Women and the Knife in East Asia: An Inquiry into Cosmetic Surgery and its Discontents 

Source: Metro UK
"The Chinese and Korean patients tell me that they want to have faces like Americans. The idea of beauty is more westernized recently. That means the Asian people want to have a less Asian, more westernized appearance. They don't like big cheekbones or small eyes. They want to have big, bright eyes with slender, nice facial bones."  

----Dr Kim Byung-gun, a plastic surgeon in South Korea, on CNN

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“There's a full-length mirror and a scale on every single floor of the school in the main hallway. Girls use them all the time. A lot of them don't really think twice about it. And then I asked some of the girls about it, and they said, yeah, our principal wants them there because it's an all-girls high school, and he wants us to be skinny. And he made a joke that if we lose a certain amount of weight, then we can get a cafe. And my first response was like, OK, that's really messed up.”

---- Julia Lurie, a high school English teacher in South Korea, on This American Life

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“Before I got double eyelids, the boys didn’t appreciate me so much.”

----Stella Ahn, a college student in South Korea, interviewed by Patricia Marx for The New Yorker

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The booming cosmetic surgery industry in East Asia regularly features in headlines in Western media because of its alarming prevalence and dubious ethics. South Korea has the highest rate of plastic surgery per capita in the world—one in five Koreans have undergone plastic surgery according to official statistics in 2008. Foreign tourists make up a third of the business, and the vast majority of these tourists are from China, where the cosmetics surgery industry is the third fastest growing industry, just behind real estate and tourism. By far the most common surgery is the double-eyelid surgery—the insertion of a crease in the eyelid to make the eyes look bigger. Other common surgeries include a nose job, to make the stereotypically flat Asian nose more prominent, and V-line jaw shaving, a reshaping of the jaw to make rounder faces smaller and presumably daintier. 

These surgeries are deeply disturbing. First, women who undergo these surgeries seem to base their decision on aspirations to a Westernized ideal of beauty. Second, these women then choose to “fix” their bodies by internalizing the objectification imposed by oppressive gender norms. Journalists and scholars drawing on postcolonial and feminist perspectives argue that the cult of cosmetic surgery in East Asia results from Western cultural imperialism and women’s subjugation to patriarchy. These conclusions induce “alternating whiplashes of sympathy and disgust, and some intensely uncomfortable reckonings”, as journalist Maureen O’Connor puts it.  

Imagine a moment of shocking realization of a Western journalist and his or her Asian interviewee of the power differential between them. One becomes the reincarnation of the colonizer, reaping the benefits of historical exploitation as the target of desire and emulation. The other becomes the reincarnation of the colonized, longing for the unattainable with a perpetually wounded and subjugated identity. In a compelling account on this American Life,  high school English teacher Julia Lurie recounts telling her South Korean students that “ideas of beauty are subjective” and that in America “we don't use photos on university and job applications the way Koreans do”, but she did not want to “come off as condescending or preachy”. Despite her good intentions, her students still felt “ashamed as [South Koreans].”

Indeed, Western cultural images play a part in the formation of beauty ideals in China. Globalization has enabled the dissemination of Hollywood movies and Western models, and these glorified images are widely transmitted through visual mass media, insidiously shaping the conception of beauty in East Asia. However, as intuitive as this explanation may be, beauty standards are not just influenced by Western sources of visual import. For example, as Korean Pop stars become increasingly popular in China, Chinese cosmetic surgery clients have requested to look like certain Korean celebrities. Although the desire for fair skin is often interpreted as the desire to look “white”, fair skin has been a sign of affluence (menial laborers have darker skin because they are exposed to the sun) and feminine elegance since ancient China. In South Korea, physiognomy—facial features that are indicative of a person’s character—also motivates people to undergo surgery for a more auspicious look. For example, wider eyes signal youth, energy and alertness. Western cultural influence also does not explain surgeries that are only popular in East Asia, such as calf trimming and cheekbone shaving.[i]

Equally complex is the issue of gendered difference in pursuing cosmetic surgery. Understanding the issue holistically requires understanding changes in the status of women throughout East Asian history. In ancient China, the Confucian thought adopted by most emperors as the state ideology dictated the subservient status of women. According to one of the most influential Confucian classics, women should be bound by the “three obediences” (obey father before marriage, husband when married, and sons in widowhood) and the “four virtues” (morality, proper speech, modest manner and diligent work). Unsurprisingly, female physical appearance was also subject to these social norms. The notorious practice of foot binding, for example, originated from the beauty ideal of small feet and the moral convention of enforcing women’s chastity and domesticity by confining their movement to the home.[ii] 

The status of women in China took an unexpected turn during the Communist era, when the Communist Party implemented Marxist feminism in what was then a historically patriarchal Chinese society. Women were granted complete equal status to men in the 1949 constitution and were well represented in schools and the work force, despite the oppressive gender norms that remained intact. Phrases like “attractive women” were labeled as “anti-revolutionary” and censored, as women put on masculine uniforms to join the revolutionary workforce to maximize labor in socialist production process. Women in the 60s and 70s were called upon to focus on work to contribute to “socialist construction” instead of focusing on appearance. Such progressive gender ideology based on egalitarian Communist values belied the deeply ingrained sexist norms and attitudes that remained unchanged. Changes in women’s status were political rather than social; they were endorsed by the state based on a newly adopted ideology instead of emerging organically based on shifting social mores. 

