Man Made Plastic

Abstract

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.