Meredith Jones

Bikinis and Bandages: An Itinerary for Cosmetic Surgery Tourism

This paper explores the ways in which cosmetic surgery tourism can be thought of specifically as a tourist experience. We argue that whilst essentially involving travel for the purpose of undertaking painful surgery, cosmetic surgery tourism has a particular resonance with the holiday, most usually constructed as relaxing and restorative. This resonance is connected to the importance in contemporary society of not simply possessing the cultural capital associated with travel knowledge and conspicuous leisure, but of being able to mark that upon and express it through the body. The paper also explores the elements of tourism that seem important to a successful cosmetic surgery tourism experience. These include a sense of place, constituted through cultural and physical proximity or distance, and discursive and physical construction of a destination’s particular characteristics – most usually in terms of the idea of ‘retreat’, care and the ‘friendliness’ of its people. This is connected to the willingness of a range of staff, from surgeons and nurses to interpreters and tour guides, to engage in successful emotional and aesthetic labour; some of these forms of labour are outlined here. The material we draw upon has tended to centre on white, middle-class Western tourists travelling to destinations outside the wealthiest nations for their surgeries. We end with a call for more wide-ranging studies and wonder whether the ‘tourism-ness’ of cosmetic surgery tourism remains central to tourists whose only motivation for travel is finding surgeries at minimal cost.

Makeover culture's dark side: Breasts, death and Lolo Ferrari

The word ‘makeover’ is dotted through popular culture and is applied to a range of activities including home renovation, gardening, urban renewal, and business invigoration. Makeover culture is part of a socio-cultural paradigm that values endless improving, renovating and rejuvenating. Makeover citizens enact urgent and neverending renovations of the self. Cosmetic surgery is both symptom and manufacturer of makeover culture. It is indicative and constitutive of an arena in which ideal objects and subjects are always being improved, and in which everything – including the body – is always ripe for enhancement. This paper focuses on the 1990s French pornography star, Lolo Ferrari. Two aspects of Ferrari’s famous cosmetic surgery are examined. They indicate a darker side of makeover culture – one that is less about lifestyle and surface gloss and more about pornography, death and unconsciousness. The first is her breasts, which I examine in relation to gigantism and normalised notions of femininity, and as symbols of the transition from girl to woman. The second is Ferrari’s striking declaration that she loved being under anaesthetic. I delve into this notion to discuss how immobility, stasis, decay and mortality are crucial parts of makeover culture’s promises of transformation.

Beautiful face, beautiful place: relational geographies and gender in cosmetic surgery tourism websites

Cosmetic surgery tourism is a significant and growing area of medical tourism. This article explores the gendered construction of cosmetic surgery tourism in different geographical locations through an analysis of destination websites in Spain, the Czech Republic and Thailand. We examine the ways in which gender and other intersections of identity interact with notions of space, place and travel to construct particular locations and cosmetic surgery tourist experiences. The relational geographies of skill, regulation and hygiene in discourses of cosmetic surgery risk are also explored. We conclude that accounts producing cosmetic surgery tourism as undifferentiated experience of ‘non-place’ fail to acknowledge the complex constructions of specific destinations in promotional materials targeting international consumers in a global marketplace.

Mutton cut up as lamb: mothers, daughters and cosmetic surgery

Cosmetic surgery is not merely a medical discipline, nor a set of surgical techniques exercised on human bodies. Rather, it is a series of interlocking practices and discourses comprising medical and surgical techniques as well as many media forms such as academic analyses, advertisements, autobiographies, feminist writing, histories, medical literature, popular magazines, and regulatory/legal texts (Davis, 1995, 1998, 2002, 2003a, b; Haiken, 1997; Gilman, 1999; Blum, 2003; Fraser, 2003). My wider project—a PhD dissertation that situates cosmetic surgery as part of what I call our ‘Makeover Culture’—examines the multifarious disciplines, endeavours, industries, cultural logics, and normative values that shape the ongoing construction of contemporary cosmetic surgery. It is impossible to attempt a cultural analysis of cosmetic surgery without paying close attention to the media and cultural products that comment upon and also produce it. It is these products that express the deployment of cosmetic surgery as desirable/undesirable or normal/abnormal; its results as beautiful/ugly; and its experience as excruciating or just mildly uncomfortable. A close-reading approach to a particular set of texts and images works, prism-like, to direct light on some of the broad cultural logics that surround cosmetic surgery. In her excellent book Cosmetic Surgery, Gender and Culture (2003) Suzanne Fraser reflects on how gender and femininity are intrinsically bound up in the various discourses around cosmetic surgery: she helpfully identifies a number of cosmetic surgery genres, including the popular magazine genre (2003, pp. 61–96). Building on Fraser’s scholarly findings I locate a sub-genre inside the magazine genre—the mother/daughter/cosmetic surgery story—and explore it here.

