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Looking Good: Race and Cosmetic Surgery in Transnational Perspective
Başlık:
Looking Good: Race and Cosmetic Surgery in Transnational Perspective
Yazar:
Menon, Alka Vaid, author. (orcid)0000-0002-7420-751X
ISBN:
9780438116122
Yazar Ek Girişi:
Fiziksel Tanımlama:
1 electronic resource (298 pages)
Genel Not:
Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 79-11(E), Section: A.
Advisors: Steven G. Epstein Committee members: Carolyn Chen; Wendy Griswold; Carol Heimer.
Özet:
This dissertation uses global cosmetic surgery to examine constructions of race, focusing especially on two multiethnic countries: the U.S. and Malaysia. The U.S. is the largest cosmetic surgery market and has historically been a center for cosmetic surgery training and technique, and Malaysia is a rapidly growing Southeast Asian country with a burgeoning domestic and cosmetic surgery tourist market. Adopting insights from gender studies, ethnic studies, and science and technology studies, I draw on these cases to argue that race and ethnicity take on particular salience in consumerist medicine as biological and sociocultural entities. In contrast to a prevalent concern in the sociology of science with the rebiologization of race in contemporary science and biomedicine, my work demonstrates that physicians continue to link race and culture.
Analyzing cosmetic surgery as a transnational profession straddling medicine and the market, this dissertation shows how cosmetic surgeons draw upon cultural explanations for racial and ethnic difference in constructing standards for physical appearance. Acknowledging that race and gender are socially constructed facilitates cosmetic surgeons' success in the transnational surgery market. To provide this analysis, the dissertation incorporates over 90 interviews with cosmetic surgeons, patients, and medical device vendors in the U.S. and Asia, as well as observations of cosmetic surgeons' interactions with patients, observations of international cosmetic surgery meetings, and analyses of the content of cosmetic surgery procedural guides and patients' online reviews.
This work highlights the role of cosmetic surgeons as gatekeepers in defining possible interventions with respect to race, exploring the tension in cosmetic surgery between art and science, clinical judgment and standardization. Expansive and ambiguous definitions of racial and panethnic categories at different levels of practice---in the surgeons' own biographies, in the clinic, in the nation, and in the transnational literature on cosmetic surgery---promote their spread and use. Such definitions lead to the racialization of physical bodies as well as surgical techniques, materials, and aesthetics. While cosmetic surgeons have made some effort to standardize practice through the development of ethnic-specific guidelines, this standardization is not totalizing. Rather, the use of race in cosmetic surgery showcases and depends upon the clinical judgment of individual cosmetic surgeons. Surgeons offer their own clinical experience accrued in distinct local contexts as an asset that differentiates them from their competitors. In addition, the cataloguing of racial difference promotes and justifies the proliferation of clinical practice variation in cosmetic surgery.
This dissertation highlights the cultural production and valuation of different kinds of "ethnic" looks. In particular, the assertion of panethnic categories, like an "Asian" ideal, aligns cosmetic surgeons with distinct medical, cultural, and scientific trajectories, even as surgeons acknowledge significant heterogeneity within such categories. By including a focus on Malaysia alongside the U.S., this work shows how ostensibly universal, transnational notions of race in medicine manifest in distinct religious, economic, and cultural contexts. Rather than a story of the universal privileging of a "white" appearance, I trace the larger nationalist and regionalist dynamics at work in contemporary linkages of race and beauty in cosmetic surgery.
Notlar:
School code: 0163
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Yer Numarası | Demirbaş Numarası | Shelf Location | Lokasyon / Statüsü / İade Tarihi |
---|---|---|---|
XX(691516.1) | 691516-1001 | Proquest E-Tez Koleksiyonu | Arıyor... |
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