To look better, not younger

The discourses that inscribe the rationalities evoked in the practice of cosmetic surgery by ‘older’ people are explored and critically examined in this chapter. This is a significant site for analysis given Pitt’s (2006: 38) insight that ‘the interior meanings of cosmetic surgery are being inscribed on the bodies of people who get cosmetic surgery as much as their bodies are inscribed by their inner meanings’. Firstly, the reoccurring prefix of ‘re’, as it is evoked in the language of rejuvenation, reversal and renewal, is examined. Through this language ‘anti-ageing’ discourses inscribe ‘ageing’ in the practice of cosmetic surgery in relation to ‘older’ people. Following this, anti-ageing discourses are problematized through a critique of cosmetic surgery as an ageist practice and ‘older’ people who undergo cosmetic surgery as denying ageing. The chapter then pursues the way in which ‘older’ people navigate and problematize normative anti-ageing discourses to provide an account and rationality of cosmetic surgery practice in their own terms. Here the critical impetus offered by a number of participants that cosmetic surgery is undertaken to look better not younger is developed to suggest that ‘older’ people engage with cosmetic surgery as an ethical practice of self-care. Guided by these insights, the discourses deployed in regimens of rationality shaping cosmetic surgery as it is engaged in by ‘older’ people are explored to argue that the forms of rationality associated with cosmetic surgery constitute a contemporary regimen of ‘care of the self ’ in which ethical and governmental imperatives connect through the aesthetics of ‘lifestyle’. This regimen provides the tekhne (Foucault, 2005) for exercising ethical agency and creative self-stylization. However, this analysis also recognizes that aesthetic stylization exists in the context of power relations and as such is a delimited freedom in struggles ‘to both resist disciplinary power matrices and carve out a space for selfempowerment and creative choice’ (Gabardi, 2001: 78). It is from this perspective that claims that cosmetic surgery is undertaken to look ‘better’ and not ‘younger’ gain a political and ethical momentum in resistance to normative discourses of ‘anti-ageing’.