Under the Knife: Feminism and Cosmetic Surgery in Contemporary Culture

Abstract

“There are no ugly women, just lazy ones”, Helena Rubinstein once said, highlighting that beauty is essentially women’s work and responsibility. Indeed, the seemingly intrinsic links between womanhood and the desire for beauty have long been upheld by patriarchal discourses that seek to characterize women in relation to their looks, thereby consigning them to the status of objects, to be looked at, displayed, and bought. At the same time as beauty has been championed by patriarchy as a route to female, or rather feminine, success, it has also been criticized by waves of feminist writers who unmask its manipulative, constraining, and mutilating aspects. From Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminist classic The Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) to Naomi Wolf’s best-selling The Beauty Myth (1991), feminists have called out for female enlightenment and liberation from the “gilt cage” of beauty, denouncing whatever pleasure and power women believe that beauty accords them (Wollstonecraft 113). In effect, one of the most iconic events that brought (second wave) feminism to public attention — the demonstration that the New York Radical Women’s group staged at the Miss America beauty pageant in Atlantic City in 1968 — was conceived as a direct attack on the beauty industry and an attempt at collective consciousness-raising, designed to engender a feminist-inspired realization of oppressive standards for (feminine) appearance.¹ In this sense, feminist activism and consciousness-raising were meant to bring forth a more enlightened, emancipated and “authentic” femaleness that defines itself in opposition to male-identified femininity and beauty.²