is too simplistic to regard individualsas cultural
‘dopes’, nevertheless there are still significant constraints on
the degreeto which individuals can subvert the dominant ideology.
As she writes:
. . . the fact that cultural resistance is continual does not
mean it is on an equal footing withforms that are culturally
entrenched. . . . [I]n contemporary Western constructions of
beautythere are dominant, strongly ‘normalizing’ (racial and
gendered) forms to contend with. Tostruggle effectively against the
coerciveness of those forms it is first necessary to recognize
thatthey have dominance, and not to efface such recognition through
a facile and abstractcelebration of ‘heterogeneity’, ‘difference’,
‘subversive reading’ and so forth. (1993: 29)
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She continues:
Some forms of postmodern feminism . . . are distressingly at one
with the culture in celebratingthe creative agency of individuals
and denying systemic pattern. It seems to me that feministtheory
has taken a very strange turn indeed when plastic surgery can be
described, as it has beenby Kathy Davis, as ‘first and foremost . .
. about taking one’s life into one’s own hands’. (1993:31)1
Thus, while women who undergo cosmetic surgery may seek to have
changeswhich do not conform to patriarchally and racially defined
norms of femininebeauty, nevertheless, the degree of control that
they have in defining the natureof the facial or bodily
modifications they desire is limited. Ultimately, they are inthe
hands of surgeons whose training has been based on a white, Western
ideal ofbeauty. As Balsamo points out (1996: 58–63), although they
work with faces thatare individually distinct, surgeons use the
codified measurements that are laid outin their training manuals as
guidelines for determining treatment goals andattempt to bring the
distinctive face into alignment with artistic ideals ofsymmetry and
proportion. These ideals, as Balsamo shows, are based on a
white,Western aesthetic of feminine beauty. In this regard she
cites (1996: 59) the volumeProportions of the Aesthetic Face
published by the American Academy of FacialPlastic and
Reconstructive Surgery and widely used by plastic surgeons.
Thepurpose of this book, according to its authors, is to document
objectively theguidelines for facial symmetry and proportion. In
actual fact, however, the ‘idealface’ depicted throughout this book
is of a white woman whose face is perfectlysymmetrical in line and
profile. The only illustration of a male face is containedin the
glossary. Furthermore, while the authors acknowledge that ‘bone
structureis different in all racial identities’ and that ‘surgeons
must acknowledge that racialqualities are appreciated differently
in various cultures’, in the end they argue that‘the facial form
[should be] able to confer harmony and aesthetic appeal regard-less
of race’ (quoted in Balsamo, 1996: 60). Implicitly, then, the
authors suggestthat non-white faces can be evaluated in terms of
ideal proportions determinedby the measurement of Caucasian faces.
This point is reinforced by Gilman, who,in his book Making the Body
Beautiful (1999), develops at great length the racialassumptions
behind Western ideals of beauty. It is not surprising, then, that
it israre for cosmetic operations to depart radically from white,
Western ideals offeminine beauty, even where the patients
themselves desire an appearance thatdoes not conform with such
conventions.
Morgan points out the paradox of women’s use of cosmetic surgery
as a meansof escaping the constraints of the ‘given’. As she argues
(1991: 38), while womenseek to gain independence through this
process, the net result is an increasingdependence on male
assessment and on the services of all those experts they
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initially bought to render them independent. Likewise, Gilman
observes: ‘Whenwe turn to the physician, we demonstrate our
autonomy and abdicate it simul-taneously’ (1999: 334). Another
paradox arising out of the practice of cosmeticsurgery, which Davis
overlooks, is that while it ostensibly enables women to feelan
embodied sense of self, at the same time it is premised on the very
alienationfrom the body it is supposed to overcome. For what makes
possible such apractice in the first place is a separation of the
mind from the body, in which thebody is seen as something that can
be manipulated at will. As Balsamo (1996:56–7) points out, plastic
surgery is premised on a distanciation from the body,which is
viewed as an object that can be fragmented into isolated parts,
capableof transformation. Davis herself acknowledges this, in her
account of particularcase studies where the recipients
compartmentalized their bodies into segments,some of which they
regarded as satisfactory, while others were in need of
remedialwork. As she writes, with each woman she interviewed:
Hated body parts were dissociated from the rest of her body as
objects – ‘those things’,‘mountains of fat’, ‘sagging knockers’.
They were described as pieces of flesh which had beenimposed upon
her – inanimate and yet acting against her. They became something
which eachwoman wanted to, literally, cut out of her life. (1995:
74)
And the sense of self-embodiment apparently achieved after
cosmetic surgery wasalso subsequently qualified by some recipients,
for example, Diana, of whomDavis writes: ‘Cosmetic surgery may have
transformed her into “just a nice face”,but she retains the
emptiness and sense that she will never be “completely one”with
herself’ (1995: 108).
