Comments on: The violence beneath ‘beauty’ [Women and Violence, Part 5]

By: Sigel Phoenix

Sigel Phoenix — Fri, 18 May 2007 20:03:50 +0000

arielladrake: I think you have mentioned – but thanks! It’s interesting how certain features can be racially coded in different ways – people might not take your eyelids as “Asian” if they think of you as white. This kind of thing does raise the question of how – or if – cosmetic surgeries on facial features might indeed be free from racism, if we could recognize the arbitrariness of assigning them to one ethnic group or another.

By: arielladrake

arielladrake — Thu, 17 May 2007 14:32:49 +0000

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned, but I do love this series. And I think you’ve covered the exploration here really well. Interestingly, I realised this week that I do have a small visible-crease in one eyelid, and no visible crease in the other. I’m not sure if it means anything in particular that I didn’t notice this before, though I suspect it has to do with the fact that generally speaking, my appearance is usually ‘white’ on account of being multiracial, but it was just a kind of weird realisation I had this week.

By: Sigel Phoenix

Sigel Phoenix — Tue, 08 May 2007 21:48:05 +0000

Luke and Jo: You're right, the dominant culture is already providing us with the language of violence for the treatment of women's bodies. I would hazard that this animosity towards the flesh is tied to the mind/body dualism that's so prevalent in Western thinking - and that dualism, of course, mirrors the male/female one. So even if we don't want to say that this all amounts to 'violence,' exactly, there's still that binary judgment of worthy vs. worthless. Elayne: "Lengthy insistence?" I think that's a bit unfair; the post was a lot of back-and-forth with my reasons supporting either conclusion. I do agree that we ought to be careful about what we label as 'violent,' and it may just be that the historical context of judging women of color by their appearance is where the violence is located, rather than the modern practice of voluntary surgery. Revena: Thanks for the article; it was fascinating. The arbitrary divide between acceptable and unacceptable self-harm is really illuminating, because it shows how much women's (and people's in general) behavior is policed by societal standards. Katie: What you say about self-policing touches upon a Foucauldian understanding of power that showed up again and again in the articles I read for my presentation. You're right that just because there isn't a central, visible authority that coerces women into surgery, it doesn't mean that power and domination aren't involved (even if they're internalized).

By: Katie

Katie — Mon, 07 May 2007 14:38:22 +0000

I think that there is certainly a link between cosmetic surgery and violence, as I understand violence to encompass the mental and emotional trauma of the brainwashing of racism and sexism. 50% of Korean women in their 20s have had plastic surgery – and that’s a conservative estimate. It’s a stock tactic of forms of control and repression that, after a while, the victims begin to police themselves. Speaking as the daughter of a woman who had a slit cut into each eyelid to make them more Western-looking, I feel that we need to expand our understanding of notion of violence and root it out of our own thinking where we perpetrate it in our own communities.

By: Revena

Revena — Mon, 07 May 2007 05:02:40 +0000

I looked up my old essay, and this is the citation I had for the article I was talking about, if you want to try to track it down: Elliott. â€œâ€Self-Inflictedâ€ Violence.â€ Off Our Backs 31 (2001). 19 Nov. 2002

By: Revena

Revena — Mon, 07 May 2007 04:13:17 +0000

This reminds me of an article I read a few years back when I was writing something about self-mutilation for a class. My memories of the piece (which I will see if can at least find the title for – it may be of use to you) are hazy, but essentially it talked about how some kinds of self-inflicted/voluntary injury by women are read as just that – injury – and reacted to with shock and horror, whereas others that are physically very similar are not (the author was comparing cutting and a face lift, if I remember right). Not 100% on-topic, but might lead to some interesting thought processes.

By: Jo

Jo — Sun, 06 May 2007 14:07:25 +0000

Good call, Luke. Not only are women with eating disorders “fighting” their weight, this terminology is applied to any woman who is trying to change (lower) her weight *at all*. I’ve used it to refer to myself.

By: Elayne Riggs

Elayne Riggs — Sun, 06 May 2007 13:57:38 +0000

I think your instinctive reluctance to label this as violence is absolutely correct. Elective surgery may be cringeworthy, and some may certainly be sexist, but it’s not violence. I think you need to be careful not to try to fit the subjects you want to cover into your series even if you have to forcibly contort them to fit a definition they obviously don’t — it weakens the overall point of what you want to say. Cosmetic surgery is certainly a worthy subject to examine for another series, but it’s just not categorizable into this one, and your lengthy insistence on why it might be sounds more like you’re trying to convince yourself than us.

By: Luke

Luke — Sun, 06 May 2007 08:33:55 +0000

I think in many ways cosmetic surgery reflects perhaps the harsh extremes in which women are told to wage a lifelong war with their bodies in terms of weight and reducing, mainly, the waistline (though no part of a woman’s body is safe from this violent sort of thinking due to the attitudes towards labias, nipples, feet, noses, etc). And I say “war” very specifically because with eating disorders so prevalant in women and young girls especially, it’s always been coined as “Jane’s battle with her size” or “Britney’s fight with her weight”…language that to me very much suggests a certain mentality of violence….of hostile, opposing forces when it comes to women’s bodies being culturally seen as the domain, the battlefield upon which a woman can only “win” by in essence, “defeating” her own body.