Abstract
A.K.M. Skarpelis on Refashioning Race.
Refashioning Race: How Global Cosmetic Surgery Crafts New Beauty Standards by Alka V. Menon 2023. Oakland: University of California Press. 304 pp.
Perhaps the most surprising finding in Alka V. Menon’s new book on the race-making practices of cosmetic surgeons in the United States and Malaysia is that elective plastic surgery does not standardize “norms of appearance to a white, feminine ideal” (192). Instead, as she writes in Refashioning Race: How Global Cosmetic Surgery Crafts New Beauty Standards, surgeons in each country develop several “standard looks” by race. Some are influenced by Whiteness ideals, but most are shaped by racially hybrid aesthetics. Menon calls this process of regionally scaling beauty ideals niche standardization.
The book’s starting point is that cosmetic surgery “reinscribes intersecting social categories of race, nationality, class, and gender on the physical body, in line with the prevailing social mores of the moment” (202). Hence, among other examples, the development of what New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino called in 2019 a unique cyborgian “Instagram face.” Menon describes customized and racially ambiguous LA and Miami “looks” for plastic surgery patients, but also explores more obviously “ethnic enhancements” like buttocks augmentations. Surgeons consider these a “legitimate” pursuit for Latina and Black patients, but less so for White and Asian clients. One big takeaway point of Refashioning Race is that surgeons operating in different cultural contexts work to craft “racially meaningful” appearances for their patients. But what is a racially meaningful look?
Menon’s detailed descriptions of clinical practice allow us to eavesdrop on surgery consultations. In this way, we learn that Malaysian surgeons’ practices are racialized, in that the doctors provide culturally sensitive care for Muslim and multiracial clients. American surgeons, in turn, create distinct racial looks for their clients—whether through said augmentations or by removing bumps from noses to enhance a “natural” look. Chapter 3, “Looking right: Crafting natural looks in cosmetic surgery,” reveals that rather than directly translating what medical journals outline and prescribe, surgeons use their personal judgment to concede or reject as reasonable the various requests patients make during consultations. In the process, Menon writes, surgeons enact two main raced goals: to preserve racial distinction and to prevent what they percieve as racial boundary-crossing. For example, we learn about surgeons telling some Black patients that a too-delicate nose will not look “right” on their faces. What emerges from these practices is thus neither a regression toward mean ideals of Whiteness (the “New York nose” being the androgynous and yet very White exception) nor an explicit creation of racialized features out of ambiguous faces. It is a new path, forged by surgeons who hew to what they see as natural and appropriate phenotypical features.
The surgeons’ race-making work borders on the subtle: No sentinels of the color line, they nonetheless inscribe their understandings of appropriate racial embodiment onto their patients’ bodies. What is less clear is how we should understand these different kinds of race-making, whether in Malaysia or in the United States. A more political as well as historical comparative approach would have made for a fuller theorization of a very strong Cultural and Science and Technology Studies ethnography.
The “preservation” of features, for example, repeatedly comes up in the surgeons’ rationalization of their choices. Preservation can refer to keeping something intact, but also to keeping something free from damage and decay. The social eugenic connotations of this “purifying” work—removing a bump from a nose to “restore” it to its presumptive ethnoracial ideal type—seem utterly lost on surgeons. Besides, getting rid of a bump in the nose does nothing to “restore” the nose of a person to their original state—unless the bump is the result of, say, a car accident. What it does do is alter the person’s appearance to align with the aesthetics of their fictional kinship group. Rather than the nose being restored to its original state, the person is restored to the aspirational image of the group. It is thus a fundamentally social and group-based process of alignment rather than one of individual restoration. Compare this to the practice of facelifts, which are meant to rejuvenate the face and return it to a younger age, thus contributing to a temporal restoration of the person’s body. Ridding the nose of an unwanted hump means dealing with a fundamental alteration in which something unruly is brought “in line” with the expected, aspirational, and utopian category.
Fears of racial transformation and race (tres)passing are hinted at but insufficiently theorized or historicized in Refashioning Race. Preservation seems to have as its goal the retention of people in their respective racial groups. At the same time, racial ambiguity is artificially created through the regional LA and Miami looks Menon identifies. Why is it permissible for a surgeon to pathologize a Black woman asking for a skinny nose, but at the same time create deliberately racially ambiguous looks? Preservation and the aesthetic confinement of people to their presumptive racial groups would seem to conflict with the deliberate creation of hybrid aesthetics. If surgeons are gatekeepers of a racialized understanding of “naturalness,” how can we make sense of their mixed creations? Is moving White people into racial ambiguity not also a form of racial boundary-crossing, distinct from ethnic “preservation,” which relies on making explicit the criteria for “racial congruence”?
In short, I found myself asking, “What is being gatekept? And what is at stake in the moves toward the preservation of presumed nature?” Menon does not prod her subjects for the deeper meaning behind their aesthetic choices. The result is that we readers remain uncertain about the broader cultural ramifications of surgeons’ practices.
At the same time, Menon’s detailed descriptions of interactional encounters at the clinic provide much-overdue comparative insights into racializing practices outside of a Black/White U.S.-centric color line. Exquisitely clever in research design—surgeons and their practices in Malaysia and the United States are chosen because both cater to multiracial populations but have different racializing practices—the book not only builds on and extends Science and Technology Studies as well as Race and Embodiment scholarship (see, for examples, Steven Epstein’s book Inclusion and Ann Morning’s book The Nature of Race and article “Kaleidoscope: Contested Identities and New Forms of Race Membership”), but also implicitly contributes to a vast literature on the state that tries to understand how practices on the ground differ from idealized notions developed in expert discourse (here, Celeste Watkins-Hayes’s The New Welfare Bureacrats and Bernardo Zacka’s When the State Meets the Street are foundational).
Building unlikely connections between disparate literatures makes Menon’s work not only compelling, but also positions her as one of her generation’s foremost theorists of race and embodiment. Beautifully and accessibly written without sacrificing theoretical depth, the book will make a great addition to both undergraduate and graduate syllabi on race, embodiment, and Science and Technology Studies.