It appears, then, that the notion of cosmetic surgery as an act
of self-empower-ment needs to be treated with more circumspection
than Davis does, despite allthe qualifications she makes to her
defence of this practice.
While Davis provides a guarded support for the practice of
cosmetic surgeryas a way for individual women to alleviate the
suffering endured from theirexperience of alienation from their
bodies, she stops short of advocating itsredeployment as a
political weapon to challenge dominant ideals of femininebeauty.2
However, a number of feminists have recently canvassed such a
possi-bility, including Morgan, Balsamo and Orlan. It is to them
that I now turn.
Cosmetic Surgery is not a Tool of Political Critique
Although Morgan and Balsamo are highly critical of cosmetic
surgery as it iscurrently practised, they see a potential for its
redeployment for feministpurposes. For both Morgan and Balsamo, the
revolutionary potential of cosmeticsurgery lies in its capacity to
highlight the fact that the body is a cultural construct
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rather than a natural entity, which is fixed and immutable. They
see it as a toolthat can be used to deconstruct the notion of a
unified and unchanging self,replacing it with a performative
conception of the self as being in a constant stateof
transmutation.
Influential for both Morgan and Balsamo have been the ideas of
DonnaHaraway, particularly her championing of the figure of the
cyborg – half-humanand half-machine – as the new model for a
liberated conception of the self (1991:149–81). Traditionally, in
Western culture, the body has been regarded as abiological given
whose organic integrity is inviolable. It has been associated
withthe innate, the immutable or the God-given. However, the advent
of new bio-technologies such as IVF, genetic engineering and
cosmetic surgery, whichprovide us with an unprecedented capacity to
intervene in and re-fashion ourbodies, has radically changed our
conception of the body as an unalterable fact ofnature. Rather than
being seen as determined by nature, the body is increasinglycoming
to be regarded as a social and cultural construct, capable of
radical trans-formation. Against those who seek to preserve the
integrity of the body from theencroachment of technology, Haraway
argues that such interventions can beproductive of fruitful new
conjunctions, which disrupt the rigid oppositionsbetween
human/machine, nature/culture, male/female, etc. – dualisms that
havebeen ‘systemic to the logics and practices of domination of
women, people ofcolour, nature, workers and animals’ (1991: 177).
While there are some feministswho decry the technological
intervention into women’s bodies,3 Harawaybelieves that women
should embrace these technologies and learn to use them fortheir
own ends. If they refuse to do so, they run the risk of reiterating
thetraditional patriarchal binarism which aligns women with nature
and opposesthem to culture. As Haraway writes:
From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final
appropriation of women’s bodies in amasculinist orgy of war. From
another, a cyborg world might be about lived social and
bodilyrealities in which people are not afraid of their joint
kinship with animals and machines, notafraid of permanently partial
identities and contradictory standpoints. The political struggle
isto see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both
dominations and possibilitiesunimaginable from the other vantage
point. (1991: 154)
In opposition to the idea of organic holism, then, Haraway
argues for a notion ofthe body as a hybrid entity whose contours
are permeable and constantlymutating as it enters into new linkages
with the non-organic. Rather than treatingtechnology as the enemy,
it should be regarded as an aspect of our embodiment.She sees such
a conception as underpinning a new understanding of the self
asfluid and open to constant change rather than as fixed and
immutable and goesso far as to entertain the possibility of a
post-gender world where gender distinc-tions will be
transcended.4
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Balsamo and Morgan both believe that cosmetic surgery could be
one meansby which the organic unity of the subject could be
destabilized. Already incontemporary society, as Balsamo notes, the
body and technology are conjoinedin a literal sense – machines
assume organic functions and the body is materiallyredesigned
through the application of newly developed technologies. She
writesthat:
. . . the ‘natural’ body has been dramatically re-fashioned
through the application of new tech-nologies of corporeality. By
the end of the 1980s the idea of the merger of the biological
withthe technological has infiltrated the imagination of Western
culture where the ‘technologicalhuman’ has become a familiar
figuration of the subject of postmodernity. . . . This merger
relieson a re-conceptualisation of the human body as a
‘techno-body’, a boundary figure belongingsimultaneously to at
least two previously incompatible systems of meaning –
the‘organic/natural’ and the ‘technological/cultural’. (1996:
5)
With the widespread technological re-fashioning of the ‘natural’
human body, shesuggests, there is a potential for gender boundaries
to be blurred or reconstructed.While she acknowledges that, at
present, bio-technologies such as cosmeticsurgery are employed to
vigilantly guard gender boundaries and to present themas natural
rather than as culturally constructed, nevertheless, they offer the
possi-bility for radically redefining who we are (1996: 78–9).
