ABSTRACT
On 27 November 2005, the first partial face transplant was carried out on 38-year-old French woman Isabelle Dinoire. Disfigured by a dog bite, Dinoire underwent the 15-hour operation in the city of Amiens under the care of doctors Bernard Devauchelle and Jean-Michel Dubernard. While the circumstances surrounding Dinoire’s operation were widely reported by news outlets around the world, the most authoritative account of them is presented in Noëlle Châtelet’s 300-page book Le baiser d’Isabelle: L’aventure de la première greffe du visage. Based on interviews with the patient and the many specialists who treated her, Le baiser d’Isabelle tells Dinoire’s surgical story. In what follows, I conduct a close reading of this story by considering the events that took place before, during and after Dinoire’s formidable facial reconstruction. Drawing on a variety of social and cultural theories, I examine how Dinoire’s ‘personal troubles’ are bound up with a number of ‘public issues’ relating to subjectivity, embodiment and the medical management of health (Mills 1959). In the end, I argue that to fully understand the implications of Dinoire’s face transplant, we must be prepared to rethink and refigure what it means to be human in an age of advanced biotechnology.
