Cosmetic Surgery, Photography and Skin

Cosmetic surgery has been my primary field of research over the past decade, and I am particularly interested in the topographies of photography and skin in cosmetic surgery. I came to the topic through the tension I felt between understanding why cosmetic surgery is a viable and helpful option for so many people, and feeling uncomfortable with the racist and sexist ideals espoused by the cosmetic surgery industry, as well as the potentially fatal risks of undergoing cosmetic surgery. Currently, I am writing about how performance art illuminates the surface imaginations of the cosmetic surgery industry, as well as contemporary understandings of embodiment and femininity (through the work of performance artists Amber Hawk Swanson and Breyer P-Orridge; I am writing about the latter piece with the philosopher Luna Dolezal).

My book, Surface Imaginations: Cosmetic Surgery, Photography and Skin queries the significance of surfaces to the practice and industry of cosmetic surgery through a feminist and psychoanalytic lens. I argue that the photograph is the idealized surface of cosmetic surgery (for it can be transformed painlessly and endlessly), while the skin is the de-idealized surface (for it heals unpredictably and sometimes undesirably, and thus exists as a limit). I examine these two surfaces through my concept surface imagination, which refers to the powerful fantasy that a change to the exterior can enhance or alter the interior; in other words, the outside creates and takes precedence over the interior. Rather than see the surface as ‘superficial,’ my book manuscript examines how identity is structured through the surface. In the book, I elaborate on the concept of surface imagination primarily through narrative interviews with women who received cosmetic surgeries, as well as historical and cultural analysis of the contemporary cosmetic surgery industry. The book uses an innovative method of representing interview transcripts called poetic transcription, which I argue is a psychoanalytic method of working with the interview as a researcher, rather than as an analyst. In April 2016, I will be participating in a meet the author discussion of my book at the “Doing the Body in the 21st Century” conference at the University of Pittsburg.

Skin has been a productive surface in my research. I am an editor, along with Sheila L. Cavanagh and Angela Failler, of Skin, Culture, and Psychoanalysis, published in January 2013 by Palgrave Macmillan. Our collection offers analyses that consider skin to be a cultural and psychical surface, and features authors from Australia, Canada, the United States, and Malaysia who use psychoanalytic theory to understand skin in fashion, film, video art, literature, and photography. My own chapter in the collection considers how the skin has been conceptualized as a textile through fashion, poetry, and popular culture, and how the notion of the skin-textile has been invaluable to the cosmetic surgery industry. With Heidi Kellett, I am a principal coordinator of (sk)interlocutors: An International Skin Research Group. This research group brings together scholars, artists, and designers engaged in the emergent discourse of skin that has flourished across many scholarly, art, and design fields in the past three decades. The group brings these diverse creative voices from the arts and humanities, social sciences, and fine and performing arts together, in order to connect, collaborate, and share resources. The web site serves as an online home for showcasing research, art, and design that takes up skin as their central object of analysis.

Related presentations

Discussion session on Surface Imaginations: Cosmetic Surgery, Photography, and Skin. Doing the Body in the 21st Century, March 31-April 2, 2016, University of Pittsburg, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

“The Surface Imaginations of Injectables, Lasers, and Chemicals in Cosmetic Surgery Cultures.” Body Imaging and the Body Imaginary: An Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Conference, April 304, 2015, Emory University Psychoanalytic Studies Program, Atlanta, Georgia.

Love and Sex Forged in Silicone: Amber Hawk Swanson, Femininity and Synthetic Embodiment.” Bodies of Art, December 3-4 2010, Center for Body, Mind and Culture, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida.

“The Textility of Skin.” Canadian Women’s Studies Association Conference, 2010 Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities, Concordia University, Montréal, Québec, May 29-30, 2010.

“The Skin as Textile in Cosmetic Surgery.” Scholarship, Teaching and Learning in the Age of the Plastic Body: Dialogues with Cosmetic Surgery: A Feminist Primer conference, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Surrey, British Columbia, March 12-13, 2010. (Invited and sponsored presentation.)

“Happiness and its Discontents in the Cosmetic Surgery Photograph.” Canadian Association of Cultural Studies National Conference (Culture, Power and Everyday Life stream), McGill University, Montréal, Québec, October 23-25, 2009.

“The Economy of Happiness in the Cosmetic Surgery Photograph.” The Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 2009 Annual Conference: Psychoanalysis, Economy, and Limits, October 9-10, 2009, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey.

“Poetic Transcription as a Psychoanalytic Writing Practice for Interview Research.” , Canadian Women’s Studies Association Conference 2009 Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, May 24-26, 2009.

“Before, After, and the Interstices: Photography in Cosmetic Surgery and ORLAN’s Surgical Performances.” Universities Art Association of Canada Conference, “Rogue Photographs” panel, November 6-8, 2008, hosted by York University and convened at the University of Toronto and the Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto, Ontario.

“The Anxious Archipelago of Skin in Cosmetic Surgery.” The Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 2008 Annual Conference: Ethics in an Age of Diminishing Distance: The Clash of Difference, October 24-26, 2008, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey.

“Photography and Cosmetic Surgery: Re-making the Body through the Image.” Image and Imagery, 5th Biennial Conference: Re-making, Re-writing, Re-discovery. October 10-11, 2008, Brock University, St. Catherines, Ontario.

“The Feminine Skin as Anxious Landscape in Cosmetic Surgery.” Canadian Women’s Studies Association Conference, 2008 Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities. University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, June 1-3, 2008.

“Surgical Stories, Gendered Telling: Cosmetic surgery through the perspective of patient and surgeon.” 39th Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association, “Prescribing Gender in Medicine and Narrative” Roundtable, April 10-13, 2008, State University of New York, Buffalo, New York.

“Metamorphosis and Stagnation: Before and after photographs in cosmetic surgery.” Photographic Proofs Conference, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, April 4-5, 2008. (Sponsored presentation, one of 12 presenters chosen from over 200 proposals.)

“The photograph as reminder, evidence and promise in cosmetic surgery.” Canadian Association of Cultural Studies National Conference, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, October 25-28, 2007.

“‘Becoming ‘Ordinary’: Women’s Narratives of Cosmetic Surgery as Commentary on Femininity and Beauty.” Canadian Women’s Studies Association Conference, 2005 Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, May 29-31, 2005.

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Cosmetic Surgery, Photography, and Skin