Instead of effacing itsintervention in the reconstruction of bodies
as it currently does in an endeavourto create a ‘natural’ look,
cosmetic surgery could be employed in such a way asto emphasize the
artificiality of beauty and to disrupt the present cultural
codingof the female body as ‘natural’. It offers the possibility of
new forms of embodi-ment which defy the natural givenness of
physical gender identity. The surgicallyre-fashioned face and body
need not necessarily be the mark of an oppressedsubjectivity,
according to Balsamo, but could be used as a way of
challengingpatriarchal conceptions of beauty as exemplified by the
anti-aesthetic of cyber-punk (where body piercing and other forms
of prosthesis are employed) andgrunge fashion.
Like Balsamo, Morgan considers that cosmetic surgery could be a
useful meansfor unmasking the dominant ideals of feminine beauty as
cultural artefacts ratherthan as natural properties of the female
body (1991: 44–7). She sees it as havingthe potential to
destabilize the naturalized categories of masculinity and
feminin-ity by highlighting the fact that gender is a performance
rather than a biologicallydetermined given. Employed in a parodic
way, the techniques and procedures ofcosmetic surgery could be used
to magnify the role that technology plays in theconstruction of
femininity. One way in which this could be achieved would bethrough
the use of surgical techniques to produce what is normally
perceived asugly (e.g. sagging breasts and wrinkles), thereby
upsetting the cultural constraints
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upon women to comply with the norms of beauty and throwing into
questionwhat is traditionally considered as beautiful. In reply to
the objection that havingoneself surgically ‘disfigured’ as a
political statement seems rather extreme,Morgan argues that:
. . . if we cringe from contemplating this alternative, this
may, in fact, testify . . . to the hold thatthe beauty imperative
has on our imagination and our bodies. If we recoil from this lived
alter-ation of the contours of our bodies and regard it as
‘mutilation’, then so, too, ought we to shirkfrom contemplation of
the cosmetic surgeons who de-skin and alter the contours of
women’sbodies so that we become more and more like athletic or
emaciated (depending on what’s invogue) mannequins with large
breasts in the shop windows of modern patriarchal culture. Inwhat
sense are these not equivalent mutilations? (1991: 46)
As more women gain knowledge of the techniques of cosmetic
surgery, so itbecomes possible for them to usurp men’s control over
these technologies andundermine the power dynamic which makes women
dependent on male exper-tise.
While Balsamo and Morgan have canvassed the possibility of the
feminist rede-ployment of cosmetic surgery in theory, the French
performance artist Orlan hassought to do this in practice. In 1990
she embarked on a project, The UltimateMasterpiece: The
Reincarnation of Saint Orlan, involving a number of cosmeticsurgery
operations designed to transform her face in ways that destabilized
male-defined notions of idealized female beauty (see Hirschhorn,
1996: 110–34, for auseful account of Orlan’s practice). In an
endeavour to convert plastic surgeryfrom an instrument of
domination into a means for re-inventing her own bodyand creating
her own self-portrait, Orlan produced her own blueprints for
thesurgeons to follow. She also refused a general anaesthetic so
that she could stage-manage the actual operations themselves,
transforming what is normally a medicalprocedure carried out behind
closed doors into a theatrical performance whichfeatured the
reading of psychoanalytic and literary texts, interactive
communi-cation with an often international audience via fax and
live satellite telecast, music,dance and outlandish costumes often
designed by famous couturiers.
Her blueprints consisted of computer composites, combining her
own facialfeatures with those derived from five famous Renaissance
and post-Renaissanceimages of women – the nose of an unattributed
sculpture of Diana from the schoolof Fontainebleau; the mouth of
Boucher’s Europa; the forehead of da Vinci’sMona Lisa; the chin of
Botticelli’s Venus and the eyes of Gérôme’s Psyche.
Theserepresentations were chosen not just for their physical
attributes but also for theirmythological or historical importance.
Thus, Diana was selected because she wasa goddess who refused to
submit to the gods and men; Europa because she lookedto another
continent and embraced an unknown future; the Mona Lisa because
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of her androgyny; Venus because of her association with
fertility and creativity;and Psyche because of her desire for love
and spiritual beauty.
While these five works have traditionally been regarded as icons
of femininebeauty, Orlan sought to transform their original
significance through her appro-priation and re-contextualization of
their facial features. Thus, whereas main-stream cosmetic surgery
tends to erase the distinctive features of individual facesin an
endeavour to make them conform with a prototypical image of the
ideal,Orlan’s composite face emphasizes what is unique and
idiosyncratic to each face.By combining distinctive elements from
each face, she seeks to disturb the notionof the perfected, the
fixed and the standardized, producing a result which is atodds with
conventional ideals of beauty. As Moss puts it:
. . . [Orlan] (re)imagines an image under different
circumstances from the artist’s originaryimpulse and reappropriates
and dissimulates constituents of the ideal face feature by feature.
