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This chapter shows how cosmetic surgery has evolved to becoming regarded as part of the “normal” process in the quest for identity transformation, arguing that an inner self is externalized so that the aesthetic body can better represent the person within. It also believes that feminist ethical engagement will need to respond to this talk of self-transformation in kind, providing a way of responding to the suffering cosmetic surgery claims to alleviate, and recognizing the necessity and potential of working on the self as a feminist strategy. Feminists need a richer ethical grammar and vocabulary for talking about our own desires and suffering in this context. This demand for a feminist ethical language arises in part from nearly a century of cultural manufacture of a psychology for potential cosmetic surgery recipients. Cosmetic surgery bears a peculiar burden of justification unlike other medical subspecialties. In some cases the rubric of “reconstructive” procedures can be employed — repairing a cleft palate, rebuilding a face after tumor removal, or grafting skin to burns are all seen as legitimate medical measures that have necessary functional and social effects.

This chapter describes twenty-seven reported cases of medical tourists who died during or shortly after undergoing cosmetic surgery or bariatric surgery abroad since 1993. It limits the analysis to news media reports that were in the public domain and were intended for public consumption. It also offers brief descriptions of these cases of mortality in individuals who traveled abroad and underwent cosmetic or bariatric surgery at international medical facilities. Of the twenty-seven reported deaths, twenty-five of the individuals were women. Eleven individuals had died after receiving health care in Mexico. Four fatalities had taken place in the Dominican Republic. In general, the in-depth case studies indicate strategies that might enhance patient safety, quality of care, disclosure of information, quality of advertising, and protection of patients in the global marketplace for health services. The significance of establishing effective measures for tracking clinical outcomes in medical tourism is also observed.

The term “artificial beauty” (renzaomeinü) became popular in China after a young Chinese woman, Hao Lulu, was dubbed as China’s first “artificial beauty” in 2003.Her story caused an upsurge of interest in cosmetic surgery and triggered a nationwide debate in China.This chapter provides a quick yet telling glimpse into the burgeoning cosmetic surgery industry and women’s involvement in it. While some people condemn the pursuit of beauty through cosmetic surgery as women’s submission to the male gaze, Hao Lulu and women like her claim their rights to cosmetic surgery as a way of self-improvement and self-fulfilment. Through discussing controversial debates concerning Hao Lulu, the author explores the newly emerging body politics and market discourse of post-Mao China. The author argues that cosmetic surgery involves both exploitation and liberation of the body, and both enslavement and empowerment of women.

This chapter presents our theoretical approach to cosmetic surgery and its discourses. We argue that cosmetic surgery tourists are seeking value, and that for many of those we spoke with, their bodies were the only asset it was possible for them to invest in. We argue that existing feminist theories of cosmetic surgery fail to account for material, fleshy bodies that change over time. Whilst most cosmetic surgery theories point to an external (‘perfect’) body of popular culture to which the cultural dopes of cosmetic surgery are subject, we point instead to instances of melancholy for a lost body, when comparisons are more often with one’s own body as it used to be than with ‘image culture’. Images do however provide guides and possible styles: when one wants to change one’s body, one has to illustrate how. So, while we do not see cosmetic surgery as totally outside any regime of images, we argue that images have a more complex and nuanced role than cosmetic surgery discourse allows. The chapter includes a discussion of the PIP scandal as a way to interrogate the workings of this discourse.

Through reviewing the development of plastic surgery from Republican China to contemporary China, this chapter discusses how plastic surgery was transmitted from the West and adopted into China’s social and political settings. How plastic surgery was appropriated into China’s social contexts demonstrates that the boundaries crossed over are not only regional, but also national, political and ideological.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book and of the research project on which it is based. It grounds the analysis of cosmetic surgery tourism through a detailed discussion of framing ideas – such as defensive subjects and identity knowledges – that shaped the epistemological approach of the research. It provides detailed accounts of two ethnographic fieldwork encounters, and reflects on how these were experienced by everyone involved, including the researchers. In so doing, it foregrounds the value of experience as a research resource. The chapter ends with outlines of the chapters of the book.

The anxiety about body image is captured by the ubiquitous consumer culture and the ever-expanding beauty market in China today. Mass media contributes to the commodification of female appearance by producing the feeling of imperfection and creating the desire to buy an “ideal beauty”. While some women actively construct their senses of self by consuming various beauty products, including cosmetic surgery, others are passively exploited by the profit-driven market and suffer from dangerous operations such as leg-stretching surgery. Nevertheless, both cases display women’s bodies being targeted by China’s thriving beauty industry.

The chapter deals with the sanctity and integrity of the human body after death. Anatomical dissection and postmortem examinations are a routine part of medical education and diagnostic techniques that stress the need for such procedure in understanding illnesses and evaluating incompletely known disorders or discovering new diseases. Accordingly, the scope of clinical diagnosis requiring autopsy has expanded beyond the traditionally validated justifications in the classical juridical formulations. One of the major decisions facing a dying person and his family is the possibility of donating organs for transplant. This means allowing surgical procedures that constitute a desecration of the dead in the Shari‘a in order to retrieve an organ. A visible incision into the body or the removal of externally visible or internal organs represents true desecrations. The chapter examines juridical principles that permitted an incision or mutilating procedure for the immediate saving of the life of a patient who is dying of organ failure. The possibility of organ transplantation for saving a critically ill patient did not exist in the past. The relatively high rate of success in organ transplantation has encouraged Muslim jurists to search for legal-ethical justifications to formulate their rulings to keep pace with the demand for such medical procedures, which are already a de facto practice in many hospitals in Muslim countries. All the jurists agree that saving of the life makes it possible to approve lesser evil of desecration for the larger good that such an act promises.

