This blogspot is for my Anthropology 305 class about the anthropology of the body. The goal is to collect images to critique in relation to quotations from the course text.

Racism in Surgery and Performance


The Racial Nose, p. 93 (Sander Gilman (1999)
"Harmony is the norm, which is disrupted by the too-small nose. Symmetry is the ideal that dominates the meaning of the healthy, beautiful face in the nineteenth century and is the wellspring of the normative ideals, which the too-small nose violated. Harmony and symmetry express the universal perfection of the human countenance. All variation from an idealized norm is thus given moral meaning."

p. 108
"The specific reason for such aesthetic surgical procedures was the ability to increase one's income or marriageability by looking more Western and thus to ensure 'personal happiness.'"

p. 115-16 (Patricia J. Williams)
"'What made it 'the very worst kind' of assimilationism was that it was also assimilation out of the very right to coexist in the world with that most basic legacy of our own bodies. What made it so bad was the unself-conscious denial of those violent social pressures that make so irresistible the 'choice' to cut off that perfect replica of one's grandmother's nose in favor of a trendier, more 'acceptable' model.'"

The True Self, p. 41 (Carl Elliott, 2003)
"This is what W. E. B. Du Bois was getting at in a famous passage from The Souls of Black Folk, when he described this sort of mirroring as 'double consciousness.' Black people in America always have the sense of 'looking at one's self through the eyes of others,' wrote Du Bois, 'of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.' Black Americans always feel their two-ness, Du Bois wrote, because the way they see themselves is distorted by the way they are seen by others."

Is Paris Burning? p. 149 (bell hooks, 1992)
"For in many ways the film was a graphic documentary portrait of the way in which colonized black people (in this case black gay brothers, some of whom were drag queens) worship at the throne of whiteness, even when such worship demands that we live in perpetual self-hate, steal, lie, go hungry, and even die in its pursuit. The 'we' envoked here is all of us, black people/people of color, who are daily bombarded by a powerful colonizing whiteness that seduces us away from ourselves, that negates that there is beauty to be found in any form of blackness that is not imitation whiteness."

In Western Eyes, we saw a number of individuals who were seeking plastic surgery to appear more Western. Some of the paraphrased quotations that I have from the film are:
"The closer you resemble Europeans, the better you are."
"A hierarchy of beauty."
"If that's the way they perceive you, you start to believe it."

These quotations reflect the attitudes and beliefs that Sander Gilman and Carl Elliott are discussing. A side that seemed to not come up in our class discussion, however, was that of Patricia J. Williams and bell hooks: racism. While these plastic surgery endeavors may be about becoming more beautiful, you must ask -- who decided that Western features were the most beautiful, at the top of this "hierarchy of beauty"? Patricia J. Williams' analysis of course aims more at the subject of plastic surgery, while bell hooks' encompasses many different behaviors, all centered around becoming more Westernized. To me, both get very efficiently at the sad, horrific, and tumultuous feelings that I think should arise when examining such a phenomenon.

Is one form better or worse than the other? Is it worse to change one's body or to change one's behavior? Both change how the person is perceived, although one is more permanent than the other. Is it better for this change to be dedicated as a lifestyle, as in the case of the drag queens, or as a way to feel better and move on with life, as in the case of plastic surgery? Are they the same?



Image Sources:

http://www.imdiversity.com/villages/asian/health_wellness/nam_eyelid_surgery_0307.asp


http://jerseygoddess.blogspot.com/2007_03_01_archive.html


http://www.fabuloussavings.com/conradrhinoplasty/

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