Cosmetic Surgery and the Construction of a Natural Look in the United States

• In Event: 078 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 18. Symbols and Cultural Scripts

Abstract

“Natural” is a described applied to phenomenon from childbirth. This paper asks how and why the products of technological intervention come to be described as “natural,” through the case of cosmetic surgery. Bringing together the literature on natural beauty norms and nature in science and technology studies, I show how credentialed experts (cosmetic surgeons) draw on the moral tropes of goodness, universality, and genuineness to navigate the public’s apprehension about the technological practice of cosmetic surgery. In the process, cosmetic surgeons come to be evaluated based on their ability to produce “natural” outcomes. I trace here what cosmetic surgeons mean by natural, how they conflate natural and good, and how they ultimately evaluate each other’s performance in terms of their ability to re-create what they recognize to be a constructed image of a “natural” look. Based on 40 semi-structured interviews with cosmetic surgeons across the U.S. and observations of a surgeons’ professional meeting, this paper takes up the question of how to think about the natural and its invocation in a commodified subfield of medicine. This study investigates cosmetic surgery as a medical technology, noting the aesthetic dimension to the construction of natural.

Author

• Alka Menon, Northwestern University