Toolkit for a Modest Witness

Abstract

In examining such a slippery and excessive articulation as cosmetic surgery, gender and culture, it is necessary to assemble a toolkit of theoretical and methodological aids. This chapter is the first of two which will introduce these tools. In it I examine three areas: Deleuze and Guattari’s work on becoming; Moira Gatens’ use of the term ‘imaginary bodies’; and Teresa de Lauretis’ development of the notion of technologies of gender. These three theoretical tools will be employed in order to pursue one of the (two) central issues of this book: the ways in which cosmetic surgery is participating in the production of gender. I will discuss these three areas separately, though I will also draw them together to create a ‘toolkit’ with which to try to understand cosmetic surgery in culture. Put simply, I will be arguing that the notion of becoming helps me to identify the ongoing construction of gender and the body in a constantly changing culture. I see this process of becoming as necessarily played out within the sexual imaginary that is at the heart of conventional Western understandings of difference between the sexes. In this sense, I investigate and then temper Deleuze’s construction of identity as infinite, by posing the sexual imaginary as a resource. It is partly through this resource that identity is constructed within society. At the same time, this resource also functions as a limit.