Sheundoes her face in an alternate visioning and estranges, makes
strange, each master’s imagisticaccretions – memory, fantasy,
fetish, story and the rhetoric of woman and beauty. (1999: 1–2)
Orlan’s disruption of conventional ideals of feminine beauty is
even moreapparent in her seventh, eighth and ninth operations –
known as her ‘Omnipres-ence’ series – which involved implants into
the upper cheeks and the sides of theforehead to give the
impression of budding horns.
An important element of Orlan’s project is the making public of
the actualoperation and its immediate aftermath. As well as
televising the surgical processitself, Orlan has produced a series
of post-operative photographs revealing all thebruising and wounds
from her surgery, and also a series of ‘reliquaries’ consist-ing in
‘souvenirs’ from her operations such as blood-stained gauze, bits
of herbone and fat removed through liposuction. Her purpose here is
to confront allthose taboos that surround the violation of the
integrity of the body in Westernculture.
What is particularly disturbing about her work is that the main
site of thisviolation is her face, which, in Western culture, is
taken as emblematic of our self-identity. As Deleuze and Guattari
argue (1988: 167–91), only in the West do weoperate with a
conception of the face as the seat and expression of a unique
subjec-tivity. In our culture, the face is deemed the most precious
characteristic of humanidentity and therefore enjoys a privileged
status in relation to the rest of the body.It becomes the site of
signification and subjectification. To quote them:
Certain assemblages of power (pouvoir) require the production of
a face, others do not. If weconsider primitive societies, we see
that there is very little that operates through the face:
theirsemiotic is nonsignifying, nonsubjective, essentially
collective, polyvocal and corporeal, playingon very diverse forms
and substances. (1988: 175; emphasis in original)
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They continue: ‘Paintings, tattoos, or marks on the skin embrace
the multi-dimensionality of bodies. Even masks ensure the head’s
belonging to the body,rather than making it a face’ (1988: 176). By
contrast, in the West, bodies aresubject to what they call a
process of ‘faciality’ whereby they are constituted asunique
subjects endowed with psychic interiority through the imposition of
theconcept of the ‘face’ upon them.
The operations undergone by Orlan, where the face is literally
peeled awayfrom the body, radically unsettles this identification
of self with face, asHirschhorn argues (1996: 128–9). This is
reinforced by the text that she reads atthe beginning of each of
her operations – an excerpt from Eugenie LemoineLuccioni’s book The
Dress (quoted in Moss, 1999: 10):
Skin is deceiving . . . in life, one only has one’s skin . . .
there is a bad exchange in human relationsbecause one never is what
one has. . . . I have the skin of a crocodile but I am a poodle,
the skinof a black person but I am a white, the skin of a woman,
but I am a man; I never have the skinof what I am. There is no
exception to the rule because I am never what I have.
Furthermore, the constant re-configurations of her face to
incorporate a pasticheof elements derived from other faces,
highlight the socially constructed nature ofthe face and undermine
any notion of identity as stable and unified (Griggers,1997: 29–30,
makes this point). As Moss comments à propos of Orlan’s
practice:
Through her transgression of facial boundaries Orlan confronts
each spectator’s understandingsand psychical investment in the face
as a site for the imaging of self. Orlan’s disruptive
practicenegates the social inscriptions of power that accept or
deny the non-conforming face. Her faceis a non-face, multiple,
shifting and hybridised from different visions and competing
imagin-ings. (1999: 3)
The totally artificial and fluctuating nature of Orlan’s face is
reinforced by heradoption of the name Orlan, which, as Moss points
out: ‘evokes allusions to thesynthetic – the material Orlon, to
masquerade – the French cosmetic brandOrlane, to gender fluidity –
the Maid of Orleans (Joan of Arc) and VirginiaWoolf’s Orlando, and
the malleability of gold – d’or’ (1999: 2). Far from denotinga
particular identity, her name connotes its infinite
malleability.
As with Balsamo and Morgan, then, the employment of cosmetic
surgery byOrlan is seen by interpreters of her work as subversive
insofar as it ‘de-natural-izes’ the body and de-stabilizes the
fixity of identity. Such a defence of cosmeticsurgery presents a
marked contrast to that of Davis. Whereas, for Davis, the valueof
cosmetic surgery lies in its ability to enable some women to
achieve a sense ofself-embodiment, for Balsamo, Morgan and Orlan,
its value lies precisely in itsdisarticulation of the unity of the
self.5 The question still remains, however, as towhether such a
re-deployment of cosmetic surgery is as emancipatory as itpurports
to be.