In the post-socialist era, as China de facto gradually diverted from the hardline socialist ideology, the state sponsored Marxist feminism began to give way to traditional patriarchal gender norms. The legacy of equal representation in schools and the workforce has remained, but feminine beauty ideals have reemerged. China’s burgeoning capitalist consumerism, fused with reformed gender dynamics, engenders new opportunities and new constraints for women. As anthropologist Yang puts it, “Instead of fulfilling productive and reproductive functions, the post-Mao female body and its erotic-aesthetic functions are celebrated to enhance consumption.”[iii] While in Mao’s era beauty and fashion were frowned upon as frivolous and decadent, China now has the world's second largest cosmetics consumer market second only to America. China has adopted the capitalist mantra that female eroticism and sexuality sell products. Attractive women have become a constant feature of almost every commercial and entertainment public event. From car exhibitions and new product promotions to business launches and public performance, attractive women are hired to be on display and appeal to consumers. The phrase “beauty economy” was coined to refer to everything from beauty pageants and modeling competitions to advertisements, cosmetics, plastic surgery, and television and cinema, which link women’s beauty with the economy.[iv]

It is against this backdrop that the abundance of plastic surgeries has come into the attention of journalists and scholars alike. Based on numerous interviews of women who chose to undergo surgery, it seems that most see plastic surgery as an investment that gives them confidence and a competitive edge in the market for jobs and lovers. When interviewed by anthropologist Wei Luo, one woman commented, “Who would pay attention to, not to mention to hire a country girl with freckles on her face?” Another woman underwent wrinkles removal surgery to keep her husband, who had had a series of affairs with younger women.[v]  

While most recognize the inequality that underlines a culture that pressures women to look attractive, they view their investment as a manifestation of their agency and self-determination in their professional and personal lives. At a time when beauty is a commodity, these women purchase and consume beauty, which earns them better opportunities in life. Many employ the rhetoric of exercising power over their bodies as a means to gain control over their social and personal relationships—that they did the surgery for themselves, not for others. (One woman told Wei Luo that surgery was a means for her to regain her confidence after a failed romantic relationship in which she felt inferior due to her appearance.[vi]) Others see the consumption of beauty as an expression of freedom and individuality.[vii] 

Compared to women who unquestioningly devoted themselves to the family in ancient China or the workforce in Mao’s era, women today have the freedom to improve their own situations through consumption. It indicates how women have changed from being servants in the house or laborers in the Communist revolutionary struggle serving “productive and reproductive” functions, to powerful individual agents, able to manipulate their bodies and take advantage of consumption to achieve their own personal aspirations. In 2004, China hosted its first Miss Plastic Surgery Pageant in Beijing. An organizer of the contest commented, “Everybody should have the right to pursue beauty, for pretty women have more opportunities and are more successful than others.”[viii] The ‘agency camp’ of feminist scholars argue that women are agents who pursue the best course of action—cosmetic surgery—at a particular moment in their lives. In her controversial book Reshaping the Female Body, Kathy Davis argues that women should be treated as “agents who negotiate their bodies and their lives within the cultural and structural constraints of a gendered social order.”[ix] However, the agency argument easily draws criticism from other feminist scholars. Susan Bordo, part of the “structure” camp of feminists, criticizes the choice and freedom rhetoric in the media which camouflages the coercion and structural oppression behind women’s “free choice” for surgery. She argues that discourses of individualism and empowerment are politically pernicious because they fail to give sufficient attention to systematic constraints that coerce women to mutilate their bodies to conform to an oppressive culture. [x]

Thus, women’s agency is restricted in this process because they are objectified in several ways. In this “beauty economy”, women are reduced to a sexualized object of desire and a sales tactic for monetary gains. Women who do not fit into a certain image of ideal of beauty are made to feel inferior or unconfident, and feel obliged to enhance their appearance to maximize their chances of success in their career and love life. Ultimately, suffering the pain of surgeries to win employers’ and men’s approval is demeaning and disempowering. While women are making more consumer choices about their physical appearance, they do so having internalized the objectification and desire to be beautiful within an oppressive culture. The formation of their identity is drenched in the culture of inequality. Just as advertisers create a need for a product in consumers by supplying them with a discourse that will leave them believing that they have had the need all along, the existing gender structure supplies women with an identity through which they form and recognize themselves, and makes them believe it is their own. The structure has constructed a comfortable position for women to fit into and conform to; women are under the illusion that they are free powerful agents who come up with their own desires and choices in life. 


References

[i] Ruth Holliday and Joanna Elfving-Hwang,  “Gender, Globalization and Aesthetic Surgery in South Korea,” Body & Society 18, no. 2 (2012): 58–81.  
[ii] Wei Luo, “Aching for the Altered Body: Beauty Economy and Chinese Women's Consumption of Cosmetic Surgery,” Women's Studies International Forum 38 (2013): 1–10.  
[iii] Jie Yang. “Nennu and Shunu : Gender, Body Politics, and the Beauty Economy in China,” Signs 36, no. 2 (2011): 333-357. 

[iv] Gary Xu and Susan Feiner. “Meinü Jingji/China's Beauty Economy: Buying Looks, Shifting Value, and Changing Place,” Feminist Economics 13 (2007): 307–323.

[v] Wei Luo, “Aching for the Altered Body: Beauty Economy and Chinese Women's Consumption of Cosmetic Surgery,” Women's Studies International Forum 38 (2013): 1–10.  
[vi] Ibid. 
[vii] Susan Brownell (2005). “China Reconstructs: Cosmetic Surgery and Nationalism in the Reform era,” In Joseph S. Alter (Ed.), Asian medicine and globalization (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), 132–150. 
[viii] China Daily, “Made-for-Order Beauty in Dispute,” 28 Aug 2004, 3.  http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-08/28/content_369597.htm 
[ix] Kathy Davis, Reshaping the Female Body: The Dilemma of Cosmetic Surgery (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 5.  
[x] Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1993). 

Angie Shen is a rising sophomore at Duke University.