Japanese medical malpractice law governs an industry that in many ways differs—radically—from the American health care industry. Before turning to that malpractice law in Chapter 5, consider the industry itself. It is an industry covered by a national health insurance. To extend that coverage, the government provides a subsidy that raises the demand for medical services. In the face of the increased demand, it then suppresses costs by suppressing prices. 4 illustrates two effects of this national insurance. First, the most talented doctors disproportionately shift into “superfluous” sectors not covered by the national insurance, and there invest heavily in their expertise. Second, both physicians and hospitals lack substantial experience in the complex procedures that lie at the heart of modern medicine. The result is a substantial increase in mortality from strokes and heart attacks.

Machinic suture refers to the operations through which the true self can be transformed into a desired human body through augmented realities. This chapter attempts to thematically connect an individual’s outer appearance with his or her inner soul. Cosmetic surgery was developed to surgically provide the desired beautiful body to an individual. All over the world, makeovers and reality shows are driving some men and many women to go under the surgeon’s knife in order to appear young, refreshed, and beautiful. This change makes them sociologically more acceptable in their community.

Since China launched its historic process of economic reform and opening up in the late 1970s, women have become vulnerable to the impact of economic restructuring on employment. This chapter focuses on the impact of economic transition and social transformation on women’s choices of cosmetic surgery. It explores why cosmetic surgery is widely considered as an “investment” to gain “beauty capital” among Chinese girls and women. In particular, it explores the phenomenon of Chinese high school and college students rushing to have cosmetic surgery over summer/winter holidays to get an edge in a tight job market.The obsession with female beauty in workplaces and in the marriage market is rooted in traditional Chinese gender norms, where women’s appearances are more emphasized than their ability and talents.

China was integrated into a global market economically as well as culturally. It is exposed to the influence of the omnipresent beauty ideals and consumer culture in the west. The rapid increase of Barbie sales in China indicates that the global capitalist market has brought China an ultimate fantasy of Western female beauty. Moreover, in recent years, the popularity of Korean TV dramas and pop music shows that the global cultural encounter also takes place within the non-Western world. Furthermore, by examining a Chinese cosmetic surgery reality TV show, the chapter explores how the development of the Chinese cosmetic surgery market has been intertwined with transnational flows of people, media, capital and techniques.

This chapter explores the history of cosmetic surgery and its intersections with transplants, showing how FAT is both and neither and something else entirely. Through a deep dive into the literature of cosmetic surgery, the chapter maps the discursive terrain on which face transplants have been charted, discussing the rhetoric of facial manipulation in the context of FAT. If the lack of a face is a debilitating medical condition for which a transplant is the cure, what is the difference between that and a more cosmetic intervention—is it a difference of degree or kind? The narrative differentiating the former from the latter, this chapter shows,is one of risk: the risk of the operation and especially of the lifetime on immunosuppressants while living with a new face. But risk is just an excuse that obscures the true source of our objections. After a discussion of the first transplants and their relationship to the birth of bioethics as a field, the chapter explores the first facial reattachment and reactions to it. It moves to fears of identity transfer and cellular memory, tracking the literary and cultural manifestations of these phenomena, thinking about how these concerns impact conceptions of transplant surgeries more broadly.

People usually assume that cosmetic surgery is a privilege of the elite and the rich. However, women who opt for cosmetic surgery come from diverse groups in China. Using ethnographic cases, this chapter highlights the diverse motivations that lead to cosmetic surgery. It reveals that for some Chinese women, cosmetic surgery is less about vanity than practicality. The drastic and dramatic economic, socio-cultural and political changes in China have produced immense anxiety that is experienced by women both mentally and physically.

In an era of globalization, female beauty seems to be increasingly standardized according to the Western ideal. However, the author argues that Chinese women’s preference to “Caucasian features” need to be understood in local settings.The author discusses how the “Caucasian features” take on various meanings in China’s historical and social contexts. Furthermore, the author explores how globalization has heightened the sense of local culture and increased the Chinese’s sentiment towards the oriental aspects of Chinese beauty. It reveals the tension between cultural homogenization and heterogenization in terms of the globalization of standards of beauty and women’s pursuit of these standards through cosmetic surgery.

Beauty is about economy; nevertheless, it is also about ideology. This chapter discusses the political implications of China’s booming beauty economy. A main driving force of cosmetic surgery in China is pragmatism. This pragmatism is not only produced by the instability of the transitional Chinese social structure, but is also channelled by the Chinese Communist Party’s pragmatic ideology as exemplified by its ”cat theory” and “xiaokang” concepts. It affects an individual’s choice to undergo cosmetic surgery and the state’s policy of developing its beauty industry. Moreover, using the Miss World competition and the ceremony hostesses of Beijing Olympics as examples, the author discusses how beautiful female bodies have been appropriated into a nationalist agenda in China. Female body image and alteration practices have become both a reflection of personal identity, and a site of ideological contestation, of which state power and market forces reconfigure their power structures to form a new bodily regime.

Instead of encountering the faces they have identified with, however ambivalently, many aging women meet a stranger in the mirror – an alien image that is an object of scorn and a constant reminder of mortality. What cultural assumptions must be changed in order for women to happily live with their time‐altered visages? Women who have undergone cosmetic surgery use several key strategies to reconnect with their radically transformed faces, and it seems that parallel strategies should serve aging women. Alas, these strategies depend on three untenable assumptions about the self, the expressivity of faces, and the nature of beauty – the identity constancy postulate, the facial legibility postulate, and the goodness‐goes‐with‐beauty postulate. With radical modifications, these postulates could accommo date women's lifelong needs, but it would remain necessary for feminist discursive politics to sever the symbolic association between death and the changes women's faces undergo as they grow old.