ABSTRACT
Discourses of ageing, anti-ageing and ageism shape a multiplicity of accounts on the rising trend of older people undergoing cosmetic surgery in the international mass media. There are those that position cosmetic surgery within the ‘pursuit of eternal youth’, ‘fear of ageing’ and wanting to ‘deny that we are getting old’ (Ryan, 2001). These buttress well with those that charge cosmetic surgery and its adherents with complicity in societal ageism or ‘a collective social prejudice against getting old and being old’ (Stock, 1996). And, then there are accounts of ‘the latest generation of pensioners as “the new old” who are determined to combat the ageing process by buying youthful brands, adventure holidays and cosmetic surgery’ (N.A., 2005). These latter accounts seem to suggest a radical refusal of ageing and resistance of old age through ‘youthful’ pursuits. Across these media accounts, ideas about whether ageing is being ‘denied’ or ‘combatted’ give rise to ethical concerns framed by a dichotomy in which cosmetic surgery is rendered either an oppressive or liberating practice. Whilst apparently polarized, both accounts reinscribe the ‘ageing’ of the body into the problematization of older people and cosmetic surgery. The dichotomy that underpins these media standpoints mirrors positions on structure and agency within feminist and critical ageing studies scholarship on cosmetic surgery (see Chapter 1). Rather than reproducing these positions in relation to ageing, this chapter provides an approach to understanding cosmetic surgery as a practice that is shaped by norms and provides possibilities for agency. This is strategically important for the cultural politics of ‘older’ because it provides an opportunity for new insights into the cultural spaces in which becoming ‘older’ is possible and the ways in which cosmetic surgery is being appropriated to this task. The depth of engagement offered here in terms of developing such an
approach is ethically important. Much research in the human and social sciences assumes ethical neutrality as if, in Rabinow’s (2003: 8) terms, ‘the reception of objective truth had no necessary consequences for the ethical state of the subject who received it’. Critical of this ethical blind spot, Rabinow (2003: 2) states:
The currently reigning modes of research in the human sciences are, it seems to me, deficient in vital aspects. Those deficiencies are especially marked in the strained relations between an ever-accumulating body of information, the ways that information is given narrative and conceptual form, and how this knowledge fits into a conduct of life.