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One of the main problems arising out of the conceptualization of
cosmeticsurgery as an instrument enabling ‘the staging of cultural
identities’ is that it failsto give due weight to the materiality
of the body. This is something of a paradox,given the criticisms
that postmodern theorists have made of mainstream philos-ophy and
social theory for their neglect of the body. While the body has
movedcentre-stage in postmodern theory, its existence as a
natural/physical entity hasbeen all but totally erased by its
conceptualization as a social and culturalconstruct. In rejecting
the notion of the body as a biological given determined bynature,
postmodern theorists have swung to the other extreme in regarding
thebody as almost infinitely malleable. Thus, for instance, Orlan
goes so far as to saythat, with the advent of technologies such as
cosmetic surgery, which enable theradical re-fashioning of the
body, the natural body is obsolete (Hirschhorn, 1996:120). She
describes her body as ‘a sack or costume to be shed’ (Rose, 1993:
86),declaring that her work ‘is a struggle against: the innate, the
inexorable, theprogrammed, Nature, DNA (which is our direct rival
as . . . artists of represen-tation) and God!’ (cited in Goodall,
1999: 152). In doing so, she accepts uncriti-cally the idea that
technology can transcend all bodily limits and tends todownplay the
fact that we are defined by certain inescapable biological
constraintsand processes, such as ageing and dying, which, although
culturally mediated,cannot be eliminated. While Jane Goodall (1999:
152) defends Orlan’s declarationof the obsolescence of the body as
a radical undermining of the patriarchalidentification of women
with their bodies, I would argue that it partakes ofanother
patriarchal myth – namely that of the transcendence of nature
throughtechnology.6
Likewise, Haraway’s notion of the cyborg, in which the natural
and the arti-ficial are indistinguishable, encourages a view of the
transcendence of the naturalbody by technology. As she writes: ‘Any
objects or persons can be reasonablythought of in terms of
disassembly and reassembly; no “natural” architecturesconstrain
system design’ (1991: 162). Contrary to Balsamo’s claim (1996:
33–4)that Haraway’s notion of the cyborg reasserts the materiality
of the body insofaras it does not treat the body simply as a
discursive construct as some versions ofpostmodern theory do, I
would argue that it perpetuates the de-materializationof the body
in its treatment of it as not subject to any material limits.
Rather thanovercoming the dichotomy between the human and the
machine, what hasoccurred with the figure of the cyborg is a
reduction of the human to the machine,where the body is treated as
a non-sentient thing that can be manipulated in thesame way as
inorganic matter. Symptomatic of this is the replacement of
organicby mechanical metaphors in post-structuralist discussions of
the body,
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particularly in the writings of Deleuze and Guattari who speak
of bodies as‘assemblages’, ‘desiring machines’, etc. As they
write:
There is no such thing as either man or nature now, only a
process that produces the one withinthe other and couples the
machines together. Producing-machines, desiring-machines
every-where, schizophrenic machines, all of species life: the self
and the non-self, outside and inside,no longer have any meaning
whatsoever. (1983: 2)
Thus, despite the great preoccupation with the body in
postmodern theory, thereis at the same time, a profound
estrangement from it. ‘The body becomes an alien-ated product . . .
from which we maintain a strange and ironic detachment’, asBordo
puts it (1993: 288). This is made quite explicit by Orlan, who
regards herbody as mere matter which can be manipulated at will. As
she herself says, shehas always felt distanced from her body and
consequently is somewhat indiffer-ent to the image produced by it
(Hirschhorn, 1996: 122). In contrast to JulieClarke (1999: 188),
who interprets Orlan’s operations as a reinstatement of
thecorporeality of the body in an age where the electronic imaging
and coding of thebody has all but displaced ‘real’ flesh and blood,
I see Orlan’s work as perpetu-ating this postmodern alienation from
the body. For while Orlan alters her bodyin a directly physical way
(rather than simply through virtual manipulation), herpractice in
no way undermines the belief that the body is almost
infinitelymalleable.7 Likewise Balsamo, although apparently more
circumspect than Orlanwith regard to the technological
transcendence of the ‘natural’ body (1996: 2,77–8), proposes that
cosmetic surgery be thought of as ‘fashion surgery’ (1996:78) – a
suggestion which implies that it is just as easy to surgically
transform thebody as it is to change the clothes one wears.
As a result of this neglect of the materiality of the body,
there is a tendency todiscount the risks and suffering involved in
the practice of cosmetic surgery. AsMorgan comments for instance:
‘although submitting to the procedures ofcosmetic surgery involves
pain, risks, undesirable side effects . . . it is also fairlyclear
that, most of the time, the pain and risks are relatively
short-term’ (1991:50).8 Similarly, Orlan is quite nonchalant about
the pain she endures, declaringthat the audience experiences more
pain watching her undergoing surgery thanshe does. However, as
Davis points out:
This nonchalance is belied by the post-operative faces of the
artist – proceeding from swollenand discoloured to, several months
later, pale and scarred. Whether a woman has her wrinklessmoothed
out surgically or carved in has little effect on the pain she feels
during the surgery.Such models, therefore, presuppose a
non-sentient female body – a body which feels no pain.(1997:
178)
The fact that Orlan has had one botched operation is also
glossed over by her.
