NORMALISATION AND THE PSYCHIC LIFE OF COSMETIC SURGERY

Much earlier feminist discussion of cosmetic surgery situates it within the larger frame of a beauty industry that imposes patriarchal norms of heterosexual, youthful feminine appearance. Although this literature is diverse, it shares the assumption that cosmetic surgery represents an attempt by the individual primarily to conform more closely to a cultural standard of beauty (e.g. Morgan 1998; Wolf 1991). More recently, feminist critics have acknowledged that cosmetic surgery is increasingly represented and experienced as an intervention not only in beauty (understood as superficial, transparently culturally dictated, and conformist) but in identity. That is, cosmetic surgery is concomitantly sold through the more resonant contemporary discourse of becoming one’s true self, having one’s body represent the person one feels one is inside, or being normal (rather than exceptional). To choose cosmetic surgery is to express one’s agency, to take control of one’s life, or to otherwise intervene in one’s lived experience without necessarily being only or even overtly motivated by beauty norms (e.g. Davis 1995, 2003; Gimlin 2006). While to be subservient to beauty norms is most easily parsed as oppression under patriarchy, being invested in self-determination is a subject position with a more ambivalent relationship to feminism. These two emphases in the literature might be understood as successor paradigms, whereby an old interpretive model has been replaced by one that better explains a new lived experience or theorises an emergent political struggle. Instead, I argue that both beauty and identity are always already part of the same phenomenon*namely, that double and contradictory historical process that Foucault calls normalisation, within which developmental standards for populations are deployed to both measure and enforce conformity at the same time as they generate modes of individuality. Normalisation, on this view, both constrains (by compelling compliance with the norm) at the same time as it enables (by making certain forms of subjectivity possible), and, indeed, these two functions cannot be clearly separated. Both compliance and the development of capacities are acted out, in many instances, through the body: we try to make ourselves over to match demanding aesthetic standards, while this process represents itself as externalising an inner authenticity both utterly typical and entirely our own. The first goal of this essay is to develop this insight by showing how it might move feminist discussion past the impasse in the exemplary debate between Susan Bordo and Kathy Davis. I suggest that the latter misses this double effect of normalisation, while the former struggles (as do many of us influenced by Foucault) fully to theorise what I will call (echoing Judith Butler) the ‘psychic life’ of cosmetic surgery. Butler’s interest in the ‘psychic life of power’ challenges the Foucauldian rejection of psychoanalysis, as well as the disinterest in Foucault’s work on the part of theorists of the psyche, to understand together the mutual constitution of social and psychic in the context of power (1997). This