Brief encounters: Assembling cosmetic surgery tourism

This paper reports findings from a large-scale, multi-disciplinary, mixed methods project which explores empirically and theoretically the rapidly growing but poorly understood (and barely regulated) phenomenon of cosmetic surgery tourism (CST). We explore CST by drawing on theories of flows, networks and assemblages, aiming to produce a fuller and more nuanced account of - and accounting for - CST. This enables us to conceptualise CST as an interplay of places, people, things, ideas and practices. Through specific instances of assembling cosmetic surgery that we encountered in the field, and that we illustrate with material from interviews with patients, facilitators and surgeons, our analysis advances understandings and theorisations of medical mobilities, globalisation and assemblage thinking.

Media-bodies and screen-births: Cosmetic surgery reality television

Cosmetic surgery reality television (CSRTV) isnot merelyabout cosmetic surgery, nor merely about reality television: it is a blend of these two areas and hence both media and bodies must be analysed when examining it. I suggest that this genre sits at a nexus of transformed bodies that are at once fleshy and digital, three-dimensional and two-dimensional, on the screen and in the living world. Reality television has been derided as exhibitionistic and banal: a sad indictment of ‘low’ culture at its most superficial. Salman Rushdie famously described it in 2001 as an ‘inverted ethical universe [where] worse is better’ (2001). However, as other writers, including those in this issue show, it is also meaningfully interactive and empowering for audiences (Roscoe 2001). While it is panoptic – self-regulating, disciplining, normalizing – it is also pleasurable and seductive. Indeed, its ‘surveillance is not only tolerated, but frequently sought after’ (McQuire 2003, 116). Further, its mass appeal and global reach are important parts of contemporary culture (Andrejevic 2003; Holmes 2004; Huff 2006; Heller 2007). Similarly, cosmetic surgery entails far more than the common stereotype of a wealthy and vain woman seeking a surgical procedure in order to look younger or more beautiful. It begs questions to do with authenticity, agency, popular culture, and changing meanings of ageing. Cosmetic surgery is intricately entwined with gender construction (Fraser 2003), is often about seeking ‘normality’ rather than beauty (Davis 1995), has very different meanings according to national contexts (Edmonds n.d.) and is part of a growing and global ‘makeover culture’ (Jones 2008). CSRTV has lately been made up of US shows such as Extreme Makeover, The Swan, I Want a Famous Face, and Dr 90210, with other programmes surely to come. The United Kingdom has 10 Years Younger, Japan has Beauty Coliseum, China has Lovely Cinderella. In these programmes reality television and cosmetic surgery are entwined for the purposes of modifying bodies and making entertainment: when surgical modification takes place within the highly surveilled space of reality television some profound intersections occur. I suggest that the bodies modified by CSRTV are ‘media-bodies’ that come about via ‘screen-births’. They traverse

Beauty and the beach: Mapping cosmetic surgery tourism

In this chapter we will: contextualise cosmetic surgery tourism and sketch some of its defining features; look more closely at how cosmetic surgery tourism works as a phenomenon that assembles a complex set of people, places and practices; examine how the cosmetic surgery tourism industry is developing; consider debates in tourism studies to understand what it means to call our subject cosmetic surgery tourism.

Sleep, radical hospitality, and makeover’s anti-matter

Sleep has long been associated with transformation. Here I review how this manifests in fairytale, science fiction, and managerial/corporate approaches to sleep. I argue that, in line with neoliberal sensibilities that overvalue action, self-control and self-transformation, sleep is increasingly understood not as a state of rest, release, or dreaming but as an active mode of being that needs to be analysed, controlled, used to improve production, and indeed acted within. In the second part of the article I introduce two contemporary texts that work with sleep in transgressive ways: Julia Leigh’s 2011 feature film Sleeping Beauty and Philipp Lachenmann’s 12 minute video SHU (Blue Hour Lullaby). Both works deploy sleep to explore spaces of stasis, of hollowness, and to express what I call the anti-matter of the neoliberal imperative to ‘Just Do It.’