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Another problem arising from the promotion of the surgical
re-styling of thebody by Balsamo, Morgan and Orlan is that they
overlook the extent to whichthis is complicit with the
commodification of the body within contemporaryconsumer culture. As
Joanne Finkelstein has pointed out, with the increasingavailability
of surgical and other techniques for altering appearance, the body
hascome to be treated as a commodity in constant need of upgrading.
In her words:‘It is as if the body were a utensil – a car, a
refrigerator, a house – which can becontinuously upgraded and
modified in accord with new interests and greaterresources’ (1991:
87). Similarly, Bordo points out the resemblance between
thepost-structuralist conception of the body as infinitely
transformable and thecosmetic surgery industry’s advocacy of the
idea of the body as something whichcan be sculpted at will. Writes
Bordo:
Gradually and surely, a technology that was first aimed at the
replacement of malfunctioningparts has generated an industry and an
ideology fuelled by fantasies of rearranging, transform-ing and
correcting; an ideology of limitless improvement and change,
defying the historicity, themortality and indeed, the very
materiality of the body. In place of that materiality we now
havewhat I will call the cultural plastic. . . . This disdain for
material limits and the concomitantintoxication with freedom,
changes and self determination are enacted not only on the level
ofthe contemporary technology of the body but in a wide range of
contexts including muchcontemporary discourse on the body, both
popular and academic. (1993: 245–6)
Contrary to Goodall’s claim (1999: 157) that the idea that one
can remake one’sown body according to one’s own will is deeply
heretical, such a belief is nowwidely endorsed and promoted by the
fashion industry. While once it posed afundamental challenge to
Christianity’s belief in the inviolability of the divinelycreated
human form, such a conviction no longer has wide currency.
Even though Balsamo, Morgan and Orlan envisage a different mode
of self-transformation from that currently practised by the
cosmetic surgery industry,nevertheless they still remain within the
same parameters insofar as they treat thebody as an instrument to
be continuously modified through technological means.Indeed, Morgan
suggests the establishment of ‘Beautiful Body Boutique’ fran-chises
to advertise and market a range of services and products for body
modifi-cation which parody those currently offered by the cosmetic
surgery industrysuch as freeze-dried fat cells for fat implantation
and transplant (1991: 46). Whileher intention here is subversive of
the mainstream cosmetic industry, neverthelessit still participates
in the commodification of the body. Likewise, the
convergencebetween Orlan’s attitude towards the body and that of
the fashion industry isindicated by the fact that her practices of
body modification are starting to beemulated by some in the fashion
world (as pointed out by Ayers, 1999: 180). Inthe process, she,
like Morgan and Balsamo, leaves unexamined the question as to
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why it is that the body has become so significant to our
self-identity and theconsequences of this.
As Giddens points out (1991: 5–8, 99–102), it is only under the
conditions ofhigh modernity that the body has become a
self-reflexive project, integral to oursense of who we are. Whereas
in traditional societies, the body was regarded aspart of nature,
only marginally subject to human intervention, in
contemporaryWestern society, we have become responsible for the
design of our own bodies.As the body has moved away from the sphere
of nature into the sphere of culture,the ‘natural’ functions of the
body such as defecation, ageing and dying have beenincreasingly
hidden from view. Furthermore, while in pre-modern societies,
thebody modifications that did occur were governed by traditional,
ritualizedmeanings, the body in modernity has been secularized and
is more frequentlytreated as a phenomenon to be fashioned as an
expression of an individual’sidentity rather than in accordance
with some traditionally given system ofmeaning. This is
particularly the case with women who, even more so than men,are
defined in terms of their physical appearance.
