ABSTRACT
Cosmetic surgery enacts a form of cultural signification where we can examine the literal and material reproduction of ideals of beauty. Where visualization technologies bring into focus isolated body parts and pieces, surgical procedures actually carve into the flesh to isolate parts to be manipulated and resculpted. In this way cosmetic surgery literally transforms the material body into a sign of culture. The discourse of cosmetic surgery offers provocative material for discussing the cultural construction of the gendered body because women are often the intended and preferred subjects of such discourse and men are often the agents performing the surgery. Cosmetic surgery is not simply a discursive site for the “construction of images of women,” but a material site at which the physical female body is surgically dissected, stretched, carved, and reconstructed according to cultural and eminently ideological standards of physical appearance.
