| Asian cosmetic eyelid surgery, also known as double eyelid surgery or Asian blepharoplasty, is a surgical procedure that alters eyes---key racial markers of Asianness---in ways that are perceived by some to minimize stereotypical Asian characteristics. It has invited an array of arguments and debate about its meaning in terms of race and gender. This dissertation explores the meaning of Asian cosmetic eyelid surgery by examining medical and popular texts and interviewing women who have had the procedure. It examines the discourses on race, gender, beauty and the body found in medical and popular texts of Asian cosmetic eyelid surgery in the U.S. and South Korea to see how they produce Asianness, femininity, masculinity, class and cosmetic surgery. It shows how medical texts have produced and pathologized racialized bodies, how along with ads they have normalized cosmetic surgery for racialized female bodies, and how the ads have objectified women as medical objects and subjectified them as consumer subjects. This study's transnational approach and its examination of eyelid surgery as a subjectifying technology introduces important new ways to analyze the procedure as a practice that produces race, gender, class, and national and diasporic identities.; This work is a political critique of the power of cosmetic eyelid surgery to regulate, discipline and subjectify women. Since its popularization in a transnational context, cosmetic eyelid surgery has been based on assumptions about the inherent flaws of the racialized Asian body, but race has been concealed through a dominant "race-neutral" discourse found in both medical and popular texts, as well as in the descriptions given by the practitioners themselves. The interviews show, however, that while the women reiterate this race-neutrality of cosmetic eyelid surgery, in other ways, they challenge the dominant meanings produced within these texts. Most significantly, cosmetic eyelid surgery is seen by many of the women as a cultural practice that indicates and reinforces diasporic Korean identity, rather than---as many of the texts frame it---a denial of Asianness. |