Shilling suggests (1994: 2–4) that this growing investment in
the body asconstitutive of self-identity is symptomatic of the
decline of transpersonalmeaning structures such as those offered by
religion or by grand political narra-tives. In a context where
there no longer exist shared systems of meaning whichconstruct and
sustain existential and ontological certainties residing outside of
theself, individuals have turned towards the body as a foundation
on which to recon-struct a reliable sense of self. The
commodification of the body within contem-porary Western society,
then, is a consequence of this focus on the body as thesource of
our identity. It also serves to reinforce this preoccupation with
the bodyby promoting its constant transformation in accordance with
the latest fashiontrends. Paradoxically, however, as our capacity
to re-fashion our bodies increaseswith the advances in surgical
procedures and other bio-technologies, our sense ofwho we are
becomes less and less certain. As Shilling writes:
We now have the means to exert an unprecedented degree of
control over our bodies, yet weare also living in an age which has
thrown into doubt our certainty of what our bodies are andhow we
should control them. The basic dynamic working behind this paradox
can be traced tothe reflexivity of modernity: the greater the
knowledge we gain about our bodies and how tocontrol them, the more
is our certainty undermined about what the body is and how it
shouldbe controlled. (1994: 183)
While science has provided us with the means by which to
transform our bodies,it is unable to give us any guidance as to how
these means should be employed.To quote Shilling once again: ‘As
science facilitates greater degrees of interventioninto the body,
it destabilises our knowledge of what bodies are and runs ahead
of
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our ability to make moral judgements about how far science
should be allowedto reconstruct the body’ (1994: 4).
That is why, for many, the surgical re-fashioning of their
bodies becomes anever-ending process, as they engage in an
impossible search for an identity whichis forever beyond reach.
Even in the case of a more critically engaged applicationof
cosmetic surgery as advocated by Orlan et al., the process becomes
an infiniteone of deconstruction of existing cultural identities
without any clearly definedalternatives. Orlan has already
undergone several operations and there appears tobe no end in
sight.9 The continual transformations of identity promoted byOrlan,
Balsamo and Morgan can be seen as a way of avoiding the issue of
whowe are, rather than as offering a solution to it. Their refusal
to embody anypositioned subjectivity at all simply defers
indefinitely the necessity ofconfronting the question of
self-definition. As such, it can be seen as a symptomof, rather
than an answer to, the dilemmas to which bio-technologies such
ascosmetic surgery have given rise. While a conception of the self
as fixed andunchanging is stultifying, the advocacy of a constantly
mutating self is equallydisabling, for, without a sense of
continuity, it is impossible to act effectively inthe world (Best
and Kellner, 1991: 211 and 290 develop this point further). AsFlax
points out, the decentring of the subject is not wholly positive
since it canlead to a dislocation from history and a sense of
political and intellectual vertigoand paralysis (1991: 218–19). As
a therapist, Flax is very much aware of the terrorthat literally
decentred selves endure, as well as the limitations of the
fragmentedand heterogeneous subjectivity of post-structuralist
theory as a principle forhuman action.
The irony of the postmodern attack on subjectivity is that it is
occurringduring an era when women are beginning to experience
themselves as ‘self-determining’ subjects for the first time. As
Nancy Hartsock writes:
Why is it, just at the moment in Western history when previously
silenced populations havebegun to speak for themselves and on
behalf of their subjectivities, that the concept of thesubject and
the possibility of discovering/creating a liberating ‘truth’ become
suspect? . . . Thepostmodern suspicion of the subject effectively
prohibits the exploration of (a repressed)subjectivity by and on
behalf of women. (quoted in Di Stefano, 1990: 75)
Paradoxically, it is only those who already have a secure sense
of their ownidentity who can afford to entertain the possibility of
its dissolution. In the wordsof Nancy Miller (quoted in Modleski,
1991: 22), ‘only those who have it can playwith not having it’. As
Morgan herself acknowledges:
Women who are increasingly immobilised bodily through physical
weakness, passivity, with-drawal and domestic sequestration in
situations of hysteria, agoraphobia and anorexia cannotpossibly
engage in radical gender performatives of an active public sort or
in other acts by which
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the feminist subject is robustly constituted. In contrast,
healthy women who have a feministunderstanding of cosmetic surgery
are in a situation to deploy cosmetic surgery in the name ofits
feminist potential for parody and protest. (1991: 45)
This point is reiterated by Davis, who comments: . . . the
visions presented by both Orlan and Morgan involve women who are
clearly unaffectedby the crippling constraints of femininity. They
are not dissatisfied with their appearance asmost women are; nor
indeed do they seem to care what happens to their bodies at all.
(1997:179)
Finally, a further problem with the advocacy of cosmetic surgery
as a politicalweapon is that it effaces the social inequalities
within which such body trans-formations occur. As Bordo (1993: 247)
points out, the surgical re-fashioning ofthe body is not an option
that is equally available to everyone but requiresconsiderable
economic means. As such, it is a rather ‘aristocratic’ form of
revolt,which can only be engaged in by those who have the freedom
from economicneed to be able to contemplate and realize different
forms of embodiment.Likewise, Felski argues that economic privilege
serves as a fundamental pre-requisite for the self-conscious
experimentation with different forms of bodyappearance. As she
writes: ‘The cultivation of a self consciously
aestheticizedpersonality presumes a certain distance from the realm
of immediate need; noteveryone can live life as a work of art’
(1995: 201).
