Ruth Holliday

We've been framed: visualising methodology

This paper explores the reasons why video, and other visual representations have been largely ignored in sociology, whilst the possibilities of video as an empirical source have been sidelined by cultural studies. Discussions of methodology have raised doubts about notions such as objectivity and scientific knowledge, and about the power relationships involved in the research and writing processes, and techniques that one might employ in order to avoid such problems have been suggested. Yet the aims of such techniques are misguided if they serve only to further legitimate the ‘truth’ of the research itself. In this context I explore some of the possibilities of visual methods, such as video and photography, whilst also examining some of the ethical issues raised by them. In this respect, the paper explores the notion of a ‘queer methodology’. This approach is indebted to the legacy of its predecessor, feminist methodology, but departs from this in several important ways. I will explore these differences and examine the possibility that a place for the visual within sociology is an inherently queer conception.

Aesthetic surgery as false beauty

This article identifies a prevalent strand of feminist writing on beauty and aesthetic surgery and explores some of the contradictions and inconsistencies inscribed within it. In particular, we concentrate on three central feminist claims: that living in a misogynist culture produces aesthetic surgery as an issue predominantly concerning women; that pain - both physical and psychic - is a central conceptual frame through which aesthetic surgery should be viewed; and that aesthetic surgery is inherently a normalizing technology. Engaging with these ‘myths’, we explore the tensions uncovered through a historical analysis of the practices of aesthetic surgery as well as the challenges to feminist claims offered by post-feminism. In particular we seek to destabilize the connection in feminist writing between beauty and passivity. We argue that through aesthetic references to denigrated black and working-class bodies, young women may mobilize aesthetic surgeries to reinscribe active sexuality on the feminine body.

Gender, Globalization and Aesthetic Surgery in South Korea:

This article explores the unusually high levels of cosmetic surgery in South Korea – for both women and men. We argue that existing explanations, which draw on feminist and postcolonial positions, presenting cosmetic surgery as pertinent only to female and non-western bodies found lacking by patriarchal and racist/imperialist economies, miss important cultural influences. In particular, focus on western cultural hegemony misses the influence in Korea of national identity discourses and traditional Korean beliefs and practices such as physiognomy. We show how these beliefs provide a more ‘gendered’ as opposed to feminist analysis, which allows space for discussion of men’s surgeries. Finally, we critique the accepted notion of the ‘western body’, especially its position in some literature as a more unobtainable ideal for non-western than for western women. We argue that this body has little in common with actual western women’s bodies, and more in common with a globalized image, embodying idealized elements from many different cultures.

Man Made Plastic Investigating men’s consumption of aesthetic surgery

Men who undergo aesthetic surgery have been largely overlooked in sociological discussions of the body. Using qualitative interviews drawn from a small pilot study of post-operative men, this article explores the narrative accounts that these men offer to explain their consumption of surgical procedures. The accounts disrupt dominant explanations of aesthetic surgery as an issue that only affects women, and contest the repetitive formulation of masculinity as disembodiment. Feminist theorizations of aesthetic surgery that attempt to link aesthetic surgery to totalizing explanations such as beauty, normalization or pain, are also challenged and extended. Instead we argue that multiple factors are at work in deciding to consume aesthetic surgery, such as identity, work, relationships and life events. Drawing on the work of Bourdieu, we argue that men’s consumption of aesthetic surgery (and perhaps women’s as well) often constitutes an investment in ‘body capital’ that can be deployed in a variety of different fields.We tentatively predict that the reconstitution of the aesthetic surgery recipient from ‘patient’ to ‘consumer’ will facilitate the development of a burgeoning market for men’s aesthetic surgery.

Naked as Nature Intended

This article explores the ways in which naturism articulates a set of relationships between the body and nature. We begin by sketching the histories of some Western naturist movements, tracing their lineage back to 19th-century life reform movements and through into inter-war reorientations of citizenship and morality. We consider the problematic of the naked bodys relationship to the erotic (and specifically to the erotics of nature), drawing on some materials on outdoor sex; set alongside this is a discussion of the regenerative use of wilderness in the mythopoetic mens movement. These strands are finally drawn together in order to consider the complex negotiation of discourses of nature, human nature, the natural body and the natural landscape - a negotiation embodied in naturism.

Filming “The Closet” The Role of Video Diaries in Researching Sexualities

This article explores the potential of video diaries in capturing identity performances. Through selected excerpts of video diaries by “queer” subjects, the methodological issues that the video diaries raise and the kinds of data made available through them are explored. This article argues that identities are constructed as a “text” on the surface of bodies and that the participant’s experience of “comfort” or “discomfort” relates to the extent to which they are read with or against authorial intention. Identity reading is complicated in a heterosexist culture structured by “the closet” in which “misreading” has been developed into a powerful normalizing mechanism.

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.

Transnational healthcare, cross-border perspectives.

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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.

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.