Midwifery and Early childbirth Practices and Women in Cosmetic Sugery

Running Head : Women in Cosmetic Surgery

Women in Cosmetic Surgery

Authors Name

Institution Name Cosmetic surgery enacts a form of cultural signification where we can examine the literal and material reproduction of ideals of beauty . Where visualization technologies bring into focus isolated body parts and pieces , surgical procedures actually carve into the flesh to isolate parts to be manipulated and resculpted . In this way cosmetic surgery literally transforms the material body into a sign of culture . The discourse of cosmetic surgery offers provocative material for discussing the cultural construction

of the gendered body because women are often the intended and subjects of such discourse and men are often the agents performing the surgery . Cosmetic surgery is not simply a discursive site for the "construction of images of women " but a material site at which the physical female body is surgically dissected stretched , carved , and reconstructed according to cultural and eminently ideological standards of physical appearance

Kathy Davis (2003 ) suggests that cosmetic surgery actually deploys three overlapping mechanisms of cultural control : inscription , surveillance and confession . According to Kathy Davis (2003 , the physician 's clinical eye functions like Foucault 's medical gaze it is a disciplinary gaze situated within apparatuses of power and knowledge that constructs the female figure as pathological , excessive , unruly and potentially threatening of the dominant . This gaze disciplines the unruly female body by first fragmenting it into isolated parts -- face , hair , legs , breasts -- and then redefining those parts as inherently flawed and pathological . When a woman internalizes a fragmented body image and accepts its "flawed " identity , each part of the body then becomes a site for the "fixing " of her physical abnormality

Twentieth century women believe that Cosmetic surgery fragments the body into a set of features that can be serially upgraded . The full importance of imposing the language of merchandising on the body is not that cash value is inherently degrading it seems right in granting the capacity of the high-intensity market to put a price tag on anything The point is that if genetic engineering is anything more than a fantasy , the decomposition of the body into features is preparing for that future . Far more consequential than upgrading the ageing features of the adult body may be pre-selecting features in the embryonic body and changing DNA structure in to do this

Ann Dally in Women Under the Knife : A History of Surgery ' describe that women are besieged by the media to deviate from healthy ambition from the productive world , and from energizing activity to the search for beauty . This pressure to be ornamental starts young and remains part of the culture of women in our society . It is intensified in a woman 's middle years , when she begins to lose the beauty of youth . Some women who have cosmetic surgery may be happy with their larger breasts or smaller noses , but it is unlikely that surgery creates happiness as the original unhappiness often had an emotional or social basis . Women who...