Conclusion
As can be seen from the above then, the ‘rehabilitation’ of
cosmetic surgery withinrecent feminist theory and practice is
somewhat problematic. In the case of Davis,her guarded ‘defence’ of
cosmetic surgery leaves unchallenged the social struc-tures of
inequality responsible for women’s dissatisfaction with their
bodies. Herconception of cosmetic surgery as a ‘solution’ in
certain circumstances, ispremised on the acceptance of the
parameters of the given system as unalterable.While Balsamo, Morgan
and Orlan envisage a more radical deployment ofcosmetic surgery,
which contravenes the conventions governing its present
appli-cation, nevertheless, they too continue to operate within its
terms in certainrespects. In particular, they share with the
cosmetic surgery industry its instru-mentalization of the body as
mere matter that is almost infinitely transformable.
In making such criticisms, I am not speaking from the point of
view of a nostal-gic Romanticism that argues for the preservation
of the organic integrity of thebody, but simply sounding a
cautionary note against uncritically embracing thecyborg as an
emblem of a liberated humanity. While the notion of the
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organic/natural body ‘untainted’ by technology is untenable, so
too is the notionof the cyborg where the distinction between the
human and the machine iseffaced. At the same time as the simple
refusal of all technological interventionsin the body is both
unrealistic and undesirable, one should not lose sight of
thedangers of placing too much faith in the surgical re-fashioning
of the body.
Notes1. Significantly, in her article ‘ “A Dubious Equality”:
Men, Women and Cosmetic Surgery’ (2002),
Davis pays much more attention to the social structures of
gender inequality within which the tech-nologies, practices and
discourses of cosmetic surgery operate than in her book (1995).
2. Indeed, she is critical of this (see Davis, 1997: 176–80).3.
Haraway has in mind here eco-feminists such as Carolyn Merchant,
Susan Griffin, Audre Lorde
and Adrienne Rich (see Haraway, 1991: 154, 174).4. Deleuze and
Guattari (1983: ch. 1) advocate a similar re-conceptualization of
the self. Like
Haraway, they are opposed to the notion of the body as a unified
organism, proposing instead theconcept of the ‘body without organs’
(following Artaud), where the body is no longer experienced asan
integrated whole which is centrally organized, but as a series of
non-hierarchically linked partswhich are constantly entering into
linkages with other loosely connected assemblages – both humanand
non-human, animate and inanimate. In contrast to the notion of the
organism with hermeticallysealed boundaries, they propose a
conception of a body that is forever open to new connections and
isconstantly reconfiguring itself. In a world where there no longer
appear to be distinct entities withclearly defined boundaries, the
old binary oppositions between the human and the non-human,
theanimate and the inanimate, subject and object, etc. are no
longer relevant. All have the same ontologicalstatus. For them, a
liberated practice is one that opposes all coagulations and
rigidifications into a stableand unified entity. The aim should be
to transcend identity and subjectivity, fragmenting and freeingup
lines of flight, ‘liberating’ multiplicities, corporeal and
otherwise, that identity subsumes under theone.
5. Orlan is not entirely consistent on this point. As Davis
points out (1997: n. 11, 180), while Orlanhas been cited as a model
for postmodern notions of identity, she still at some points
continues tooperate with a notion of the sovereign subject more
akin to the existentialist concept of self than thatof Butler
(1989).
6. Elsewhere in the same article, Goodall puts forward a
somewhat different argument suggestingthat Orlan’s rhetoric about
transcending bodily limits should not be taken at face value, since
therhetoric is belied by her actual performances which strip the
dream of a ‘post-biological’ world of itsappeal through the
grotesque display of the body’s interior (1999: 167). But if this
was Orlan’sintention, why does she seek to glamorize her
performances with lavish costumes and props, and toemphasize her
apparent lack of suffering during her operations?
7. As Clarke herself acknowledges later in her article (1999:
195), while on the one hand Orlanstresses corporeality by using her
own body as the material for her art, on the other she disavows
itthrough her re-creation of her body as text.
8. Curiously, earlier on in the same article, where Morgan is
developing her critique of mainstreamcosmetic surgery, she seems
much more concerned about the risks associated with such a practice
(1991:29).
9. While Orlan’s most recent work involves computer
manipulations of her image rather than actualphysical operations,
she has indicated in a recent interview with Ayers (1999: 182–4)
that she intendsto undergo further operations.
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Llewellyn Negrin is Senior Lecturer in and Head of art theory at
the University of Tasmania. She haspublished a number of articles
on fashioning the body and on the role of art and art institutions
in post-modern culture in a variety of journals, including
Philosophy and Social Criticism, Arena Journal,Theory, Culture
& Society, the European Journal of Cultural Studies,
Postcolonial Studies and Hecate.
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