Performing Perfection: Plastic and Cosmetic Surgery and the Rhetorical Body

Abstract

While there is a long history of rhetorical studies that focus on oral and written discourses, the relatively recent trend of studying rhetorical images, materiality, and rhetorical bodies presents a shift toward an expanded perspective on what constitutes texts and what can be considered rhetorical. The study of bodies as rhetorical texts prompts the questions of how language is material and visual in nature. In my dissertation I examine the relationship between rhetoric and the body through Judith Butler's theories of materiality and performativity. Using Butler's theories of performance as a lens, I analyze the rhetoric of plastic and cosmetic surgery and demonstrate the role of performance in the perpetuation of and response to rhetoric of the body. Cosmetic and plastic surgery are performatives in that they not only confer a binding power on the action performed by altering the body through surgical and non-surgical means, but also initiate various citational practices within the field of medicine and in popular culture (through various mediums such as television, magazines, billboards, and websites). These procedures result in images and claims that authorize particular social expectations of beauty, youth, and sexuality.I examine a range of mass media texts related to cosmetic surgery (television shows, magazines, news clips, websites, and films) that portray different normative and deviant performativity of the body. In my research, I include interviews from volunteers in Los Angeles; my analysis involves local individuals' relationships to plastic and cosmetic surgery and their various body performatives in terms of normativity and agency. By comparing global and local perspectives, I argue that media sensationalizes the agent/victim binary in order to sell plastic and cosmetic surgeries, as well as related texts. The local stories serve to counter assumptions about the role of power in plastic surgery, revealing a far more complicated relationship between clients, rhetoric, and the reasons behind their surgeries; the agent/victim binary that is emphasized in mass media fails to capture lived experience and creates a detrimental rhetoric of empowerment.