Dubious Equalities and Embodied Differences: Cultural Studies on Cosmetic Surgery.

Dubious Equalities and Embodied Differences: Cultural Studies on Cosmetic Surgery. By Kathy Davis. Pp. 176. Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, Mass. , 2003. Price 21. 95. “Cosmetic surgery is regarded—and rightly so—as a particularly pernicious expression of the disciplinary regimes of the feminine beauty system—as a way, quite literally, to ‘cut women down to size. ’” This quotation from page 59 of Kathy Davis’s new book pretty much sets the tone for this 144-page summation of a feminist’s viewpoint on a subject which has been her special interest for a long time: cosmetic surgery on women. Her previous work, Reshaping the Female Body, has also generated a fair bit of controversy, though I am reasonably sure not as much as this one will. Davis is associate professor of women’s studies and humanities at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. A great deal of her research is based on interviews with Dutch women and the Dutch health system, which in colloquial language is “a whole nother thing. ” She sets out to explore aesthetic surgery as a cultural phenomenon and thus joins a number of scholars in exploring its ingrained, growing popularity. She raises a number of challenging theoretical, moral, ethical, and political issues which would have more validity if they were not so heavily tainted by what appears to this reviewer as unreasonable emphasis on the societal or “externally” imposed parameters imposed on women rather than the “internally” generated ones. (Might this be “cause and effect”? ) Her approach is not the wild-eyed, resentful brand of hostile antimachismo that undermines much of the constructive and reasonably justified feminist causes. Rather, it is a scholarly, scientific, serious overview of what she sees as a biocultural phenomenon. In contrast to most works of this nature, this book is quite readable. It proceeds with a detailed, in-depth examination of various key historical figures in the formative years of aesthetic surgery. You would probably notice the contrast in her treatment of Madame Noel, an early pioneer cosmetic surgeon, and that of Maxwell Maltz and Jaques Joseph, her male counterparts. She puzzles over the inherent conflict between being simultaneously a female surgeon and a feminist, but is still able to accept the social context of the female body as “deficient and in need of constant transformation. ” It would probably have been better to give this review to one of our female colleagues. Though for many years I have been a strong supporter and quite vocal about the gender maldistribution within our specialty, I recently have noted with satisfaction the growing number of female heads in my professional audiences. Davis’s quandary might have been partially resolved had she taken the trouble to interview some of the excellent female members of our specialty. From them she might have understood that the conflicts she examines in her scholarly fashion are really not that complex. As a matter of fact, I would venture to suggest that in the minds of most of our female colleagues, the “gender” question, in the traditional sense, is not a matter of male or female surgeons: they are surgeons period! Whether they wear skirts or pants is totally irrelevant. The fact that our society still differentiates in academic preference, in compensation, in advancement opportunities, in recognizing superior ability, and so on is what remains deplorable. This is a well-written, readable, and thought-provoking book which, despite its obvious gender bias, should stimulate reflection in those male surgeons whose brains are not saturated with testosterone. However, it will doubtless be better understood and appreciated by the women in our midst.